Building a diverse nonprofit staff will likely require big changes to the way you recruit and hire employees, how you pay people, and the kind of organizational culture you foster, experts advise in the online briefing How to Build a Diverse Nonprofit Staff, hosted by Chronicle senior writer Jim Rendon and featuring three executives:
- Misa Labato, resident, Apra (formerly Association of Professional Researchers for Advancement)
- Shadae McDaniel, vice president and city leader, All Stars Project of New Jersey
- Carmen Marshall, director of consulting group, Maryland Nonprofits
Here are a few of the recommendations the panelists shared. You can also watch the video below to hear all of their advice firsthand.
Get started now. Diversifying your staff can be a slow process so develop a bias for action. That may mean pushing people out of their comfort zones, says Marshall. “If we wait on folks’ emotions and hearts to catch up, it might be years down the road before that happens,” she says. “We want to get organizations who are committed and leaders who are committed and supervisors who are committed to taking action.”
The work ahead can seem daunting, Marshall adds, but you can take immediate steps to get started.
Hold up a mirror to yourself and your organization. Leaders in particular must make sure that they are building an organizational culture in which people feel safe to seek support or express concerns about the work environment, which is necessary for them to do their best work, says Marshall. “Look at things like who holds the power and who doesn’t, and what’s the impact of that,” she says, so you can begin to identify inequities within your organization.
Leaders can often be oblivious to the challenges faced by people on their staffs, Marshall says, so they must create an atmosphere in which people feel comfortable talking about those obstacles.
Overcome any discomfort and have difficult conversations. “A lot of times folks who run organizations are not aware of the impact of racism or the impact of ageism or the impact of being offensive to people with disabilities,” Marshall says. “If we don’t talk about it, we won’t do anything about it.”
Marshall urges leaders to be blunt about the terminology of diversity, equity, and inclusion. “Sometimes folks don’t enter into the discussion at all or do the work because they grapple with the language and they find it off-putting,” she says. “But if we don’t look at things like white supremacy and dominant culture and get comfortable with terms like that, then we’ll undermine what we say we want to do.”
Collect the right kinds of data. Lobato says that collecting data through all levels of an organization — from leaders, rank-and-file staff, members, and trustees — is an important early step that will help reveal how your organization needs to change.
For example, if an organization lacks diversity at the top, it can be a challenge to find diverse volunteers, she says. “If people feel like they’re not represented in leadership, they’re not interested in volunteering for your organization,” she says.
Also, think expansively about what “data” means, says Marshall. “When someone says, ‘I can’t advance here,’ that’s data, too.”
Explain why you’re collecting data, including demographic data. It can be a challenge to get people to voluntarily provide demographic data, but it gets easier when you explain why you want it, says Lobato.
“We wanted our members to know we’re acknowledging that we have not been as intentional in making sure that this is a diverse and inclusive organization, and this is a way in which we will begin to move in another direction and have accountability in our work,” Lobato says.
Be sure to pay attention to the details when gathering data. For example, says Lobato, consider listing all possible responses in alphabetical order “so that there was no perceived hierarchy.”
Dismantle the systems and practices that led to hiring the same kind of people over and over again. Systems are “designed to continue to perpetuate the same thing that we say we want to change,” says Marshall.
For example, if your organization uses recruiters, make sure they are fully committed to what you’re trying to achieve, she says: “Recruiters need to have the same values that you want your organization to have.”
Also, make sure a diverse group of people interviews job candidates. That means going beyond factors like race, gender, and ethnicity, says McDaniel. Pull in people from all corners of your organization — junior people and senior people and people who may never work directly with the person you’re trying to hire, she says.
Such an approach makes everyone “feel like they’re responsible for diversifying the organization,” McDaniel says.
Get out of the “experience-based” hiring rut. One of the biggest factors that get in the way of more diverse hiring, the panelists said, is an old-school reliance on long-established “experience” indicators, such as where a job candidate went to school, where they worked previously, or the specific role they had.
An excessive focus on those kinds of factors can cause hiring managers to overlook people who have the skills to do the job even though they lack the traditional signposts on a résumé, says Lobato. “Skills-based versus experience-based hiring is really important for diversification,” she says.
Examine your pay structures. For example, fundraisers often are among the highest-paid people in nonprofits, and that field is historically less diverse than other roles at nonprofits. Meanwhile, says McDaniel, nonprofit workers on the front lines of serving communities are more likely to be people of color.
The All Stars Project examined the compensation of employees at all levels and found disparities. “That meant that our Black and brown program staff were on different pay scales,” McDaniel says. “That now becomes a social-equity concern.”
“Our CEO was really willing to take a step out of some of the traditional pay scales for comparable roles because she saw that the system was skewed,” says McDaniel. “I found this to be one of the most groundbreaking activities for a nonprofit to go through.”
Rethink how you identify potential board members. The board can set the tone for an organization. Nonprofit leaders need to take a close look at how people get on their boards because those mechanisms are often obstacles to diversity, according to Lobato. For example, service on volunteer board committees often leads to a board appointment down the road, she says, and those committees are often stacked with people from the chairperson’s network.
“We know that network-based recruitment can be problematic in the hiring process, but it’s also problematic in other ways,” says Lobato. “When you’re using network-based recruitment, you’re often inviting the same people or the same kinds of people to have more and more opportunities.”
Apra now prohibits committee leaders from recruiting from their networks to fill board committee seats. The staff provides these people with lists of potential volunteers that are intentionally diverse, she says.
And board candidates must provide information about their identity and explain why diversity and inclusion are important to them, Lobato says.
The old ways of thinking about boards primarily as sources of cash can be problematic, too. “If your nonprofit board is made up of your top donors and you haven’t done the work to intentionally diversify your donor base, then you’re going to have a less diverse board,” she says. “Looking at those feeder pipelines is really important.”
Don’t let up. All the speakers said that diversity, equity, and inclusion work must become part of everything a nonprofit does, all the time.
“You have to do it every single day and make it a part of the ongoing conversation, so that it’s not event driven,” Marshall says. “The moment you stop doing it, it rolls back to the 1950s.”
