Opinion Blog : Entries Tagged With 'minorities'
| June 30, 2008 06:00 AM |
Compromise Might Greatly Diversify Leadership of California Foundations and NonprofitsIn a compromise announced last Monday, California foundations and legislators agreed to scuttle AB 624, a controversial California bill aimed at disclosing the ethnicity and gender of foundation board members. The compromise preserves the possibility that funders and advocates may cooperate to find better ways philanthropy can serve communities of color, and may also spur similar accords in other states. Under the compromise, a coalition of 10 leading foundations pledged to:
The 10 foundation coalition members, seven of which are headquartered in Southern California, include: The Ahmanson Foundation, The California Wellness Foundation, The James Irvine Foundation, The Annenberg Foundation, UniHealth Foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, The Ralph M. Parsons Foundation, The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, The California Endowment, and the Weingart Foundation. All involved – the Greenlining Institute, whose series of studies led to the bill’s introduction, Senator Coto, the bill’s sponsor, and the foundation coalition – deserve praise for this result. With Governor Schwarzenegger likely to veto the bill, each of the parties could have held firm and claimed victory later for standing on principle. Rather than let the perfect be the enemy of the good, they chose to try something workable that, if implemented well, can go a long way toward broadening and deepening diverse leadership in foundations and nonprofits. If the ultimate goal of the bill was to increase benefits from philanthropy flowing to either communities of color or low- income communities, then there is still much work to be done. Even if the capacity building called for in the compromise flawlessly succeeds, there will continue to be a need for better data on the reach of philanthropy in communities of color. (A key weakness in the bill is that it did not require the collection of information that would establish who actually is served by grant dollars, as I argued here.) Such data would help funders assess and improve their grant making, as well as enable advocates and public officials to be better informed and targeted in their critiques. With a modest investment of time and resources, we can determine which census tracts are served by which organizations, and map the amount of grant dollars relative to the numbers of people living in an area or, more specifically, the particular characteristics of people actually served. This is not a technological pipedream; HealthCity.org, a partnership of nonprofits in Los Angeles sponsored by the Advancement Project, already has built tools and methods for making the flow of grant dollars visible, for several public agencies and private funders, to help them assess their grants in Los Angeles County and throughout California.* Ironically, grants promoting systems change to benefit low- income communities, an increasing trend among many of the foundations involved in the compromise, will be harder to map, but this difficulty can be solved. A good starting data universe is the grants of the compromise sponsors, perhaps with a few more of the state’s largest funders added. It makes sense to stick with grantees from this pilot set of funders for a couple years or more to evaluate both the usefulness and costs of this approach (the number of new grantee service areas that would need to be geo coded would drop, and the higher initial costs of the system could be smoothed over the period). To get beyond the initial set of grants from a small group of leading foundations, we’d need to make the grants data already disclosed by foundations more accessible to advocates, and supplement that with data about the geographic and demographic reach of those grant funds. This likely would mean bringing the grants databases out from behind the firewalls of services like the Foundation Center or Foundation Search, or paying the costs of providing free public access to that data (as I argued in this space previously). My thoughts are just informed speculation, and there may be better ways to get a handle on which communities actually are served by the grants made by, and leadership developed by, foundations like the compromise sponsors. However, it should be clear that a well-designed system couldn’t very well be mandated in advance through legislation. With this compromise under their belt, advocates for more responsive grant making, like Greenlining and others, and leaders of foundations in California (and elsewhere), have preserved the time and space to explore these possibilities.
