Category: Opinion

Hi everyone, I’m thinking of all my friends and colleagues in Canada, who just achieved a resounding election victory against their version of MAGA; this came after the horrific tragedy over the weekend at the Lapu Lapu Day Festival.

Last week, I gave a keynote at a conference of funders who were mostly awesome and fired up to advance DEI and fight to save democracy. During the Q&A, however, a program officer asked, “How do we make change happen when the people with all the power at our foundations are not in the room?”

By that, of course, he meant foundation board members, aka trustees. This is a dynamic we see across the sector: Foundation staff who get it, who want to do things differently and better, and who leave these gatherings inspired only to be quickly demoralized when they go back to their workplaces and must deal with their foundation trustees, who are often the biggest barriers to progress in our field.

Foundation trustees, if you are reading this, thank you; just the fact that these words somehow reached you is a miracle, as we don’t ever see or hear from many of you. Right now, everything is on fire as the right-wing dismantles every institution keeping democracy and society intact. Nonprofits and foundation are trying to work together to fight this authoritarian regime. You play a vital role. But for you to be effective in that role, there are a few things we need you to understand. These are things your program officers want to tell you but usually can’t due to power dynamics:

1. You are not just stewards of an endowment; you are stewards of justice. Some of you see your primary role as protecting your foundation’s financial assets. But what are those assets for? Your role includes advancing equity and justice, and you must assess whether protecting your foundation’s assets will aid in that or hinder it. Be on the right side of history and understand that your main role is not protecting a bunch of meaningless money, but in protecting people, communities, and humanity.

2. Understand that neutrality is not an option. Staying silent or “nonpartisan” in the face of injustice is a political stance—one that maintains inequity and injustice. If you are preventing your foundation from naming white supremacy, anti-trans bigotry, fascism, and other things we’re fighting, you’re part of the problem. If you refuse to stand up for DEI, you’re part of the problem. We need you to lead your foundation to take strong, courageous stances, or at the very least don’t get in the way of those who do.

3. Give out more money. Now. Decades of foundations’ refusal to spend out money to solve problems in the past or prevent them from spreading led us to where we are. Now, we are in a crisis like we’ve never seen before and we need funding to survive, mobilize, and fight. Your endowments will be completely pointless if democracy falls to dictatorship. You need to move beyond 5%, beyond 6%, or 10%, or 15%. Stop thinking about giving the bare minimum you can get away with, and start thinking about what you are willing to do to save our society.

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Read full article here.

Two weeks ago, I met with a colleague who was invited to a convening of funders in Seattle. He reported that the funders present were wringing their hands, unsure of what their foundations should be doing to respond to the rapid dismantling of democracy and the exponential increase in suffering communities are facing.

This week, David Callahan of Inside Philanthropy wrote a post on LinkedIn reporting similar dynamics of tentativeness among funders across the sector. David suggests several possible reasons for the hesitation, including shellshock from the cruelty and chaos unleashed by this administration, as well as funders’ lack of knowledge and confidence as to what strategies would work to counter it. While David and I agree on a lot of things, it’s this last point he makes where we may differ in opinions:

“Third, there’s only so much that funders can or should do to lead. Philanthropy’s main role is to support civil society groups, who rightly should be out front in the pushback to Trump’s actions. If those organizations aren’t coalescing around a set of promising big strategies — and there’s no sign they are — funders have limited options. They can’t bankroll grand new plans to fight MAGA if such plans don’t yet exist.

“Or, as one foundation CEO told me, ‘People keep yelling at us to give out more money, but for what?’”

This is frustrating that some funders still think this way. Because civil society groups and progressive activists HAVE BEEN proposing plans and strategies to push back against the right and advance democracy. FOR LITERAL DECADES! We have asked for more funding for advocacy and lobbying. For capacity building of both c3s and c4 orgs. For increasing political engagement. For doing media and narrative work. For strengthening pipelines of progressive leaders. Funders just refused to fund it in any meaningful level or for an adequate length of time!

I remember 15 years ago begging foundations in Seattle (one of the most well-funded regions in the world) for grants to do voter registration work and being shot down because it didn’t “align” with their “priorities” for that year. Decades of our ideas being rejected have trained many of us to stop approaching funders with strategies we think would work, because we have known, through painful experience, that many funders are mired in toxic intellectualizing, risk-aversion, white moderation, and solutions privilege—things that make most philanthropic leaders unable to mentally register strategies, much less support them.

David proposes, “The top funders in liberal philanthropy should make a pact with grantees: You all work together to devise ambitious new blueprints to save democracy that can plausibly succeed, and we will foot the bill — whatever it costs.”

