Author: Vu Le

Hi everyone, this coming Sunday is Father’s Day, so I thought I would write about my dad and what I’ve learned from him. The last few weeks, he has been staying with me. He had been living in Vietnam, and some health concerns sent him back to the US. Because of the pandemic, I hadn’t seen him in four years. Living with him the past three months, which I realized I hadn’t done in 20 years, has been fun, though I’ve had to make some adjustments. When he got back, the first thing he asked me was about a giant wooden beam he told me six years ago to guard. I had given it to someone else, I don’t even remember who. “You shouldn’t have done that. You’ll need that wooden beam someday.” I guess it doesn’t matter what cultures fathers are from, they will want to hoard pieces of wood and reprimand you for not doing so.

My father, Loi Le, was born in Vietnam 76 years ago, in 1947. My father is one of the smartest, strongest, most hardworking, and most hilarious people I know. He is also an amazing storyteller. He enlisted to fight against the North, for which he was put into reeducation camp for a couple of years when South Vietnam fell. The next two decades would be an equally harrowing time that saw our family eking out a survival under Vietnam’s new government, leaving our home, spending six months in a refugee camp in the Philippines, landing in Philly, moving to Seattle, owning a convenience store in Memphis, and moving back to Seattle, along the way facing numerous setbacks and tragedies. The entire story would be too long, so I’ll save it for a book, or maybe a one-man show that involves Vietnamese water puppets, I haven’t decided. Until then, though, here are a few lessons I’ve learned from him:

When you have privilege, use it to help people: In the sixth grade, my father was the biggest and strongest kid in class. One day, he saw a smaller kid being bullied and he stepped in to defend him. He didn’t do it to get on Karma’s good side or whatever. However, sometimes Karma did step in. Years later, after the War, the government made life hell for people who fought against the North. People were assigned to hard labor in reeducation camps. The guy who doled out assignments recognized my father as the kid who protected him from bullies over a decade prior and helped him avoid being sent to much more grueling work.

Always keep your words: When he was in reeducation camp, he and my mother had already fallen in love. They decided to get married. So he went to the head of the camp and asked for permission to leave for a few days. The guy was shocked and indignant: “Who has heard of anyone asking to leave reeducation camp to get married?! How do I know you won’t just try to escape?” My father reassured the man that he wouldn’t escape. He was granted permission. He left the camp, had a simple wedding ceremony with my mother, and came back, one day earlier than he promised.

Find joy and humor whenever you can: My father told me stories of life in these camps, where people were so hungry they were lucky if they could find a rat to eat (the rat was not so lucky). The work was often horrific, sometimes involving detonating unexploded mines. Two people would hold the ends of a long log, and they would slowly and carefully lower the middle of the log to the ground to trigger a mine. The resulting explosion often created shrapnel that flew everywhere. “One guy had his ear sliced off. He taped it back up and continued working. It must have tickled a bit the rest of the day.” I think to endure what my fathers and his fellow prisoners endured, they had to develop a sense of humor. Joy and humor are vital tools that allow us to hold on to our humanity during the longest nights.

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Hi everyone, if you’re in or near Seattle, we are having a PEEP (Party to Enhance Equity in Philanthropy) event on Thursday June 15^th 3pm to 5pm, sponsored by Nonprofit AF, Satterberg Foundation, United Way of King County, Philanthropy Northwest, and Progress Alliance of Washington. If you Sign up here, I’ll send you the location and other details. If you’re hosting an event in your geographic area, let people know in the comment section.

I said a few months ago that it’s been hard to get people in our sector to pay attention to Donor-Advised Funds (DAFs) and proposed legislation around them because “people care about this topic as much as they care about the mating habits of banana slugs.” Well, that was one of my worst analogies. Many of you pointed out that banana slugs’ mating habits are quite interesting, and I went down a rabbit hole (or rather a banana slug hole) to learn more about their reproductive behaviors. Did you know, for example, that banana slugs are hermaphroditic and can, under rare circumstances, make themselves pregnant?

As delightful as banana slugs are, we need to focus and divert our attention toward DAFs, as they have become a major force over the past few decades. And not a force for good. Briefly, DAFs are a mechanism for people to set aside money for charity, grab an immediate tax break, and yet have no legal obligation whatsoever to ever give out that money to an active nonprofit. That money could just stay there, growing, making money in fees for the people and institutions that manage them or advise wealthy people on them, for eternity, or a thousand generations of banana slugs.

