Author: Vu Le

Hi everyone. I wrote on this topic on LinkedIn last week, and it hit a nerve, so I wanted to expand. Every once in a while, folks in our sector make lists highlighting experts and resources they think are great. “25 Fundraising Experts You Should Follow.” “20 Books on Leadership That Should Be on Your Reading List.” “Top 10 Unconventionally Sexiest Vegan Nonprofit Bloggers from the Pacific Northwest.” Etc.

I appreciate the effort that it takes to make these lists, as they can be helpful. However, if you’ve made such a list and published it, just know that the first thing many people will do is scan to see the demographics information. And even to this day, many of these lists are glaringly white, and often full of white men.

And the responses from the mostly white colleagues on these lists are along the lines of “So honored to be among such great company!” Sometimes, a gracious colleague will name several leaders of color they recommend to also get a bit of the limelight. But more likely, there’s further recommendations of more white professionals, without much reflection or self-awareness. Yikes.

It’s not just lists though, as colleagues on LinkedIn point out. Conference speakers, podcasts, panels, etc., all still have problems with representation, despite our years of DEI training. And it’s not just the lack of diversity and inclusion, but also how we react to it that may reinforce it. All of it just shows just how pervasive white, patriarchal, ableist, neurotypical, and heteronormative systems are, to the point that many of us don’t even know that we’re perpetuating them.

So here are a few guidelines and reminders. For all of us, but especially for white colleagues:  

Constantly check for who is missing: When you make a list, invite guests for your podcast, put together a panel, etc., double check to see whose voices have been absent, and take corrective actions as needed. All of us need to be more intentional about this. When I first wrote this light-hearted blog post “24 quotes by famous people if they had worked in nonprofit,” I read through it and realized that 18 out of 24 of the quotes were from famous men, so I changed it (It was also originally 25, but I removed a transphobic author). Race and gender are the most obvious, but also think about sexual orientation, disability, transgender identity, age, neurodiversity, geographic representation, etc.

Be aware of who agrees with you: Sometimes I peruse through social media posts and see some of the most asinine viewpoints expressed ever, or some of the most non-inclusive lists. And these posts may have dozens or hundreds of likes. That may seem like people agree, but if you click on who reacted to the post, it may tell a different story. If the majority of the people who “liked” what you created are white, men, etc., and there’s no response or mostly negative responses from people of color, women, etc., then maybe reassess what you said. Yes, I know there are more white people in our sector. Even so, it should be a warning if most people who agree with you are white.

If you’re “included,” give feedback when it’s appropriate: Because of how pervasive this is, people often don’t realize they’re doing it. If you are aware of it, and you are also privileged enough to be included, use your voice to provide some helpful feedback. For instance, privately contact the author of a list and let them know that while you’re honored to be thought of, their list is not very diverse and you recommend they be more inclusive. Or if you’re invited to be a speaker at an event, and you notice most of the other speakers listed are men, let the conference organizers know.

Be thoughtful about when you should refuse engagement: If something is not inclusive online, refrain from “liking” and sharing it. Engaging with these posts leads to algorithms further disseminating them, which means you are helping normalize lack of diversity and reinforcing the content creator’s lack of thoughtfulness. Meanwhile, those who are included in lists, invitations to speak, etc. should be intentional about when you accept these opportunities. Sometimes, the most significant thing you can do is turn them down, and maybe recommend other people who aren’t often featured. It would be the equitable thing to do, but also, do you really want to be the 19^th dude on a list of top 25 experts on fundraising, or the 4^th white person on a panel talking about…anything?

If someone calls you out, take it graciously: It can make you feel like crap to get feedback that a list of experts you like, panel, podcast guest roster, book recommendations, or whatever you put together is composed almost entirely of white men or white women. But be appreciative, especially if it comes from a person of color or of other marginalized backgrounds. Most of us don’t want to constantly deal with this stuff. But it’s in our faces all the time. So if someone takes time and energy to let you know something is amiss, when they could be watching Sex Education’s final Season on Netflix and not deal with the stress of handling your potential fragility and defensiveness, be grateful. Thank them and make corrections.

Be intentional about who you follow and who follows you: Regularly check your social media followers, as well as the people you follow. If most of them are white, male, non-disabled, cisgender, etc., then chances are, you are in a certain bubble, and you’re more likely to amplify people and opinions that uphold dominant systems. Make more effort to follow and connect with people who are not in dominant groups: people of color, women, women of color, transgender people, LGBQIA people, neurodiverse people, lower-income people, etc.

“Over”-representation of people from marginalized communities is good: The late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was asked when would there be enough women on the SCOTUS, and she said, “When there are nine.” Because people from dominant identities are represented everywhere and all the time, it is completely OK when they are not represented. For example, a panel of mostly or all white men is not good. However, a panel of mostly or all women of color is amazing!