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Read full article here.

About 15 years ago, I was invited to speak on a panel at a conference run by a large, well-funded national organization whose mission was to represent the entire nonprofit sector. The entry fee for this 3-day conference was $2200, which my org with a budget of $500K couldn’t afford. The panel organizer asked me to apply for a scholarship, which I did, but it wasn’t successful. “Sorry,” I said, “I can’t speak on the panel because my scholarship application got rejected.” She was able to convince the organization to let me in.

Those were three surreal days. I felt like an unwashed peasant who had sneaked into the royal ball. But that dissonance tapered off, and I was disappointed at how a space full of the most powerful nonprofit organizations and leaders were focused on some of the most banal topics possible (“Legal compliance for foundations” “How to lower overhead costs” “The art of keeping donors happy” “Signs someone from a small organization has crashed your conference”). I stuffed my tote bag with as many free swag items and snacks as I could get, consolation prizes for the disillusionment I felt at our sector’s leadership.

It’s been a decade and a half since that conference, and it seems things have not changed very much. These large national organizations are supposed to be the voice for our entire sector but often tend to focus on larger organizations, leaving the smaller, most vulnerable organizations behind. As one colleague puts it:

“If smaller nonprofits and nonprofit associations aren’t invited to the table and given a voice, you will see a deeper divide between the haves and the have nots […] big, well-oiled nonprofit machines and the smaller grassroots orgs who are barely getting by. And impact begins and ends in communities. Those organizations who are embedded in communities already, who have gained the trust of those communities and advocate for those communities every day, are the ones who are and will suffer the most.”

Meanwhile, with everything being on fire right now with nonprofits being attacked by Trump, Republicans, and fascist tech bros, I am hearing a lot of frustration from nonprofits on the frontlines regarding the inactions of these orgs. With a few exceptions—notably the National Council of Nonprofits (NCN), who has been decisive and effective, working with Democracy Forward to immediately sue to stop the executive order that would have frozen federal funds for thousands of organizations, and filing several more lawsuits against the administration since then—most people in our sector have no idea what our handful of national organizations are doing to fight against this regime and advance our sector. As another colleague says:

“[T]hese organizations seem more focused on self-preservation, driven and influenced by the priorities of the most privileged institutions. At a time when courageous leadership is desperately needed, where are they? What are they doing? How are they demonstrating their commitment to equity when they fail to listen to our most under-resourced and vulnerable nonprofits? We don’t need performative solidarity or clueless statements. We need bold action—yesterday. Once again, those with the most to lose are taking the greatest risks—not by choice, but because lives literally depend on it.”

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Read full article here.

Hi everyone, I have been keeping quiet about this exciting project I’ve been working on for the past two years, but I’m happy to report it’s finally ready for the limelight! As some of you know, I have a background in theater. Well, OK, I took Drama as an elective in high school, and I have been pulled up on stage at least once during an improv show. This is enough for me to realize I love acting and performing.

So for the past couple of years, I’ve been developing a one-man show and testing it out with small focus groups (usually my friends and family members who couldn’t think of excuses fast enough to get out of it).

And now, with generous sponsorship from the Satterberg Foundation, Minnesota Council of Nonprofits (MCN), and my Patreon community, it’s ready to hit the road this June on a nine-city tour (Seattle, Portland Oregon, Denver, Austin, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Asheville, New York, and Toronto).

The four-hour show (with intermission) is called “Please Send Money: A Joyful Yet Soul-Crushing Journey Through Nonprofit and Philanthropy.”

It is a deeply personal but hopefully also universally relatable exploration of what it means to work in this sector, based on a lot of the stuff I’ve been rambling about on this blog. While I can’t reveal everything about the content, as the element of surprise is part of the experience, and there are slight variations from show to show, here are a few things you might see:

“After the Monsoon”: A wistful retelling, using puppets crafted by artisans in Vietnam, of my childhood and the series of events that sparked my passion to make the world better.

“Con Khùng Rồi Hả?!” A conversation between me and my father, where he tries to dissuade me from going down my chosen career path. I do my best to embody his tone and mannerisms.  

“Downward-Facing Budget”: I am a yoga instructor who leads willing audience members in poses named after various nonprofit and philanthropic concepts. Besides the titular pose, there’s the “Mountain (of Emails)” and the “Declining Warrior.”

“Birth and Character Count”: A 17-minute silent segment where I struggle to come out of the “womb,” covered in pennies and strawberry jam, to represent the 9 months it often takes to complete a grant process and receive a decision from a funder.

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Read full article here.

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.