Then, there’s also the issue of foundations using DAFs to avoid giving out money they are required to give out by law. Foundations in the US are required to spend out a pathetic 5% of their endowments each year. (A lot of this 5% goes to nonprofits as grants, but legally foundations can count their rent, staff salaries, office snacks, and other expenses as part of that 5%, so they technically don’t even have to give out grants at all, but that’s for another angry blog post). However, they can count any money to put into DAFs, and that would count toward the 5%. And, again, since DAFs have no requirement to disburse funds ever, the money can just sit there until the heat death of the universe. 

Truly gross. Here is a great 2.5-minute video and article from our friends at Institute for Policy Studies that summarizes the main problem with DAFs. Please share it widely. (And if you have the time, here’s a 90-minute recording of me, Susannah Morgan, Ray Madoff, and Chuck Collins discussing DAFs on a webinar, where I said, “philanthropy has often become a hobby for the rich,” a statement that caused several dozen people on LinkedIn to clutch their pearls and pass out on their fainting couches).

As horrible as having money set aside for nonprofit never actually reaching nonprofits, we have another serious issue: DAFs being used to fund hate groups, undermine democracy, advance injustice, and generally undoing many of the things we are working to achieve. Here’s an article that goes deeper on this topic. An excerpt:

“Donors Trust, Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund, Schwab Charitable Fund, and Vanguard Charitable […] from mid-2014 through 2017, these four donor-advised funds combined to give nearly $11 million to 34 groups that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) considers to be hate groups, according to its 2017 hate map. These hate groups include 12 anti-LGBT groups, 12 anti-Muslim groups, eight anti-immigrant groups, one white nationalist group, and one radical traditional Catholic group.”

Our colleague Dan Petegorsky has an article about how Leonard Leo, a powerful right-wing judicial activist, has been using DAFs as part of his $1.6 billion dark money machine to pack courts, including the Supreme Court, with extreme conservative judges, leading to the ending of abortion rights, and to who knows what other horrible things. Because of the lack of regulations around DAFs, they are often opaque and mysterious, which makes them perfect vehicles for funding horrific causes and movements without any scrutiny or pushback.

We as a sector can’t keep ignoring Donor-Advised Funds. Or point out a few good apples to gloss over how corrupt and destructive the whole system is. DAFs are being weaponized to further the very injustice and inequity many of us are fighting. We burn ourselves out trying to contain myriad fires every day, while the people setting the fires use vehicles like DAFs to purchase gasoline and matches.

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Hi everyone, you may have heard about MacKenzie Scott’s new funding initiative, Yield Giving, which will be giving out 250 million in $1M grants. The catch is that organizations are only eligible if they are between $1M to 5M in budget size for two or more of the past five years.

Scott has done some cool stuff, cutting through the BS and giving away billions of dollars with few hoops to many great orgs. So this eligibility criterion in her new grant is disappointing. As many colleagues have pointed out, the vast majority of nonprofits are less than a million in budget size, and organizations led by and serving marginalized communities are more likely to fall within this category. Having this budget threshold as an eligibility requirement ensures many vital organizations led by and serving people of color, rural communities, disabled people, etc., will be left out of accessing this fund.

This line of thinking, however, is not new or uncommon. For years many funders have bought into this idea of “readiness,” when an organization has demonstrated enough financial management capacity, leadership stability, and program effectiveness to receive significant, catalytic funding. It reminds me of the story of Pinocchio, who just wanted to be a real boy: “One day, tiny nonprofit, if you work hard, you will become a real org and then you’ll be ready to handle large grants. Until then, here’s $5,000 that will take you 30 hours to apply for.”

I understand the reasoning behind the concept of readiness. What if an organization doesn’t have its systems in place, such as bookkeeping and HR. A huge grant might overwhelm it. Will it be able to “scale” up quickly? Can it hire so many new staff at once? Will existing staff and board be burned out with the new responsibilities that come with growth? What if this large grant tips the nonprofit toward become a private foundation itself and thus unleashes Fundageddon upon humanity?

These are all valid concerns (except for the tipping, which is such a low risk that it’s ridiculous for funders to even worry about). However, they are not enough to outweigh the benefits of providing significant funding to organizations led by communities most affected by systemic injustice. Ensuring these communities get the resources they need is one of the primary tenets of equity.

Funders need to stop using the concept of “Readiness” to justify giving large, transformative grants to already established organizations, while forcing torturous smaller grants on smaller nonprofits, as these orgs are often led by marginalized communities. Here are things to do and consider:  

Understand the Capacity Paradox: Organizations need significant funding to build their infrastructure, but they cannot get significant funding unless they have strong infrastructure. They are stuck in a Catch-22. Grants of $5K or 10K can be helpful, but they are not the transformative investments that many organizations need to break them out of this paradox.

