Last month, while editing a grant report for a nonprofit client, the development director asked me to remove all mentions of “BIPOC.” I should have been surprised since the organization works to improve racial equity, but I wasn’t. In recent months, I’ve seen similar language shifts from many clients who work on racial justice issues.

This is largely in response to the Supreme Court decision last year to bar affirmative action in college admissions and, more recently, the Fearless Fund settlement in September that ended a grant program for businesses owned by Black women. In my experience, many nonprofits and foundations are increasingly wary of explicitly mentioning well-known racial justice and identity focused acronyms, such as DEI, ESG, BIPOC, and LGBTQIA+. They don’t want to trigger the wrath of right-wing actors looking to make an example of organizations with a diversity focus.

Because I’m a contract writer, I dutifully did as I was told. But I noticed a major shift in how the report read simply by replacing BIPOC with a phrase describing the acronym: “Black American, Indigenous, and people from other racially marginalized groups.” Using “racially marginalized” rather than “people of color” was important because my client didn’t want to be seen as using identity-based grant criteria — a subtle but important shift in a climate where affirmative action in all forms is at risk.

Using the longer phrase forced me to get sharper with my remaining word count and rely less on vague generalities and jargon. This editing exercise also offered a lesson in the benefits of clear language beyond grant reports. Leaning on overused words, acronyms, and cliches obfuscates a nonprofit’s intentions both on and off the page, causing it to lose sight of its goals. Conversely, precise and direct language encourages precision and directness in whom a nonprofit helps and how.

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This became clear while editing the following sentence, which is slightly altered to protect my client’s identity: “We saw massive success in assisting BIPOC leaders to create targeted youth development cohorts within their communities.”

Replacing “BIPOC” gave me this sentence: “We saw massive success in assisting Black, Indigenous, and people from other racially marginalized groups leaders to create targeted youth development cohorts within their communities.”

Yikes. That’s clunky and unwieldy, even for a grant report. No offense grant writers — I get it!

I tried to focus instead on the program’s overall effect: “Supporting leaders to create targeted youth development cohorts had a large impact in Black, Indigenous, and other racially marginalized communities.” It’s clearly not the best sentence. Does anyone outside the nonprofit world really understand what “cohorts” means? Still, it adequately communicates the idea: The nonprofit supported specific leaders in youth development, which helped the broader community.

But as I dug deeper, more questions emerged: Was the program really offered in Indigenous communities, for example? The grant report focused on a geographical area with almost no Native population. And how big were these “communities”? A neighborhood, a region, a state? What made the so-called cohorts — or groups of people doing similar work who learn from each other — “targeted?” How did the nonprofit define “large impact?” By removing BIPOC, I peeled back the sentence’s first layer, only to realize there were many more underneath that needed examining.

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Meaningless Words

Nonprofits too often use language as placeholders for concepts that have lost meaning. If they can’t speak directly about the work they’re doing or the problems at hand, how can they create programs to address them?

Consider “ESG.” This acronym for “Environmental, Social and Governance” was developed to evaluate a company’s long-term financial health, based on environmental and social factors. However, people now use it interchangeably with “social impact” and sometimes phrases even further from its meaning, including “DEI” or “racial justice.” I was in a meeting once where a midlevel nonprofit employee used the phrase ESG, and the CEO asked her to define it. She couldn’t. She was using it to mean “helping the world be better.”

I’m reminded of a passage from George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language,” in which he noted that “political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.” Writing in 1946, Orwell was describing the doublespeak of war. Yet the lesson still applies to today’s nonprofits and grant makers, only in reverse: We obfuscate our meaning not to hide travesties but because we can’t understand the effect of our virtue.

When we rely on phrases such as “BIPOC,” we don’t need to worry about the specifics of our actions. We know we’re helping people, but we aren’t sure whom, how much, and in what ways. So we wave those questions away with benedictions of “commitment to BIPOC leadership,” “investments in BIPOC-led organizations,” and “support for BIPOC leaders on the ground” — another favorite in the philanthro-speak oeuvre. I want to meet all those people living in the sky.

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As Orwell said: “Where there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns … [to] exhausted idioms.” By using BIPOC as a catch-all racial category, nonprofits regularly communicate things that may not be true: Did that organization really help Indigenous people? Or Black people? What about all those other people of color? Or is the organization just conflating broad categories of people because it’s easy?

The Power of Precision

Since this op-ed is about clarity, I’ll be clear: I’m not suggesting anyone stop supporting BIPOC organizations or individuals. Just the opposite. If we bring clarity of language to our work, we’ll accomplish more for the people who benefit from our actions. The strength of our work should be reflected in the boldness of our language.

Certainly, acronyms such as BIPOC can be useful for nonprofits that want to avoid saying they’re only focusing on certain groups — say, Black women in Atlanta or Native people in rural Arizona — when so many others also need help. Of course they do. But nonprofits can’t help everyone all the time, and that’s OK.

Many of the issues foundations work on are so big and amorphous, they’re hard to distill into words. It’s like how the arc of history is incomprehensible until it’s summarized in a book generations later.

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But even within these big concepts, clarity should always be the goal. Instead of talking generally about supporting “cohorts” or “on-the-ground solutions,” nonprofits need to consider what they actually want to change and how. Resorting to jargon and acronyms should never be the answer.

So is anyone actually doing this well? Somewhat ironically, I’d vote for the Fearless Fund, which is bold in both its language and approach. It didn’t claim to support all BIPOC people or people who are, for example, historically disadvantaged. It was clear whom it cared about: Black women. Of course, that boldness got the Fearless Fund sued. But it didn’t back down. It continued to fight until it became clear that a settlement was the only way to avoid a legal precedent that would prevent others from being as bold.

In the case of my client, I admit that I went with the sentence shared above. While not great, it was the best I could do with the constraints I had, particularly time. The issues with the report left the realm of my abilities as a writer and instead became strategic questions about whom the organization serves and how. I hope to have a conversation with them about this soon.

The lesson I took from it, though, is that we should all follow the example of the Fearless Fund. The work of nonprofits and philanthropy is too important to hide away under vague acronyms. We must be bold. We must be fearless. And we must have language to match.