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Hi everyone, a quick note before we get started. If you’re in Seattle and available the evening of October 26^th, please join me at the Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI) for a book reading I’m doing of my book, Unicorns on Fire, which is a collection of some of my favorite blog posts, but in print. It’ll be fun. We’ll be sharing scary nonprofit stories, taking photobooth pictures, and giving out NAF merch as door prizes. It’s free. Register here so we know how much hummus to buy for the hummus bar.  

If you work in this sector, you’ve probably experienced your fair share of bizsplaining. This is a term my friend Allison Carney coined where someone from the corporate sector who often has little to no nonprofit experience, talks down to nonprofit professionals. It manifests in several ways, including, but not limited to:

1. Criticizing nonprofits by comparing them with for-profits: “Nonprofits leaders are so disorganized, unlike all these amazing, highly competent leaders who run businesses.”
2. Assuming their experience in for-profit makes them qualified to school nonprofits: “I retired from a 40-year career in banking. I’d love to mentor a nonprofit leader or two.”
3. Believing nonprofit work is easier than for-profit work: “Being a corporate lawyer has been so stressful. Sometimes I daydream about quitting and starting my own nonprofit.”
4. Using corporate terms and concepts as if we’ve never heard of them: “Have you heard of revenues projection?”
5. Insisting that nonprofits be more like for-profits: “Nonprofits should be more like for-profits.”
6. Believing volunteering or using nonprofits makes them expert: “I’ve been a board member of several nonprofits, so I know how to run one. That’s why I’m applying for this ED position.”
7. Arguing about nonprofit issues as if the bizsplainer’s opinions about them are as equally valid as the opinions of someone in nonprofit: “I disagree. I think nonprofits should all be forced to pay taxes.”
8. Ignoring glaring issues in for-profits: “Wow, nonprofits have a unique problem of people of color quitting.”
9. Believing for-profits are the solutions for every problem: “Nonprofits should just all go out of business and let social enterprises take over solving social issues.”
10. Being unable to detect irony, such as understanding the problems caused by for-profits: “Maybe if nonprofits acted more like for-profits, they’d be more successful at solving issues like poverty and homelessness.”

I’m sure there’s plenty of other categories. It’s weird. It’s rare when nonprofit folks have the same patronizing attitude toward for-profits. There are probably a few nonprofit people who have no experience in another field saying something like, “I’ve never run a restaurant before, but I have eaten at several, and I think you need to consolidate with other restaurants in your neighborhood into one mega-restaurant, to lower overhead costs” or “When I’m retired from my career in youth development, I’d love to open my own medical practice. It seems so rewarding!”

But that’s not common. Most of us don’t go butting into the intricacies of medicine, law, architecture, engineering, or underwater welding with the same breathtaking combination of arrogance and ignorance that many for-profit people come at us with. And none of this is to say that there are no good for-profit folks who enter the nonprofit sector and become awesome; there are, and their secret is that they’re humble enough to put aside their ego and learn from the folks who have been here in the sector for a while.

If you’re dealing with a bizsplainer, it can be exhausting, frustrating, and sometimes bewildering. Some bizsplainers mean well but just don’t realize how condescending and ridiculous they’re being. Think of them like adorable toddlers with LinkedIn accounts who are learning the ways of the world. If you have the time and patience, feel free to help educate. Remember, not everyone has had the same experience we do, and society does not do a very good job educating people on the intricacies of nonprofit dynamics. It does the opposite, which is to further misinformation, such as on overhead, etc.

So unless it’s obviously otherwise, assume at first that the bizsplainer is well-meaning, and calmly provide context, statistics, and counterarguments. One time, a bizsplainer said to me, “You nonprofits all should sell things to earn revenues. Like my church. It sells sausages each weekend.” I calmly explained how earned revenues can be great but is not realistic for most nonprofits. He took it well.

The real issues are with the bizsplainers who are trolls and who like riling people up. Here are some tips and tricks I’ve learned over the years:

Remain calm: Trolls like to wind people up, and the more irritated you are, the more gleeful they get. They can sense when their prey is flustered, and they will attack. Don’t engage with them as if they were rational human beings who are open to change, because most of the time, they’re not.

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For decades, our sector has had this refrain: “Donors and funders deserve transparency. They have a right to know how nonprofits spend their donations and the outcomes they achieved.” Many of us agree with this, including me. Yes, nonprofits should be transparent. They need to report their revenues, expenses, program activities, and the results of their work. And most nonprofits do, as required by law. In the US nonprofits are legally required to file 990 tax forms each year. Most orgs release annual reports. Throughout the year they also let people know what they’ve been up to, using newsletters and other forms of communication.

