Equity & the Nonprofit Sector
Next month will mark 16 years since I first entered the nonprofit sector. In the fall of my junior year of college one of my poli sci undergrad classes had a requirement that we connect with a nonprofit organization and find a volunteer role for a “service learning” project. We were to get involved in a cause we cared about, help however we could, and find opportunities to connect our reading about political systems to the activities that our nonprofit had us do m, in monthly reflection essays.
This assignment didn’t just accomplish its goal (to help me see how the experiences can vary wildly by factors like where you are born, your race, your gender, etc.) it also sparked a chain reaction of events that changed my career goals and put in motion the life that I am living today.
Condensing a series of connected major life moments into a paragraph: Once I realized that you could make a living for yourself grounded in a mission you care about and in the process not help rich people get richer, I was hooked. I had just discovered the basic concepts of social justice and you’d often hear me say, “I want to be a professional feminist!” in this era. So that service learning project rolled into an internship which rolled into a part time job which rolled into a full time job. Along the way I halted my plans to take the LSAT and pursue law school in favor of getting a Masters of Public Affairs, Nonprofit Management. By luck of circumstance, one of the top ranked schools for this type of degree (which was relatively new back then) was in my backyard. I applied while finishing my undergrad program and was offered a generous fellowship that covered my tuition both years and came with a stipend, given that I worked for the university part time during my second year. I jumped into that program wholeheartedly in the fall of 2007.
(Side note: reflecting back on that program reveals many issues that are related to my gripes about the sector. We were taught very old school, conservative White Spremacist mindset practices and views of philanthropy.)
Come May of 2009, I officially held my MPA. I moved to Austin later that year and landed my dream job with the nonprofit that I still work for today (having had a few promotions in the following 11 years.) Currently, I sit in a “C level” seat at the organization, which has grown from around 8 staff when I started to a staff of 30 part time/full time paid positions. We have a roughly $1.5M annual budget (the majority of which I am responsible for raising) and there are 15 people in the department I am the head of and responsible for day-to-day.
I say all of this to highlight a few things before I dig in on my criticisms…I want it to be clear. I’m a dyed in the wool nonprofit person. I am an insider to this sector; ALL of my professional experience is in nonprofits (8 years in program management, 8 in fundraising/leadership) and I was someone, who for a long time, truly believed that this type of work was inherently more just, less socially damaging, and just all around “better” than the for-profit space (certainly) and the governmental space (likely.) I not only believed in the inherent “good” of this type of work; I also fancied myself special because I had formal training in this type of work through a nationally visible and regarded program. So I wasn’t just any nonprofit person, I was the best kind of person, who understood this “third sector” so well and could be trusted to show up every day to work my ass off toward building a better society.
Ha!
Over the past 5 years or so (and especially in the last year) I’ve begun to question everything in my own mindsets, biases, and what the nonprofit sector stands on generally. This chipping away at my faith in the “inherent good” of sector was the case of a death by a thousand cuts. I’ll chronicle just a few of them here:
In my personal interactions, I began to see how difficult it was to convince powerful donors that using money to pay for skilled staff people was a worthwhile expense. People who would easily spend $500,000 on an employee they valued at their companies often think that even the most MEAGER salaries for people delivering critical direct services is not an acceptable expense for their grant funds.
In interactions with this same type of powerful donor, I often experience microaggressions related to class and my body size. As a white woman, I experience a lot of racist, coded “in group” language from the wealthy white people who clearly viewed themselves as white saviors. While I typically felt capable of redirecting these situations, their prevalences has taken a toll. Similarly, when in programs, I’ve had to intervene in moments of entitled, ignorant volunteers saying things around kids they’re supposed to be supporting.
Folks in leadership positions in nonprofits themselves, my colleagues, were constantly displaying signs of the comparison bias of “upward comparison.” So much of the chatter I encountered around 2017-2020 in particular showed that they looked at the lives of these donors or their for-profit counterparts and coveted what they had…their salaries, their net worths, their power. (And some of these colleagues were from that world to begin with.) The forces that I felt we are supposed to deconstruct were ever alluring and desirable to them. At the same period of time, I was on a journey of deprogramming capitalism and money worship in my brain and I began feeling more and more out of pace. I don’t desire b/millionaire lives…I wish to make the conditions of their obscene wealth less likely. And yet, while battling this upward comparison bias, I find myself in the position of simultaneously trying to advocate for raises on behalf of entry level staff people (to make salaries rates of pay that are sometimes as low as 1/3 of the pay rate of other colleagues in the room.) That disconnect feels particularly daunting to try to navigate.
