Nonprofit Finance Fund is a 40-year-old, multimillion-dollar institution that provides accessible loan financing, financial advice, and advocacy to nonprofit groups in fields ranging from the arts and education to health and housing.
We are a historically white-led organization that is committed to prioritizing racial equity. In our efforts, we have made progress, and we’ve stumbled. We share our experiences here in the hope that it will be useful to other organizations.
We believe, as an organization of financial privilege that has relationships with some of the wealthiest philanthropic organizations in the world, that we must change or become irrelevant.
However, while leaders and donors in the nonprofit world increasingly proclaim the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion, making the changes required to realize those commitments is fraught.
If we’re to thoughtfully answer calls to decolonize wealth and respect that those closest to the pain must be closest to the solution, incremental change isn’t enough. Major changes are required at the representational, cultural, and structural levels.
Here are three ways NFF has changed its practices to advance racial equity over the past several years.
We rely on diverse voices within and outside the organization to guide our racial-equity focus. We diversified our staff and board. Today, 56 percent of NFF’s leaders, 65 percent of staff members, and 80 percent of board members are people of color. (By comparison, in 2019, 37 percent of leaders, 47 percent of staff, and 50 percent of board members were people of color.)
We have also prioritized gender diversity and other areas of inclusion.
The organization is now more diverse because it:
- Recruits to reach more diverse candidates for staff and board.
- Publishes salary ranges.
- Values lived experience as much, if not more than, academic degrees when evaluating job candidates.
- Guards against staff members of color carrying an outsize or uncompensated burden to be racial-equity “experts.”
These changes – all works in progress – have helped us do a far better job of helping BIPOC-led and -serving nonprofits realize their communities’ aspirations.
As we work to create transparency and inclusivity, we’ve hit a few stumbling blocks when it comes to being clear about who has input into a decision versus who has decision-making authority on specific issues.
Respecting everyone’s expertise and experience includes being clear about when you’re asking for input versus conferring decision rights or veto power on a decision. This is an ongoing challenge for us.
When we let go of old ways — even if we execute imperfectly at first — we emerge better able to meet our mission and the needs of those we support.
We seek expert counsel. BMe has helped us understand and apply asset-framing (a way of defining people by highlighting their assets and aspirations rather than their challenges and deficits). Race Forward has informed how we approach equity as an imperative that is integral to our success. Grantmakers for Effective Organizations often guides us as we restructure our organization to better advance equity. Consultants like Lovely Dhillon of Jodevi Consulting and Yolanda Gorman of Gorman Partners serve as our thought partners on leadership, culture, and change management.
Maya Angelou once said, “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” Here’s some of what we know now:
- When we planned for improvements and change, we couldn’t see in advance how it would affect our organization, but it has improved everything from our lending guidelines to our website copy.
- We found it useful to complement external training with internal supportive affinity groups — self-selected based on shared identities — to create space for reflection and support.
- Seeking expert counsel requires significant amounts of time and money — all well spent, but often difficult to raise money for.
- When conducting training on racial equity and issues related to identity, we need to give staff members time to absorb the material, rest, and reflect as needed so they do not feel compelled to move directly to the next Zoom meeting or share their reactions in real time.
The changes we are making are overdue, and like most big changes to established routines, for many people (and for many different reasons) they inherently cause discomfort. To ensure we can move forward successfully, we’ve learned that we need to create a culture of collective care to navigate that discomfort productively.
We have to think about personal needs as much as professional needs and create space for those personal needs to be addressed (including time off, flexible work schedules, and leaving meetings in order to process exceptionally heavy situations).
We continually ensure that our practices support an inclusive culture. Amid all of the mission gains and positive organizational change, sometimes weariness or wariness can creep in as we unpack 40 years of baggage and determine how to act in ways that better serve us today.
Time and time again, however, we find that when we let go of old ways, even if we execute imperfectly at first, we emerge better able to meet our mission and the needs of those we support. Here are some of the actions we have taken:
- Created an organizationwide process for finding diverse vendors
- Pay community-based nonprofits when we ask for their insight or draw on their expertise and stories
- Ensure that equity is factored into large initiatives from the beginning like our State of the Nonprofit Sector survey.
One recent challenge in creating a more equitable culture involved a shift away from bonuses, which we’d historically given to all staff based on a variety of performance metrics. Now we use that money to offer higher base salaries to junior staff instead.
Yes, it is a trade-off: We have no more bonuses, but we are able to pay junior staff more equitably. We are willing to accept necessary sacrifices due to the substantial gains that more equitable organizations and societies deliver.
We share these reflections with great respect for those organizations that are ahead of us on the path toward racial equity. We also offer it in service of other leaders who are trying to turn their organizational ships against the tides of systemic racism.
We live in times in which true leadership in the nonprofit world requires the hard work of making our institutions more inclusive and ending policies and practices that exclude people or limit the reach of our work.
With thoughtful intention and commitment, we can ensure that our future is far more equitable one than our past.
