Imagine that you discovered that 25 percent of your employees were being injured in car accidents — on the job. Furthermore, every employee was required to be in a car as a condition of employment. Upon further investigation, it turns out that in the majority of these accidents, your most important clients were the ones driving the car. In response, you now require your employees to take a written driver’s test to demonstrate their capacity to drive safely.
It’s easy to see how this response fails to solve the problem at hand. While a comprehensive response would include a review of the rules of the road, it would also include supporting employees injured in car accidents, a plan to prevent clients from causing accidents and injuries, and a way for employees to learn the skills to actually drive a car. Leaders of the organization might also need to reckon with — and repair — the fact they were either not aware of this as a problem or they were aware but did not take action.
Two years after the #MeToo movement shined a light on the pervasiveness of sexual harassment that nonprofit leaders ignored and many fundraisers and other employees suffered, more and more institutions are still struggling with the right ways to respond.
To move forward, nonprofits must realize that sexual harassment is not about a handful of people acting badly but a pervasive problem in our workplaces, boards, and donor pools. And we need to teach everyone in our organizations the skills to begin to repair the damage done and imagine a safe, productive, and respectful workplace in which we can achieve our social missions.
Provide the rules of the road, but only as a place to start.
Defining the rules is a critical first step toward transforming culture where we can achieve our missions with safety and respect for all. Compliance training provides a common language for talking about behavior and sets the expectation that those who commit sexual harassment will be held accountable.
Compliance training also provides companies with the necessary legal mechanisms to hold perpetrators of sexual harassment accountable without being sued. Preventing lawsuits is important, especially for organizations that address critical social issues like education, poverty alleviation, health care, or racial justice.
However, when training begins and ends with compliance, it creates challenges that can allow troubling behavior to continue. Oftentimes, compliance training leaves more questions than answers and doesn’t support a tone or climate where those questions can be effectively answered and addressed.
Even worse, perpetrators often aren’t deterred by rules, even when those rules are clearly spelled out. After all, sexual harassment was already against the rules before the #MeToo movement broke. When a perpetrator or potential perpetrator leaves a compliance training and returns to a culture of silence and avoidance, that sends a clear message that the inappropriate behavior can continue without repercussions.
Perpetrators of sexual harassment and misconduct thrive not only on the silence of their victims but also on the silence of bystanders. Perpetrators are enabled by a culture that doesn’t collectively enforce the rules and by individuals who don’t share accountability for relationships and behavior at work.
In the aftermath of scandals, such as those that toppled the leaders of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, the Humane Society, the Nature Conservancy, and Oxfam International, it became abundantly clear how the silence of board members, senior managers, and others allowed harm to continue for far too long. When we know someone is intoxicated, we take that person’s keys — but most of us don’t yet know how to do that when someone is intoxicated with power.
If what we want in the workplace is a place where we have safer and more respectful relationships and interactions, we have to get back on the road after learning the rules. When we understand that the rules are designed to support a safer on-the-road experience for everyone, we’re more likely to pay attention, ask questions, and actually follow the rules when we’re on the road.
When approached thoughtfully, compliance training is about more than checking a box. Nonprofits and foundations can use these training sessions as an opportunity to communicate key information about the reporting process, offer ways for employees to access support while deciding whether to formally report, and demystify the way a report is handled. When we make the process transparent, it’s an opportunity to restore trust.
After all, the car accidents themselves are only part of the problem. The larger problem is that these accidents have taken place for years, in plain sight, and leadership has been blind to the dented cars and persistent back injuries.
In the nonprofit world, the blindness and inaction go beyond the high-profile cases of institutions accepting gifts from the likes of Jeffrey Epstein or those who hobnobbed with Hollywood executives at events underwritten by Harvey Weinstein. According to last year’s survey by the Chronicle of Philanthropy and the Association of Fundraising Professionals, one in four fundraisers experienced harassment on the job; more than half were perpetrated by donors or prospects. It’s not hard to imagine the scholarships and programs paid for with these gifts. To address this requires taking responsibility for inaction and rebuilding trust across the board.
Training is not a one-step process.
Without developing new skills as employees, managers, fundraisers, and board members, our collective ability to follow rules and policies — and hold others accountable to them — will continue to fall short. When resources are raised to advance missions at the expense of human dignity, it will be board members, the ultimate stewards of a nonprofit’s financial resources, who will need to step up in new ways to address inappropriate behavior by donors.
Navigating relationship dynamics with powerful people is high-skill work, especially when we have limited control over the behavior of those who do not work for us. When it comes to fundraising, we frequently ask inexperienced people to visit powerful strangers in their homes or other locations and engage in personal conversations without providing any training on recognizing and responding to the signs of unhealthy or abusive relationships. In the case of fundraising, we’re not asking them to put their cars on the line; we’re asking them to put their dignity — and sometimes their bodies — at risk for the sake of our missions.
Consent, healthy relationships, and appropriate boundaries are not topics that many of us learned in school or even at home. Yet when it comes to applying these skills to a complicated workplace that combines mission, friendship, and wealth, too many nonprofit managers and leaders are surprised when their employees demonstrate their inexperience.
There are many skills that help employees prevent and respond to sexual harassment internally and with donors: responding to disclosures of workplace harassment, setting and respecting boundaries, giving and receiving feedback, supporting colleagues who experienced sexual violence outside of work, interrupting troubling behavior in person or online, recognizing and confronting people who show bias, and engaging in uncomfortable conversations.
Addressing the swirling mess of power dynamics encompassing boards, staff, donors, and volunteers will require many, many more conversations in which we walk through our own discomfort in service of a safer future for us all.
Sexual-harassment prevention isn’t a topic that can be covered in an annual online training or once-a-year workshop. It’s continuous work to develop and hone critical skills. The only way to get better at asking a donor to offer handshakes and not hugs to a fundraiser or speaking to a colleague about telling off-color jokes is to practice saying the words out loud. The more we practice any skill — whether driving or sexual-harassment prevention — the better we get. By practicing together in low-stakes situations, we can develop our own skills, learn from our colleagues, and understand where we can improve and grow.
Reimagine a future of safety and respect.
In the case of the organization that saw a quarter of its employees harmed by car accidents, what might the future accident-free workplace look like? First, driving skills and safety would be a massive theme of the organization. It would be a key part of new employees’ orientation and in their regular check-ins with managers, and it would be an essential topic at leadership retreats. We would put in place systems to report unsafe driving before accidents took place. We would collect data on accidents and share strategies among institutions to learn what works best to avoid harm. The organization would participate in activities to promote driving safety and skills outside of work, recognizing that influencing culture supports safer roads for everyone.
When it comes to sexual harassment, what is the future we want to imagine? People of all genders safely and confidently interact with one another. It’s a place where people can talk about workplace relationships. It’s a place where power is something that can be seen and discussed openly. It’s a place where people set and respect boundaries and discuss them when there is a difference in approach. It’s a place where people receive feedback or experience conflict, integrate what they’ve learned, and go back to work. It’s a place where people look out for one another and share responsibility not just for the work they do but for how they do it together.
We can’t attain this future through rules alone. And we can’t place the responsibility for this future solely on advancement leaders and boards (though they do play an important role). When we apply a skills lens to sexual- harassment prevention and response, each of us, regardless of our job title, can play a critical role in creating and sustaining gender-diverse workplaces that are safe and respectful.
