Nearly two-thirds of respondents to the Chronicle’s recent survey of nonprofit leaders said polarization was making their jobs more difficult. It’s a stunning statistic: The growing divides in the country — primarily related to politics and race, but also over issues like gender, urban-rural differences, and the war in Gaza — affect the work of the majority of organizations.
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Nearly two-thirds of respondents to the Chronicle’s recent survey of nonprofit leaders said polarization was making their jobs more difficult. It’s a stunning statistic: The growing divides in the country — primarily related to politics and race, but also over issues like gender, urban-rural differences, and the war in Gaza — affect the work of the majority of organizations.
For many charities, coping with polarization has creeped into even routine matters. News releases are worded even more carefully than usual to avoid antagonizing one side or the other. Fundraising pitches are segmented with an eye to the political persuasions of the donor or foundation. Controversial topics are deemed off-limits at board meetings.
Polarization affects some organizations in more direct and harmful ways. That’s particularly true for groups that sit squarely on the fault lines of the country’s divisions. More than three-fifths of LGTBQ+ community centers, youth programs, and other gathering places report harassment or violence — a figure that’s been increasing, according to a survey last year. California reports “pronounced demand” for security grants it provides to nonprofits at high risk of violence and hate crimes.
To get an insider’s perspective on polarization’s effects, the Chronicle sought out three leaders whose programs were hit by polarization yet withstood the damage. We offer their stories as a window into the experience and what it’s like to uphold a charity’s mission — and a leader’s personal integrity and values — while also weighing the impact on the charity’s finances or its very survival.
Keep Showing Up
Boise Pride’s trial by fire came in 2022, when a conservative uproar over a festival session forced the charity to rework its plans and plug a hole in its budget.
Boise, Idaho, may not strike coastal residents as especially progressive, but it’s the biggest city in a 300-mile radius. When teens from Boise and rural areas in Idaho and surrounding states want to explore their gender or sexual identity, they often find their way to the Boise Pride Festival.
“This is one of the few safe spaces that kids can come to,” says Michael Dale, president of the charity’s board.
In 2022, organizers of the three-day festival added a half-hour program called “Drag Kids,” in which kids and teens could dress up and go on stage. When Idaho Republicans got wind of the plan, opposition was intense. The Idaho Department of Health and Welfare pulled $38,000 in sponsorship funding for the festival just days before it started — a move, it later became clear, that was directed by Gov. Brad Little, a Republican.
“The sexualization of children is wrong, full stop,” the Idaho GOP party wrote on Twitter. “Idaho rejects the imposition of adult sexuality & adult sexual appetites on children.”
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On Facebook, a post by a far-right group listed the parade’s time and starting point and showed a meme of a man loading a revolver with the text: “Can’t expect God to do all the work.”
Like any LGBTQ organization, Boise Pride was used to controversy, but the combination of violent threats and the loss of funding raised the stakes.
The charity issued a statement defending the show, saying the kids had the support of their parents and that the performance would be a “celebration of self-expression and confidence.”
“It’s not a radical liberal agenda to accept people for who they are,” the group wrote on Facebook. “It’s human.”
Minal Bopaiah, a consultant who has written about advancing diversity in a polarized world, says Boise Pride was right during this moment of controversy to humanize the teens at the heart of the matter. “Nonprofits have to be able to dig deep into their values and put a stake in the ground that we will not engage in dehumanization,” she says.
Boise Pride continues to run the festival without state support. Idaho said it would consider restoring funding if the charity provided two months’ advance notice about planned sessions. The charity rejected that condition. “We want them to trust us,” Dale says.
The state’s withdrawal as a sponsor hurts one of its public-health programs. Idaho had used the event to promote HIV prevention. Dale calls the festival the “biggest venue in the state” for promoting prevention and testing. “It’s really sad,” he says.
Fortunately for the charity, while a few corporate sponsors pulled back in the first days of the controversy, nearly all quickly returned, including Micron Technology and Albertsons. Today, corporate support totals nearly $500,000, up from $118,000 in 2018.
“These companies all have employees who are part of our community,” Dale says. “That is what it’s more about than just the dollars behind it.”
The kids and teens voluntarily decided to step aside from the 2022 event, but Boise Pride promised they would get a chance to perform. The charity revived the kids drag show this year in a slightly less visible performance, called “Hometown Drag Show Too!,” at a local theater. “We know how important it is to keep showing up for these kids,” Dale says.
Truth vs. Duplicity
Lincoln Jones is the director and choreographer of American Contemporary Ballet, in Los Angeles, which he founded in 2011. After George Floyd’s murder in 2020, arts and music organizations, including his own ballet company, were pressured to embrace diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and back the Black Lives Matter movement. Jones refused to follow a common protest at the time and post a black square in support of Black Lives Matter on Instagram. He viewed the group as political with specific objectives — and goals that varied by chapter.
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“My view was really bad things are happening all the time — shootings, wars, all these things,” Jones says. “If we begin commenting on those things, then we are no longer a place where people can come to get away from that for a moment and enjoy art and be reminded of their common humanity.”
Around the same time, nearly all the ballet’s funders started including what Jones describes as “a DEI pledge” to include race as a factor when hiring and promoting dancers.
Jones viewed the DEI pledges as adding a “social justice” component to a charity whose mission was to create the best art possible. He refused, and nearly all the organization’s grants dried up as a result, he says — at roughly the same time the pandemic forced the company to shut down for an extended period.
