Category: Opinion

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 

• 12 Years a Fly in the Milk, a brilliant, honest, and moving video by Marisa DeSalles
• 10 Reasons Why Fundraisers and Nonprofits All Need to Support Defunding the Police, an important essay by Erika Chen encouraging fundraisers to take a stand.
• The Power of a Fundraiser: Why You Are the Key to Systems Change a thoughtful piece by Michelle Muri exploring the critical role fundraisers play. 

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.

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 7^th, 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 13^th, 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.