Dallas Fort Worth Nonprofit Business Journal

Author: Vu Le

  • Capacity Building’s Necessary Existential Crisis

    Hi everyone, in observance of Indigenous Peoples’ Day, here is a great list by Cultural Survival of events happening all over the country, including important conversations on doing land acknowledgements right, supporting Indigenous folks who are LGBTQIA, decolonizing the classroom, and more. Check out this Activist’s Guide for Supporting Indigenous Peoples’ Day from IllumiNative. Here are five more ideas.

    Meanwhile, we should all remember that less than one half of one percent of total philanthropic funding in the US goes to Native communities, according to Native Americans in Philanthropy. Foundations, you can do better. The rest of us who are non-Native, donate to Native/Indigenous organizations, pay rent for the land we’re on (such as through here if you’re on Duwamish land), and support local Native/Indigenous artists and businesses, such as Eighth Generation. And let’s not allow this day to be the only time we learn about, make reparations toward, and support Native communities.

    ***

    Last week I was asked to present at the Alliance for Nonprofit Management’s conference about the future of capacity building, and what capacity builders can learn from Star Trek. The team at RVC, meanwhile, wrote a really important article on Transformational Capacity Building, exploring the ways that traditional capacity building tactics have often actually been harmful to organizations led by and serving Black, Indigenous, POC, and other marginalized communities, and presenting a new framework. And here’s the article I wrote on the Mycelium Model of Capacity Building, where I lay out what mushrooms can teach us about capacity building.

    It is really exciting to see that we are starting to look at this area with a more critical lens and evolve it to work better for the organizations and movements led by communities most affected by systemic injustice. Given the events of this year, including the pandemic, the protests against racism, and our last-ditch effort to prevent the US from sliding deeper into fascism, our sector really needs to further reexamine our perspectives on capacity building.

    Many of us think of capacity building as the boring but important stuff we need to get our missions done: people, office and program space, technology, infrastructure, professional development, and so on. There are amazing capacity builders, including state associations, back-office providers, philanthropic networks, consulting firms, etc., and their work has been vital for thousands of organizations.

    However, as fundraising, philanthropy, evaluation, and other areas in our field undergo an existential crisis, so too must capacity building. What we are doing may have worked in the past, but it may be irrelevant or even harmful to do the same things now. Most capacity building philosophies and practices have been very white, one-size fits all, and lacks a racial justice analysis, among other problems that RVC’s Transformational Capacity Building model points out. As we work to address these issues, here are some other ones I am starting to see:

    Capacity building often furthers incrementalism: So many capacity building strategies and activities home in on easily-measurable, short-term goals such as developing a strategic plan, increasing board effectiveness, strengthening fundraising systems. Not that these are not important goals (they sometimes are), but it often seems that we’ve lost sight of bigger, more audacious goals. Our strategic plans are often safe and boring. We talk about how to make boards slightly more tolerable instead of questioning the entire problematic default board structure. Our fundraising is still grounded in white saviorism and poverty tourism. Capacity building often gives the illusion of progress while actually preventing more meaningful progress from happening.

    Capacity building often prevents the true actualization of many missions: So much of capacity building is to help nonprofits develop skills and experience in bookkeeping, HR policies, grantwriting, etc. What is missing has been this analysis of should they even be developing capacity in these areas, or is it just a distraction? Imagine you have a plumbing school. Some folks sign up to learn how to fix broken sinks and toilets. Over several months, they make lots of progress. You’re proud because you see all the plumbing skills they’re learning. Then one day, you realize that these folks are actually doctors. They feel like they’re learning, and you feel really good, but the reality is that while they’re learning plumbing, they’re prevented from practicing medicine. How many organizations and leaders are learning bookkeeping when they really should be focused on mobilizing their communities, for example?

    Capacity building often legitimizes inequitable systems: You may be thinking, “But that’s ridiculous. Why would a group of doctors suddenly decide to learn plumbing?” Well, what if they’ve been told they need to learn plumbing or else funding for their clinics would be cut? That would be a really terrible thing, right? Forcing doctors to be plumbers? So much of capacity building is not organizations being intrinsically motivated to learn various skills, but because they have to in order to function within inequitable systems. Grantwriting, for example. Grant applications are a horrible way to distribute funding, one that mostly rewards white-led organizations that can speak the white-dominant grant language and understand unwritten white-dominant rules. By building people’s capacity to navigate grants, we legitimize grant proposals as a valid philanthropic tool. What other inequitable philosophies and practices are we legitimizing through capacity building?

    Capacity building often reinforces neutrality and white moderation: As I’ve mentioned multiple times, we as a sector needs to focus on the levers of power if we hope to effectively address injustice. This includes getting more women of color elected into office, ending voter suppression, changing the tax code so rich people pay their fair share of taxes, decreasing the influence of money on politics, and shaping the public narrative to align with truth and science. Unfortunately, our field has a fear and disdain of engaging in what we perceive to be “political.” Capacity building has for the most part reinforced this sort of neutral, moderate stance through avoiding engaging with systems change work and anything that may seem too polarizing.

    With everything going on—the threat to democracy, the increase in racism and misogyny, the undoing of hard-won progressive victories—capacity building, and capacity builders, cannot continue to operate as it has always done. If we’re in the Nonprofit Hunger Games, then capacity builders are often like the characters Effie Trinket or Haymitch Abernathy, good folks who train and support the tributes so they can increase their skills and chance of survival in the battles to the death. What our communities need now are not more survival skills, but to figure out how to work together to bring the games crashing down.

    I know that’s a lot to take in (I mentioned mushrooms, Star Trek, and Hunger Games all in one post). Please feel free to disagree with anything. I hope this post will start some conversations among capacity builders. As I mentioned, our sector is going through a necessary existential reckoning. No longer can we assume that everything we do is net positive. We have to examine how we may be complicit in furthering the injustice we’re trying to end. This applies to capacity building. This is a painful but necessary process, but I think capacity building practices will come out on the other side more effective and more aligned with our sector’s prime directive of realizing a better, more just world.

  • Foundations, stop playing the reckless game of Funding-Chicken

    Durfee Foundation President Carrie Avery and I were discussing over email the power dynamics between funders and nonprofits. While there is much to talk about, Carrie brought up a really good point that I had not considered before—the term “Foundation Program Officer” is weird:

    “Why an officer? An officer makes me think of a police officer, a probation officer, someone in a position of power whose judgment can have a devastating and decisive effect. If foundations want to work with their ‘nonprofit partners’ then why is the person on the foundation side of that relationship called an officer? Language matters. Let’s start a movement to rename this role!”

    I agree, and while we’re thinking about new titles, let’s completely reimagine what the role entails. It should be less micromanagey—like a boss who constantly watches over you to make sure you don’t steal office supplies—and more expansive, like a favorite colleague that you can commiserate with and occasionally play pranks on.

    Today’s topic, however, is about Funding-Chicken. Funding-Chicken, which is not nearly as fun as it sounds, is when a foundation refuses to be the first to fund a project or organization. Instead it waits for another funder to formally commit, and then might join in. It’s also known as “Fear of being First Syndrome,” aka FFS.

    Truly this is one of the most annoying and baffling of funder behaviors. When we get back to “normal” and I can work on my sketch comedy show, there will be a nature-documentary skit called “Funders in the Wild.” Imagine the soothing voice of Sir David Attenborough narrating:

    “Funders, though they have no natural predators, have nonetheless developed an evolutionary instinct based in fear. Here we see three funding organisations, frozen in equal measure at the thought of being the first to commit financial support for a project. Let us observe this fascinating ritual as the group uses various herd-based mentality and communications tactics to avoid taking initiative.”

    This is, unfortunately, all too common. I’ve experienced it several times, the latest being trying to find funding to launch the Community-Centric Fundraising movement. (And before that, when I sought foundation sponsors for my one-man show, “Point of Vu: An Exploration of Organizational Capacity Building in Twelve Acts.”) I am not saying all funders engage in Funding-Chicken, but enough do, so we need to examine how harmful and inequitable this practice is:

    It stifles innovation: Nonprofits are told all the time that we need to be “innovative.” Often this manifests in many funders refusing to support anything but the newest, shiniest programs, often at the neglect of ones that have been proven to work. The irony comes when, after constantly extolling nonprofits to be innovative (and punishing them for not), foundations refuse to be the first to fund a new project. If you want nonprofits to be innovative, then you need to take risks.

