The Council for Advancement and Support of Education on Tuesday encouraged its members to commit to a “zero tolerance” pledge on sexual harassment and other inappropriate behavior, — suggesting that members should cut ties with anyone, including donors, who harasses staff members.
The pledge — released publicly during a panel discussion on harassment at the group’s annual leadership conference in New York — asks fundraisers, communications staff, alumni-relations professionals, and others to do all they can to prevent harassment “in any context” and to create environments where staff members feel comfortable reporting problems.
The move follows a push announced in March by the Association of Fundraising Professionals, which represents fundraisers at all nonprofits, to combat harassment and promote gender equity in the profession.
The CASE pledge was drafted in consultation with roughly 30 of the council’s members who work in fundraising, communications, and marketing at colleges and private schools. It comes at a time of enhanced awareness of sexual harassment, including in the fundraising profession.
A poll of more than 1,000 fundraisers commissioned by the Chronicle and the Association of Fundraising Professionals, which was released in April, found that one in four women fundraisers has faced harassment on the job.
“The whole #MeToo campaign has gained increasing prominence and volume in all of our lives in the recent months,” said Sue Cunningham, the council’s president. “And, as we know, the world of educational advancement, fundraising, marketing, communications, alumni engagement is not outside of this broader environment.”
The pledge, which is written in the first person, does not define which behaviors should be prohibited in the workplace. Instead, people vow through the pledge to take actions generally to prevent harassment and to encourage reporting of inappropriate behavior.
Zero Tolerance in Any Setting
Because much of the work that fundraisers and alumni-relations officials do is with donors and outside supporters — sometimes at bars, restaurants, and events — the pledge suggests that harassment should not be accepted anywhere, including outside of the office, said Rob Moore, vice president for marketing and communications at the council.
The Chronicle survey on harassment, which was conducted by Harris Poll in February, found that 65 percent of fundraisers who said they’d been harassed in their careers identified donors as the perpetrators in at least one incident — which suggests that a lot of inappropriate behavior against development staff may occur in informal environments.
“Nobody should feel harassed or threatened simply because [their] work takes place in more of the social than the business setting,” Moore said.
Other Groups’ Stance on Harassment
CASE isn’t the only fundraising organization that’s tackling harassment.
In addition to the gender-equity effort announced in March, the Association of Fundraising Professionals also used its annual meeting to promote a “zero tolerance” policy for sexual harassment. “No donation and no donor is worth someone’s respect or self-worth,” said Ann Hale, the association’s board chair and chief development officer of the Anchorage Museum.
The Association for Healthcare Philanthropy, a membership group of fundraisers for hospitals and other medical institutions, has not yet followed suit. “We recognize the value and importance of creating new policies to fight sexual harassment,” Allana Schwaab, a spokeswoman for the organization, wrote in an email. “Though it is on AHP’s agenda to address this in the future, we do not currently have a specific policy in place.”
A Welcome Pledge
CASE hopes that its pledge becomes an important part of advancement offices’ efforts to combat harassment, no matter who perpetrates it, Cunningham said. “In hearing the zero-tolerance pledge for the first time, I hope that people will absorb [it], think about it in the context of their own institutions, and think about how they would like to apply it in their contexts.”
The pledge will likely be embraced by many people in university development, said Beth Ann Locke, a fundraiser at Simon Fraser University, who’s written about sexual harassment at nonprofits.
Locke was heartened to see that the education association is asking people to take a clear stand against harassment — something that is especially critical for department heads, she said. “For leaders to say, ‘I have a commitment around this,’ I think, is an important step,” she said.
She was also pleased to see that the pledge included language on creating an “environment of mutual respect and safety” among employees — which many experts on harassment say is crucial to curbing problems. “So much of what doesn’t happen well comes from a place of lack of respect,” Locke said.
Further Work Needed
Colleges and other institutions that adopt the pledge should also be sure to hold training sessions on preventing abuse and inappropriate behavior — including, for instance, on how development staff members should set boundaries with supporters who act inappropriately, said Sarah Beaulieu, a former university fundraiser and founder of the Uncomfortable Conversation, a nonprofit that creates educational videos and other materials on sexual harassment. Leaders should also hold discussions that get employees thinking about why certain types of behavior might be problematic, she advises.
“Very quickly a zero-tolerance policy needs to move into ongoing commitments to building the skills that individuals and organizations need to create cultures that are free of sexual harassment and that are effective at preventing it,” she said.
Organizations that rely solely on a “zero-tolerance” pledge aren’t doing enough, Beaulieu said. “It doesn’t necessarily address the broader cultural problem” many organizations have, she said.
Young Fundraisers
As the harassment issue has become part of the national conversation, CASE has made a point in its own recent educational programs to bring up the importance of a zero-tolerance attitude against harassment, she said — particularly to early-career fundraisers, whom experts say tend to be most vulnerable.
Most universities and other institutions she’s talked to in recent months seem to be taking the problem seriously, Cunningham said. A bigger focus on the issue, she said, is “being very welcomed.”
Heather Joslyn contributed to this article.
