The 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown lit a spark of hope in the nonprofit world even as outrage and anger swelled. The protests in Ferguson, Mo., spread across the country and evolved into the enduring, conscience-pricking Black Lives Matter movement.
This activism, some believed, might finally force nonprofits to confront an uncomfortable truth: that the staffs and leaders of charities aiming to make America better don’t reflect the diversity of America. Optimism was fanned by influential new reports and data showing diversity as critical to an organization’s effectiveness and innovation.
Nine out of 10 nonprofit leaders are white — a number that’s not changed in a quarter century.
Accompanying those were efforts within the nonprofit world, separate campaigns waged by GuideStar, the D5 Coalition of grant makers, and others to research the issue, advocate, and force a reckoning.
Numbers That Don’t Lie
Yet the numbers are in, and they don’t lie: Little has changed.
People of color now lead major organizations such as the Ford Foundation (Darren Walker), the Rockefeller Foundation (Rajiv Shah), and the March of Dimes (Stacey Stewart), but they are exceptions to the rule. D5 noted that despite its five years of work, Council on Foundations data suggested that whites still accounted for more than 90 percent of top executives.
BoardSource, in a summer 2016 survey of charity leaders, found nearly identical numbers: Whites fill nine out of 10 board chair and CEO positions at nonprofits nationwide. That figure has varied little since the organization launched its first survey, in 1994.
Why so little progress?
Because there’s been so little action. A 2016 report noted that 68 percent of 200 “emerging” nonprofit leaders said their organizations valued diversity and understood its importance. Yet only 22 percent of charities had even assessed their diversity, respondents said. “This reflects a lack of awareness of what practices should be reconsidered or changed to advance diversity and inclusion,” said the report, which was produced by Public Allies, an organization that supports aspiring leaders in the social-service sector.
Last year’s BoardSource report found that only about a quarter of executives and board chairs placed a “high priority” on demographics in recruitment. “There’s no mystery in terms of why boards have not become diverse,” says Anne Wallestad, president of BoardSource.
Diversity advocates contend that nonprofits make a lot of excuses for not taking action. Among these:
“There’s not enough talent.” One common refrain is that there are simply not enough qualified people of color, particularly for leadership roles.
“The pipeline problem is a myth,” says Erin Okuno, executive director of the Southeast Seattle Education Coalition, who started Fakequity, an irreverent blog calling out inadequate equity and diversity efforts. “There are qualified people of color out there,” but biases mean nonprofits often overlook them. White leaders typically recruit from their largely white professional networks, Okuno says.
Advancement is another problem, diversity advocates say. A study last year by the Building Movement Project found that people of color were less likely than white people to believe they had enough relationships with donors or access to professional networks and role models to succeed as leaders.
“We want qualified candidates.” People of color also face disadvantages because of how nonprofits define candidates as “qualified,” Okuno says. For instance, fewer Hispanics and African-Americans have college degrees — often a threshold credential — than do whites and Asian-Americans. Without that degree, candidates who might bring other important qualifications to the job, such as cultural connections to the community the nonprofit serves, don’t even get a look.
Similarly, traditional board recruitment works against people of color. Trustees are often selected with an eye to their ability to make big gifts and raise money. That’s an advantage for whites, who are on average wealthier than people of color.
Board qualifications need to be reassessed so that they emphasize cultural understanding of the communities the organization is serving, which should result in more people of color on boards, says Mando Rayo, founder of the New Philanthropists, an organization aiming to find 100 people of color who are ready for board service in Austin, Tex., in 2018.
“We do enough already.” Some charities — particularly those with social-justice missions — think they’re already doing enough, says Howard Ross, founding partner of Cook Ross, a consulting firm that provides equity and inclusion training to nonprofits and businesses. Because they serve people of color, they think they “get it,” he says. “Often, people with the most liberal points of view — in my experience — have some of the most hardened blind spots.”
“We’re colorblind.” Some nonprofits argue that diversity should occur naturally — that race shouldn’t be a factor in hiring or recruiting, says Robert Ross, president of the California Endowment and D5 co-chair. Yet without targeted recruiting, he argues, nothing will change.
Charities should consider equity rather than equality when hiring, he adds. With equity as a guiding principle, nonprofits would recognize that gender, race, poverty, immigrant status, and other aspects of candidates’ backgrounds and identities could hurt their chances of being noticed and hired.
Left Unsaid
What’s often not discussed is that white leaders are sometimes scared — consciously or unconsciously — about giving power to people of color, says Arlene Ford, who works with education groups on fostering an equitable organizational culture. As part of a wider culture biased against people of color, white nonprofit leaders hold many unconscious biases, she says — and they need to recognize that.
“If you don’t deal with those issues, you’re not going to get [anywhere] with your diversity policies,” she says.
Today’s toxic rhetoric about race and ethnicity means the time has come for greater diversity, says Rayo.
Many nonprofits serve the poor, and many of the poor are people of color, he notes. Building mostly white nonprofit leadership teams and staffs from outside of those communities, he says, is “just not a healthy way to run an organization.”