    It furthers the “Track Record Paradox:” On the other hand, many funders won’t fund stuff until there’s track record of success. But how the hell are leaders, orgs, and movements supposed to get a track record if there’s no funding in the first place? This paradox stacks on top of other ones, including the Capacity Paradox, where funders won’t fund an organization unless it has strong capacity, but it can’t build strong capacity unless it has resources; and the Data-Resource Paradox, where an organization can’t get funding unless it has strong data, but it can’t get strong data unless it has funding.

    It wastes time that we don’t have: So much nonprofit time is wasted waiting on a foundation to be the first to commit so that we can “leverage” their support for other grants. It’s like a really bad romantic comedy where two characters will wait on the other one to make the first move, then two years pass, and everyone around them is exasperated. Unlike “Love Actually,” though, as we wait for funders to be the first to pitch in a few bucks, real people are dying, forests are burning, and our democracy is crumbling.

    It causes burnout: It is really exhausting doing the community needs assessment, researching effective models, designing a program, developing a fundraising plan, approaching funders to be told they need to see who else is committed before committing themselves, and then having to play annoying psychological games to get someone to make the first move: “We heard from the XYZ Foundation, and they said they might be interested in matching ABC Foundation, but ABC will only hop on board if your foundation commits.” As I have mentioned many times, so much of our burnout in this sector is not necessarily due running our programs, it is because of having to deal with aggravation like this again and again.  

    It disproportionately affects BIPOC-led orgs: All of these negative effects are not equally distributed. Like with everything else, they are more harmful organizations and movements led by and serving BIPOC communities, disabled people, LGBTQIA, and other marginalized folks who do not have the same access to time and money to sustain themselves while funders figure things out. When you play the game of Funding-Chicken, just remember that the people you hurt most will be the folks who are already the most affected by systemic injustice.

    A while ago, I was complaining about Funding Chicken, aka FFS, to a funder colleague when she said something that has stuck with me: “Foundations often move in packs. Like wolves. Or lemmings. We will not do anything until we see other foundations doing it first.” Well, this is ridiculous. No one has time or energy for this. The sector has put up with it long enough. You are stymying progress and harming communities with your indecisiveness and risk-aversion. If you care about communities, do not play Funding-Chicken. Here are some things funders can do, with thanks to Carrie and the Durfee Foundation for contributions to these thoughts:

    Analyze to see if/when you are doing this. Look at your grant processes. Do you require organizations to have a track record? Do you have an unspoken rule about not funding a leader, organization, or movement unless it has a “seal of approval” from another funder whose opinion you trust? Look through your past and current grantees. Were you among the First Funders for these orgs, or were you more a Bandwagon Funder?

    Intentionally be the first to support projects: You can do this by having grant programs such as Durfee’s Springboard Fund. And/or ensure that all your grantmaking is deliberate about jumping on board even when organizations do not have other supporters committed. Take it as a point of pride to the first to back something, as this takes way more guts than to wait until it’s more “safe” to do so. (Although don’t turn this into a thing where you don’t support something unless you’re among the first funders, either.)

    Assess what risks you’re trying to avoid: Figure out why you play Funding-Chicken. Is it because you’re afraid other foundations won’t join in, and your foundation will look like a fool, like someone who got pranked into wearing a costume to a non-costume party? Is it because you fear that if you invest in an “unproven” or “unvetted” organization, there might be financial malfeasance? Reflect on whether these are valid reasons to delay supporting important projects, especially ones proposed by communities most affected by injustice.

    Reexamine and redefine what success looks like: As Carrie says, “we don’t define success simply as ‘scaling up.’ Not all community groups are meant to become multi-million dollar nonprofits. Certainly we’ve had Springboard groups that haven’t reached as many people as we would have hoped, or embarked on a strategy that we didn’t love. But good things still happened for the community, so we believe our grant dollars were well spent.” Embrace failure and learning as part of success.

    The era of funders playing Funding-Chicken needs to end. If you think an organization, leader, or movement is important, then fund it, regardless of who else is on board. Accept failure as part of doing this work. And understand that your decisions disproportionately affect marginalized communities.

    Let me know your thoughts in the comment section. Now, if you will excuse me, I have to go practice my Sir David Attenborough impersonation.

  • Democracy hangs in the balance. Nonprofit and philanthropy need to stop being neutral.

    Hi everyone, apologies for the likely brusque tone of this week’s post. Like many of you, I am shaken by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg; may her memory be a blessing. It is hard for us to celebrate the life of an extraordinary (and imperfect) leader when there are so many terrifying implications now that she is gone. Already Trump and McConnell plan to ram a nomination through, despite what they said four years ago about not confirming SCOTUS nominees during election years. The hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy are astounding but not surprising. We need to ensure Biden/Harris are elected and the Senate is majority blue, then expand the Supreme Court, set term limits, grant statehood to DC, pass the Voting Rights Act, end the filibuster, and get rid of the electoral college, among other things.

    If you’re asking me why I’m talking about politics on a nonprofit blog, I need you to shut the hell up. Believing that nonprofit and philanthropy are somehow separate from or above politics is how we’ve been complicit in perpetuating unjust systems. And yet we keep doing this. Last week, I gave a keynote virtually where I reminded folks that kids are still in cages, that Black people are still being killed by the police, that Indigenous women are still missing and murdered, and that everything is still being controlled by rich old white dudes and we need to get more women of color elected into office. In the chat stream was a sniveling remark along the lines of “Wow, this presentation did not need to be so political.”

    First of all, I was talking about basic human rights and a government that looks like its people. The fact that some people in our sector believe that saying something like “we need to end the state-sanctioned murder of Black folks” or “we need more women of color in leadership” is somehow “political” or “partisan” or “controversial” just shows how effectively we’ve been brainwashed to believe that anything that conservatives disagree with is political.

    Second of all, so what if it were to have been political? Are we as a sector going to keep pretending that what happens within the realm of politics does not affect our communities and our work? Are we just going to keep hunkering down to deal with the symptoms of shitty systems instead of using our influence to collectively change these systems? Neutrality is the security blanket of the privileged, folks whose lives will not be negatively affected no matter who wins what elections or who is on the Supreme Court. Their kids are not in cages. They are not undergoing hysterectomies against their will.

    The most important elections of our lifetimes are coming up, a matter of life and death, and nonprofit and philanthropy need to stop with this pretense of neutrality and being above the fray. Charity and philanthropy have been used to launder the reputation and conscience of people and institutions who have been hoarding wealth and power and causing the problems we’re trying to solve. We are complicit. We’re in it, whether or not we think we’re too good for politics. If we’re going to do our part save democracy and the soul of the US, we have to acknowledge that our sector has to stop being neutral and all of us have to roll up our sleeves.

    I know many of you are in despair. We have been for the past four years, and it continues to look hopeless as our society rapidly descends into fascism and chaos. All the work we’ve put in, and the work of so many leaders before us, are being undone before our eyes. But RBG along with John Lewis and other leaders fought until the very end, and we need to honor them by not giving up. We need to organize.

    Foundations, you need to shift the conversations you’re having: We have about 40 days left, and so many of you are still discussing inane, pointless things like “should we give 1-year grants, or maybe 2-years?” or “Let’s discuss at the next board meeting whether we should ask grantees for quarterly or annual reports.” Double your payout and give 10-year unrestricted grants, the end, move on! You are standing there ignoring the smoke alarm, debating where the couch should go, when the three-quarters of the house has been engulfed in flames. Many of the things you think are important—grant applications, budgets, logic models, theories of change, reports—are actually completely insignificant right now and you need to stop wasting energy on them. Focus your attention on getting more money out immediately to the communities on the front lines getting folks to vote, helping with the Census, organizing rallies and protests, mitigating the influence of money on politics, etc. Stop being wishy-washy while civilization burns, and increase your payout right now.

    Nonprofits, you need to mobilize your staff, donors, volunteers, and clients to vote, write postcards, call elected officials, etc. I know all of you are stretched to the limit this hellish year. It’s a lot to ask you to do more. And some of you are still squeamish about “mission creep” and whether you are even allowed to do these types of things. Yes, you are allowed to (just don’t endorse anyone). And in fact, we as a sector have a moral obligation to organize our communities. We have seen what happens when the forces of hatred and white supremacy gain power. We need to do everything we can to stop this from continuing, because the next four years will be even worse for our communities. Remind your community to vote. Give staff who are signing up to be poll workers paid days off. Host some postcard writing virtual parties. Let’s get prepared to demonstrate the full strength of our communities. Also, inevitably, there will be a fight regarding Trump’s nomination of Justice Ginsburg’s successor. We will need to take to the streets.