Examine who gets to define “readiness”: In many cases, the criteria and thresholds for which org is “ready” to receive large grants is determined by funders, who are for the most part white, urban, formally educated people with lots of privilege and relatively little lived experience. This skews the definition. People from marginalized communities may likely have completely different definitions of “readiness.”

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Hi everyone, if you get this in time, Edgar Villanueva and I are having one of our “Decolonizing AF” conversations at 10:30am PT on Instagram today, May 23rd. I think if you go to either of our Instagram pages (@villanuevaedgar or @nonprofitAF) at that time, it should let you know that we’re speaking live. Have low expectations; we’re just winging it.

Also, the time is coming up for our annual sector-wide Party to Enhance Equity in Philanthropy (PEEP), a time around the Summer Solstice when funders and nonprofit leaders get together to hang out informally, with the hope of building relationships and breaking down power dynamics. If your geographic area is hosting something, let me know in the comment section so I can compile it. In Seattle, there’s likely going to be an event on Thursday June 15th from 3 to 5pm somewhere in the Central District; more details coming soon.

18 years ago, I remember being excited that I finally got this really great community leader to join my nonprofit’s board. I will call him “Minh.” I was excited to have Minh and his skills, especially around the logistics of running a board, which at the time was full of well-meaning but inexperienced leaders. Maybe Minh would get the board into shape. And he seemed like a nice guy who truly wanted to help the community.

Minh turned out to be a nightmare. Among his many offenses, he butted into operations, including insisting on designing the flyer for the annual gala. When it turned out horrible and the staff gave him feedback (“this looks like we’re throwing a Halloween party”), he was offended and demanded staff meeting minutes for some reason. Then he tried to start a mutiny to remove the board chair, which then caused a rumor that I was trying to remove the board chair, and then the board chair tried to get me fired as the ED. Even now, 18 years later, I sometimes wake up in a cold sweat, Minh’s cursed words ringing in my ears: “I have graphic design experience!”

This is not a unique story. Throughout the next two decades, I would encounter board members who started as nice people who then became assholes after a year or two on the board. And I hear similar stories from colleagues. And on occasions I catch myself veering toward asshole territory when I am on a board: “I don’t understand. Why do staff need…what do they call it…benefits?”

Not to say everyone becomes a jerk when they join a board, of course; there are lots of nice people who stay nice, and there are also assholes who turn nice. (And let’s not talk about crappy EDs/CEOs who are propped up by a board that fails to do its duties, as that’s for another day). But it happens with enough frequency that we should discuss it. Here are a few reasons we should consider:

The board structure is set up to encourage asshole tendencies: The traditional structure sets it up so that the board is considered the highest governing authority at the organization. Board members are often considered the “boss” of the staff. That sort of power can get to people’s heads, and they start to believe their own hype.

People think they’re doing a good job when they’re being difficult: A lot of board members believe their job is to challenge the CEO/ED and staff to keep them “accountable” and on their toes or whatever. They believe their primary job is to minimize risk, and that means poking holes and finding weaknesses in everything.

Lack of feedback mechanisms for boards: Because of the power dynamics inherent in board structure, there are often few avenues to give board members feedback. When board members can fire the ED/CEO and make staff’s lives miserable, it’s hard to be honest.

The prioritization of people with money or connections to it: The entire sector has a bad habit of making people with money feel special and important, with the more money they have, the more perks and deference they receive. Boards contribute to the problem by focusing on recruiting board members with money and connections, who may act in certain ways because they’re used to being treated a certain way.

The superiority complex among corporate people: We recruit a lot of corporate folks to join our boards. Many are great, but many have a superiority complex, believing that for-profits are inherently better run than nonprofits, and that they themselves are doing the organization a huge favor by being on the board.

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Hi everyone, before we get started, next week, May 23^rd, at 10:30am Pacific Time, Edgar Villanueva (my brother from another mother and also another father) and I will once again be having a session of “Decolonizing AF.” It’s an informal Instagram Live conversation where we talk about nonprofit, philanthropy, and whatever else is on our minds, with much cussing. Captions auto-generated by Instagram. See you there.

Since the start of the pandemic, I’ve been using the hashtag #CrappyFundingPractices to publicly call out funders who were doing ridiculous and/or harmful things. Well, several years have passed, and it seems some funders are still doing crappy things. In fact, there are several innovative new shenanigans! Thank you to all the funders who are awesome. However, we still have many funders whose unreasonable and clueless requirements are jeopardizing nonprofits’ work and thus harming people.

