Author: Vu Le

Hi everyone, happy Spring in the Northern Hemisphere. This post may be short and incoherent, because I’m supposed to be wrapping up the manuscript of my book and sending it to my editor at Wiley. Due to the collapse of democracy and the rise of fascism, it must be changed a bit, including the title, which right now stands at “Burn It All Down and Rise from the Ashes: A Guide for Transforming the Nonprofit and Philanthropy Sector into a Badass Phoenix of Equity and Justice!” But I’m sure the publisher will demand a more boring and “marketable” title.

A few weeks ago, as the federal government launched the first phase of its war on DEI and on the nonprofit sector, I was on LinkedIn perusing the comments while eating a container of Ben and Jerry’s “Cherry Garcia” non-dairy ice cream, when one of those annoying AI questions popped up, where apparently, I was one of the experts invited to answer a question. The question was “You’re seeking to engage new major donors. How can you tailor your fundraising strategy to their preferences?”

72 answers were given by various fundraising experts, most of them advising nonprofits to cater to donors by doing things like:

• “personalize outreach with stories and opportunities to align with their passions,”
• “research their philanthropic interests and past giving patterns” so you can adjust your interactions, and
• “invite them to private events or behind-the-scenes tours to show how your cause aligns with their values.”

Only one person pushed back against the idea that nonprofits should “tailor” their strategies for donors or funders.

I took a big spoonful of creamy non-dairy frozen dessert and typed, “Tell them fascism is on the rise you’re busy fighting it and won’t have time for personalized thank-yous and interactions. Ask them if they’re interested in examining where their wealth comes from and if they’d like to help you change the tax code so the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes.”

My hastily written answer got 76 likes, which is not many, but is still higher than the next highest-liked answer, which got 11 likes and mentioned really listening to your donors and making the relationship one that benefits both parties.

It is not surprising, but it continues to be disappointing how entrenched this idea has been that fundraisers’ job is to cater to the whims and passions of donors. It furthers what I call the “retailification of nonprofit and philanthropy,” where our sector serves as a giant SkyMall catalog of causes, and nonprofit professionals are personal shoppers for the rich, with a few crumbs of attention tossed to the non-rich donors who give smaller amounts.  

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Read full article here.

Hi everyone, this week is my birthday, when I’m officially a year older. But joke’s on the universe, since I’ve always looked ten years older than my biological age! If you’d like to help me celebrate, please donate $44 (or whatever you can afford) to nonprofits serving transgender people and advancing trans rights, such as the Trans Continental Pipe and the Marsha P. Johnson Institute.

Also, at the advice of our colleague Thaddeus Squire in his article “Four Ways the Nonprofit Sector Can Tell the Trump Administration to F**k Off,” I’m forming a religion, Vuism, to fight injustice, since religious organizations have almost zero oversight in this country and can take tax-deductible donations. Part of Vuism is the observance of Vumas on March 12, which requires all nonprofit professionals take the day off, eat hummus, and use the Oxford Comma to send one another good wishes.

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Over the past few days, you may have noticed the uptick in conversations regarding foundations’ increasing their payout rate during this sharknado shitstorm of fascism, cruelty, and ignorance (Marked by things like people protesting and destroying posters at a neuroscience conference in Orlando because scientists were talking about “diversity of efferent firing in the cochlea” and these MAGAts’ hate-infused brains thought it was about DEI and started foaming at the mouth).

I am glad the conversation is happening. According to research, US foundations’ cumulative assets have grown 15 times over the past 35 years, including an astounding 46% during the pandemic. There’s now 1.53Trillion US dollars hoarded by private foundations, and it’s still growing (unless the market crashes or something). If foundations increase their payout on average from 5% to 6%, experts estimate it would free up an additional 15 to 20 billion dollars each year. Think of the good that would do when the federal government and oligarchs continue to attack marginalized communities, revoke civil liberties, and work to dismantle nonprofits.

However, I’m afraid left-leaning funders (and many influential nonprofit leaders) still do not have an accurate analysis of what happened that got us to this horrible point in history and what’s needed to set things right. Over the past several decades, conservative forces, backed by right-wing funders, had a clear, long-term strategy to shift society to align with conservative values. I like to cite Sally Covington’s report, commissioned by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, “Moving a Public Policy Agenda: The Strategic Philanthropy of Conservative Foundations.”

The whole 58-page report is illuminating, but here’s a quote that summarizes how conservatives have been so successful:

“Proclaiming their movement to be a war of ideas, conservatives began to mobilize resources for battle in the 1960s. They built new institutional bastions; recruited, trained and equipped their intellectual warriors; forged new weapons as cable television, the Internet, and other communications technologies evolved; and threw their full resources into policy and political battles.”