    As individuals, we need to not make the same mistake we made last time: We became complacent, believing in the polls, believing that Hilary Clinton would win. Something that will haunt me forever is that on the day of the election four years ago, I and some colleagues took a stroll through a scenic park in Seattle, assuming things would turn out ok. Who knew if our making some additional phone calls or writing post cards to swing voters or donating money to campaigns would have made a difference, but doing nothing certainly was not helpful. Over the next 40+ days, let’s all of us, to the best of our abilities, take actions. I asked colleagues what they’re involved in. Here are few things you can do right now:

    • Visit votesaveamerica.com It has lots of helpful information about mail-in ballots, how you can be a poll worker, volunteer to confirm registrations, etc.
    • Donate to Black Voters Matter and Movement Voter Project
    • Donate to candidates in contested Senate seats, including Mark Kelly in Arizona (who will play a critical role in the Supreme Court fight coming up if he wins), Jaime Harrison in South Carolina, Doug Jones in Alabama, Sara Gideon in Maine, and Amy McGrath in her long-shot but not hopeless battle against Mitch McConnell in Kentucky.
    • Instead of donating to individual contests, you can also donate to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. They have a wider view of Senate contests and can spend the funds where needed.
    • Sign up with Vote Forward to send letters to voters in swing states encouraging them to vote
    • Volunteer with Gun Sense Voter to help elect candidates who support common-sense gun safety laws.
    • Visit Swingleft.org and write letters, volunteer virtually, donate, start a fundraising campaign, phone bank, etc.
    • Write postcards with Postcards To Voters.
    • Phone bank to swing state voters with Seed the Vote. You’ll get trained, and you’ll join zoom parties so you’re not on your own. Mobilize.us is another place you can sign up to make calls to battleground states.
    • For those who want a little more art with their civic engagement, Art on the Streets has coloring pages created by local artists to help kids and adults get informed about how to vote safely.
    • Tell your US-citizen friends who live abroad that they need to vote. They can go to votefromabroad.com to register and request ballots. Also check out Democrats Abroad.
    • Check out and get involved with Stacey Abrams’s Fair Fight.
    • Host virtual events to encourage others to write postcards, make phone calls, donate, etc. Host ballot briefing parties where you can discuss issues, candidates, etc., as voting can be overwhelming and it’s helpful for folks to not feel alone.  
    • Read this extremely informative report on what progressives need to do to effect structural change, and then take actions.

    I’m sure there are lots of other cool things you might be doing. Please feel free to add them in the comment section. There are plenty of choices, but let’s not get distracted trying to choose. Just pick one or two things and start doing them. Today. Our sector, both nonprofit and philanthropy, collectively and as individuals, must get out of this entrenched belief that we must “remain neutral.” That is how we’ve been helping to allow these harrowing past four years to happen. We now have a chance to unravel this nightmare.

    I know it seems hopeless sometimes, and this year has been relentless with bad news. But let’s remember the words of Justice Ginsburg: “Don’t be distracted by emotions like anger, envy, resentment. These just zap energy and waste time.” She also said, “I would like to be remembered as someone who used whatever talent she had to do her work to the very best of her ability. And to help repair tears in her society, to make things a little better through the use of whatever ability she has.”

    Let us honor her and other leaders by using whatever talent we have to do our work to the very best of our ability to build a society that is just and inclusive. Let’s get fired up.

    —

  • Wealth Hoarding, Tax Avoidance, and How Nonprofits are Complicit

    Happy September, everyone. Holy hummus, it’s September! Fellow parents with school-age children, I hope you are doing ok. Hang in there. We’ll make it through this together. When things get tough with virtual schooling, just remember the old adage: “The days are long, but the years are—You better not be playing Minecraft again! Get back to your Zoom class this instant or no media the rest of the day! And you! Those loose fruit snacks you found under the couch are covered with dust! Throw them away, or at least rinse with water before eating!”

    I know we all have a lot on our minds, and unfortunately I must add one more thing for us to think about. Three months ago, I wrote “Have nonprofit and philanthropy become and white moderate that Dr. King warned us about?” Since then, I have been grappling with the question of how effective our work is as a sector. Are we actually doing good in the world, or have we tricked ourselves into believing that we are while in reality we’re allowing inequity and injustice to proliferate? The reality is that we’re doing both, and it’s important for us to untangle these dynamics.

    Recently, I read the Gilded Giving report by the Institute for Policy Studies. It examines the trends in giving in our sector and what it means. It paints a picture that is not pretty. Here are several points we should pay attention to:

    • Starting in 2010, a bunch of billionaires signed a pledge to give away half their wealth. Since then, their combined wealth has actually doubled. From $376 billion in 2010 to $734 billion as of July 18, 2020.
    • Over the first four months of the pandemic, when everyone has been struggling, the 100 living Pledgers who were billionaires in March actually INCREASED their wealth by $213.6 billion, or 28%, from 758B in March to 972B in July.
    • Small individual giving has been in decline over the past two decades. Between 2000 and 2016, the percentage of households giving to charity has dropped from 66 percent to 53 percent.
    • Large gifts, however, have been increasing. Households making over $1M claimed 33% of all charitable deductions in 2017, up from 12% in 1995.
    • The number of foundations in existence increased by 68% between 2005 and 2019, from 71, 097 to 119,791. During this period, their assets more than doubled, from $551 billion to $1.2 trillion
    • Donor-Advised Funds (DAFs) have grown even more rapidly in number and assets. DAFs have no legal mandate to pay out anything each year. Donors take tax breaks immediately when they transfer their wealth to DAFs, but they are not legally required to actually distribute those funds to nonprofits.

    This is a lot of information, and you may be thinking, “So what? Rich people are getting richer and putting their money into foundations and DAFs, what’s the big deal? It’s their money, after all.” It is a big deal. The hoarding of all this money has implications for our sector and society. As pointed out in the report, these implications include:

    • Wealthy individuals are allowed to warehouse money during a time of urgency. When so many people are facing poverty, hunger, evictions, etc., it is unconscionable that the ultra-rich are able to just hoard all that money, doling out 5% from their foundation endowments (or possibly nothing from DAFs), the rest just sitting there while people suffer. Again, this is money that they would have paid in taxes.
    • Wealthy individuals are able to control what problems society tackles and how. Jeff Bezos can decide to work on homelessness. Bill and Melinda Gates can decide to work on Malaria or education. It sounds great, until we realize that a handful of individuals get to work on whatever they feel like, not necessarily what is needed by society. Our ability to address systemic inequity should not be determined by the whims and extracurricular interests of a few rich mostly white people. 
    • Wealthy individuals use philanthropy to increase their power and privilege and worsen inequity: Examples the report provides include donors giving a bunch of money to their kids’ schools and worsen the disparity in education because poorer families aren’t able to support their schools at the same levels. These large donors then donate to their universities to get their kids admitted, a gross practice that’s a part of “legacy admission.” Major donors can also, and have been, driving conservative policies that continue to enrich them and worsen economic, social, and political inequity all around, stuff that we nonprofits have to deal with.  
    • Wealthy individuals force us to basically subsidize their deductions: All of this is concerning, and we’re actually paying for it. We’re effectively subsidizing deductions taken by wealthy people. As the report states, “for every dollar a billionaire gives to charity, the rest of us chip in as much as 74 cents to make up for the lost revenue.” It’s kind of like Amazon avoiding paying taxes and yet underpaying their employees and not providing them with sick leave etc., and then the rest of have to pitch in through taxes to provide safety net support for Amazon employees.

    On Twitter, I saw this quote by Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, said 80 years ago: “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” It is undeniable now that we have reached this point where wealth is hoarded by a few people, and it’s undermining our democracy, and it’s getting worse by the day. And we need to acknowledge that we nonprofits been playing a role in it:

    We positively reinforce wealth hoarding: As the number of smaller individuals shrinks and the number of larger donors increases, our sector caters more and more to major donors, providing them with special privileges and recognition. We have been doing this without really examining the long-term and wide-reaching implications. There is a direct correlation in our sector where the more money people give, the more they are treated as heroes and saviors. We do the same with foundation and DAF donors, spinning tales of the amazing things we’re doing with the 5% of endowments given out each year. All of this continues to reward people for hoarding wealth.  

    We help donors charity-wash their guilt and the harm they cause: As Anand Giridharadas’s Winners Take All and others have brought up, charity work has often been used as a façade to conceal harmful stuff. At the extreme end, there’s the Sacklers giving money to nonprofits while perpetuating the opioid epidemic. But more pervasive is wealthy donors at all levels avoiding paying taxes and instead picking and choosing from a buffet of causes that appeal to them personally. This undermines our government and is harmful to society. But donors and foundations won’t feel bad about it, because we’ve consistently been telling them how awesome they are.

