Four years ago, Judi Taylor Cantor, the head of planned giving at a New England university, rented a car for what she thought would be an ordinary visit with a longtime donor. The man wanted to add money to a previous gift.
“After lunch, we returned to his home where we discussed the gift contract, and he gave me a check,” recalls Ms. Cantor, now a fund-raising consultant in Westwood, Mass. Up to that point, “there was nothing unusual about the visit.”
But just as she was leaving, Ms. Cantor says, “he helped me with my coat and then grabbed my breast and tried to kiss me—very dramatically. I was horrified. He immediately apologized, but I couldn’t talk.”
Instead, Ms. Cantor says, she fled to her rental car. “I was shaking. I was really shocked and frightened,” she says. “It came out of the blue.”
Such unwanted sexual overtures are shocking in part because so few people openly discuss them in the nonprofit world. But many fund raisers say that it is not unusual for donors, board members, and other supporters to subject fund raisers to inappropriate comments and unwanted advances.
“It is a fairly common problem, unfortunately, and I am not sure it is going to go away,” says Bruce Flessner, a Minneapolis fund-raising consultant. “Just because you are doing good work doesn’t mean that bad things aren’t going on.”
Making the problem all the more vexing is that it often involves people a charity has little control over.
“In a typical workplace sexual-harassment incident, you have a male supervisor harassing a female subordinate,” says Caren Goldberg, an assistant professor of management at American University who has conducted numerous studies on sexual harassment. “In the world of philanthropy, the donor has all the power.” That, she says, makes “it much more difficult since you can’t fire them.”
Not only does the charity have limited control over individual donors and other benefactors who behave inappropriately, but it also often depends on those people for money: In at least three instances The Chronicle uncovered, fund raisers who complained about unwanted advances say their institutions ended up losing big gifts, including one donation of $2-million.
Vulnerable Situations
Sexual harassment can occur in any job, but certain aspects of the fund-raising profession make it more likely. For one thing, women now dominate the profession. Three-fourths of the 30,000 members of the Association of Fundraising Professionals are female.
In many cases, those women are appealing to older, more powerful men for large donations. To succeed, fund raisers must build long-term relationships with donors. And they often visit donors in their homes or meet them in social settings where alcohol and personal information are freely exchanged.
To be sure, unwelcome sexual advances are not a daily occurrence for most fund raisers. But the problem happens often enough that fund raisers and the organizations that employ them should have better guidance on what they can do to prevent and deal with harassment, says Polly Aris Stamatopoulos, a Washington consultant to nonprofit organizations.
Ms. Stamatopoulos says she has personally rejected inappropriate sexual requests from donors and observed several incidents in which other donors or trustees made sexual overtures toward fund raisers she supervised. People who raise money for a living, she said, should be required to take “a class in the sexual politics of fund raising.”
The Association of Fundraising Professionals does not offer such training routinely, but it adopted a “fair behavior policy” in 2005 to protect its own workers and people involved in its chapters from any form of sexual harassment.
‘An X on Your Head’
Still, the subject of harassment is so difficult for most fund raisers to discuss that very few of the more than 20 people who told The Chronicle they had faced the problem were willing to allow their names to be used.
“It is a disempowering experience,” said one woman, explaining her decision to remain anonymous. “I do not want to publicly acknowledge weird experiences in my career. It puts an X on your head. And I do not want people to think I brought it on myself.”
Despite their reluctance, nearly every one of the fund raisers who talked to The Chronicle said they wanted to speak about their experience in hopes that doing so would prompt more discussion about how to handle unwelcome sexual overtures.
Most of the examples The Chronicle uncovered involved women harassed by male donors, trustees, or grant makers, but two men said they had been victims of unwanted advances.
One of them, a Tennessee fund raiser who spoke on the condition that neither he nor his employer at the time be named, recalls a female donor he had visited many times. One evening she invited him to dinner at her club to discuss a large gift; at the end of the evening, he escorted the donor home, and she invited him in.