The straw that broke the camel’s back in me deciding to write this post was when 2 weeks ago I was approached on LinkedIN by a recruiter who was hiring a position at an extremely large nonprofit in Austin (one I see as the epitome of the Nonprofit Industrial Complex.) The salary they shared with me for this position was $190,000 (I almost fell off my seat, I’d never seen pay anywhere in the neighborhood of that high for a job like mine.) I went to their website to see what they pay the people who deliver their direct services…and it is currently $13/hour (or roughly $27,040/annual IF they are granted 40 hours/week). This is less than the poverty rate for Austin and only ONE SEVENTH of the salary of that senior level person. How can a nonprofit claim to be a part of poverty eradication when they pay their service providers poverty wages??? It’s straight up nonsense.
Obviously, I did not apply for that job. The disillusionment that it left me with seeing that was so strong, I started noodling on writing about this. And here we are.
These examples are just a few of the things I was feeling on the personal front, and in 2020, two extremely powerful movements came into my life and educated me that what I was feeling on the micro was something gigantic that our sector had to confront all together. They were:
1. Edgar Villanueva’s Decolonizing Wealth: This was my favorite book of 2020, and if you’ve talked to me in person since I read it, I’ve probably enthusiastically recommended it to you because while it is for the philanthropic world, its research and content is extremely important for anyone who cares about equity generally. Here’s its official summary blurb:
Decolonizing Wealth is a provocative analysis of the dysfunctional colonial dynamics at play in philanthropy and finance. Award-winning philanthropy executive Edgar Villanueva draws from the traditions from the Native way to prescribe the medicine for restoring balance and healing our divides.
Villanueva write brilliantly, weaving research and personal anecdotes, to explore how philanthropy in the US is built on a foundation of white supremacy and twice stolen wealth. It is wealth created through colonialism, genocide, and slavery, and then invested through exploitative capitalistic practices, which often perpetuate harm—then philanthropy swoops in with bandaids, and pats themselves on the back for being oh so generous and the solutions to society’s ills. There are so many changes that could be made which he writes about. The best examples from the book that I love to give are 1) require foundations to at least disclose the businesses their giant endowments are invested in and 2) raise the legally required minimum annual granting of foundations from 5% to 10%. (That one change alone would radically transforce the funding environment and force foundations to keep at their actual purpose—you know: giving away money.)
2. Community Centric Fundraising (CCF): Any nonprofit fundraiser my age has undoubtedly been trained and trained and re-trained on a perspective by Penelope Burke called “Donor Centric Fundraising.” Burke has long been hailed as a genius in our world, because she championed such concepts as calling your donors to thank them, ensuring you spend funds as intended, and having open conversations with donors—all things that could be said to be objectively good, if that was where it ended.
However, as the CCF movement has rightfully pointed out, it propagated a dangerous idea that the donor is king. Fundraising professionals all over engaged in relationships like what I alluded to above where donors call the shots, exercise inappropriate power, and ultimately fund what they personally THINK is good work, instead of what the community actually needs.
Community Centric Fundraising, led by fundraisers of color, has risen as the newest philosophy to counter this over valuation of a donor’s power in the philanthropic equation. They are generating conversations about white supremacy in the sector, the Nonprofit Industrial Complex, and the harms that nonprofits inflict on the very communities they say they seek to help. They promote a set of 10 principles which include:
Fundraising must be grounded in race, equity, and social justice.
Individual organizational missions are not as important as the collective community.
Nonprofits are generous with and mutually supportive of one another.
We treat donors as partners, and this means that we are transparent, and occasionally have difficult conversations.
We promote the understanding that everyone (donors, staff, funders, board members, volunteers) personally benefits from engaging in the work of social justice – it’s not just charity and compassion.
Now this??? This is the sector that I wanted to be a part of and could see myself staying in for many more years.
On that note (my own career trajectory) I want to pause for a moment and insert here —> I have no backup plan. This piece isn’t about how I’m leaving the sector and going into consulting or coaching or community relations for a tech company or any of the many other things my disillusioned peers have done. There are days where my heart is so full of inspiration about my organization’s work and I couldn’t be more proud of the badass people I get to call my colleagues. And I want to underscore: this isn’t even about my particular organization (although many of these things are present.) This is about the sector generally and the opportunities I see for equity based improvements that, to me, wouldn’t be extremely complicated or cumbersome to implement. And if I’m being really honest with you, I still have no desire to go make even five times more working for someone like Jeff Bezos. (I’m not saying Amazon would even hire me because the nonprofit sector is also often sneered at by our for-profit colleagues as if our world has no relevance to theirs, but I digress.) I’ll save my professional existential crises for another day.