    We allow inequitable systems to go unchallenged: Unfortunately, our sector, or at least the progressive wing of our sector, is deathly allergic to advocacy and systems change. We would rather respond to the symptoms than address the root causes. By not being engaged with changing crappy systems, we are complicit in allowing them to continue. In fact, by reinforcing donors’ and foundations’ harmful behaviors and then allowing them to charity-wash the harm they might cause, we give the illusion that progress is being made, which increases complacency and reduces the urgency to actually solve systemic problems.

    By now, you might be in despair. I don’t think it’s hopeless. The Gilded Giving report provides plenty of recommendations, including increasing the legal minimum payout rate of foundations; limiting the amount of foundations’ admin costs that can count toward payout compliance; disallowing foundations from paying family members, existing in perpetuity, or counting as payout money they transfer to DAFs; imposing a legal payout rate on DAFs; letting DAF donors only take tax deductions when money flows to nonprofits; etc.

    These are great, but at the crux of it, we in nonprofit and philanthropy must undergo an existential self-reckoning. I do believe in our sector’s ability to do amazing things. We have been. We do awesome stuff all the time. We lift up families, we build community, we challenge unjust laws. All of that remains true. AND we must also examine where we may be complicit in furthering the injustice we’re trying to fight.

    If you’ve read this far and want to know more, please join me for two town halls, hosted by Community-Centric Fundraising, Nonprofit AF, Institute for Policy Studies, and CalNonprofits. I’ll be moderating the first one, set for 9/21 at 11am PT. For this first town hall, we will be discussing these questions: “What are the current rules governing philanthropy, especially foundations and donor-advised funds? How do these operate in practice? Are wealthy people using these vehicles to game the system?” It will feature Edgar Villanueva, author of Decolonizing Wealth; Andrea Caupain, CEO of Byrd Barr Place; and Chuck Collins, one of the co-authors of the Gilded Giving report. Read the details and register here.

    The second town hall, set for 10/5 at 11am PT, will address the question “What are some of the national and state efforts looking to address the issues identified in the first town hall?” Details and registration here.

    —

  • “There Can Only Be One” Syndrome and how people of color can also uphold white supremacy and injustice

    After the kids went to sleep one day, my partner and I put up “Ugly Delicious,” a show where celebrity chef David Chang explores different types of food and talks to various chefs and restaurant owners. In one episode, he explores Viet-Cajun, the combination of Vietnamese and Cajun. It was great, until he interviewed a Vietnamese shrimp fisherman whose family came over decades ago, who worked hard, overcame racism (including the KKK attacking shrimping boats), and became successful. When Chef Chang asked his opinion on more recent immigrants and whether he could empathize with them, the dude said something along the lines of “Well, we worked hard, but a lot of immigrants these days just want handouts.”

    When we think of white supremacy and who upholds it, we think of white folks. White people clearly benefit most from systems designed to uphold whiteness as the default and concentrate power in the hands of white people. So much of our work in nonprofit and philanthropy is to de-center this whiteness. I’ve been encouraged to see white colleagues engaging with the uncomfortable and necessary conversations around systemic racism and taking actions aligned with racial equity.

    However, the inescapable pervasiveness of white supremacy means that we POCs are not immune to perpetuating it, consciously or unconsciously. Just look at any social media conversation about race, Black Lives Matter, injustice, systemic change, etc. There will always be several people of color who serve as a layer of defense for awful views. It’s been sad and disappointing to encounter POCs who insist on being “color-blind,” who believe they succeeded because of hard work while others in similar situations are lazy. In POC communities, there is still a lot of anti-Blackness. I have friends who have gotten into fights with Asian relatives who condone state-sanctioned murders of Black people (we need to get into these fights, even with our closest family members!).

    People of color upholding white supremacy is confusing. I was talking with a colleague, Rashad Morris, on this topic when he mentioned “Highlander Syndrome,” a term he heard from another Black colleague a decade ago. It comes from the Highlander movies and TV shows, about immortals who constantly try to kill one another, because at the end “there can only be one.” (This should not be confused with the unofficial name of a medical condition that prevents people from aging. And update: We are now, at least temporarily, calling it the Only Be One (OBO) Syndrome, to not affect the work of the amazing Highlander Research and Education Center).

    In the context of what we’re talking about today, this is when a member of a marginalized community, once having achieved some level of privilege, becomes a gatekeeper to prevent other marginalized people from achieving the same privilege. As exhausting as it is for most of us to be the only person of color at an organization, event, committee, or whatever, for some it confers a degree of power, privilege, and even safety that they want to protect.

    “Whenever I think of [this],” says Rashad, “I also think about the house slave versus the field slave, like the character of Stephen in Django Unchained (played by Samuel L. Jackson). He’s conditioned to see himself as different, special. And fights hard to maintain that status. How often have we as POC, especially Black folks, heard the phrase ‘I don’t mean you, you’re different;’ ‘I don’t think of you as Black.’”

    This desired proximity to whiteness and white acceptance, and the temptation to protect it once you have it, is a survival mechanism. Over centuries many of us have internalized it, and it is now entrenched as a significant barrier to our work of addressing injustice. White supremacy relies on all of us being divided to maintain itself. When we prioritize our own proximity to whiteness above what is equitable and just, we become a cog in the machine of oppression. We often become unwitting tools. We see this in politics with POCs who have abhorrent views being given platforms to spout their xenophobia and prejudice. This is an incredibly effective tactic, because how can you argue with a person of color when they support “all lives matter” or insist that asylum seekers are criminals? I mean, they’re a person of color, so obviously they have some authority on the subject, right?

    In our sector, I’ve seen so many instances over the years of POCs who prevent progress, who uphold white moderation. A board member of color who blocks a public statement of support for Black lives. An ED of color who prevents implementation of equitable hiring practices such as disclosing salary ranges and not requiring formal education. A fundraiser of color who prioritizes the comfort of white donors. A foundation program officer of color who insists on using the same ineffective grant strategies for allocation of funds instead of allowing targeted funding to go specifically to Black, Indigenous, and other marginalized communities.

    Sometimes POCs are weaponized to maintain status quo. For instance, a neighborhood group that’s against low-income housing will have POCs testify at public hearings in order to conceal its racism. On social media and elsewhere, POCs get tagged in to defend archaic or inequitable philosophies and practices all the time. Few things are more damaging to the work of addressing systemic injustice than people of color defending systemic injustice.

    Of course, I know communities of color are not monolithic. The assumption or expectation that we should all think similar thoughts about racism or anything is in itself racist. We deserve the right and opportunities, just like everyone else, to have unpopular, controversial, or just different viewpoints. At the same time, those of us doing this work, the work of creating a just and inclusive world, must understand these complex dynamics so that we can control for them.

    Also, this is not just something that affects people of color. As Rashad says, “I can imagine, and have heard of similar situations playing out among gay male athletes, for example, or female executives in male-dominant environments. To continue being associated with dominant culture, they deploy oppressive and undercutting tactics against the people who have traits most like themselves.”

    All of us are susceptible to it. I am sure that if there were another vegan Vietnamese blogger who also has stress acne and writes about nonprofit stuff, my hackles would be raised. But jokes aside, because all of us are affected, it’s important for all of us to take measures:

    POCs and others from marginalized communities: We need to constantly be vigilant of how white supremacy and patriarchy divide us. The desire for proximity to whiteness and patriarchy—and with it the access to resources, power, and privilege—is often not conscious. The same goes for gatekeeping, undermining, or sabotaging of others who also face systemic oppression. We may be causing harm without realizing it, without intending to. We must be cognizant of how we may be used as tools to further inequity and injustice. Let’s be aware of how we have benefited from others who came before us who may have helped us get to where we are. And when we have achieved some level of success, let’s use our privilege and access to open doors for and lift up others. Our communities’ chance to survive and thrive depends on us all being mutually supportive of, and building solidarity with, one another.

    White colleagues and others from dominant communities: I know you’ve been told to trust people of marginalized backgrounds when we tell you about our lived-experience, and generally you should. But you still need to do some critical thinking so that you don’t get affected by what I’m calling the “Equity Halo Effect,” where an opinion is automatically valid simply because it’s given by a person of marginalized backgrounds. Do your homework and reflection. Ensure that those who claim to represent certain communities are actually a part of those communities. Be thoughtful when you pull in colleagues from marginalized backgrounds to bolster your views and arguments; if your arguments do not stand on their own when delivered by you, then you probably need to do some more work. (Also, don’t feel uncomfortable about sharing this blog post. Share it!)

