Opinion

Are you perpetuating inequity while engaging in Community-Centric Fundraising?

Written by Vu Le

Hi everyone, the virtual rally to get nonprofits better representation within the White House, and ideally the Harris administration, has been changed from October 24th to October 17th at 4:30pm Pacific Time, so please note that in your calendar. It’s free; register HERE.

Over the past four years, one of the most heartening things I’ve seen is the rise of the Community-Centric Fundraising (CCF) movement. Organizations are doing really awesome and creative stuff, such as asking their donors to support other nonprofits, getting rid of long-held practices such as “raising the paddle,” and using nontraditional metrics for assessing fundraising success. You can read about a lot of the cool stuff colleagues are thinking and doing at the CCF Hub, edited by the brilliant Chris Talbot-Heindl.

It’s also been heartening for me and other CCF proponents to receive fewer annoying and misinformed comments on this topic: “CCF people don’t care about raising money at all; all they do write angry beat poetry about taxes!” “Woke is broke, and it must be true because it rhymes!” “Vu Le hates donors and thinks you should punch every donor you meet in the face!”

However, the growth of the movement has also come with some alarming feedback I’ve been getting from more than a few colleagues across different geographic areas. It seems that some organizations and fundraising teams have been using their engagement in CCF as a shield and an excuse from having deeper, more meaningful engagement with equity practices, and in the process perpetuating inequity. Here are some examples of that:

  • Participating in regular CCF discussions, but still ignoring or ostracizing the voices of women of color and other marginalized people when they bring up dissonance with CCF principles
  • Prioritizing easy CCF-aligned actions, while avoiding examining and resolving serious issues such as lack of diversity in senior leadership; gender and racial wage gaps; and other concerns
  • White senior staff asking lower-seniority staff, who are more likely to be of marginalized identities and who are paid less, to take on unpaid additional CCF-related work

A while ago, I wrote about the concept of Equity Offset, where equity-aligned actions in some areas are used to justify inequity in other areas. It’s like carbon offset, where actions such as paying to plant some trees, in itself a great thing to do, risk allowing people and corporations to feel good about themselves and continue polluting the planet. This seems to be happening occasionally with CCF, and we need to do a better job recognizing and mitigating it:

Read full article here.

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About the author

Vu Le

Vu Le (“voo lay”) is a writer, speaker, vegan, Pisces, and the former Executive Director of RVC, a nonprofit in Seattle that promotes social justice by developing leaders of color, strengthening organizations led by communities of color, and fostering collaboration between diverse communities.

Vu’s passion to make the world better, combined with a low score on the Law School Admission Test, drove him into the field of nonprofit work, where he learned that we should take the work seriously, but not ourselves. There’s tons of humor in the nonprofit world, and someone needs to document it. He is going to do that, with the hope that one day, a TV producer will see how cool and interesting our field is and make a show about nonprofit work, featuring attractive actors attending strategic planning meetings and filing 990 tax forms.

Known for his no-BS approach, irreverent sense of humor, and love of unicorns, Vu has been featured in dozens, if not hundreds, of his own blog posts at NonprofitAF.com.