Rahsaan Harris is CEO of the Citizens Committee for New York City, a nonprofit that aims to help New Yorkers — especially people in low-income areas — improve the quality of life in their neighborhoods. During his varied career in philanthropy — leading the Emma Bowen Foundation and Emerging Practitioners in Philanthropy, serving as a program officer at Atlantic Philanthropies, and writing his Ph.D. dissertation on Black philanthropy — Harris has confronted the nonprofit world’s lack of diversity. “I know what it looks like,” he says, “I’ve starred in that movie.”
Harris is the first Black leader of the Citizens Committee. He started in the middle of March, after Covid shut the city down. He shared advice on how to discuss racial inequity in your organization — and how to act on those conversations.
1. Stop. Breathe. Tend to yourself. How is this affecting you? There’s so much shame and guilt and confusion and hurt. Folks who are confused, who are hurt, who are shameful, they react. They’re not strategic. Tending to your own emotions is really, really important.
2. After you’ve done that, there need to be conversations that are across race. But before that, white people need to talk to white people about race and work some of the kinks out. Read some books. Can I say “Black?” Can I not say “Black?” Is this offensive? Just in the same way that men trying to work well with women need to talk to men about it, the way folks who are aren’t in the LGBTQ community need to work it out with themselves. Don’t put the burden on the people that are in the “other group” to educate you.
3. After you’ve worked it out on your own, those collective organizational conversations can happen where people are looking at the data. Is this an all-white space? Where are our blind spots? Where are our places where we don’t have the capacity to even address this because authentically and internally we’re not equipped? I think there needs to be literal skin-tone differences. If you don’t have someone that is physically, phenotypically different, it just impacts the way folks are with one another. Make sure that you’re really inclusive.
4. For whatever project you’re on, collect external data. How many Black organizations are we supporting? How many Latino organizations are we supporting? Where does most of our funding go? Do we have a certain way of doing business that keeps us blind and has us systematically forgetting a community? Do we really spread the wealth?
5. Once you understand your habits, your proclivities, you’ve gotten over the shame and know how to have conversations internally without tearing each other down, then you can actually make investments and do actions and try to do it on a consistent basis. You need to have very clear goals for what you’re trying to accomplish. Evaluate and keep going back to an iterative process. This is what we did. Did we get the results we want to? If not, make adjustments.
6. What is not measured is not managed. If you’re not measuring it, you have no way of knowing if you’re being successful or not. If you’re not measuring what you’re doing with regard to inclusion and diversity, then it’s never going to get better.