The challenge is that for some reason the above level of transparency is not enough, and we’ve all convinced ourselves that not only do donors and funders deserve to know specifically how the dollars they contributed were spent and what outcomes could be personally attributed to them, but also that this somehow makes sense.

Let’s talk about financial reports. One time I spent 15 hours trying to dissect out how much my organization was spending on each line item from the $75,000 grant a foundation provided us. Since this funder had a different chart of account than us, we first had recategorize our line items to match theirs. Then they also had a different fiscal year, so they only wanted a report on the expenses that fell in their particular fiscal year.

They wanted to know, among other line items, of the $890 we spent on postage that year, how much of their 75K was spent, but only from beginning of September to end of August. $172.28, I recall, according to my calculations using Excel formulas, the help of a staff member who loved sudoku, and some light dabbling in the arcane arts, which I can’t really talk about, but it did involve a bit of beet juice as a vegan substitute for chicken blood.

I’m going to call this accounting that requires disaggregating out expenses based on who contributed what: Donor-Adjacent Financial Tracking (DAFT). DAFT has been so prevalent in our sector that we’ve just all taken it at face value. Many funders seem fully bought into this, as evidenced by the constant silly, aggravating, and pointless financial reporting, like the above, that they force nonprofits to do.

The same goes for outcomes. I’m going to call it Contributor-Linked Outcome Disaggregation (CLOD). One funder to my last org not only requested a breakdown of how we spent $25,000, but also what outcomes their $25,000 achieved. “Please explain what outcomes were specifically attributable to the grant fund that we allocated to your organization” they wrote on the grant report instructions. This was followed up with “Please also indicate what outcomes you achieved that were NOT attributable to the funds we gave your organization.” I wept softly into my lunch: a container of hummus and some raw cauliflower florets, leftovers from a prior community event (Cauliflower florets are always the least popular!)

These examples seem extreme. But this sort of thinking—that individual expenses and outcomes can be attributed to individual donors and funders—is pervasive in our sector, manifesting in various degrees, and so we’ve all just accepted it as normal. Most funders will think it’s perfectly fine, even best-practice, to ask a nonprofit to parse out what their 10K or 100K specifically accomplished, and to do it on the funder’s own timeline, and not what timeline makes sense for the nonprofit’s programs and services and fiscal year.

Can you imagine if for-profits are expected to do this? Picture someone going to a store to buy a laptop:

Customer: “Here’s $750 for my laptop. At the end of the year, I want to know how you spent the $750 I gave you and how it helped your bottom line.”

Cashier: “Uh, we’re a publicly traded company, and in the US the SEC requires that we file financial reports every quarter, as well as file annual and 10-Q and 10-K reports. You’re more than welcome to those reports.”

Customer: “No, bro, I need a detailed report of how much of my specific $750 you spent on each line item. For instance, of the $750, how much went to your rent, how much to your CEO’s salary, etc. And also how my $750 affected your stock price.”

It’s time to admit that this is a delusion, a charade we’ve all be upholding. And a destructive one.

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Hi everyone, last week was my kids’ first week of school. This always brings bittersweet emotions as I watch my little ones find their lines, reconnect with their friends, and increase a notch in their confidence and independence. I know the days of them holding my hands as we walk to their classes each morning are numbered, as are the moments when they turn around to wave to me before they disappear behind the walls and doors of their school. It’s beautiful. But also heart-wrenching, when I let myself ruminate about the unforgiving passage of time.

But this post is not about my kids. While dealing with the logistics of school starting, I was filled with appreciation for the nonprofits and nonprofit professionals in our sector. Kiet, my younger one, asked when his “art classes” will start up again. This is an after-school program run by a local organization here. Last year, I dropped by the program, and the wonderful staff were leading creative games and having the kids express themselves by drawing on little squares of paper.

Kiet loved these classes, and it was so great last year to see his eyes light up as he explained what he drew and what meanings and emotions they conveyed. It’s the patient, creative, caring nonprofit professionals who taught my son these skills, working in partnership with the amazing educators and paraprofessionals at their school.

In the afternoon, when the final bell rings, our kids wait in the cafeteria, where staff from another nonprofit walk them to an after-school program. There they get snacks and engage in various activities. One day last Spring, I came to pick them up early, and the kids were outside at a local park, playing tag, watched by the kind, patient program team. Viet, my older one, was sweating profusely, running around the field. Unlike his little brother, he’s a shy kid who often just wants to camp out at home; it was nice to watch him laugh and joke around with the other kids. He ran over when he saw me. “I’m having fun. Can you come back in like an hour?”

Throughout the year, the afterschool program partners with various other nonprofits, including a food truck that comes once a week and provides delicious warm meals for children, most of whom are low-income. “Daddy,” Kiet said one evening, “they have vegan food, and their rice and beans are better than yours.”