Given that I’m not looking to change sectors, at least not any time soon, I’ve been thinking a bit more about things that could make this space into what it actually should be in our society. The first 50 bullet points on that list are: literally everything already articulated by CCF and Edgar Villanueva. Really, I can’t recommend these expert resources enough. Other ideas I have that I think are very doable for nonprofits:
Set salary floors: Assuming that a nonprofit is in the business of social justice, no one who works for the mission full time, should be making anything less than a living wage, ideally we’ll ABOVE a living wage. Do the research for your area and implement a floor as is appropriate. Revisit/raise it annually.
Limit executive level salaries: no single person should become an outsized portion of the total budget. A pay structure could be implemented so that from entry level brand new employee through CEO, there could be only so much % change that could occur. I don’t think that 2-3X from bottom to top is an issue, as experience, tenure, and responsibility do logically necessitate higher compensation, but a SEVEN FOLD or a ten fold difference should be explicitly prohibited by the organization. So should a cap related to total % of budget. This activity, in alignment with the floor, would help distribute the funding. (In other words, your C-suite salary cap would free up funding to pay the entry level folks better. Ya know, wealth distribution and stuff.)
Co-Executives: If organizations want to bring social justice to life, then we have to step away from the paternalistic, colonialist framework that “one person is ultimately in charge” entirely. I am seeing this more and more with progressive organizations around Austin and I love it. There is no reason why organizations can’t be led by 2-5 C level executives, each with unique strengths and a set of responsibilities, who work collaboratively with the board and make decisions with more input and as a collective…on that note…
Radically change who we see as board members: Far too often, organizations structure their board as “prestige” (they look for recognizable names) or boards of donors who are supposed to write hefty checks themselves or ask their wealthy contacts for money. While this shared role in funding can be a gift to development staff when it goes well (rare), it is also inherently exclusionary and too often drives the decision making power of the organization from a place of disconnected, wealthy, white leadership. Additionally, these type of board members are unfamiliar with the nonprofit sector and often defer to the CEO for meaningful decision making. This can result in very bad, often tyrannical leaders staying for a long time, unchecked. (There’s a notorious arts organization in Austin who pops to mind as the prototypical example of this case—nonprofit employees talk about who the abusive leaders are!) I think that Nonprofit boards should restructure so that a % is made up of C level executive employees of the organization, an equal amount of additional staff people of ALL levels who rotate, past/current service recipients, community volunteers, and a few donors. Bring more of the people who are supposed to be impacted by the work and who actually DO the work into the room, and genuinely listen to them.
Unionize: collective bargaining simply works and nonprofit employees should have just as much opportunity and open access to unionizing as every field.
Blur all lines between development and non-development staff: If we want donors and the wider community to understand our work and value, then we cannot only have ONLY “professional fundraisers” acting as the spokespeople and mouth pieces of our services to donors. People who sit in every seat, and most importantly—the direct service seats—NEED TO BE HEARD. We must facilitate more honest, hard discussions between supporters and those doing the work. As a part of deconstructing rigid pay scales, we need to blur siloed responsibilities, too. This is the one that would probably be disfavored by the most people who work in nonprofits (but not fundraising) because development/fundraising is often seen as the “scary” side of our work. (I can’t tell you how many times in my career I’ve heard, “I hate asking for money.”) Like, I get it, I do too!!! But I’ve been doing it every day anyway for 8 years because it is a necessary part of bringing our mission to life. And it will be a better part of our organization the more that other staff people are comfortable with it and in those spaces. This is something I’m personally proud to be a champion of at my organization and some of the best people who have ever raised funds for us started as direct service providers.
There you have it, some ideas for a more equitable nonprofit sector. There are probably 5 million more things that could be added and I in no way mean to portray this as “done” or “definitive.” One of the guidelines that the CCF movement uses that I really love is “expect/accept non-closure.” The issues that we are working on right now have been around a long time and the solutions are not simple or easy. (If they treat them as if they are, we’ll never actually fix them.) On that note, what’s next for me now, you ask? Annoying everyone in my world that I possibly can with these ideas and thoughts until things start to shift meaningfully!