The decision was gut-wrenching — even if it seemed like the best option at the time.
At a Saturday retreat, leaders and staff of the Prison Birth Project, where I served as a board member, decided to close the nonprofit’s doors.
It was a sad end to an important and much-admired organization. I first learned about the Prison Birth Project while working with the Women’s Fund of Western Massachusetts, which supported the Holyoke, Mass., nonprofit. I was so inspired by its innovative model of policy advocacy, childbirth education, and doula assistance for pregnant women behind bars that I signed up as a volunteer and eventually joined the board.
But now the bare-bones operation was just hanging on. We hadn’t run out of money yet, but staff burnout and an inability to attract more and bigger grants left us little choice. By deciding to shut down, we could at least give the remaining staff severance pay.
Still, the decision didn’t sit right. The severance funds, while appreciated by the staff, couldn’t make up for years of underpay and overwork endured by these dedicated leaders.
Now, more than three years later, I’ve had to face up to a deeply troubling reality: I was complicit in the death of an organization I cared about deeply — an organization focused on giving life.
During a time when many of us in philanthropy are confronting our own roles in perpetuating systemic inequity, I’ve come to understand that my class privilege and white advantages blinded me to the problems facing the organization. I failed as a grant maker to ask myself fundamental questions about what the Prison Birth Project needed to thrive — namely, the pay, benefits, and working conditions that would allow staff to support their own families and personal well-being while also fighting for the incarcerated women of Massachusetts.
In retrospect, the problem was in plain sight. Although the Women’s Fund always reviewed grant applications thoroughly, including an organization’s budget, we failed to appreciate how little the three women who ran the Prison Birth Project were paying themselves. We didn’t see the long hours they routinely worked and missed the signs of encroaching burnout. We didn’t ask the right questions or invite frank dialogue. We were focused on the bottom line of the budget, not the details of how they were making it all happen or whether they were appropriately valued.
I didn’t become aware of how dire the situation was until I joined the board in 2016. I learned that one founder had just left and the two remaining leaders were running on fumes after years of underpay, lack of benefits, and the psychic toll of bearing witness to the trauma experienced by women behind bars. We did what we could to raise salaries, but it was too little, too late. The women who ran the Prison Birth Project needed living-wage jobs at stable organizations that provided a healthy work-life balance. Somehow all of us together could not figure out how to get out of this toxic deprivation cycle and press the reset button.
Blinded to the Signs of Exploitation
How was it that so many smart, progressive women within the organization and at the Women’s Fund — as well as other grant makers that supported this group — unwittingly perpetuated a system that undervalued women’s labor?
I can only speak to my own background, thinking, and actions at the time. As a white, middle-class woman, I’ve had the luxury of choosing work with social-change nonprofits that offer decent pay and benefits. Early in my career, when I interviewed for an organizing job that paid just above minimum wage, I had a financial safety net that enabled me to hold out for something better.
Looking back on my career, most of the nonprofits I worked for — all of which had diverse staffs and boards — were run by white men who were excellent at raising funds from foundations run by other white men. Now I see that they likely had an edge over leaders of color due to the implicit bias of donors, along with access to “old boys” networks. Even when I spent a stint as a consultant to nonprofits and foundations, my connections to white men enabled me to get a steady stream of clients, who, I realize in hindsight, were also mostly white men.
I am embarrassed to say today that it never occurred to me to probe the Prison Birth Project’s salary structure more closely. My race, class advantages, and experiences blinded me to how nonprofit culture, even when it espouses social-justice values, often obfuscates inherent racism, sexism, and classism — leading to the exploitation of low-income women of color.
It’s clear to me now that I held naïve and unchallenged assumptions about the Prison Birth Project leaders. For example, I assumed that they chose to work part-time so they could raise their young children. But did they really have a choice since the budget didn’t allow for paid parental leave?
I assumed they were driven by a fire in the belly that comes from the lived experience of oppression that fuels so much social change. Faced with a funding system that forces nonprofit staff to toil for hours to get pennies from philanthropy, it seemed they did what women have done for millennia — borne the double burden of unpaid family work and underpaid community work. No doubt the Black leaders suffered the additional double burdens of intersecting race and gender discrimination.
End the Hoarding
What can we do differently? Broadly, we need to dismantle the endemic hoarding practices that predominate in philanthropy and fully fund organizations and movements led by people of color.
Part of that process should be a close examination of the low pay, inadequate working conditions, and race and gender disparities we have accepted as the norm for those who choose nonprofit careers. We can start by exploring the steps necessary to achieve needs-based and equitable pay. The group Class Action and its Staffing the Mission Project provides some helpful guidelines, such as determine local living-wage levels, consider the family size of employees when setting salaries, and get input from staff on which benefits to prioritize within budget constraints.
Thankfully, the women who led the Prison Birth Project all found good positions at other organizations. But we should never have tolerated the conditions that forced them to leave in the first place. A “mentality of scrappiness,” says nonprofit advocate Vu Le, has “led us to undervalue and underinvest in the most critical factor in our quest for equity and social justice: The people who do this work each day.”
During this difficult past year, many of us in philanthropy have come to recognize the need to account for how our own practices perpetuate systemic inequality and racism. That should include an acknowledgment that our assumptions about nonprofit pay and benefits have fed those inequities. Together, let’s learn from our mistakes and take concrete steps to advocate for the equitable workplaces we all deserve.