We are not low-income, and I was a bit hesitant that my kids were taking food meant for other kids, but in interacting with the friendly, dedicated servers, I recognized the nonprofit’s thoughtful approach of ensuring no kids felt left out or less than.

I always say that our sector is like air, whereas other sectors are like food. Air and food are both vital, but air does not get the same level of appreciation. Because it’s invisible and automatically consumed, no one appreciates air until they are forced to pay attention, like when they’re planning to dive underwater or climb a tall mountain, or when it’s not there.

Though I work in and speak and write about our sector, I too have been taking for granted these amazing nonprofits all around me. I often walk around my neighborhood, and there are nonprofits and nonprofit professionals everywhere. There’s the food pantry providing staples to hungry families. There’s the climate nonprofit working to advance green solutions. There’s the bike-focused nonprofit that helps youth increase their confidence through fixing up bicycles among other activities, where my seven-year-old got his first bike.

I’ve seen nonprofit staff and volunteers standing on the corner to get folks to sign petitions for sensible gun laws and other needed legislations. On a wall, there’s a vibrant mural painted by kids organized by an art nonprofit. On a community bulletin board, there’s a flyer for an event in the park put on by a music nonprofit. I see tiny homes built by an organization that supports homeless people.

I pass by dozens of nonprofits every day, and often don’t think much about it. Yet these nonprofits are making my neighborhood and the world so much better. My 76-year-old father, until he returned to Vietnam recently, told me how a friend of his took him to visit a nearby senior center. I like the thought of my dad and his buddy dropping by the center, making friends, playing Bingo, building community.

I know our sector is far from perfect. I spend a lot of time pointing out everything we need to improve on. But that doesn’t negate the fact that I deeply and profoundly love our sector and the people in it, and the pride I feel in being a part of it. For all its challenges and barriers and imperfections, it’s filled with some of the kindest, hardest-working, most brilliant, most dedicated individuals.

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A while ago, a colleague mentioned a funder who required a whole-ass grant proposal from their current grantees to renew their grant every year. Requiring a full proposal for renewal is very annoying, but common enough, like the philanthropic equivalent of pinkeye.

This one funder, however, specified that grantees could not copy and paste information from previous year’s proposals. This forced grantees every year to spend time rewriting their mission statements, community needs, program descriptions, evaluation methodologies, budget narratives etc. using different words and phrases, even though most of that information remains the same.

If I ever wake up in the middle of the night recalling the name of this foundation (or if you know them), I will be sure to publicly bestow upon them the glorious title of “Crappy Funder of the Milky Way Galaxy.” They would get a plaque they can display for being a condescending, time-wasting fopdoodle. That’s right, I said fopdoodle, because only Old English can convey how archaic and vexing this funder is.

With AI-supported grantwriting platforms like Grantable increasingly being used in our sector, nonprofits can better deal with clueless funder malarkey and shenanigans like the above. Someone can paste answers from last year’s grant proposal into ChatGPT, for example, and ask it to paraphrase, saving them time and energy that can be used on much more important work, such as running programs or turning some milk crates into a makeshift filing system.

With the rise of AI-assisted proposals, I bet some funders are probably experiencing a combination of fear, anxiety, and possibly resentment. With the barriers being lowered, they may be flooded with more grant proposals. They may no longer be able to judge and discard proposals based on ridiculous and inequitable criteria like spelling and grammar. They may use AI themselves to read, summarize, and possibly even select proposals for funding, which brings with it some ethical considerations of its own. This article from our colleagues in Australia provides a good summary of how many funders will respond to increasingly-AI generated grant applications.

However, I am less interested in how funders WILL respond, and more on how they SHOULD. While there are tons of crappy, fustilarian funders in our sector, there are plenty of amazing ones. For those who are trying to be thoughtful about the increase in AI-generated content and what that means for their work, here’s some advice:

Let go and have a Zen-like acceptance of a new normal: Generative AI is a tool, and if it’s a useful tool, people will use it. You can resist and fight it, or you can accept this as what people will be doing from now on. And it could be a good thing. Funders get all the information they need in the formats they want, while nonprofits conserve their time and energy to focus on helping people, saving democracy, or anything else that’s more important than trying to count words in characters and other menial, pointless tasks that most grants require. That’s a good thing.

Refocus on your value of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion: Many funders tout Equity as one of their values. AI, when it’s used with intention, can help advance this. As it’s been mentioned many times over the years, grants are inherently inequitable, tending to reward the organizations that have more fundraising resources and can play the game most effectively. This leaves out many organizations led by marginalized communities, who often can’t compete. AI-supported grantwriting can balance things out a bit. Funders who value DEI should find ways to work with this.