Posted by Kelsey Walker
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| July 28, 2008 10:45 AM |
Threats to Latinos a Challenge for NonprofitsAdvocates for Latinos have become targets of hate campaigns that underscore the critical role nonprofits play protecting minority rights and strengthening civic life in a democracy. One of the great champions of nonprofits was Alexis de Tocqueville, the 19th-century French writer who saw in nonprofits a distinguishing hallmark of our ongoing “democratic revolution,” which he believed faced a continuing threat from the “tyranny of the majority.” Instead of expecting government to take care of their problems, a solution that could lead to government running their lives, Americans team up and work to fix what is wrong. Those “associations” that Americans form—known today as “nonprofits”—also represented for Tocqueville an important safeguard against the tendency of majorities and government to run roughshod over the rights of minorities. Tocqueville’s insights and fears are important to remember in the face of growing intolerance in America for Latino immigrants and their nonprofit advocates. As The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., reported recently, two of the state’s leading Latino advocates have been the target of threats and racist messages. Because of the threats, Andrea Bazán, president of the Triangle Community Foundation in Durham and the new board chair for the National Council of La Raza, a national advocacy group for Latinos, has requested protection at some public appearances. She was so concerned, in fact, that she sent her children to stay with her former husband and stayed away from home for several days in June, the newspaper reported. And Tony Asion, a former police office and a successor to Bazán as executive director of El Pueblo, the leading advocacy for Latinos in the state, told the newspaper he had received death threats and messages he considers to be racist, and he now fears for staff members at El Pueblo. Nonprofits work to advance the philanthropic mission of healing and repairing our communities and making them better places to live and work. Yet in simply doing their job and advocating for the rights of Latinos, nonprofit leaders like Bazán and Asion now face threats that cause them to fear for their own lives and those of their children and fellow workers. As Tocqueville recognized roughly 170 years ago, nonprofits perform a critical job in America by helping to make sure the most vulnerable among us do not fall prey to the intolerance of the majority. But in a land of immigrants, a land in which the fading white majority is being replaced by a new majority consisting of minorities, the hate hurled at Latinos and their advocates only reinforces the indispensable role nonprofits must continue to play in safeguarding our continuing experiment with democracy.
Posted by Kelsey Walker
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| September 18, 2008 08:30 AM |
Letter to John D. Mcllguham, Publisher of The NonProfit Times and the 2008 Power & Influence Top 50Heather Carpenter’s list of next generation leaders inspired me last week. But when I saw the official NonProfit Times Power & Influence Top 50, I got so riled up that I wrote a letter to the publisher. There were barely any people of color on that list, and I feel that it is really time for us to start pointing that out when we see it, instead of just saying “well, that’s the way it is.” Below is the letter I emailed to John McIlquham, the publisher of The NonProfit Times. Hopefully he will write me back. In the meantime, please help me add to my list in the comments, so we can all learn from each other about the depth of multicultural leadership in our sector. How do we pay this forward so that we can begin to build a culture of honoring contributions from people of color in the nonprofit field? Dear John, Like my colleagues in the nonprofit field, I am an avid reader of The NonProfit Times, as the “premier business publication written for nonprofit executives.” As your Web site notes, The NonProfit Times reaches 38,000 executive decision makers, and we all appreciate the timely information that is presented in each issue. That is why it shocked me to see that http://fromthepipeline.blogspot.com/
Posted by Kelsey Walker
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| October 2, 2008 11:00 AM |
Diversity Is Everyone’s BusinessI had the opportunity to speak at the National Human Services Assembly Summit last week on the topic, “Responding to the Diversity Gap” along with Carolyn Creager, director of the Multicultural Executive Development Program of the National YMCA. The theme underlying our discussion was that society is changing all around us, yet the nonprofit sector isn’t keeping pace with the cultural shift in America, nor making enough of an effort to recruit, retain, and promote people of color to top executive positions in our field. The reality is that the current racial makeup of this country is changing, and as nonprofits we have to think about who we will be serving, and who will be leading. I know you saw this in The New York Times: “Ethnic and racial minorities will comprise a majority of the nation’s population in a little more than a generation, according to new Census Bureau projections, a transformation that is occurring faster than anticipated just a few years ago. The census calculates that by 2042, Americans who identify themselves as Hispanic, Black, Asian, American Indian, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander will together outnumber non-Hispanic whites. Four years ago, officials had projected the shift would come in 2050.” I also shared some up-to-date stats about the current racial makeup of nonprofit leadership, as well as my disappointment with the lack of people of color who are being recognized for their contributions. I think everyone agreed that we need to promote sweeping changes in nonprofit culture regarding diversity issues. My aim was to remind the audience that all of us in that room were agents of nonprofit culture, and there were many things we could each do individually and collectively to raise the issue of multicultural leadership at every opportunity we get. In that room were CEOs, VPs, directors of mostly national organizations, and I know they each sit on some committee, board of directors, or taskforce where their voice is influential to others in our sector. If in fact we are concerned about increasing the racial diversity of nonprofit leadership, we need to put our money where our mouths are and start taking some risks, personally and institutionally, to make that happen. What role can we each play as an agent of nonprofit culture to change the game? A few ideas we discussed:
We ARE nonprofit culture, and it is up to us to be the change we wish to see. AFP’s magazine, Advancing Philanthropy, has a great article in the current issue about the importance of having lunch with someone of another culture to get to know people outside your usual networks. I think that’s a great idea. But I also think we each can use our voices to motivate others in our organizations and across the field. You CAN take action today: Write a short email to the Nonprofit Times editor to express your support for an open nominations process in their selection of the annual Power and Influence Top 50 list of nonprofit leaders. Tell them you want to see their publication reflect the racial diversity of leadership within our sector! Send an email to Paul Clolery at: ednchief@nptimes.com or call him at: (973) 401-0202 Ext 211. Together we can change our culture, one step at a time. I share my presentation with you here so that it might spark some thoughts of your own. What are your ideas about individual and collective action we all can take to make diversity everyone’s business?