“She had never been inappropriate in the past, so I thought it was an innocent invitation,” he says. But when the donor started lighting candles and then sat down on the arm of his chair, leaning over him suggestively, he says that he realized she was trying to seduce him and abruptly excused himself.
Another fund raiser in the San Francisco Bay Area who requested that her identity be withheld says she is considering quitting her new job over a “power imbalance” with an official who makes grants for a local corporation.
She had met him in a previous job, but now that she is approaching him for a large gift, he wants more than a professional relationship, she says.
“A relationship I’d considered mutually respectful was instantly reduced to a ‘sexual strings attached’ power struggle,” she says. “What leverage to demand appropriate treatment do I have when he’s the one with the money and I’m the one with my hand out? As the only fund raiser on staff, you do not want to go to the board and say you are in danger of not landing the biggest gift.”
The fund raiser says that she gently rebuffed the grant maker’s advances, pointing out that they both are married, but he continues to ask her out. She adds: “I have felt unbelievably alone and unsure how to deal with this situation.”
Not Much Guidance
Other fund raisers who have endured unwanted sexual advances say they were surprised how little guidance is available about how to deal with the problem.
“I remember looking online to try and find some wisdom from veteran fund raisers, and I couldn’t find anything,” says a 30-year-old fund raiser who asked that her name be withheld. She says that she was asked to seek donations from an older man who has provided millions of dollars to her institution.
After she had met with the donor several times, he asked her to go away with him, made other inappropriate gestures, and bombarded her with daily e-mails and phone calls, the fund raiser recalls. “He began to take up so much of my time that the rest of my portfolio of donors was suffering.”
She says the donor ignored her repeated efforts to curb his amorous attentions, even becoming “angry and defensive.”
But she put up with his behavior for more than two years, she says, because “my newness to the field and youth impacted how I handled the relationship. I was proving myself professionally. I wanted to keep raising as much money as possible.”
In hindsight, she adds, “this was not the right thing to do, but it is hard when this kind of thing gets in the way of your performance.”
When the fund raiser decided she could no longer interact with the donor, she told her supervisors. They readily agreed to assign another fund raiser to work with the man, but the donor has made no further gifts to the institution since the reassignment.
Charity’s Responsibility
While some charities have formal policies to help fund raisers and other employees deal with sexual harassment, many charity workers find that the policies do not solve the problem.
A fund raiser in her 20s named Dana, who requested that her last name be withheld, says that the California organization where she works has such a policy and has provided training to help its employees recognize and protect themselves from sexual harassment.
Still, Dana says, she has been the target of suggestive comments and was once offered unsolicited sexual advice from a donor old enough to be her grandfather. Another time, she says, she managed a charity event at the home of a donor who handed her a nametag and told her to wear it “to give everyone an excuse to look at my chest.”
She says that because she and another colleague brought up those and other incidents at a recent staff meeting, the organization’s top executives are considering asking board members to sign an agreement to abide by a “conduct policy” that explicitly bans sexual harassment and other inappropriate behavior.
While such measures will not prevent every sexual overture a fund raiser may encounter on the job, nonprofit organizations need to be prepared to take action when their employees face harassment, says Noreen Farrell, managing attorney at Equal Rights Advocates, a San Francisco nonprofit group that helps women fight bias.
Under federal law, Ms. Farrell says, employers can be held liable if they are aware that clients or customers are harassing employees and the organization does not try to stop it.
The same standards would apply to nonprofit organizations if donors, trustees, or other outsiders are harassing fund raisers, Ms. Farrell says.
“The employer should step in rather than put the employee in this uncomfortable position,” she says. “Once the group has been made aware of it, they need to intervene.”
To help nonprofit organizations and their employees handle inappropriate sexual behavior, professional organizations for fund raisers should offer training to their members, says Ms. Cantor.
“We come in contact with hundreds of donors, and the odds are that this will come up somehow in your career,” she says. “This calls for us to stand up to this and say that we need more instruction about what to do about it.”