Here is a list of #CrappyFundingPractices that have been called out under the hashtag. If you are at a foundation, please check that you’re not doing these things below, because your foundation may be called out by name:  

1. Excessive requirements for small amounts of funding: No one should be required to prepare a five-page narrative, eight attachments, and sign a blood oath to give up their firstborn, for a $1,000 grant.  
2. Making nonprofits translate their budget into a funder’s budget format: It is ridiculous and self-centered for any funder to expect anyone to convert their budgets into the funder’s format, especially if the funder’s format is in—gasp!—Microsoft Word!
3. Insisting that grant applicants print out and mail in or deliver grant proposals: Let that be an option in case some applicants can’t email their proposal for some reason. Requiring it of everyone, however, is environmentally insensitive and time-wasting.
4. Not funding overhead: Funders who are still allergic to overhead, or whatever their misguided perception is of overhead, need to be called out publicly. We have been battling this for years, and we’re losing patience.  
5. Not funding staff salary: Some funders are ok with funding some overhead, just not compensation for the people doing the work. Who do they think is doing all the work? Elves? ChatGPT now, I guess?  
6. Restricting the funding of overhead to a certain percentage, usually 10%: If you have any sort of percentage restriction, you are insisting you know more about how a nonprofit should do its work than the nonprofit does. You’re silly, and you will be called out.
7. Cutting off accepting grant proposal submissions after a certain number has been reached: This is one of the “innovative” new shenanigans. To only take the first 100 LOIs or the first 200 proposals or whatever means hundreds of people wasted thousands of hours doing work for nothing. Unconscionable.
8. Requiring any sort of documentation of board approval for the grant application: Grants are operations, which the board should not be involved in. Stop forcing nonprofits to blur the lines of autonomy and responsibility between board and staff.  
9. Having nonprofits to farm for votes in popularity-based contests: If you require nonprofits to waste their time harassing their networks for votes or likes on social media, you will be called out. Forcefully. I cannot stress enough how shitty and demeaning this practice is.

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Hey everyone, before we begin, here’s a cute and short video about foundations and their investments, which is a topic I’ll likely rant about later (after “Ask Vu: Love, Dating, Romance, and Relationship Advice for Nonprofit Professionals, Part 2,” which tens of people have been asking for. Here’s part 1).

I usually don’t write much about fundraising events. There’s been a general agreement that auctions, luncheons, golf tournaments, and their ilk are soul-crushingly awful and would make good deterrents for crimes: “You have been found guilty of armed robbery. I sentence you to be the event planner of four consecutive fundraising galas!”

As our colleague Paul Nazareth commented on Twitter: “The dislike I have for what was just weak fundraising strategy of charity galas; the garish glee of dress up, worshipping of wealth and culture of white supremacy, is evolving into disgust.”  

I am not on the hate-all-events bandwagon. Marginalized-communities-led groups often rely on them for a significant part of their revenues, and when done well, they can do a lot to bring people together and build community. Here, in no particular order, are a few ways we can make these events more aligned with equity and with principles of Community-Centric Fundraising:

Reconsider your ticket prices: Some galas are $100 or $150 or more per ticket, plus the expectation that you donate on top of that. This leaves out a vast majority of people. Comp tickets are nice, but they often make people feel like they snuck into some place they don’t really belong. Think about lowering your ticket prices.

Mix up your seating arrangement: Good seats are usually reserved for major donors and sponsors, with the top tiers going towards those who contributed the most financially. This just reinforces the message that the more money you have, the more special and important you are. That’s silly. Mix up your attendees. Seat clients at the front. Or randomize it.

Treat volunteers thoughtfully: While donors of money are worshipped, donors of time are treated like an afterthought. “After you finish setting up all the centerpieces, feel free to scavenge through the dumpster for your dinner, since we reserve the gourmet food for guests.” OK, I exaggerate a bit, and volunteer food (usually pizza) is not bad. But if we’re going to be community-centered, then volunteers are an essential part of the community, and should be treated accordingly.

Make the event accessible: Ensure spaces can accommodate guests and speakers who use wheelchairs. Make the event hybrid. Have captions and ASL interpreters. Ensure all your videos have captions and images have alt text. Have every speaker use the microphone. I was at an event when a speaker decided to skip the microphone; I was at a table near the stage and could only catch half of what she said.

Welcome kids: Children are an important part of our community, but from the looks of most fundraising events, kids might as well be nonexistent. This is weird, considering so many events are about making the world better for future generations. If we mean to do that, then let’s make more fundraising events children-inclusive. Have activities geared toward kids. Invite kid poets and artists to perform. Hire professional childcare providers.

Nix the VIP pre-event: This is once again another way of reinforcing the idea that people with more money are more special and therefore deserve upgraded experiences. If you’re going to have a pre-event, think about making it community-centric. For example, have an opportunity for donors, volunteers, clients, and staff to mingle and get to know one another and learn about the programs.

