Hi everyone. Reminder: Wednesday October 21st at 10am Pacific Time, please join me and fellow rabble-rouser Aparna Rae for a fun and informal conversation where we bust some of the myths about nonprofit and philanthropy. It’s free, and will be auto-captioned. Register here.
Last week, I talked about the civility industrial complex (CIC) as a manifestation of white moderation and how our sector’s propensity for niceness and conflict-avoidance has been weaponized by the right-wing, who has been funding the “bridge-building,” “viewpoint diversity,” and “polarization reduction” initiatives as a strategy to get people to avoid bringing up racism, genocide, and other forms of injustice, which then helps these inequities continue unaddressed.
Furthering the theme this week is nonprofit and foundation leader’s gravitation towards order and processes and how that too has been weaponized by the right without most of us realizing it.
After I gave a keynote a few days ago in beautiful Sonoma County, the host organization invited me to a post-event lunch. Nearly a dozen brilliant leaders from the host organization and community and I sat around an oval table. While we talked, the servers brought out people’s orders. No one touched their food, as common courtesy dictated waiting until everyone received their plate before digging in.
While we waited, a nonprofit leader asked me, “You say that we should be more politically engaged and to do more advocacy work, but how do we do these things without running afoul of the rules and regulations?”
Our white-moderate need to follow rules and processes and to “do things right” has been one of the biggest barriers preventing nonprofits and philanthropy from tackling systemic injustice. For instance, in an online forum someone mentioned how nervous they were of losing their 501c3 tax exempt status because they were failing their public support test due to where most of their funds were coming from.
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