Recalibrate your criteria and parameters: If you’re freaked out that you may receive significantly more grant proposals now that it’s easier to produce grant applications, then spend more time refining your parameters and criteria. Especially around eligibility. Use your equity lens to ensure funding goes to the communities that are most affected by inequity and injustice. If you care about Black communities, for example, ensure your grants are only accessible to Black-led organizations, based on criteria like their ED(s) being Black, along with 75% of their board members, and 75% of their senior staff, or whatever makes most sense. When criteria are grounded on equity, it won’t matter that proposals are AI-generated, because only so many organizations will be eligible in the first place.

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Hi everyone, for the past two weeks I’ve been dealing with ongoing violent coughs, wheezing, and occasional migraines. Chest x-rays finally concluded I have pneumonia. (My ten-year-old: “So can you transform into different animals now?” “No, son, that’s Nimona.”). I am now on a delightful cocktail of antibiotics, inhalers, and various other medications. All that to say, I am not exactly the most coherent right now and might start hallucinating again at any moment, so thank you for your understanding. Yes, Ms. Scott, I would love for you to fund Nonprofit The Musical!

This summer, I went back to Vietnam for three weeks. There, among amazing food and beautiful scenery, as usual I strove to answer questions from various relatives on what it is I do. It doesn’t help that I left Vietnam when I was eight, so my Vietnamese vocabulary is limited, which is not helpful when trying to explain complicated things like equity, grantwriting, and hummus, the trademarks of our profession.

But it turns out, none of my family over here, who all speak English, understands it either. I have given up trying to explain to them what I do and instead have decided to cultivate a mysterious brooding persona, akin to a vigilante superhero with a troubled past (“They call me…The Caped Capacity Builder…”)

A reason many of our families have little understanding of what we do could be that our sector isn’t very visible in society. Newspapers will have a business section, but not a nonprofit/philanthropy section. Local TV news programs will have a sports segment, but no dedicated space to highlight the important work our sector does daily.

It’s kind of annoying. There are shows are chocolate sculpting and glass blowing, about firefighters and ice truckers, and like a billion shows about cops. I am now watching “Fisk” on Netflix, a hilarious show about a no-nonsense lawyer at a wills and probate firm in Australia. But there’s barely anything about our work. There are a few things, like “Loot,” which I analyzed here. And technically, universities and hospitals are nonprofits, and there’s lots of shows about them.

The point, however, is not that we need more shows about nonprofit and philanthropy, which we do. The lack of shows and dedicated news segments about our work is a symptom of how quiet and modest we are as a sector. Other sectors, especially for-profits, tend to be very vocal, to the point of insisting they know how to do our own work better than we do. Our sector, on the other hand, is the opposite—mostly quiet and unassuming. Kind of like Dunning-Kruger, but for entire fields.

I remember attending an amazing conference a few years ago where people came from all sorts of fields: tech, medicine, nonprofits, etc. All were there to figure out how to solve global problems like poverty and infant mortality. The loudest, most self-assured people were the tech bros. They had the least knowledge about the issues, and their solutions were often not based in reality (“we need an app to help homeless people use GPS to find shelters”), and yet they were so confident and eager to share their ideas. It was inspiring in a way.  

I think there are reasons why we’re generally not as loud as other fields. The work of advancing equity and justice attracts those who tend to be less focused on themselves and their own well-being (and some of whom may have a martyr complex). Meanwhile, society has a philosophy where those with wealth get more attention, propped up by sayings like “beggars can’t be choosers,” and our work often does feel like begging the wealthy for funding. Then, we ourselves reinforce it with fundraising philosophies like the expectation of constant gratitude toward donors. And, it’s a women-majority profession, like teaching and nursing, and these professions, because of patriarchal BS, tend to be less loud and arrogant than men-majority ones.

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Hi everyone. Quick reminder: On August 30^th at 11am Pacific Time, there is a FREE webinar on legislative reforms on Donor-Advised Funds. Get more details and register here. There will be live captioning.

Also, this week I’ll be speaking virtually at the Nonprofit Marketing Summit, which is free for everyone. My lecture, called “Burn It All Down: Achieving Radical Impact in Nonprofit and Philanthropy” will be on Thursday August 24 at 11am Pacific Time. Get details and register here. There will be auto-captions. And I might have a sexy, smokey voice from weeks of chronic coughing.

After doing this work a while, I realize there are a few words and phrases in our sector that absolute raise my hackles and cause me to go immediately into fight or fight mode (yes, I said “fight” twice). These words and phrases include “overhead,” “logic model,” “sustainability,” “donor love,” “strategic philanthropy,” “nonprofits should act more like for-profits,” and “can I give you some friendly feedback about your personal appearance on that virtual keynote?”

But the one that causes me to want to dramatically flip over a silent auction table and scatter all the items on the floor is “resilient.” Especially when funders use it in talking about nonprofits.