  • 9 Crappy Paradoxes that Shape Nonprofit and Philanthropy

    Hi everyone, quick announcement: Please put August 10th at 12:00pm Pacific Time on your calendar for Community-Centric Fundraising’s first town hall meeting. Sign up here and we’ll send you the zoom link. Until then, the (CCF) Hub is designed to provide alternatives to our default white-centric fundraising narratives. It features about three new thought-provoking pieces of content each week, including “How prospect research can help nonprofits become less racist and more inclusive,” “What I Learned from Losing Two Jobs in the Fight for Racial Equity,” “‘You want a director of what now?!’ When orgs that are hiring are too lazy to know what they want,” and the first episode of the Ethical Rainmaker podcast, where CCF Co-Chair Michelle Muri and I talk about fundraising and equity. Check it out!

    ***

    I’ve been spending a lot of time flossing while thinking of how to categorize the challenges in our sector (What, like your quarantine activities are so much more interesting). Many of the stuff we deal with falls under the category of “well-meaning people inadvertently making nonprofits’ jobs harder.” Here are a nine. I’m going to call them paradoxes, though some of these are not paradoxes exactly, but are more like dilemmas, conundrums, or shenanigans. I’ve written about a few of them, but they keep coming up and remain a problem, so it’s good for us to review and have common language to push back. If we want our sector to succeed, we need to be aware of these paradoxes and control for them.

    1.The Overhead Paradox: The focus on reducing overhead actually increases overhead. Is there anything more ridiculous than “overhead”? (*cough* infinity scarves *cough*). Despite countless people speaking out against this archaic and silly concept, it still comes back up like soy yogurt that expired three months ago but you decide to eat it anyway because yogurt is fermented and therefore can’t really go bad. But if you think about, the more that people worry about overhead, the more overhead it creates. Tracking and reporting on overhead requires staff time, accounting software, healthcare to deal with migraines, etc. These things are all overhead! If funders and donors want nonprofit overhead to go down (which is another argument entirely), then give general operating funds and stop forcing nonprofits to use overhead to track overhead.

    2.The Sustainability Paradox: The focus on increasing organizational sustainability actually decreases organizational sustainability. I’ve been seeing fewer and fewer foundations asking the dumbass Sustainability Question (“How will you sustain this program when our grant support runs out so that you can stop being a freeloader and parasite on us foundations?”). But it still pops up from time to time. It is counterproductive. It’s like going to a small business that makes face masks and saying “You make great masks, but I will only buy from you if I know you’ll be around in five years. Since you don’t have a good plan to be sustainable, I can’t support your business, sorry.” If every customer does this, if every customer is focused on this business’s “sustainability,” it would ruin the business. Not worrying AT ALL about sustainability and funding nonprofits for the good work they do is what helps nonprofits become sustainable.

    3.The Capacity Building Paradox: Forcing nonprofits to focus on building organizational capacity reduces their ability to build organizational capacity. There are still funders who give out small grants and require that organizations spend those dollars on accounting, HR, etc. One funder told me, “If we give nonprofits general operating dollars, they just spend it on programs, not on infrastructure.” I know these funders mean well, but by restricting nonprofits’ autonomy, you ultimately lessen their chances of building capacity. As I wrote here, the best way to help organizations develop their capacity is to give multi-year general operating dollars (MYGOD!). And then if you want to give additional funds on top of that for executive coaching or whatever, that’s great. (This is different from the Capacity Paradox, where organizations need funds to build capacity, but they cannot get funds because they don’t have capacity).

    4.The Data-Resource paradox: Organizations cannot get significant funding without good data, but they cannot get good data without significant funding. This has been a bane for many organizations, especially organizations led by marginalized communities. Added to the complexity is that what is considered “good data” is determined by elite white institutions and people, which makes it even more difficult and expensive to obtain. We need to completely rethink how we view and resource data as well as who gets to define what is acceptable data and what is not.

    5.The Single Issues Paradox: Foundations that prioritize specific social issues lessen the chances of those issues being successfully addressed. I’ll probably elaborate more on this in a future post, but basically, foundations have treated social issues like a salad bar and they get to choose which programs “align” with their priorities. So then they fund only homelessness, or only climate change, or only preschool programs that serve 4-year-olds with curly brown hair or whatever. The laser focus on single issues, though, is paradoxically why we suck at addressing these issues. That’s because social issues are interconnected: Homelessness is related to housing, which is related to education, which is related to food security, etc., and we have to address these problems holistically, not in silos based on individuals’ whims. If you want to make a difference in the stuff you care about, then invest in organizations, movements, and leaders, not your pet issues. And for nonprofits, stop being so focused on only your mission, and start thinking of the entire nonprofit ecosystem.

    6.The Strategic Planning Paradox: Being too strategic reduces organizations’ ability to get stuff done. This article here lays out all the problems with our traditional ways of doing strategic planning, and highlights La Piana’s work around strategic thinking and real-time strategic planning, which I appreciate. Overall, the paradox is that the more “strategic” funders and nonprofits are, the less effective they often are. This is particularly true of foundations, whose “strategic philanthropy” approach has caused untold damage to the sector, to the point that several apologies were issued by proponents of this concept several years ago. And yet, it seems we’ve learned nothing. I keep hearing from foundations about how proudly “strategic” they are. And nonprofits continue to follow.

    7.The Outcomes Paradox: The hyper-focus on outcomes often lessens the likelihood that there will be successful outcomes. Our sector has been conditioned to think that outcomes are awesome. And they are. To a point. But the gravitation toward outcomes often leads to ones that are narrow, easily-measurable, and short-term. Significant changes will take years, possibly decades to achieve. By being too focused on immediate, easily-accessible outcomes, we miss out on these longer-term successes. So to achieve meaningful outcomes, we may need to focus less on outcomes and more on supporting the work, especially the work of organizations led by BIPOC communities, over the long haul and trust that it will lead to the changes we want.

    8.The Innovation Paradox: Rewarding “innovative” programs and services ultimately reduces innovation in the sector. One of the common complains we have in the sector is that many funders and donors don’t want to fund existing, proven-effective programs; they want to chase shiny new stuff. It’s exhausting, and some nonprofits have found clever ways to rebrand existing programs so they sound “innovative.” But being forced to lie and constantly worry about funding and having to scramble to survive because funders are enamored with shininess, these things do not lead to innovation. For innovation to happen, people need trust and stability of support so they can experiment, fail, and iterate.

    9.The Social Good Paradox: Focusing on the good to society instead of intrinsic values of individuals reduces social good. We’ve been taught to explain how helping people helps society. For instance, by supporting youth, they will more likely grow up to be productive citizens who pay taxes and don’t commit crimes. We help older adults because if they’re healthy, they’re less likely to end up in the emergency room, which will save society money. But this reduces individuals to economic units whose value is measured by how useful they are to the rest of the community. This in the long-run reduces social good. If we want to increase social good, then we should forget about social good and get everyone to believe that people have intrinsic worth independent of their value to society, and that we should help them because that’s the right thing to do, the end.

    There are plenty of other paradoxes, dilemmas, and shenanigans in our sector. Let me know your thoughts in the comment section. Until next week, remember to floss.

    —

  • Toxic intellectualization: How progressives’ addiction to overthinking is sabotaging our work

    About a year ago, I was complaining to my friend Ben Reuler, ED of Seattle Works, about my backyard. I told him how the yard had been cleared the year prior and had just remained a patch of dirt. This was because my spouse and I were indecisive. We didn’t know whether to plant grass seeds, or maybe roll out some turf, try for an ecolawn full of clovers, or possibly hire a landscape designer. We wanted to do some more research. So for 14 months the yard remained barren, save for weeds. The kids refused to play in it except when it rained, then they loved jumping around in the mud. No one complained. We just thought, “We’ll get to it and some point.”

    A few weeks later, we invited Ben and his family over for lunch (I make kickass bánh xèo). Ben arrived with a bag of grass seeds, a bag of compost, and a seed spreader thing. “Come on,” he said, “we’re planting grass in your yard.” And just like that, we were out in the yard, sprinkling grass seeds and compost. I was skeptical. Ben is not an expert in lawn care; he is a nonprofit executive director, and everyone knows we EDs have very few useful life skills. Over the next few months, though, as we moved into the rainy season, the grass grew. Now we have a lawn! It’s great for picnics. The children wrestle on the ground. This little yard has been a lifesaver during this pandemic when schools are closed.