Lighten up on the dress code: The more formal the dress code is, the more exclusive it is. Many people can’t afford the fancy clothes, but even if they could, it doesn’t mean they would feel comfortable at events where everyone is dressed that way. I mean, just because I have a monocle and a diamond-tipped cane, doesn’t mean that I don’t feel like a fraud at your fancy ball.

Highlight partner organizations: Chances are, your org relies on other nonprofit organizations’ work, since all missions are interrelated. Your event provides a great way to publicly acknowledge these partners and bring attention to their missions. The community will only benefit from nonprofits being generous with one another.

Skip the tiered sponsorship levels: Yet one more way we perpetuate the idea that people and corporations should be treated based on how much they contribute financially. The sponsors at the “higher” levels get more marketing, better seats, more recognition, etc. Let’s move away from this. Here’s a great article on this topic from our colleague Phuong Pham.  

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Hi everyone, this post will be more personal and serious than usual. Content warning: I will be talking about suicide, trauma, and grief. Please take care of yourself, and skip this post if you need to.

Over the past two months I have been struggling with the suicide death of a friend. She was a nonprofit professional and social justice activist. She was 30 and had been battling depression and anxiety and suicidal ideation for most of her life. A traumatic childhood led her to cutting ties with her family at a young age and being homeless for several years. Despite various challenges, she got a master’s degree, became an educator, and dedicated years of her life to advancing social justice through her nonprofit and community work, affecting the lives of many people, especially the numerous kids she taught and mentored.

Grief does a number on you, and grief when someone dies of suicide brings different feelings of guilt and regret. I run through various scenarios of what I could have said and done. Maybe if I hadn’t stayed up so late the previous night, I wouldn’t have slept through the last time she tried to call me. Maybe if I had invited her over for Christmas, she wouldn’t have spent it alone, and things might have been different. Until recently, I sometimes woke up, and unable to sleep, scanned through our text threads. Some of the messages were happy: trading vegan recipes, discussing TV shows. Others involved us arguing over various things. The later ones were of me begging her to get professional help. She had bought a gun, and I and her other friends couldn’t convince her to get rid of it. The last text she sent me was “I’m sorry. Goodbye.”

My friend was just the latest person in our field who died by suicide. In Seattle, the loss of a brilliant and beloved activist of color at the beginning of the pandemic sent waves of shock and sadness. Last month, a friend told me of yet another person who ended her life. On Twitter, a respected activist I follow spoke openly about dealing with suicidal ideation. The mental health challenges, lack of support and resources for, and suicide death of those who seek to advance social justice, to create a better world, is something that affects us all.

We don’t want to talk about suicide, but we need to. Suicide rates have overall increased 40% over the past two decades. And like everything else, it is worse for people of marginalized identities. According to this article, “Among individuals between the ages of 25 and 44 years, the suicide rate rose by 5% overall and by nearly 34% for American Indians or Alaska Natives from 2018 to 2021. It rose by more than 19% among Hispanic persons in that age group, by approximately 23% among Black people and by nearly 21% among multiracial individuals.”

According to a report released by The Trevor Project, about half of trans and non-binary youth consider suicide. And disabled people are at significantly higher risk of suicide than non-disabled people. People who are poor, as well as older adults also face increase risk of suicide.

I don’t think it is surprising that the suicide rates are disproportionally high among people of color, trans people, nonbinary people, disabled people, low-income people, and older adults. The barrage of hatred and injustice we’ve seen, especially over the past few years, has been relentless. There has been so little shelter, so few places where marginalized people can just safely exist.

Suicide among nonprofit professionals and social justice activists, needs to be recognized as an issue. Many of us entered this line of work because we have dealt with trauma in our own lives. We have seen and felt firsthand the effects of injustice, and it drove many of us into the field. Our traumas make us more empathetic and often more effective. As my friend said, “For me, it’s always come down to feeling like this world wasn’t designed for me—socially, physically, structurally, systemically. As such, I’ve long been obsessed with how to structurally solve loneliness, hopelessness, despair, and other difficult, pervasive feelings.”

But this empathy and drive can also be too much, as we are constantly retraumatized by seeing others being beaten down by unjust systems as we do the work each day. And we often feel helpless, that our efforts often do not make that big a difference, that the tide is often too strong for us to abide, that the arc of justice is too long for us to bend in our lifetimes. It is deeply demoralizing.

