It has almost felt like normal in one part of the Chronicle’s editorial operations these past few weeks. Michael Theis, our data journalist, was working with our summer interns, Karenna Warden and Eleanor Walsh, on two important projects that we usually kick off in July or August. The only difference was that this was the first summer the student interns never stepped foot into our newsroom. Instead they connected with us on Zoom and Slack, using laptops the Chronicle sent to their homes.
One product of the work Karenna helped research appears in this issue: a look at the gender and race of the 100 people who run the biggest nonprofits in America.
We first conducted such a study in 2009 and decided to repeat it last year to see if anything had changed in a decade. With the racial-justice movement intensifying questions about who makes decisions at leading institutions, we decided it was worth repeating this study more regularly than we had in the past. Once again, the results were a reminder of the slow pace of change at big institutions.
Save the Children’s appointment of Janti Soeripto represented the only appointment of a person of color in the top 100. And while she replaced a female chief executive, the other top jobs shifted in a way that favored men so the overall result was a slight fallback for women.
After I heard from readers who appreciated the study of race and gender, it made me think back to what prompted us to do the study in 2009. It was the fruit of a conversation with a nonprofit executive who came to pitch ideas for coverage to our editorial team. The executive wondered what would happen if we compared nonprofit leaders with those at the biggest companies. He warned us that we might be surprised to find businesses doing better than nonprofits — but that wasn’t the case. In all three studies, nonprofits were doing more than businesses to diversify the race and gender of their leaders.
The questions and ideas nonprofit and foundation leaders pose to us often lead to our best articles, and I have been reminded in recent days how much we miss them visiting our offices. Many of the conversations we had with visiting executives led to articles about their work, but, often just as important, these discussions deepened our staff’s understanding of key issues in the nonprofit world and of the challenges and joys of mission-driven careers.
We aren’t expected to return to our offices anytime soon, but I hope we can resume the tradition soon, even if it will just be on Zoom. Let us know if you’re interested, and we’ll follow up.
Now, to be sure, the busy fall will not leave any of you — or any of my colleagues — with loads of time for wide-ranging conversation. We already know what we’ll be pre-occupied with: finishing the second project that we always kick off with help from summer interns — our annual look at how much America’s biggest charities raise.
Eleanor has been helping us with our outreach efforts as we retool our approach to better meet your needs at a time when the recession and the coronavirus have upended nonprofit finances. In recent days, Michael and others have been interviewing nonprofit executives to better understand what data is essential to help them make decisions now.
We have been gratified by how candid, thoughtful, and generous people have been in sharing their best ideas to shape the Chronicle. And in that way, everything seems normal once again.
— Stacy Palmer, Editor
Stacy.palmer@philanthropy.com