    Why the heck am I bringing this up? This story is an analogy for a critical weakness in our sector: Our over-intellectualization, tendency to complicate things, gravitation toward research and planning, and avoidance of risk and action. Just like my partner and I hemmed and hawed and was indecisive about what to do about our yard for over a year, we nonprofits and foundations too equivocate and overthink all sorts of things. And gradually, over the years, we start to praise ourselves for doing endless researching, planning, and pontificating instead of taking actions, to the point where we now consider this course of inaction as “best practices.”

    This is not to say that we shouldn’t plan or research, but the pendulum has swung too far and it’s become destructive and we don’t even realize it. For instance, I talked to a foundation CEO who asked me to facilitate a discussion about how to better fund Black and Indigenous communities during this time. I told him to just increase payout and give multi-year general operating dollars to Black and Indigenous-led organizations, the end, stop wasting time. Another funder, when I told them something similar about increasing funding to communities-of-color-led orgs, said, “Well, we would love to do that, but we are very white and haven’t really done our inner work yet to be more diverse, so it would feel hypocritical.” So basically communities are suffering because you need months or years to think and reflect and plan and look good to the public.  

    Toxic intellectualizing is pervasive across our sector. We have deeply internalized it, overusing concepts like “due diligence” and refrains like “the process is just as important as the results” to justify it. We have built entire industries of data/evaluation and strategic planning consultants around it. We are geared toward planning and thinking because it is safer and less risky to do. The consequences of taking impulsive actions and failing are usually serious in our sector and in society, but we don’t want to seem like we’re not taking any actions, so the middle ground is to think and talk about stuff, and in doing so we continue to waste so much time and resources.

    In our daily work, this is exasperating. But taken as a whole, toxic intellectualization explains why progressives have fallen far behind conservatives in getting things done. At the beginning of the year, I wrote “It’s 2020, be bold or get the hell out of the way.” I said that if we need change in our society, nonprofits and philanthropy must collectively focus on five key areas:

    1. Get more women of color elected into office, 2. end voter suppression and ensure marginalized folks are able to vote 3. remove the influence of corporations on politics, 4. change the tax code so rich people pay their fair share 5. change public perceptions to align with facts and science.

    Let’s take the first one, the importance of getting women of color into office (and also into every leadership position in every sector). Progressive women of color have saved us time and time again; let’s not forget how Black women turned the tide in this critical election in Alabama. As the group most affected by systemic injustice, WOC being in positions of influence is vital to every single issue that we care about, and it is imperative for us to either support them or GTFO of the way. Whenever this is brought up, however, the response from fellow progressives is often, “That’s great. But how do we know that getting women of color into office will work? What outcomes and metrics should we use to measure if it’s successful? What is the research behind it? I dunno, that seems a little political, maybe we should focus on educating people about issues.”

    Can you imagine right-wing conservatives doing the same things that progressives are doing? While we are distracted fighting the pandemic and a racist police system, they have confirmed hundreds of conservative federal judges who will prevent and reverse progressive policies for decades to come. They didn’t stop to think, “Hm, getting more conservative judges into power sounds great, but how do we know if it will work to advance our conservative values? Do we have a theory of change or logic model? Why don’t we plan a summit a year from now to discuss and create, like, a strategic plan to do an assessment that would lead to a white paper? Also, is this a little too political, you think?”

    Progressives/liberals’ propensity to think that we are smart leads us to do things to make us appear to be smart. These things include being excessively skeptical, planful, and mired in vetting. We are addicted to appearing intelligent and measured, so we overdo it with the outcomes and metrics and proof of concept etc. Instead of acting, we discuss. Instead of taking risks, we research. Instead of learning by trying and failing, as conservatives have done so effectively for decades, we waffle and equivocate. Yes, measure twice, cut once as the saying goes. But it’s reached a point where we measure a hundred times and barely cut anything.  

    It is time for action. We must all be like my friend Ben Reuler, who brought over some grass seeds without even checking in with me first. Ben is one of the most thoughtful people I know, and he knew me well enough to know that if he had given me a chance, I would have been like “I need some more time to think about it, maybe spend eight months researching how clover affects local honeybees, and something called ‘fescue.’” To thank him for this valuable lesson, I’m naming a concept after him (unless someone already named it, in which case, sorry Ben):

    Reuler’s Razor: Once you have sufficient information to act to create change, start acting.

    Nonprofits and foundations, do an inventory of stuff you’ve been thinking about and figure out what’s preventing you from acting on it. Knock it off with more research and discussions, or gear these things deliberately toward immediate action. Learn to accept and embrace failure in an iterative process where we learn stuff as we go along.

    At the systems level, we need to get a grasp on this. We have fewer than 100 days left before the elections in the US. I don’t need to state how vital the defeat of this current president and his cult is. We need to end our infatuation with intellectualizing everything. It hasn’t been working. We need to take actions, and do so quickly.

    —

  • Why we need to move away from empathy in our fundraising approach

    By Vu Le

    Happy Monday, everyone. I hope to see you at the Community Centric Fundraising’s launch event today at 11a PDT (you can still register to join). If you can’t be there, please sign up to get more information on future events. Our next one, on 7/24, will be about the data we collected from the Fundraising Perception Survey. (Spoiler: A majority of the 2300 people who responded to the survey, both BIPOC and white, are not happy with the way our sector has been doing fundraising.) 

    I am also thrilled to announce that the Community-Centric Fundraising Website is up! Check out communitycentricfundraising.org! The CCF Hub will serve as a central area for reflection and learning. Already there are several pieces on there, including 

    There is also a list of some CCF-aligned actions you can take at your organization. Please keep in mind that these actions, crowdsourced over the years, are notcomprehensive, and this list will change and evolve. The exciting and necessary work of this movement is for all of us to reexamine the philosophies that ground so many of our practices in the sector.

    One of those philosophies is our orientation toward empathy. In an interview with Joan Garry about Community-Centric Fundraising, a colleague asked, “How do we move our donors from sympathy to empathy?” This, in many ways, has been the evolution of our fundraising practices. We are trained to use storytelling that allows donors to viscerally feel what it’s like to be affected by various issues. We are advised to understand and employ the “identifiable victim effect” where instead of overwhelming donors with statistics, we point out specific individuals—with names and faces and hopes and dreams—who are suffering and who could be helped if the donors pitch in.

    These strategies work; I’m not arguing against that. Donors do respond better and give more when they are moved. And many important policies are passed because people’s sense of empathy is activated, as we have seen from various conservative politicians who change their minds on various issues because their child has a disability or is LGBTQIA+, etc.

    But, there are serious problems with this approach. There are now numerous articles about the detrimental effects of empathy. Here’s one: “Empathy is Overrated,” written by Devon Price. And here’s another one that’s particularly relevant to fundraising: “Think empathy makes the world a better place? Think again …” by Paul Bloom. He writes:

    “A reliance on empathy is part of the reason why people’s desire to help abused dogs or oil-drenched penguins often exceeds their interest in suffering millions in other countries or ethnic minorities in their own. It’s why governments and individuals often care more about a little girl stuck in a well than about crises that affect so many more.”

    Through our reliance on empathy to generate funding, we have conditioned donors to think and feel certain ways. Through empathy-oriented practices, we have been training people to believe that the most important thing is how they feel when they give, and that the worthiest causes to support are those that they can understand and relate to.

    But this, in the long-run, is harmful to our communities and to our work of creating a better world. Many of the issues we are trying to address are difficult if not impossible to generate empathy for, due to racial and other dynamics at play. It is unconsciously easier for our donors, most of whom are white, to empathize with certain issues than others, which explains why during the racist incident where Amy Cooper called the police on Christian Cooper (no relation), many people on social media seemed to be more concerned about the dog she was strangling than about the bird-watching Black man whose life she threatened with violence and death.

    This is the critical weakness of empathy. We as human beings are programmed to relate to and help people who are most like us. But what if we can’t relate to certain people or communities? Does that mean that they should not be helped? This is why I roll my eyes every time I see a politician say stuff like “My son came out as gay, and it really changed my heart, and therefore I am now supporting marriage equality.” So if your kid isn’t gay, you wouldn’t support LGBTQ rights?

    The role of empathy and the lack of it explains why Black trans women continue to be murdered, why immigrant children continue to be kept in cages to this day, why Indigenous/Native Americans continue to face housing discrimination, why disabled people face insurmountable obstacles finding employment. Our society has not prioritized these injustices because we’ve relied on empathy to move people, but people in power often can never empathize with these issues. Politicians, and again, most of them are white, won’t suddenly have their offspring come home one day and say, “Mom, Dad, I’m an undocumented kid fleeing poverty and violence.”