During the Before Times, I received a phone call from a consultant. “Vu,” they said, “I was hired by the XYZ foundation to do some research and write a report with recommendations on how funders can support nonprofits to be more resilient, and your name came up as someone I should talk to.”

“Resilient?” I asked, sitting on the steps outside my office building, because our office was too small to accommodate everyone.

“Yes, how nonprofits can weather different challenges, especially the lack of funding, funders’ changing priorities, the unpredictable economy, etc.”

I’m glad it was a phone call and not a video call, because my eyes rolled so hard that I’m pretty sure I lost consciousness for several seconds. “Please tell funders the best way for them to build nonprofit resilience is to give nonprofits lots of money. Lots of unrestricted money. For a long period of time. And to stop spending resources on pointless research on topics where everyone already knows the answer.”

Ten years and an ongoing pandemic later, and I’m frustrated to see this conversation still exists in the same way in our sector. We need to talk about it. I want us all, but especially funders, to stop using this framework altogether, because while it seems noble, it’s destructive to our sector, in multiple ways:

First, the idea of resilience entrenches people in accepting inequitable systems instead of challenging them: There are lots of articles about the problematic nature of “resilience” when it is applied to people and communities who are most affected by systemic injustice. “Children are resilient,” we often say when kids go through traumatizing stuff, which allows us a measure of comfort, but this often makes us complacent about changing the systems and conditions that force kids to have to be resilient in the first place.

The same goes for nonprofits. Often when funders talk about ensuring their nonprofit partners are strong and resilient during challenging times, they’re not focused on fixing the systems that make nonprofit work necessary in the first place. Or the systems of unpredictable, subsistence funding that keeps most nonprofit at a level of basic survival that sparks these conversations around resilience.

Second, it continues to place the onus on nonprofits to fund their programs and services: “Resilience” and “sustainability” are two scoops of the same hummus. Both are grounded on this belief that nonprofits are responsible for ensuring their own survival, and funders’ financial support through grants is out of the goodness of funders’ hearts, something extraneous that nonprofits should be thankful for, but never rely on.

The “resilience” and “sustainability” framework perpetuates the idea that nonprofits are freeloaders “dependent” on funders and donors. The problem with this is, of course nonprofits are by their nature dependent on funders and donors! As long as there’s inequity and nonprofits need to exist to address it, they will be dependent. Stop thinking this is a bad thing, when it’s just how things are. Nonprofits’ jobs should be to run programs and services that are needed by the community, and funders’ jobs should be to fund these nonprofits for as long as they are effective.

Third, it stifles imagination and encourages an incremental approach to the work: When we focus on things like organizational sustainability and resilience, for both nonprofits and foundations, there is a risk that we’ve accepted that inequity and injustice and ultimately unsolvable. Foundations that are deeply attached to the idea of giving out a small amount of their endowment each year so they can exist in perpetuity have lost their imagination. They don’t think we can solve problems in the present, so they must save for the future. This is a self-reinforcing prophecy.

The same goes for nonprofits and movements. If we haven’t lost our imagination, we should not be so focused on long-term sustainability or resilience. We should be focused on effectively addressing issues…and then going out of business. That means any resilience-aligned thinking should be toward a short-term existence, ensuring nonprofits and movements are strong enough to effectively to do the work for while they’re needed, with the goal of them sunsetting immediately after.

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I am a generous and humble man who wants to help sad poor people. This is why I give money to charity. If you help sad poor people, I might also give your organization money. But I have high standards, so I usually give initial donations to test organizations’ responses. Sure, $100 may not be much, though I believe one should be able to purchase at least 10 bananas with that amount. After making the initial donation, I wait in the shadows like a philanthropic hawk to see how charities treat me, which will determine whether I will give them more in the future.

I have been very disappointed to say the least. Some nonprofits don’t respond at all. Some wait excessively long periods of time before getting back to me. One time I had to wait a whole month like an animal for a handwritten thank-you note. Another organization received a huge grant from another donor, and I expected them to know immediately how that money would affect their operations, and more importantly, how it would affect me. My various attempts demanding answers were met with silence. In fact, across multiple charities I donate to, all seem to be avoiding communicating with me, which can only mean they are all no-good, very bad.

Do these nonprofits think their work helping people is more important than stewarding their donors and responding to our needs? Am I not as important as these “homeless veterans,” “refugees fleeing poverty and violence,” and other assortments of non-donors? Did Jesus not say the poor will always be around, but donors are precious and few and must have our feet washed or something?

I don’t want to cast a negative light on all nonprofits. Some are great. One nonprofit, for example, gave me treats, a tummy rub, and scritches behind the ear when I dropped by the other week to visit the impoverished waifs in their program. If you can’t get good scritches and tummy rubs, what’s the point of donating?

