Pros
The Asia Foundation has a wonderful track record for attracting intensely intelligent, highly motivated people--few organizations anywhere can offer the same range of intelligent, interesting international colleagues. Opportunities to interact with visiting field staff and local partners are frequent for staff in headquarters, and many staff members have the opportunity to travel to Asia with some regularity (although not all--many staff members are exhausted from too much time on the road, while their junior colleagues resent having to stay behind). TAF has done some great, sometimes revolutionary, work over the past sixty years, even if there's been a tendency toward bloat and a conservative approach to programming that has not always been innovative or nimble.
Cons
For more than a year now, The Asia Foundation has been wrestling with severe budgetary constraints, in large part dictated by the changing international development funding landscape. Multilateral aid budgets for TAF's biggest country offices have plummeted, and with them, overhead revenues. This, more or less understandably, has required budget cuts and other hard decisions. However, these cuts have not been handled at all well--the President's office has approached projected shortfalls by handing all departments a red pen and a pair of scissors, setting purely numerical cost-cutting targets. The cuts that have been made seem arbitrary and unfair, and reflect a lack of coherent strategy. Some departments have been forced to lay off productive junior and midlevel staff--in some cases, reducing the organization's impact and revenue-generating capacities in exchange for very modest cost savings--while the organization continues to pour huge amounts of money into line items that are not as mission critical, or are purely cost centers with limited impact. Repeated demands for cuts have created a culture of anxiety and interdepartmental resentment, while cost savings are rendered all but meaningless in the face of sustained high spending elsewhere. People have been laid off, sometimes with little notice, with no official end in sight. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of dollars have been spent on internal human resources trainings, other workshops, expensive global IT projects (some elements of which evidently require Asia travel for C-level executives with no relevant core competencies), multi-country boondoggles for the Board of Trustees (requiring the dispatch of advance teams of support staff from the executive suite, despite the general availability of expert local administrators on the ground in destination countries), and senior-level travel. As noted by many others, the fact that the most senior staff are, as of just last year, permitted to book business-class travel, often at very short notice, to sites across Asia, often for little purpose beyond attending a meeting, while other departments are forced to make drastic cuts to travel and other budgets, is a very sore point for most. This contributes to the low morale noted by many other reviewers. The situation is all the worse because the current administration makes no attempt at transparency. If there are coherent strategies behind the enormous spending in some areas and the painful cuts in others (and very few if any staff members believe that a real strategy exists), they have not been shared with line staff, who have been offered no opportunity to contribute, or even to provide meaningful feedback. The organization is the worse for it.