Posted by Kelsey Walker
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| February 9, 2009 10:00 AM |
A Technology Revolution for Revolutions!In the good ol’ USA it’s no surprise to anyone that the Internet has transformed power dynamics. In some respects, it took the Internet to push out the old guard and bring in the new—and the first minority president in the history of our nation. Obama had four times the number of Facebook supporters compared to McCain. He also had 24 times the number of Twitter followers and three times the number of website visitors to his site in the final weeks of the campaign. Voters watched 15 million hours of Obama video on YouTube and his campaign regularly emailed approximately 13 million people and received of course half a billion dollars in online donations. The Washington Post termed this the “YouTube Presidency.” The revolutionizing of revolutions is not only an American phenomenon; it has quickly become a critical catalyst behind collective action throughout the world. Interestingly these Internet savvy activists are using tools not designed initially or intended for these purposes, but they are powerful tools nonetheless with regards to social action, labor action and really any kind of collective action. In its article, Revolution, Facebook-Style, the New York Times reported recently about how these Web 2.0 tools have been adopted for Jihad but also to protest dictatorial leaders in police states. As the Internet improves at exponential rates, so too will the way it is harnessed for the sake of power and influence. It will be used for forces of good and forces of bad. Similarly the Economist wrote recently about how online protest spontaneously emerged after the Greek police shot a young boy, facilitated by an online-enabled self-organization. Activism does not only affect those in political power, but also big business. In 2007, the first virtual strike was organized in Second Life and caused IBM’s CEO of Italy to resign and the workers to gain better terms in their union negotiations. See the video below. Labor strikes, PR scandals and government regulation are all examples of non-market threats that are recognized as a major business risk in today’s economy. Billions of dollars are spent in this industry every year. As the nature of this threat transforms itself and grows more daunting with the adoption of new social software technologies and the saturation of internet penetration, business will need to react. Social protest and advocacy is evolving at a similar pace as well threatening those in political power. They will need to embrace this phenomenon as quickly as those without power. Existing tools and future Web tools yet to have emerged are not going to be used only for insurgents trying to overrun those in power: a tool for revolutionaries. They are utilities whose fundamental value is to help crowds emerge into organized campaigns deployed as a force by the organizers, be it those in power or those seeking greater influence. However, because crowd-sourcing is most effective when voluntary, those businesses, organizations or governments looking to do so better be in the right. They better have such great products and such good policies that their supporters and evangelists are willing to hit the e-streets. One more point for democracy!
He’s starting Blitz Bazaar because “there is nothing more exhilarating than building an enterprise that changes the world.”