While all their strategies have been extremely effective, the one where they “threw their full resources into policy and political battles” is what left-leaning funders have failed spectacularly to counter. Or even consider countering. While left-leaning funders mostly avoided funding politics (or, really, anything remotely even seeming political, such as advocacy), viewing it as beneath them, conservative funders went full-steam into supporting right-wing candidates and judges at all levels, backing gerrymandering, funding efforts to pass voter suppression laws, setting up political think tanks, and doing other things many in left-leaning philanthropy would consider “distasteful.”

An example of how astoundingly effective conservative funders have been in the political arena is the Federalist Society, a powerful organization that has worked for several decades to shape the judiciary system. It’s funded by conservative foundations like the Charles Koch Foundation, Bradley Foundation, Scaife Foundation, and Mercer Family Foundation, along with dark money groups like DonorsTrust. Its key leader is Leonard Leo. According to this article, Leo and his organization “helped [Trump] appoint and confirm more than 200 nominees to the federal bench, most famously Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.” (The Federalist Society was also instrumental in the nominations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito).

The Covington Report was published nearly 30 years ago, and the Federal Society was founded in 1982. Since then, conservative funders and donors, seeing how effective their strategies have been, doubled down on them. Three years ago, as the article above mentioned, billionaire Barre Seid donated $1.6 billion dollars—the largest donation to a political group in US history—to a new organization run by Leonard Leo, to continue shaping the judiciary until it’s entirely right-wing. This $1.6B, focused on seating conservative judges, will have ripple effects that will cost our sector multiple times more to address.

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Read full article here.

Last week, the MacArthur Foundation received a lot of praise for committing to increase its payout rate for at least the next two years from the legal minimum of 5% to 6%, which will add to the foundation’s total giving by about $150M. Here’s an article on it (Content warning, the article immediately displays a picture of Agent Orange, Russia’s most valuable puppet, in case you are trying to regulate your stress level). Here’s a piece from MacArthur’s president, John Palfrey, encouraging other foundations to do the same:

“We are inviting other philanthropies to join us: set it at six. We hope others in a position to do so will consider voluntarily raising their baseline payout rate to 6 percent, from the 5 percent as mandated by law, for the coming two years, at a minimum […] Philanthropies are well positioned to respond during periods of crisis. Many stepped up during COVID-19 and put out more funds when the social sector needed it. Today is a time when severe budget shortages again call for an infusion of additional capital.”

Quick disclaimer: I like and appreciate the MacArthur Foundation, especially since it affirmed its commitment to racial justice work when there has been so much pressure to drop DEI. Also, the foundation brought me in to speak a couple of years ago, and I hung out with John and the team, and everyone I met was wonderful. MacArthur does important work. And it takes some guts to bring in someone who points out all the stuff you could be doing wrong, and who is known to steal dry erase markers and snacks from foundation offices (In my defense, the stealing is a result of decades of being conditioned by funders to keep overhead low).

In the spirit of collegial feedback, I have to say 6% is nowhere near enough for what the world is facing. As colleague Rahul Chandran says, “Mac had a return of 10.92% on its portfolio in 2023 and a compounded annual rate of return 2014-2023 of 8.52% […] Given that rate of growth, Mac could have given out about 10.11 percent of its assets annually = doubled its giving. Had it done so, it would have about 20% less in net assets (or…$6.4 billion!) today.”

And two years is also not enough. As I mentioned in a reel last week, conservative funders often fund for 20 years or 30 years or more.

Setting such low thresholds anchors these numbers in people’s minds, preventing them from thinking bigger and bolder. When everything is burning down all around us, foundations should be considering upping their payout rate significantly, and though I love alliteration as much as anyone, the call to “Set it at Six” is an incremental step that does not acknowledge the reality of the situation. Freedom Together Foundation goes further by deciding to double its payout rate from 5% to 10%. Its President, Deepak Bhargava, in a letter titled “Courage is Contagious” writes:

“We’re moving to provide rapid response grants to communities and organizations under attack. We’re backing groups that are defending democratic norms, as well as supporting safety and security initiatives for organizations under threat. And we’re doubling down on long-term strategies to get at the roots of the democracy crisis.”

10% is certainly a significant improvement from 6%. And if we’re going for alliterative mottos, “Take It To Ten” is a better rallying cry.

But even that is not enough. We’re debating whether foundations should stick to 5%, or increase to 6% or possibly 10%, but this discussion is symptomatic of a continued denial of reality. We’re treating this crisis as if it were like other crises we’ve dealt with before. People think if we can just weather the next two years, maybe Democrats will win back the house, and then we can stop the bleeding, and then in four years, maybe we’ll win back the presidency, and then we can start restoring Medicaid and trans rights and so on and everything will be back on track and all of us can finally have decent sleep without night terrors. And of course, we’re going to need money to get all of that done and address other societal problems, so funders need to save and shore up for the future.