For the charitable organizations that want to improve their relationships with donors like me, here is how they can go about doing that:

Be prompt in your responses: Whenever you get a donation, immediately stop whatever you’re doing, such as helping a child find food during the summer or saving democracy or whatever your mission is, and make sure the donor feels properly thanked.

Have ongoing communications with donors: We don’t just want to hear from you when you need money, which seems to be curiously often. However, it’s important to honor donors’ wishes and communication preferences. For example, I only want to receive emails on Tuesday afternoons and phone calls when the moon is full.

Build relationships with your donors: You do this by taking an interest in your donors’ lives, hopes, dreams, favorite foods, childhood traumas, phobias, and the deepest most profound pining they hold in the bosoms of their philanthropic hearts.

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Read the full article here.

Hi everyone, this will be the last blog post until August 8^th, as I’ll be on my annual July break. By the time you’re reading this, I am on my way to Vietnam to see the relatives. It will be three weeks of getting criticized for my career choice, divorced single status, and disheveled general appearance. It’s OK; relentless criticism is one of the love languages in Vietnamese culture.

I hope that you’re also taking time for yourself. Our sector sucks at this. Even during a pandemic, I see so many colleagues lamenting/bragging about how little vacation they’ve been taking, how they haven’t taken a break in literally years. Cut it out. There is no honor in burnout. You deserve to rest and to recharge and watch all 10 episodes of The Bear season 2 in one sitting, or whatever brings you joy.

However, it’s easy to say that. We’ve internalized some philosophies and messages that make rest feel shameful. One of these is the concept of “laziness.” Our self-worth and even identity are tied to doing stuff constantly, and when we think we’re not, we feel awful and useless. It’s a risotto of capitalism that we’re expected to stir perpetually while adding more and more heated broth of productivity.

Let’s change our conceptualization of laziness. You’re not “lazy” when you’re taking time off, whether it’s an afternoon or several days or a sabbatical of several months. You’re not “lazy” when you say no to extraneous stuff you may not have the time or energy for. You’re not “lazy” when you don’t constantly engage with people in real life or online. You’re not “lazy” when you don’t take a shower for several days, or spend three hours napping in the supply closet/conference room after looking over the cashflow projections. You’re probably just emotionally and physically exhausted but your stress tolerance has reached such a level that you don’t notice.

Here’s a scenario of what true laziness looks like: My friend applied for a job and went through several rounds of interviews. She was asked to do free labor such as providing feedback and suggestions (free consulting) regarding the organization’s current practices. After the hiring timeline they proposed had passed, she waited patiently and then sent in a polite request asking to know when they would make their decision. She waited several days and sent another email. They ghosted her for weeks and eventually told her she didn’t get the job.

Not following up with job candidates is lazy. At least my friend finally got the rejection notice from this organization. I’ve heard so many colleagues being ghosted after going through several rounds of interviews, never getting a call or email from the org again. Except a few who got messages later asking for a donation. This is not just lazy, it’s also thoughtless, cruel, and gross. And inequitable, as job candidates from marginalized communities will be most affected.

The definition of “laziness” needs to shift from “being averse to work and productivity” toward “being averse to doing things that would lead to a just and equitable world.” Along those lines, here are other forms of true laziness. This list is by no means comprehensive:

Funders:

• Requiring full grant applications that’s tailored to your foundation because you’re too lazy to gather the same information by reading a grant proposal that’s already written by the organization for another foundation.
• Having ridiculous character limits on grant applications because you’re too lazy to take an additional 30 seconds each to read slightly longer answers.
• Requiring grant applicants to fill out your own budget template because you’re too lazy to try to understand applicants’ budgets in their original formats.
• Having nonprofits attach or print out documents like 990 tax forms because you’re too lazy to look these publicly available documents on the internet.
• Using “overhead” rate as a criterion to evaluate nonprofits because you’re too lazy to learn more effective ways to assess outcomes and effectiveness.
• Prohibiting nonprofits from engaging in advocacy because you’re too lazy to bother looking up the legal parameters around lobbying, advocacy, etc.

Board members:

• Putting a stop to equity practices that the staff propose because you’re too lazy to learn about the issues affecting our communities. For example, the board members who stopped their staff who just wanted to put their pronouns in their email signatures. And the ones who prevented their team from releasing a statement supporting abortion rights. Get your lazy ass to several trainings or at least read an article.  
• Letting the ED/CEO get away with horrible stuff because you’re too lazy to check to ensure they are not abusing their power or doing other terrible things.
• Not making important decisions, such as firing a racist CEO, and instead keeping the staff on edge and demoralized because you’re too lazy to spend the time to do what is needed.

