Nonprofit So White
Confronting the DEI problem in nonprofit leadership
In 2015, dismayed by the lack of diversity in the lead and supporting actor categories nominations, April Reign coined the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite, which kicked off an international in-your-face conversation about race in Hollywood.
My immediate thought was “if you think the Oscars are so white, you should see non-profit.” To be clear, Ms. Reign’s specific concern was the absence of people of color in leading roles. Similarly, my response highlighted years of frustration with the lack of non-white faces at various nonprofit leadership tables.
Multiple studies over the last decade have spotlighted the diversity, equity and inclusion gap in nonprofit leadership. The Daring to Lead report of 2006 found that 82 percent of executive directors were Caucasian. In 2014 a study conducted by D5, a coalition to advance DEI in philanthropy, found that 92 percent of foundation executive directors were white.
A 2018 white paper, The State of Diversity in Nonprofit and Foundation Leadership, found that 87 percent of all executive directors or presidents were white. Another 2018 study, specific to NYC — the largest city in the country — found that over 69 percent of nonprofit CEOs and EDs were Caucasian. A percentage that highlighted how nonprofit leadership demographics do not reflect the diversity of NYC.
Most recently, a 2019 study by Building Movement Project stated that “the percentage of people of color in the executive director/CEO role has remained under 20% for the last 15 years.”
Just as #OscarsSoWhite exposed racial inequity in the film industry beyond Hollywood, so too is #NonProfitSoWhite an epidemic that reaches beyond the United States.
According to the former head of the NSPCC, the UK’s leading children’s charity, “Britain’s charities have an appalling record of recruiting and promoting ethnic minority staff to senior roles.” A trend that is also reflected on the Board level according to a 2017 report from Charity Commission, the charity watchdog for England and Wales. The report found that 92 percent of charity trustees were white. According to Helen Stephenson, chief executive of the Charity Commission, “White, older men dominate leadership roles in most British charities.”
A 2018 Australian panel on the “shifting nature of leadership and the role of citizens to shape their own prosperous and inclusive society,” echoed this sentiment. Speaking about leadership in the trade union movement, Will Stracke from the Victorian Trades Hall Council said, “We’ve very white in terms of our leadership and we need to get better at that.”
A running theme both nationally and globally is how nonprofit leadership fails to mirror the communities they serve.
For people of color in this field, it’s a truth we didn’t need confirmed by statistics. We have eyes. We recognize that most of us are not the decision makers in our organizations. The faces of the leadership rarely reflect the communities serve, but the faces of direct service staff do.
Perhaps as a consequence, Building Movement Project found that staff of color “often feel they have a second, unpaid job — internally and externally — to represent the interests of people of color, which is often an unrecognized part of their work.”
Even though staff of color are not speaking about this reality in mixed-race company, we’re doing so in our safe spaces. People of color are questioning what their white leaders are choosing not to: Why are the black and brown staff skilled enough to deliver the services, but not enough to lead and to set the strategic vision for the organizations?
Nayuka Gorrie, a prominent Indigenous Australian writer and activist, organized a forum to discuss “dismantling white supremacy in the NGO sector.” As I know to be true in my own 15 years of nonprofit work, Ms. Gorrie said, “[people of color] are doing twice as much work just to survive… the sector does a lot of damage to a lot of black people who work for them.”
In organizing this forum, Ms. Gorrie has started to do for this discussion what Ms. Reign has done for race in Hollywood. She has translated the statistics into human conversations.
On an organizational level, in 2018, the Ford and W.K. Kellogg foundations partnered with Borealis Philanthropy to launch the Racial Equity in Philanthropy Fund. The REP Fund’s vision is to “promote grantmaking strategies that prioritize structural change and ending racial disparities as the norm in philanthropy.”
While efforts to systemically dismantle racial inequity in the nonprofit field are underway, we’ve barely scratched the surface. This complex problem has been ignored for years by those with power and whispered about by those who have feared speaking the problem aloud.
The answer to solving this issue is as complex as the issue itself. The combination of a national conversation coupled with the funding needed for nonprofits to do the work is a step in the right direction.
Like me, activist Gorrie believes in the nonprofit power for good. We know that nonprofits are committed to living up to their mission to do good for those they serve. We’re simply calling for nonprofits to align their values to extend beyond the population serve to include the staff who provide their services.
Building Movement Project respondents overwhelmingly agreed that “the lack of people of color in top leadership roles is a structural problem for the nonprofit sector.”
Their survey response found that 80 percent of people of color respondents agreed and strongly agreed that “executive recruiters don’t do enough to find a diverse pool of qualified candidates for top-level nonprofit positions.” Also part of the systemic issue is the lack of board support. Seventy-one percent said that predominately white boards often don’t support the leadership potential of staff of color.
As a first step towards change, the burden is on white leaders to create a safe, retaliation-free space for an honest discussion with employees of color about racial disparity within their organizations.
Several questions for leaders to answer honestly for themselves before doing this work include:
- Do I understand that certain things shared will offend me and question what I believe of myself as a leader?
- Am I able and willing to hear and to listen without defending myself?
- Can I accept — even if I don’t understand — that employees of color and white employees may be experiencing work differently (toxic vs. healthy) under my leadership?
- Will I engage other leaders on staff and on my Board to do the work to prepare for and continue these conversations?
- Will I create a measurable plan of action to prevent unintended consequences for employees of color who speak up?
- Am I willing to champion investing the time, money and other necessary resources to make long-term organizational changes?
As Ms. Reign did with Hollywood, it’s time to kick open the door on nonprofit’s shameful secret. In the wake of the #OscarsSoWhite public conversation, subsequent Oscars saw improvement in the number of people of color nominated for lead roles. While the progress has been slow, progress is progress.
Until the nonprofit field confronts the truth and invests in the work, progress — slow or otherwise — will remain a farfetched hope.