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Read full article here.

Hi everyone, if you’re free next week, March 4 to 6, please join me at the virtual Nonprofit Marketing Summit: Evolve, which is FREE. My session will be on March 5^th at 11am Pacific Time, and is called “Nonprofits, Bans, and Burnout: Surviving in 2025 Without Losing Our Collective Minds (or Tax-Exempt Status).” It’s really more of a pep talk, but anticipate some cussing. Register here.

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When my younger son was two, I remember him one day sitting on the stairs, his tiny face cradled by his little hands, looking forlorn. I sat down a few steps below him to be at eye level. “Kiet,” I said, “are you ok? What’s wrong?” He shook his head solemnly. “I have no two wings,” he said. Apparently, he realized some animals had wings and could fly, and he didn’t, and it created some sort of toddler existential crisis.

The past month, a lot of us probably felt like Kiet did, helpless while watching our society collapse, wishing we had the power to do something about it (and sometimes, maybe, the opportunity to fly away from it all). It is easy to fall into a sense of futility, thinking that nothing we do matters any more.

However, when things are toughest is when our everyday actions matter the most. These simple things we do to support one another, build community, and protect what’s good in the world, are just as important as the major actions. I asked colleagues (Feb 19th post) to list some tangible actions we can all take that make a difference. Below are a few of them, in no particular order, mildly edited for typos and length. Reading through the 450 comments I received was very heartening, thank you. Apologies for not including everyone and not crediting who said what (people and orgs named on this blog have gotten attacked in the past):

For everyone reading, don’t be overwhelmed by this list. You can’t do everything. Try your best to do a few things when you can:

1. “Dramatically reduce spending. I’m only spending money on necessities and only at BIPOC and/or LGBTQ+ local businesses in my rural area. I grocery shop at the Mexican grocery. Buy eggs from a neighbor who happens to be a member of the LGBTQ community. I’m having the heater core in my car changed out by a Mexican American owned mechanic. I have yet to figure out the gas piece beyond dramatically reducing my driving – taking transit, carpooling with friends, walking, grouping trips.” This Friday February 28 is an economic blackout, so try to spend nothing.
2. “Boycott business that have scratched DEI focus.” Some of them are Amazon, Ford, Lowe’s, Target, McDonald’s, Walmart, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Disney. Here is a list of more. Email and let them know your reason.
3. “Go to local school board meetings in visible gear that supports queer and trans students. Volunteer at our neighborhood foodbank. Frequent POC and woman-owned businesses. Check on the senior citizens on my block once a week. Help folks safety plan who may need access to an international border and be with people who know how to cross and are passable. We realized we have space in our home, time, and (in relativity) money. Trying to focus on directly helping people we know who are impacted by federal cuts – either employees or services. Those who are terrified.”

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Read full article here.

Next week, because the universe has a perverse sense of humor, we have MLK Jr. Day on the same day as the Inauguration. One of the brightest lights for equity and justice sharing the same day with one of the most effective catalysts for hate, racism, misogyny, and injustice that Humanity has ever produced. It feels sickly appropriate, as these opposing forces have been fighting one another for decades, with the stakes now higher than ever.

The side of equity and justice, though, has taken a huge hit recently. Meta (which runs Facebook), for example, has capitulated, now relaxing their rules against hateful content. So now it’s a free-for-all for people to harass transgender people, women, immigrants, and other vulnerable people. Zuckerberg has also said companies need more “masculine energy,” which I think means having employees of all genders wear fake mustaches and interrupt one another more often to talk about stuff they only have a little knowledge about but a lot of confidence in.

Meanwhile, I hear about the rise of MEI, which stands for Merit, Excellence, and Intelligence. It is a counterresponse to DEI. Instead of focusing on “woke garbage” like equity and inclusion, with MEI we just focus on whoever does the best job, never mind stuff like systemic racism and bias, those things “don’t exist.” Be on the lookout for more MEI language from right-wing pundits, politicians, and CEOs. Thankfully, we have some companies, notably Costco, whose board refused to cave in to pressure from the right to dismantle their DEI program.

It is a time of moral reckoning. There are people and organizations like Costco who stand resolute in their commitment to DEI, even as they know the attacks on them will increase significantly. And then there are others, like Meta, who will openly choose the path of obedience, hoping to save themselves by complying with the demands of oppressors.

But our sector often falls into the third group: the leaders and organizations who say they are for equity and justice, but whose actions continue to advance injustice. These are the white moderates that MLK warned us about, and our sector is full of them. Here are 21 signs you or your organization may be one.