Over the past few years, I have also been seeing leaders demoralized by the very people and systems who are supposed to be allies and partners in our work. Funders who continue burdensome and ineffective practices. Donors who care more about their “legacy” and whether they receive the appropriate amount of gratitude and hero-worship. Board members and supervisors more concerned about their power and authority than in creating a better world. And an entire sector that prioritizes playing nice with the very forces that have been successful in making the world less just and equitable.

People in our sector are exhausted and on the breaking point. I know many of you are. We must talk about suicide and do something about it because I am afraid the rates among people in our profession will only increase if we continue to neglect it. We will continue to lose people. We will continue to lose their vision and voice. Their joy and humor and strength.

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Hi everyone. Before we get started with today’s post, next week, to kick off AANHPI heritage month, I’ll be on a virtual conversation with colleague Jennifer Li Dotson on May 3^rd at 12pm PT. It’s free, with automatic captions. I hope to see you there.

I am still reeling from this op-ed published a few days ago. A time of relentless attacks on our communities and on democracy itself requires our leaders to take bold stances, not engage in the white moderation and both-siding that has led to the rise of antivaxxers, climate change deniers, flat-earthers, and people who think Love Actually is a good movie. (I said what I said!)

However, progressive-leaning philanthropy has always been like this. Months ago I was having lunch with a colleague who works at a prominent national foundation. We were lamenting how risk-averse progressive-leaning funders are, how board trustees and CEOs are hesitant to take bold actions.

“It’s also the GCs,” said my colleague, “the General Counsels. They have a lot of power and often prevent foundations from doing anything even remotely risky.”

At that moment, I realized we have barely paid any attention to GCs and the role they play in the sector, including in stifling progress. It’s kind of like a murder mystery where at the end, you find out that it was the barely acknowledged background character who was pulling the strings all along: “That’s right! ‘Twas I who poisoned the Mayor’s daily green smoothie! Me, the Assistant Director of Archives, who only had two lines of dialogue in Act 1! This will teach you to not decrease funding from the Archives department again!”

For those who are not familiar, a General Counsel at a foundation is a legal professional who provides legal advice and guidance. They review contracts, communications, strategies, intellectual property stuff, etc. Their job is to help ensure compliance with existing laws and to reduce risk for the foundation, especially mitigate the possibility of the foundation getting sued or its status revoked by the IRS.

That is all vital and important work, and I can only imagine how difficult it is, especially in this sociopolitical environment. But it seems over time many GCs (at progressive-leaning foundations) and their avoidance of risks and liabilities often prevent courageous strategies and actions. Another funder colleague told me how the GC at their foundation revised an RFP and associated communications to remove words like “race” and “Black,” when the grant itself was created to address racial disparity and lack of funding going to Black-led organizations. This was in order to avoid being sued for “reverse discrimination.” Yikes.

There are other ways GCs’ risk-aversion, amplified or directed by boards’ and CEOs’, can manifests. They could prevent a foundation from engaging in advocacy or lobbying, and forbid nonprofit themselves from doing these things. They could stop the foundation from funding vital organizations and issues because they may be “controversial.” They could put the kibosh on a foundation increasing its annual payout rate (the percentage the foundation spends of its endowment) beyond the legal minimum, which is currently 5%. They could shut down the foundation’s plans to take bold public stands that would advance equity, for instance supporting trans rights or abortion rights.

We haven’t focused much on General Counsels, but clearly they have significant impact on the entire field, and we need to pay more attention to this crucial but often invisible role. A GC who is aligned with the mission and who is thoroughly versed in the law can balance out trustees and CEOs’ risk aversion and help a foundation significantly to advance equity.

On the other hand, a GC who is mainly focused on reducing liabilities will amplify trustees’ and CEOs’ equal tendency to avoid risk. This risk-aversion may spread through the rest of the foundation, toward other foundations, and to nonprofits, creating an entire sector that is terrified to take meaningful actions for fear of legal liabilities. How can we advance equity in that state of mind?

Here are some potential solutions to unlock GCs potential to help advance equity:

Recruit and retain general counsels who have lived experience and come from marginalized communities: While I couldn’t find much information on the demographics of GCs at foundations in terms of race, the legal profession in general is very white (81% in 2022 in the US), so we can assume the majority of GCs at foundations are white. Hiring GCs who come from marginalized communities and who’ve experienced racism, homelessness, poverty, etc., may help to increase urgency to solve these issues.  

Hire GCs who are aligned with the mission and who have a track record of taking bold risks: All GCs who come on the team, just like everyone else, should be aligned with the foundation’s mission, vision, and values. Find the ones who talk about using the law to advance the mission and vision, and not just complying with it. Hire the GCs who have experience working with organizations and foundations that have taken courageous actions to advance equity.