His stance on the Instagram black square led to threats on social media directed at him and his dancers. A petition demanded that Jones change how he handled casting, and his dancers were told they would be blacklisted and blocked from working elsewhere, Jones says. The dancers asked him to better explain his views, so Jones released a letter. “That made it 10 times worse,” he says. “The letter got passed around, and we started getting more threats.”
Although not speaking about Jones’s experience, Bopaiah says that advocates for progressive causes can dehumanize opponents if they push a narrow vision that refuses to acknowledge dissent.
“Diversity, when it’s done poorly, becomes propaganda, where you’re trying to tell people that they have to think a certain way to be an acceptable human being,” Bopaiah says.
Meeting with other arts leaders around the country, Jones says he learned that many agreed with his views but were afraid to voice their concerns. That’s when he decided to speak publicly about his experience — despite warnings from colleagues that doing so would be career suicide.
He spoke on a podcast hosted by the Philanthropy Roundtable, a donor group promoting liberty, opportunity, and personal responsibility, and later at the organization’s 2023 annual meeting. His appearances were driven by conviction, but also because he needed new funders. The ballet’s philanthropic revenue fell by more than 40 percent in 2021 before rebounding in 2022. Two members of the Philanthropy Roundtable ultimately came through with significant support, he says.
Before speaking out for the first time, Jones tried to carefully craft answers to avoid any misunderstanding. He remembers thinking: “If I say one wrong thing, it’s the end.”
“Then I just like stopped for a second. I was like, ‘What am I doing?’” Jones says. “I’m supposed to be an artist. I’m supposed to take things that are felt deeply within me and get them out and take risks. And here I am not even willing to say what’s on the top of my mind. So at that point, I said, ‘I’m just going to speak. Maybe I’ll make mistakes. Maybe I won’t word things right, but I’m going to tell the truth. I’m going to say what I believe.’”
To do otherwise, he says, would have edged him closer to compromising on his art.
“It’s hard to maintain a duplicity in one area of your life and then try to get really truthful in another area of your life,” Jones says. “I think that’s actually the worst thing you could do to an artist.”
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‘It Could Have Destroyed Us’
The Village Exchange Center in Aurora, Co., which provides food, housing, and other services to immigrants and refugees, has been whipsawed in the past four years by fluctuating demand for its services. Founded in 2017 when a declining Lutheran church donated its building and grounds to establish the center, the charity saw a surge in demand during the pandemic and again starting in the summer of 2023.
Last summer’s surge was directly related to the polarized debate over immigration. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, began busing migrants to Denver and other cities run by Democrats to focus national attention on his state’s immigration problem.
Village Exchange Center’s main building sits just blocks from Denver, where 36,000 immigrants arrived during 2023. When the city became overwhelmed, immigrants made their way across the city line to the charity to seek services. At the peak last fall, the Village Exchange Center was serving 3,000 to 4,000 people a week, says Amanda Blaurock, its executive director. Aurora has been in the national news, with former President Donald Trump claiming the city is being overtaken by Venezuelan gangs, a narrative city officials describe as greatly exaggerated.
Much of the charity’s support for vaccines, housing, and case management comes from the state, but the grants are reimbursements for work already completed. That means the charity receives payments months after the funds are spent. At one point, the money due to the charity approached $1 million, Blaurock says. The charity’s 2023 tax return shows a year-end cash balance of just $970,000, roughly half the $1.85 million of a year earlier.
“We found that to be an extremely painful process,” Blaurock says. “It really could have destroyed us” if not for the charity’s solid reserves.
The fluctuations in demand also put tremendous stress on the charity’s employees. The state of Colorado provided $1.1 million for the group to provide case management to hundreds of the new arrivals, but that money ran out in July, forcing the center to lay off five workers. For the charity, it was a replay of the pandemic.
“We get asked to do something,” Blaurock says. “We ramp up. We hire a bunch of people. We act like chickens with their heads cut off due to the chaos of the emergency response, then we have to fire everyone because the money’s gone.”
Her proposed solution: a fund that would help immigration charities throughout the state hire and retain “cultural brokers,” trusted community members who speak the same language as the newcomers and may have similar lived experiences.
During quiet times, the brokers would help migrants with everyday crises, such as when the owner of a food truck suddenly faces a large bill to repair a broken generator. When a citywide crisis arises, like the one precipitated by the Texas busing, the cultural brokers could respond immediately.
“We want to set up an infrastructure so that when FEMA or the state comes in with support, the infrastructure is already there,” Blaurock says.
The center has already received a $300,000 matching gift from an anonymous donor for the project, Blaurock says. The charity will raise additional money from others and hopes to use a portion of a new $2.1 million FEMA grant.
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Though the arrival of immigrants to the Denver area has slowed in the past six months, Blaurock says, the city needs to be prepared when the polarized issue rears its head again.
“Decisions get made, and it massively disrupts the ecosystem for nonprofits,” she says. “We’re pivoting, constantly, based on political changes. So how do we fix that?”
Ben is a senior editor at the Chronicle of Philanthropy whose coverage areas include leadership and other topics. Before joining the Chronicle, he worked at Wyoming PBS and the Chronicle of Higher Education. Ben is a graduate of Dartmouth College.