Posted by Kelsey Walker
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| February 12, 2009 01:00 PM |
Why I Wish Nonprofits Would Stop Using the Word ‘Minorities’We’ve got to stop using the word “minorities” to describe the communities we serve. It doesn’t have any value. It never has. I’ve been thinking a lot about language lately. How it can inspire or enrage, clarify or condemn. The English major in me wants to take a red pen to all the useless jargon we promote in our organizations, starting with how we talk about the people we serve. Because part of the role of nonprofits, I believe, is not only to drive social change, but to also reframe the way America looks at social problems. For years, we’ve made a pity party out of the fact that “XX percent of the people we serve are minorities” as if this were in itself a reason to support our cause. One of my first jobs was as a grantwriter for a small community development agency. Way back when I literally knew nothing about nonprofits or philanthropy, it baffled me as to why our grant language was littered with terminology about “serving minorities” and helping “at-risk youth.” A minority compared to whom? At-risk of what, exactly? A better term to use that is highly regarded by academics is “people of color” which encompasses all people who are non-white. It’s a term that I prefer, and one you’ll notice me using a lot here on this blog. The term “people of color” has a more positive connotation than “minorities.” “People of color” have cultural significance, while “minorities” conjure up images of people that are worth less than the majority, marginalized, minor. As an African American, I’ve never wanted to be known by a term that makes me feel like I don’t matter. That reminds me I’m not majorly important just because of my race. Many nonprofits use the word “minorities” as a blanket term to indicate that they provide services for underrepresented groups including African Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, Native Americans, and so on. Why don’t we just be specific and name the communities we serve rather than being lazy with it? In Washington, DC, many nonprofits serve 100 percent African Americans. Much better to say that than to call your youth or homeless clients “ethnic minorities.” It means nothing except to connote a group of people that get stuck on the bottom of society’s shoe. Anyway, as we know in this country the minority is becoming the majority. As the New York Times has reported: Ethnic and racial minorities will comprise a majority of the nation’s population in a little more than a generation, according to new Census Bureau projections, a transformation that is occurring faster than anticipated just a few years ago. The census calculates that by 2042, Americans who identify themselves as Hispanic, black, Asian, American Indian, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander will together outnumber non-Hispanic whites. Four years ago, officials had projected the shift would come in 2050. As the times change, we might as well get rid of the antiquated language that remains a huge barrier to our cultural competence.
Posted by Kelsey Walker
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| February 27, 2009 11:00 AM |
Creating the Safe Space to Talk About Race in the Nonprofit SectorHere in America, we’ve had several opportunities to discuss race since the election of our nation’s first African American President:
I don’t need to tell you how disappointed I’ve been after reading the commentary these events have prompted. Or maybe I do. For the most part, this nationwide conversation about race that we’ve been having very reluctantly has also been approached in some of the most demeaning ways, namely this editorial by one Heather Mac Donald. The idea that we are moving “past race” in any way because we have a Black President has only served to bring to light the reality of just how marginalized people of color are in this country, and even in our very own nonprofit sector. I’ll be interested to see how many nonprofit conferences this year take diversity off the agenda, now that California foundations have agreed to invest more in “minorities.” I’m not saying we should drop everything and run around hooping & hollering about race and diversity. We all have competing priorities in the work we do on a daily basis. But as agents of change and the keepers of our nonprofit culture, we do need to make it a point to consider race & diversity in every decision we make, or don’t make, in our work. I know it is hard to talk about race. It will not get easier. It is hard and it will not get easier no matter how much we want to believe whomever is telling us that we are “post-race.” I’m under no illusion that when you see me walk into the room, you no doubt see my skin color. That inconvenient truth is what drives these statistics on leadership in the nonprofit sector: 82 percent of nonprofit CEOs are White, 94 percent of foundation presidents are White, and 86 percent of board members are White. In order to change that, we need to be able to talk about it. Without being dismissive or demeaning. This is our opportunity to show that we as a nonprofit sector can do better than mainstream America on this issue. I’m always disappointed when discussions about diversity at nonprofit conferences are so sparsely attended. People don’t come for many different reasons, but mainly because they are afraid. So we need to do a better job of creating the kind of safe space to have conversations about race in a productive way. If you attend a conference, meeting, training, or dialogue about race, diversity, or inclusion, please know that you are the right person in the room at the right time. It’s important to remember that talking about race is difficult, but that to learn anything, you must move past the discomfort to fully participate. I believe that deep down, what we all want is to find a place where we can engage together and make meaning out of this thing called history. We’re all searching for that sweet poetry that lies beneath the work that we are called to do. We want to overcome our own personal issues with race and be reminded of the common values that brought us to nonprofit work in the first place. We need to know that we are kept in a safe place where we’re free to put our hopes and dreams out on the table and co-create something new and real once it’s all said and done. Talking about race and how to increase the diversity of our sector is still an important conversation to have. We also need to define in a real way what can and cannot come into the room when we talk about race. If the room were a poem, it might look like this: Excuses cannot come into the room New ideas can enter the room What are your ideas for creating a safe place to talk about race in the nonprofit sector?