Provide professional development opportunities for general counsel beyond just legal stuff: In attending over a hundred conferences now I have yet to meet a single general counsel from a foundation. This seems to be the pattern, that the people with the most power at foundations (board trustees, GCs, CEOs) are rarely on the ground, yet they are the ones making pivotal decisions despite missing some critical conversations and debates the rest of the field is having about equity and justice.

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Hi everyone, I’ve been busy filing taxes, so apologies for the lateness and ineloquence of this post (Also, I’m not sure why it won’t let me put captions under the image, but it’s an image of the ground with several rolled up dollar bills popping up out of it).

Last week, six influential philanthropic leaders released this joint statement about protecting pluralism and diverse perspectives in philanthropy. This letter has generated a lot of strong feelings among my colleagues. As half of these six co-authors are leaders I know and respect, I am offering my thoughts here, in line with the third principle proposed in the article, which is “When we challenge another’s views or activities, we focus on substantive arguments and invite response.” Thank you for creating this opportunity for dialog, and for accepting my perspective in the constructive spirit in which it is offered.

This letter is the philanthropic equivalent of “all lives matter.” In this case, its premise is that all philanthropy is equally valid and good: “philanthropy provides the greatest value when donors enable and encourage pluralism by supporting and investing in a wide and diverse range of values, missions, and interests.”

The problem is that philanthropy is not some sort of sport or brand of ice cream, where it doesn’t matter if you root for the Patriots or the Seahawks, or if you choose mint chocolate chip or rocky road. Philanthropy’s actions often mean life or death.

So no, not all philanthropy is good. There are donors and foundations that fund anti-trans hate groups, ones that back white supremacist movements, ones that support efforts to suppress votes, and ones that work to ban abortions and cause pain and death to millions of people. These donors and foundations cannot and should never be equally respected as donors and funders who are working to advance trans people’s rights and humanity, protect voting rights and access, fight white supremacy, and restore the rights to abortions.

To insist that all philanthropic values, missions, and activities are equally valid is at best naïve and at worst harmful to people and communities.

To support its erroneous premise, the article glosses over history, if not downright distorts it. “The history of philanthropy is a history of using private capital to supplement, not replace other approaches to investing in and supporting a prosperous and just society.”

Philanthropy’s roots are stained with inequity and injustice. So much wealth in this country has been built on a legacy of slavery, stolen Indigenous land, worker exploitation, environmental degradation, and tax avoidance. It is a history of white people and white-led corporations creating the very injustices that they then get lauded for giving fractions of the wealth they hoarded to solve.

And yes, it is a history of using private capital to replace other approaches to investing in and supporting a prosperous and just society. It is a history of wealthy people refusing to pay their fair of taxes and instead squirreling that money away into family foundations (and now also Donor-Advised Funds) to spend on their pet projects at their whims and leisure.

The authors assert that “philanthropy as a whole makes its greatest contribution to democracy when all foundations and donors engage in the unfettered pursuit of their own mission, interests, and prerogatives.”

The lack of acknowledgement of the problematic history of philanthropy is amplified by the lack of acknowledgement of racial and other dynamics. Philanthropy has always been the realm of wealthy white people. Most donors are white. Most foundation trustees are white. Most foundation CEO’s and staff are white. How can philanthropy contribute to democracy when it itself is so undemocratic? Nothing that is controlled almost entirely by wealthy white people should ever be “unfettered.”

The authors go on to suggest five key principles to protect philanthropic “pluralism.” I’ll respond to each of them here:

1. We recognize and affirm the right and prerogative of foundations and philanthropists to take programmatic or public stances in accordance with their best judgment. And while it is appropriate for any donor to question or challenge another’s views, we should not question the underlying legitimacy of any foundation or philanthropist holding a particular view.

Again, your “best judgment” is still from the perspective of wealthy, extremely privileged white elites whose wealth have often been accumulated through inequitable means. This has caused all sorts of problems for years, exacerbating the issues we nonprofits are trying to solve. The existence of philanthropy itself is an indication of the proliferation of injustice, so we absolutely must question the underlying legitimacy of all foundations or philanthropists holding any sort of view at all, but in particular those who use their power and resources to advance inequity.

As our colleague Cathy García says, “Not only should we question the legitimacy of foundations or philanthropists whose views include neutrality in the face of white supremacy, we should interrogate why we want to hold on to the conditions that make egregious wealth inequality possible. There’s never been a MORE urgent time to question. Our people’s livelihoods and survival are not up for debate. Punto.”

2. We behave as if the foundations and individual donors who take stances with which we disagree are also committed to the betterment of society. We assume that those involved in philanthropy have the best intentions, even if they take a different approach.