EDs/CEOs:

• Hiring your friends or family members because you’re too lazy to run an effective hiring process and too lazy to reflect on nepotism and other unethical practices.
• Forcing your team members to follow inane and nonsensical rules because you’re too lazy to try to improve your skills as a leader so you stick to archaic, ineffective, and inequitable BS.
• Firing staff who bring up problematic issues of race, white supremacy, etc. because you’re too lazy to do the difficult work of addressing these issues.
• Sticking around when you are clearly not good for the organization or even destructive to it because you’re too lazy to find another line of work and maybe go to therapy.

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Read full article here.

Hi everyone, Juneteenth was this week, so a quick reminder to funders that Black-led organizations only get only a tiny fraction of all foundation dollars, so if you released a statement and then took the day off, give more money to Black-led organizations and Black leaders. Everyone else, support Black businesses, donate to Black orgs, and fight against racism, such as the fascists making the teaching of Black history illegal.

Today’s topic is the portrayal of nonprofits by the media, mainly by journalists covering nonprofits. A colleague wrote me, irritated by yet another article that portrays nonprofits in poor light. “There’s so much handwringing about how nonprofits are never held accountable, without any actual understanding of nonprofit experiences. Why don’t [nonprofits] just collect data, Vu? How hard can it be to collect data???”

A while ago I was excited because the New York Times had a reporter who introduced himself as the main person who would be covering nonprofits. He went onto Twitter and crowdsourced for topic suggestions. People gave him lots of great suggestions: spotlight amazing nonprofits doing great things, highlight the inequity that nonprofits are addressing, bring attention to the lack of resources going to nonprofits and how we still manage to kick ass, feature amazing nonprofit leaders, maybe do a piece on nonprofit professionals’ amazing sense of style and fashion and our symbiotic relationship with Ross Dress for Less.

The dude came back later to announce that he would focus on uncovering nonprofit malfeasance and corruption. I guess every article would feature an Evil Nonprofit of the Week or something, I dunno.

Anyway, it’s getting very annoying. Our sector is the third largest sector. We are 10% of the workforce in the US. And yet we barely get much coverage in the media. The newspaper has sections on Art, Sports, Business, Entertainment, etc. I would love it if every newspaper had a “Nonprofit” or “Charity and Philanthropy” section. Instead, we are barely seen, and on the rare occasion we do appear, it’s usually because reporters are trying to expose some org for something the public would consider shameful.

It’s not to say that nonprofits are all awesome and should never be called out publicly when they do unethical or illegal things. There are organizations and foundations that suck and should absolutely be scrutinized. But the reporting on our sector has been unbalanced, with tons of omissions and generalizations. It’s been warping society’s perceptions of nonprofits, which only makes the work harder.

So let’s keep a few things in mind, all you journalists and other media folks out there:

Stop lumping all nonprofits together: So one nonprofit does something considered bad, that automatically means all nonprofits are awful? Do we do that to for-profits? If a restaurant makes some sort of mistake, like accidentally give people food poisoning, you journalists don’t generalize to the entire restaurant business and encourage the public to think that ALL restaurants have lax health standards. And when people read about it, they will probably try to avoid the restaurant, but they don’t think “See? All restaurants will give you salmonella!” Have the same courtesy for nonprofits.

Increase your awareness of nonprofits: For some reason, everyone seems to think they’re knowledgeable about nonprofits. It’s weird. We don’t do this for most other professions. No one suddenly thinks they understand legal complexities if they’re not a lawyer. I don’t go to realtors and start giving them advice on mortgage capital rates or whatever. But people who have never worked at nonprofits somehow think they can run one and can have equally valid opinions on our work. This appears to be the case with a lot of journalists. Whereas they might be humble and learn stuff about other fields, the general assumption that nonprofit work is simple and easy means there’s less thoughtfulness in covering nonprofits.

Put down the pitchforks: Like I said, there are nonprofits and foundations that suck, and they should be held accountable. But there seems to be something especially gleeful in people’s attempts to “take down” nonprofits; a type of schadenfreude. It’s as if nonprofits and nonprofit people think they’re too high and mighty, and it’s good whenever they’re brought down a notch. Have you met any nonprofit people?! Look at them, with their greying hair, involuntary twitch in one eye, and a Ross Dress for Less shirt that’s stained with community hummus and despair! And yet they manage to help countless people every day. There’s nothing to bring down! Help lift them up!

Be thoughtful when simplifying complex issues: Nonprofit work often involves complex social, economic, political, cultural, and environmental issues. Do not think you can understand things like homelessness or youth incarceration with a couple of interviews and a few background articles. Heck, some of us in this field for decades are still trying to figure it all out. Your inclination to simplify things into shorter news segments and articles will lead to shallow understanding and perceptions among the public, which only helps worsen the problems. Keep that in mind as you cover nonprofit work.

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Read full article here.