    We need to acknowledge that our fundraising strategies have used empathy to center white donors’ feelings and the things they can relate to and care about. And in the short run, it works. People will give more. But in the long run, it is harmful, as it conditions our donors to support only the people, communities, and issues they can understand and feel moved by, and implicitly gives them permission to not worry about the ones they can’t.

    The solution we as a sector must embrace is to move from empathy to trust and justice. Trust asks us to believe the people who are most affected by an unjust system, to take their words at value, even if it’s outside our understanding or ability to relate. It also asks us to accept that the solutions proposed by the most marginalized people and communities would have the best chance of succeeding and to act accordingly. Justice demands that we support those who are most affected by injustice, whether we or not we understand or feel empathy for them. It demands the recognition that our thoughts and feelings are secondary, if not irrelevant, to the realities facing many people with whom we will never completely empathize.

    What does this mean for our fundraising practices? We must reexamine the time that we spend trying to get people, especially donors and others with wealth and power, to understand and empathize as a pre-condition for them to act. We have to figure out how to encourage donors to support the people, communities, and issues that they may never fully or even partially understand. We must get people to do the right things because they are the right and just things to do, not because they make people feel good or feel less bad. And that will be much harder than what we know currently works. 

    This is not a simple solution. We are caught in a paradox where we need to tug at people’s heart-strings to get funding to help those suffering under injustice and oppression, but by tugging at heart-strings, we condition donors to not care unless their strings are tugged, which further perpetuates injustice and oppression. But we can start by exploring ways to move from empathy to trust, from pity to justice.

  • The default nonprofit board model is archaic and toxic; let’s try some new models

    By Vu Le

    Hi everyone, before we dive into today’s post, two quick announcements. My friend, the awesome Kishshana Palmer, and I are having an Instagram Live conversation, Rooted AF, tomorrow July 7th, at 5:30pm ET. These Live events are unscripted conversations where we discuss whatever is on our minds, so likely fundraising, philanthropy, equity, and Kish’s awesome new venture providing a supportive network for women of color.

    Also, next week, July 13th, is the launch of the Community-Centric Fundraising (CCF) movement, as I wrote about here. It will kick off with a virtual event “Let’s Make Fundraising Less Racist” on 7/13 at 11am PST. The CCF Hub will launch on that day too; it’ll be a place to explore ways to fundraise that are aligned with racial and economic justice. Sign up here so we can send you the meeting link to the launch event and address to the Hub when they are ready.

    OK, let’s talk about boards. First off, let me just say that I know lots of amazing people who serve on boards. Board members are volunteers who contribute time, money, talents, connections, and even the occasional shoulder to cry on during challenging moments. Without the awesome folks on my board, the two organizations that I was ED of would not have been nearly as successful. I am also currently serving on two boards of organizations I love. I know how hard boards and board members work, and we owe a lot to the brilliant board members out there who are helping us make the world better every day.

    However, we need to admit that boards in general are seriously problematic. I have a Rule of One-Thirds when it comes to boards: 1/3 of them are helpful, 1/3 are useless, and 1/3 are actually harmful. This means that 2/3 of nonprofit boards are useless or harmful. For every good-board story, there are countless tales of crappy boards. Those who micromanage the staff. Those who get buried in operations, wasting their time scrutinizing font selections and toilet paper purchases. Those who prevent progress, like the boards who refuse to allow their organizations to publicly support Black Lives Matter, thinking it’s too “political.” Even among the boards I’ve worked with, I’ve dealt with my fair share of crappiness, like the time my board blocked a paid family leave policy that the staff all supported and the entire sector is moving toward.

    But how could boards not be crappy? We are talking about a structure where groups of volunteers who barely know one another, see one percent of the work, often don’t reflect the communities we serve, and who may have little to no experience running nonprofits, being given vast power to supervise leadership and determine values, policies, and practices. Why did we think this weird structure would work?

    We have been in denial about the destructiveness of our sector’s default board model. Over the years, we have developed a learned helplessness, thinking that this model is the only one we have. So we put up with it, grumbling to our colleagues and working to mitigate our challenges, for instance figuring out ways to bring good board members on to neutralize bad ones or having more trainings or meetings to increase “board engagement.”

    What we need to do though, is completely reimagine the board and experiment with some new structures. A while ago, I was lamenting the glaring failures of the default board model when colleague Vanessa LeBourdais, Executive Producer and Creative Director of DreamRider Productions, mentioned that her organization had been experimenting with a new model, which they called Evolutionary Governance. “It’s a little ‘woo’,” she said, which I think means hippie or touchy-feely. Among other things, it included the board and staff sharing power, the board being a supportive partner and sounding board for the ED, the board doing nothing if “nothing” is what is needed at various moments, everyone doing a lot of inner work. It requires an understanding of the minimum legal stuff the board is required to do, having that stuff done, and then being free to do much more interesting things. I know Vanessa and DreamRider are working to put their model down in writing, and I’m excited to see it. We need less “Robert’s Rules” and more “woo”!

    Also in Canada, a collaboration between Ontario Nonprofit Network and Ignite NPS, Reimagining Governance encourages us to think of governance in a holistic sense, something shared in an ecosystem that includes staff, board, and community, instead of just being concentrated at the board level. “We need to critically examine the very design of governance so that effective governance is not wholly dependent on maintaining an effective board.” The idea that the board is responsible for almost all governance responsibilities is pretty archaic and ridiculous if you think about it, considering again that the board oftentimes has the least amount of knowledge and connections to what is happening on the ground. I’m looking forward to seeing the experimentation and lessons that come out of this work.

    Meanwhile, I am on the board of Creating the Future, a movement and experiment to change systems and create a more humane world, rooted in founder Hildy Gottlieb’s research and work. CTF has also been wrestling with the complexity of creating a new structure. We have been discussing a model where the formal “minimally viable board” fulfills the absolute minimum legal requirements and does little else. This may then be combined with a second, less formal but larger, more expansive, more inclusive (and more fun!) “integrity board” that reflects the community and its values.

    A critical common theme among all three of these approaches is the recognition that boards have very few legal requirements. These vary from state to state in the US and I’m not sure about Canada and other countries, but often are just “have three people, set some by-laws, meet once a year, file financial records.” What this means is that most practices we’ve associated with boards over the decades are COMPLETELY OPTIONAL! They are traditions we’ve just passed down to the point where we think they’re legally required, but they’re not! The board hires the ED. Who says?! The board meets once a month. Why?! The board approves the budget. Not necessarily! Many practices are ensconced in by-laws, but bylaws are easily changed. (Creating the Future is trying to craft a one-page set of bylaws, because there are few specific legal requirements on what these bylaws entail!)

    Anyway, the point is, we’ve been putting up with this crappy board structure long enough. Yes, there are some good boards, and plenty of great board members. But the structure is archaic, weird, glaringly white, and full of corporate people who know little about nonprofits and often have less lived experience and who often are too busy to bother learning (but who still insist on being in charge!) So, it’s time to try some new stuff. This is challenging, because if we had an effective structure that works for everyone, we would already be using it. The important thing is for us to give ourselves permission to experiment.

    This will require unlearning a bunch of no-good, very bad philosophies that have been toxic for our sector. For example, a deeply internalized belief is that the board is the “boss” of the ED/CEO and thus the entire staff team. This sets up a dynamic where the staff are often undermined by less-informed board members and must operate in a pervasive environment of permission seeking, which leads to inaction or ineffective actions.

    Another destructive belief is that the board’s main loyalty is only to its own mission. This often prevents nonprofits from working together and perpetuates the Nonprofit Hunger Games. I’ve had colleagues lament to me of their boards being unhappy with their helping out other organizations, such as introducing donors or passing on a grant proposal or sharing critical community data. The mission-centeredness of boards jeopardizes our sector’s ability to work together as an ecosystem of interdependent elements needed to do this work well.  

    As we experiment with the board of the future, it may look like many different things, but I would love to see boards that are ecosystems-minded and think about the entire sector not just individual missions, work in tandem with other boards, are focused on possibilities not liabilities, reflect the people the org serves, encourage risk-taking, take strong courageous public stances against white supremacy and injustice, are fully engaged in advocacy and systems change, and trust the staff and work in equal partnership with them.  

    Our work has gotten even more urgent lately. We must start challenging every philosophy, system, and practice that stand in our way of being effective. One of the biggest barriers to our sector’s ability to fulfill its potential has been our default board model, which is based on a white corporate way of doing things. Let’s stop using this model. Let’s stop trying to succeed in spite of it, like something we have no choice but to put up with. Let’s burn it down and experiment to create a model, or several models, that we can all be excited about. 