Really? Those foundations and donors using funds to advance hate groups, suppress votes among people of color, prevent work to reverse climate change, roll back rights for anyone who is not a rich white dude, these foundations and donors are committed to the betterment of society? They have the best intentions? Have we not had endless conversations about how intentions do not matter as much as impact? The intentions of rich mostly white people in power do not matter; it is the impact of their actions that has led to endless suffering for marginalized people and communities for hundreds of years, and if philanthropy has any self-awareness, it would work to rectify this.

3. When we challenge another’s views or activities, we focus on substantive arguments and invite response. While disagreements may be profound — even fundamental — we believe that public debates should rely on reason and open conversation. We discourage practices such as personal or ad hominem attacks because we regard them as unhelpful to productively advancing knowledge within a pluralistic society.

I think most of us agree with this principle in theory. But people and communities most affected by systemic injustice are exhausted. We’re tired of our humanity and ability to exist being debated like some sort of academic exercise. We’re tired of the prioritizing of civility and comfort of the privileged over our safety and wellbeing. And we’re tired of this “bothsiding” that philanthropy often does, this belief that no matter how heinous, atrocious, and dehumanizing a perspective is, it should be respected for the sake of “diversity of perspectives.”

Read the full article here.

Hi everyone. Confession: I don’t hate most meetings. I mean, if you think about it, in our sector meetings often mean we get to spend time with usually awesome people to brainstorm ideas on how to make the world better. This is something our ancestors, who likely worked long hours doing manual labor, probably dreamed about for us: “One day, our descendants will be paid to sit, eat tiny oranges that are easy to peel, and talk while others write stuff on the walls.”

However, it seems lately that meetings have been out of control. The pandemic, which should have slowed us down, somehow increased the numbers of meetings we each have. It’s so easy and acceptable now to have virtual meetings. Not having to drive, find parking, shower, and brush one’s teeth means many people end up with more frequent back-to-back meetings. I’ve had days when I’ve had 5 or more. One colleague I know said she had 12 in one day!

A while ago I wrote “12 New Rules for Virtual Meetings, Since We’re Still In a Pandemic” which included “Rule 2: All one-hour meetings will now default to be 50 minutes. The therapists got the right idea. Having 50-minute meetings prevents the stress of back-to-back meetings without breaks and will give us all time to run to the bathroom, grab a snack, take a rapid test, or stare out the window and shake our fists at the sky in futile resentment.”

And now there’s research to back this up. Thanks to colleagues on LinkedIn like Beth Kanter, you may have seen this recent study done by Microsoft that shows having back-to-back meetings is bad for our brain, creativity, productivity, etc. Going from one meeting right into the next places a lot of stress on our noggins. There’s evidence that having breaks allows our brains to reset, focus, and engage.

Of course, this study just confirms what most of us already knew. The problem is how do we change habits that have been ingrained in us over hundreds of years? Capitalism culture has us equating having tons of meetings with being productive and effective. And also the reverse: That having breaks and doing “nothing” is “lazy” and “bad” and “Vu, it’s been 37 minutes; can you get back to facilitating this workshop on ‘The Golden Girls as Leadership Styles’ that we paid you a lot of money to do?” (Such a Sophia thing to say!)

Anyway, all of us need to start unlearning ingrained stuff and shift our habits. Especially supervisors and others who have formal power at organizations, you have a particular responsibility to create change. Here are some things I encourage us all to do:

Discuss the above article with your team: Have people read the above article in advance and then add it to your next team meeting agenda. Here are some questions you can use in your discussion: “Which of the study findings surprised you the most?” “Which solutions do you think we should implement?” “OK, did anyone read this article at all?” “I am very disappointed in us…”

Do a quick org-wide and individual “meetings audits”: Run through all the standing meetings that you have. See if some of them are even necessary. Maybe a few can be less frequent. Or shorter. Or can just be an email thread or Slack discussion. Then ask each person to do a personal meetings audit by scanning through their calendars and seeing how frequently they have back-to-back meetings. Look at the person who has the most back-to-back meetings. Look at them! Those haunted eyes! Is that what you want to look like?!

Agree to turn all 1-hour meetings into 50-minute meetings: Get everyone to indicate that all one-hour meetings, virtual and in-person, if they need to happen at all, will now be 50-minutes. Get an artistic staff member to design a manifesto on a piece of easel paper, and then have everyone draw outlines of their hands, write their names in their hand outlines, and decorate the outlines to serve as signatures. I saw my kids’ preschool do this for their classroom rules, and I don’t see why it wouldn’t work for adults.

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Read full article here.