Posted by Kelsey Walker
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| July 1, 2009 01:42 PM |
First and Foremost: Know your CommunityHave we replicated our offline social dynamics and barriers online? I believe we have—and Danah Boyd does, too. As reported by the New York Observer, Danah recently spoke to this when she presented at the Personal Democracy Forum about the data uncovered in her four years of research on new media use. If we truly are reproducing our offline social divides online, then it’s further proof that the central part of your social media strategy needs to be focused on your audience.
You’ve probably heard of Facebook; you may even have set up a group or a fan page there for your organization. But did you do that because you heard of Facebook in the news, or from a friend? Did you choose Facebook because you evaluated your existing community as well as the audience you wanted to bring into your community, and they were already using Facebook? Did you consider MySpace? or Orkut? or Bebo? Maybe you’ve never heard of those platforms, but for some large demographics they are the hot spots online, not Facebook. Let’s step back a minute and consider why a nonprofit or social benefit group wants to include social networking as part of a social media strategy. Why would your organization want to have a presence on a social network?
Choosing the platform or platforms to concentrate your efforts online is crucial. You may hear about Facebook, but if your audience is on MySpace, it doesn’t matter how much time and energy you put in. They won’t be there to find you. When evaluating your community, some of the most influential items to consider regarding social networks include:
Danah’s research shines a bright light on an issue many activists and organizations have been concerned about ever since the media hype around Facebook VS MySpace rose as a loud voice in the conversation about social media use. The issues our social service agencies and social benefit organizations are dealing with offline, in local communities, are showing up online. It’s imperative that we recognize the social divides permeating online social networks and carefully consider how we craft our online strategies to truly reach and serve our communities. What do you think? Has your organization had experience reaching your core constituents in an online social network? How did you identify the best place to concentrate your efforts? What lessons have you learned? You can download Danah’s dissertation here.
Posted by Jason Chua
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| October 20, 2009 12:17 PM |
Social Enterprise: A Gated Community?There’s a growing debate in the social enterprise world, not only about who’s a social entrepreneur but about who’s being left out of the club. True, the exceptions and misconceptions abound, but the debate settles around two main points—that unless you’re a Caucasian and unless you’re an MBA, it’s tougher to get support for your good work trying to start a social enterprise. Is that fair? Consider the arguments. The first point being raised by some across the sector is that MBAs seem to be preferred by social ventures and the foundations willing to fund aspiring social entrepreneurs. Employers, the argument goes, also seem to prefer MBAs, but the truth is that not everyone who can make a difference or start a social enterprise can afford business school—nor think they should have to get an MBA in order to get funding to develop their ideas. “I have no MBA nor do I want one,” says Martin Montero, the founder of Austin Social Innovation Fund. Montero tweeted me the other day in response to one of my queries about an October 15 story in the Wall Street Journal that cites the surge of interest by business school students in “socially-responsible money-making.” The article also notes how business schools are being pushed to create a whole host of courses and study tracks to help MBA students sort out the best way to build companies that both make money and help to solve social problems. Montero and others, including a number of Justmeans.com community members who messaged me earlier this week, said the fuss over socially-minded MBAs tends to leave out a great deal of people who are not in business school but who already have been making a big difference in the sector. ” We most definitely need more non-MBA social entrepreneurs,” Montero wrote. A second point I keep hearing is that the developing world is, more or less, being left out of the conversation. Justmeans community member Gerard Ww, in a comment responding to my query on that site, said that “no company, organization, or individuals (seems) willing to really get their hands truly dirty side-by-side with us (those people at the bottom of the pyramid) while trying to help the BoP!” Describing himself as one of the billions at the bottom of the pyramid, he said that “we are never included in the [potential] interventions; it’s always the so-called academics and ‘successful’ business persons who dictate terms and conditions. Too few of us will ever be helped by the continued exclusion, but who else knows the conditions [at the bottom of the pyramid] better” than the people who live there? Gerard isn’t the only person posing the question. Rod Schwartz, CEO of ClearlySo, an online marketplace that aims to raise the visibility of social businesses, sparked a lively debate earlier this year when he posed on the SocialEdge blog the following question: “Are the only innovations in social entrepreneurship Anglo-Saxon?” Schwartz had asked the same question at the 2009 Skoll World Forum, which I also attended, asking fellow conferees what they thought of the fact that a majority of the speakers and panelists were Caucasian. Ashni Mohnot, who joins me as a contributing blogger at PopTech, wrote on that site this past summer that “many of the top socially entrepreneurial organizations work in international development, building products, services and social capital to improve lives at the base of the pyramid, yet they are often based in the UK or the US with founders and CEOs hailing from the Western world.” She cited D.light Design, FORGE, FaceAids, and Kiva as some examples of social ventures that develop their products by native Westerners or those educated in the West. Mohnot wrote that while these social ventures “subsequently engage locals in pilots, distribution or marketing, the initial product design is often the sole realm of the US arm.” To be sure, it’s not true that all social innovators have MBAs and that they’re all “Anglo-Saxon” as Schwartz put it. But the debate continues over what some see as troubling trends in this new field of social enterprise. What do you think? Do you perceive yourself to be in what Mohnot called an elite “social entrepreneur’s club?” Or is the debate unfair or misinformed? Does it raise some important or long-ignored issues that should continue to be discussed on these pages and across the sector?