As natural catastrophes, such as the LA wildfires, increase in number and intensity; as g3nocides continue, supported by our tax dollars; and as attacks strengthen on vulnerable people and communities, I think about Timothy Snyder’s work “On Tyranny,” where he talks about not “obeying in advance”:

“Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

“Anticipatory obedience is a political tragedy. Perhaps rulers did not initially know that citizens were willing to compromise this value or that principle. Perhaps a new regime did not at first have the direct means of influencing citizens one way or another. After the German elections of 1932, which brought Nazis into government, or the Czechoslovak elections of 1946, where communists were victorious, the next crucial step was anticipatory obedience. Because enough people in both cases voluntarily extended their services to the new leaders, Nazis and communists alike realized that they could move quickly toward a full regime change. The first heedless acts of conformity could not then be reversed.”

White moderation will trick us into obeying tyranny in advance while we think what we’re doing is the pragmatic course of action. It’ll look like:

• foundations moving toward the center to elude the wrath of the right;
• boards and leaders telling their team to avoid using certain words and phrases, such as “white supremacy” and “equity;”
• nonprofits backing off from vital work such as protecting trans rights and reproductive rights;
• a general avoidance of advocacy and activism
• special counsels at foundations becoming even more risk-averse
• think tanks recommending appeasement and centrism
• sector publications further platforming hateful views to seem more “balanced”  
• donors avoiding giving to organizations that are openly fighting the cruelty and chaos dished out by right-wing conservatives;
• a rise in non-controversial outcomes and outputs, versus those that relate to systems change
• individuals rolling their eyes at those of us who see the world slipping further into fascism and who are doing what we can to stop it.   

Instead of the above, I hope we choose to fight, which will include doing things like:

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Read full article here.

Welcome back to work, everyone. I hope your holiday break was restful. I was able to hang out with my kids, and when they were asleep, binge-watched all the episodes of Shogun; it was glorious! But now we’re back to the grind, and it is cold and miserable. Sometimes, I think the people who believe we exist in a computer simulation may be on to something, and I find myself looking around, trying to break the fourth wall, hoping whoever is running this simulation would just give us all a reprieve from all this. Maybe they could simulate a world where the forces of good win for once.

Anyway, I’m reminded of the movie The Matrix, where the main character, played by Keanu Reeves, realizes he’s been living in a simulation, trapped along with other humans by sentient machines that are using humans as batteries while creating a fake reality to subdue them and keep them from rebelling. Of course, that makes me think about our sector, and what it would be like if The Matrix were set in nonprofit and philanthropy:

SCENE 1. NONPROFIT OFFICE. DAYTIME.

NEON sits on a duct-taped-patched swivel chair at his desk, which is piled high with reports, random paperwork, sticky notes, and granola bar wrappers. On his computer screen is a Word document with a chart on it. He is typing numbers into a small desk calculator.

NEON (under his breath): A budget in Word? What kind of asshole funder asks for that?!

A ping comes from his phone. He looks at it. “Follow the sticky dots.” He looks around, surprised to find a trail of round dot stickers leading out of the office.

SCENE 2. A PARKING GARAGE. NIGHTIME.

MOBIUS, a grizzled man, and EQUITY, a mysterious woman, both wearing sunglasses and dressed in clothing from Ross Dress for Less, approach Neon.

MOBIUS: Neon, you’ve been living in the Nonprofit Matrix, a world controlled by wealthy individuals and corporations, who created a sector to delude people from seeing how they’re hoarding money, avoiding taxes, and furthering inequity while convincing people they are the solutions to the problems they cause.

NEON: What are you talking about? I’m a good person. My nonprofit helps a lot of people.

EQUITY: That’s true, it does. But remember that improv workshop you took once, where you learned about “Yes and”?

NEON: Yes. And?

EQUITY: You are helping people AND you are helping capitalism uphold itself by charity-washing its most egregious offenses. You see, by setting up foundations and donating to nonprofits, the extremely wealthy get to feel good about themselves while the masses are tricked into believing excessively wealthy people are good. This is how wealth disparity maintains itself.

MOBIUS pulls out two containers, holding one in each hand. Equity pulls out a spoon from her pocket.

MOBIUS: We don’t have much time. Eat the edamame hummus and you go back to what you’ve known. Eat the roasted red pepper hummus, and we’ll show you the truth.

Neon hesitates, then takes the spoon out of Equity’s hand and uses it to eat a bite of the roasted red pepper hummus.

NEON: I don’t feel any different.

MOBIUS: You should feel fuller. Keeping nonprofit workers busy and subsisting on granola bars is a tactic Capitalists use to prevent nonprofit workers from having the energy to start an uprising. That’s why those of us on the resistance eat hummus. It’s full of protein and fiber.

EQUITY: We need to go. The Agents will be here soon.

NEON: Can I have the hummus for later?

MOBIUS: Of course. You’ll need both hummus to maintain your strength for the fights ahead.

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Read full article here.