  • Privilege, power, and personal conflicts: The forces preventing change in nonprofit and philanthropy

    Hi everyone. Apologies, this post will likely be long, poorly edited, and not have as many links to sources and I would like. I haven’t slept much, and even with a partner who is an experienced educator, parenting and crisis-schooling two small children have been fun but challenging.

    As the protests against our deeply anti-Black, extremely racist systems continue, I am glad to see that foundations and nonprofits are getting more engaged in the conversations about how our sector must change. Invest more in Black-led organizations. Support grassroots orgs working to enable marginalized communities to vote and elect more women of color into office. Analyze the diversity at our own organizations and DO SOMETHING about the pervasiveness of senior leaders being white and front-line staff being BIPOC. Change the way fundraising is done to be less white-donor-centered. Increase payout rates beyond the minimum 5% and give Multi-Year General Operating Funds (MYGOD)!

    These and other solutions are not new. People with the most lived-experience with injustice have proposed them for decades. So why don’t things change? Why do we keep beating our heads against the wall? What is this wall? What is it made of? I’ve been thinking about it, and think there are three main forces at play.

    First is Privilege, which is something we are familiar with, as we discuss it often. Those with privilege want to maintain it, so they will oppose change. However, a form of privilege we do not talk much about is Solutions Privilege, a phenomenon that includes people of privilege expecting solutions to be brought to them but being unable to even perceive solutions that challenge their privilege. They cannot even mentally register the solutions that are proposed, and that’s why they’re always like “Why don’t you propose solutions and stop whining?”

    But there are two other major forces at work to prevent change, and we barely talk about them, much less deal with them, so I’ll focus on them more here. One major force is Power. There are power differentials everywhere. White people have significantly more power than Black, Indigenous, and other people of color. Men have more power than women and nonbinary folks. Cis-gender folks have more power than trans folks. Currently-abled people have more power than disabled people. Neuro-typical people have more power than neuro-diverse people.

    In our field, foundations have significantly more power than nonprofits. White-led organizations have more power than those led by BIPOC communities. Foundations with more money hoarded in their endowments have more power than those with less. And within both nonprofits and foundations, senior staff and board/trustee members have more power than everybody else.

    If we do not address power dynamics, our proposed solutions will continue to be stymied. For instance, many diversity and equity efforts go nowhere because they are relegated to a DEI committee that does not actively include the CEO/ED and key board members. So then these committees spend endless time creating recommendations that are rarely implemented. And among foundations, there are many sympathetic program officers who are fighting hard to change philanthropy for the better, but the folks with the actual power to make changes—foundation trustees—are never in the room. They use their power and privilege to excuse themselves from these conversations and then use their power and privilege to shut down solutions they don’t like or understand.

    It is time our sector grasp with these severe power imbalances and get comfortable with using different strategies. Seriously, as much as I appreciate articles pointing out the severe racial inequity in where philanthropic dollars are going, for example, this issue has been pointed out repeatedly, by countless people, for a long, long time now. Asking nicely of entrenched institutions and systems to change has not worked. We need some different tactics:

    Demand that the people with power be present: How many times have all of us been in conversations and think “I wish my board member/CEO/foundation-trustees were here to hear this?” So many important efforts are blocked every day because we allow the people with the most power in our sector to skip out on vital conversations. Which means that the most powerful people are also the most clueless. This has to stop. Demand that they be present or that they delegate decision-making powers to those who are. Especially foundation trustees: You all need to stop thinking of this work as a hobby; either show up to vital discussions, trust your staff who do to make decisions, or get off the board.  

    Mobilize the voices of the community: As we have seen recently in the protests, power often only responds to massive demonstrations of number. Unfortunately, many of us in the sector have never learned the basics of organizing or have let our skills rust from lack of use. It’s time to learn or relearn them. I know it is challenging to mobilize folks, especially those who are busy dealing with systemic injustice, but oftentimes packing the room, or virtual meeting, with dozens or hundreds of faces is the best way to break power out of its insidious habit of reducing people to statistics. We need to remind people in power that their decisions affect the lives of real people.

    Work on legislation: How often have sector leaders screamed about the pathetic 5% minimum foundation payout rate? Donor-Advised Funds (DAFs), meanwhile, have no legal mandate to give out any money at all, so many just sit there growing or collecting dust, when donors get tax breaks immediately as soon as they park that money there. Begging and pleading with foundations and DAF-holding financial institutions to increase their payout rates have not worked. Writing op-eds has not worked. Presenting research and evidence has not worked. This is why there is now a petition calling for the Congress to enact legislation requiring the payout for foundations and DAFs to be doubled to 10% for the next three years. Please sign it. And start creating and rallying around other laws.  

    Use public shaming: The past few weeks on Twitter I have been naming and shaming foundations who perpetuate harmful practices, on behalf of folks using the hashtag #CrappyFundingPractices (You can DM me @nonprofitAF and I will tweet and tag the funder; also point out #AwesomeFundingPractices). This was a deliberate decision I made after hearing about a foundation that required proposals to be hand-delivered during a pandemic. A lot of stuff that institutions with power do are not just annoying, they are actually harmful, and one of the most effecitve ways to get them to change is to call it out. @charitysowhite is naming-and-shaming organizations that have crappy DEI practices. And all of us should call out any organization that have a job listing that doesn’t have a salary range or that asks for salary history. Among other things we need to call out.

    These tactics are not new; they have been used successfully by activists and community organizers for centuries. Most of us just suck at using them. We need to understand and learn how to confront power, sometimes by leveling the power we innately have but have not been using. Otherwise, we will continue to make incremental progress that may actually be more harmful in the long run, as these tiny wins lull us into a state of complacency that allows white supremacy, racism, and inequity to continue.

    However, there is a third force we have to contend with: Our individual personal conflicts of interest. We cannot confront power effectively without understanding that we are unconsciously motivated to NOT confront power.

    18 months ago, I was invited to speak with two dozen foundation program officers about how inequitable philanthropy is, how inhospitable it has been for BIPOC-community-led organizations. I think there was one foundation board trustee there. The folks in the room were people I worked with and admire. “Communities of color are tired,” I said, “We’ve been saying these things again and again. You’ve been hearing these things again and again. Why will it take?”

    The room went quiet for a few seconds. One program officer said, and I paraphrase, “Let’s admit it. Most of us have cushy jobs working for foundations. How can we rock the boat when we have well-paying jobs that we don’t want to lose?”

    This was a refreshing moment of honestly that has stuck with me. All of us do this work because we believe in doing our part to create a just and equitable world. But let’s also be honest with ourselves, we also do this work because we have families to feed, rent to pay, futures to think about. All of us then have personal conflicts. If we push too much, if we cause too much trouble, we increase our chances of not being promoted, or getting demoted or fired. And besides the financial and career risks, there are potential costs to our reputations, our mental and emotional health, our sense of belonging to the “insider” group.

    Challenging institutions with power comes with a cost. We see this in the people who are getting beaten or killed by the police during the protests, and who greatly increase their risks of contracting Covid. Some folks are losing their jobs for speaking up. Children are being attacked by white supremacists for holding signs in support of Black lives. In order to achieve the world we want, all of us must ask ourselves how we are conflicted and what are we willing to give up, especially those of us who have more privilege. Are we willing to risk our jobs, our reputations, our sense of comfort, even our physical safety?

    These are challenging questions. But if there’s ever a moment for us to get some clarity on who we are and what we each stand for as individuals and as a sector, this is it. While we think about it, though, let’s remember that Black civil rights leaders and activists have risked and lost their lives and continue to do so, so that all of us can enjoy the many freedoms we have. And in our sector, as colleague Catherine García (@thecathyshow) points out on Twitter, “Black and Brown women in philanthropy & nonprofits [have] paid the price historically by being benched, ostracized, harassed, unpaid, unpromoted, and fired for speaking up. You almost never hear of men sticking their necks out. Or white women either for that matter.”

    As I mentioned last week, our sector has become one giant white moderate that Dr. King warned us about, and as such, we are standing in the way of progress even as we continue to help people. Things need to seriously change. Many of the things that were reluctantly tolerated in the past, like the fact that less than 10% of philanthropic dollars go to organizations led by Black, Indigenous, and other POC communities, or the fact that 92% of US foundation leaders are white, are unconscionable now.

    But the strategies we have used to try to solve these and myriad other issues have not worked. Just like trying to reform the racist police system has not worked, or nicely asking for racist statues to come down has not worked. We have to understand that people and institutions with privilege have all the formal the power, and formal power does not yield without being challenged. But to effectively challenge power, we must examine the personal conflicts we each have and wrestle with what we are each willing to give up to realize a world we know is possible.