Posted by Jason Chua
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| August 20, 2007 07:00 PM |
Notes on Robert Putnam’s “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-First Century”
2. It’s an excellent article; a thought provoking read. Apart from a dicey section on the multivariate analysis of data to control for the effect of certain variables, the study is completely accessible to non-experts. Don’t make the same mistake as 98 percent of the people who are currently dismissing Putnam’s results: read the article for yourself. 3. An aside: More interesting than Putnam’s article, in my view, has been the sociology of its reception. There’s a palpable hesitancy, in polite liberal circles, to bring up the subject. First, it’s never his article, but rather somebody’s gloss on it that my colleagues suggest I read. Second, no person of conscience broaches the subject of Putnam’s article unless, in the same breath, he also recommends a book or article that purports to advance a countervailing thesis. Putnam’s work is clearly radioactive. 4. Never fear the truth, whatever it might be. 5. Putnam’s article might ultimately rival Christine Letts’s “Virtuous Capital” for the volume of eyebrow-raising commentary it will generate—much of it, I predict, involving a great deal of hand-wringing. 6. Liberals are in some ways hoist on their own petard: Putnam uses variation in ethnic/racial category as a proxy for “diversity.” This is what I sometimes refer to as the Whitman’s Sampler Model of diversity, an impoverished notion that enables well-meaning liberals to declare victory when they have “one of these, one of these, and one of those” on their staff or on their board. 7. Putnam’s results will play handily to those conservatives who believe that self-segregation works with, rather than against, “the grain of human nature.” We hear this kind of argument in apologetics for “a conservatism comfortable with materialist self-interest.” These same conservatives will likely pass over in silence those sections of the article that review the many benefits of increased immigration and diversity, among them: greater creativity; better, faster problem-solving; and more rapid economic growth, among others. Putnam never argues that diversity is, on balance, a bad thing. 8. Putnam’s results discredit the idea that greater diversity is correlated with increased inter-ethnic hostility. He stresses that “[d]iversity seems to trigger not in-group/out-group division, but anomie or social isolation.” To put it another way, “In more diverse settings, Americans distrust not merely people who do not look like them, but even people who do.” 9. Putnam points out that:
What would these further studies likely reveal? 10. Finally, and most importantly in my opinion, Putnam doesn’t argue that we can’t learn to respond to ethnic and racial diversity better than we currently do. We’re not fated forever to wallow in our ignorance and respond irrationally to fear of the “other,” however much recent history has inclined us to this view.
Posted by Albert Ruesga
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| October 22, 2007 12:01 PM |
Philanthropy Doesn’t Care About Black People
Pablo Eisenberg says that leadership and challenge go hand in hand. So, if our current leaders never had to face the kind of challenges that go along with being a person of color in a community of great poverty, but are then tasked with paving the way for change in these same communities, who’s zooming who? If we are, in fact, buying into the idea that a White leadership pool is more desirable than one that is racially diverse, are we really getting anywhere with our goals of solving the kinds of problems that could benefit from leaders with first-hand knowledge of the issues? The nonprofit sector needs to recognize that people of color are often still seen as takers of handouts and charity instead of as empowered and valuable citizens, and having White leaders of philanthropic organizations only reinforces this notion and does more harm than good. There are many other reasons to promote diversity within nonprofit leadership that we could name here, but the point is that it’s clear we need to start openly talking about these reasons more so that we can begin to truly open up our boardrooms and executive positions to different kinds of leaders. Right now I definitely think there’s space and opportunity for some real inquiry within the nonprofit sector. We need to ask ourselves some hard questions: (Photo courtesy blackpeopleloveus.com.)
