Category: Opinion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Read full article here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Read the full article here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Funders:

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

Board members:

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

EDs/CEOs:

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

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Read full article here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Read full article here.

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

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

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

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

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

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Read full article here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Read full article here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Read full article here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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