Posted by Katie Harrington
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| October 29, 2007 12:17 PM |
...but some are more equal than othersYou’re meeting with a nonprofit Board as it tries to establish a mandatory minimum gift by individual Board members. These meetings are always excruciating because Americans would rather detail their sex lives—honestly!—than talk about money. But this meeting is about to become doubly excruciating, because the agency in question serves poor people of color and has one or two Board members of color adrift on a milky sea. Often these Board members have been recruited from institutions in the neighborhood the agency serves—the pastor of a local church, perhaps. So no sooner is the toxic monetary topic broached than some well-meaning pale person says, “Well, of course, whatever number we pick we wouldn’t expect Reverend Jones . . . ” and then tails off because s/he doesn’t want to say what s/he’s thinking so obviously it could be spotted on Google Earth: ” . . . . wouldn’t expect Reverend Jones TO HAVE ANY MONEY BECAUSE HE HAS DARK SKIN AND LIVES/WORKS IN THIS AWFUL NEIGHBORHOOD.” [The Nonprofiteer doesn’t mean to suggest that only agencies serving poor people of color do, or should, have nonwhite Board members. Rather, she’s trying to give clueless whites the benefit of the doubt. At a community-based social service agency, white Board members might conceivably think Reverend Jones doesn’t have any money because of the neighborhood he and the agency share. Whereas at the city’s main art museum, white Board members who hastened to exempt the Reverend from having to make a gift would be proceeding solely and blatantly on the basis of their beliefs about his skin color.] If the consulting gods are with you, you’ll be spared the necessity of forcing the issue (“You wouldn’t expect Reverend Jones to do what? And why not?”) by that gentleman’s polished pastoral tact. Reverend Jones, who’s too polite to have said “I’m right here!” when his Board colleagues began talking around and about him instead of to him, will ask, ‘How much money are we talking about, again?” and, once the number is reiterated, nod and say, “That wouldn’t be a problem for me.” But you can’t always expect to be so lucky; because, again, most people will do whatever they must to avoid talking about money, especially their own. So any random Reverend Jones—one might almost say any self-preserving Reverend Jones—will most likely keep his mouth shut and enjoy not being pressed for a contribution the way the rest of the Board will and should be. Because after all, if you’re going to tolerate the costs of your fellows’ racism you might as well enjoy the benefits. The Nonprofiteer can’t possibly be the only one who understands that we’re talking about literal costs, actual lost gifts, to every charity in America where white people let their racism trump their good sense. And it goes beyond Boards: friends of friends of ours, who’ve retired very comfortably, observe that local charities never ask them for contributions. Why? They’re only guessing that the color of their skin, coupled with the slight drawl that reveals their roots in the South, causes people to assume they’re just “poor country Negroes.” They, like the imaginary Reverend Jones, are gracious about it, but you can tell it sticks in their craws. So here are some suggestions. Every Board President should—and if s/he can’t or won’t every Executive Director must—impress upon every member of his/her Board the sacred Nonprofit Syllogism: If necessary, mention that So ask her to do so. Don’t just assume she can’t. There’s a tendency to let one’s prejudices skew the outcome—to try to spare someone the imagined embarrassment of having to say, “I don’t want to do that” by asking them to do something else, something less: “Chair our new Community Advisory Board! You won’t have to give any money!” But that’s just compounding the original underestimation of Ms. Special’s capacity—which may well have been based on her race. Lest you accidentally create a separate-but-unequal Board for people of color, ask her to accept the full range of Board responsibilities, and give her the chance to decline. If she does, you can always float the Advisory Board idea then—but she won’t. Because amazingly when you treat people as your full partners, they return the favor.
Posted by Katie Harrington
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Peter Manzo is the director of strategic initiatives for the 
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Rosetta Thurman is an emerging nonprofit leader of color working and living in the Washington, DC area. She holds a Master’s degree in Nonprofit Management and blogs about nonprofit leadership and management issues at 
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