Why Are Nonprofits Still So white? - Elevate Post

By Allison Gilbreath and Chloe Edwards

The content in this blog post is a reflection of the personal and professional experiences of the writers. The views and opinions of the guest contributors are their own and not affiliated with their employer.

Blog Series

Elevation is a series of blog posts being presented elevating community voices from People of Color. Last week in the wake of unrest in our city and after making a public statement we decided to take more concrete action steps to dismantling white supremacy. We invited individuals, without stipulations or rules, to submit writing and we paid them for their time. We decided to offer our blog as space for them to share a message of their choosing in response to the 2020 Racial Uprising happening in the wake of 400 years of discrimination and the recent death of George Floyd in Minnesota and locally the death of Marcus David-Peters among other countless black lives taken. We value the energy they put into their writing. To contact the authors, please see the end of the piece.

People of color, particularly Black people, have similar educational backgrounds, skills, and aspirations as their white counterparts, so why are nonprofits still so white? According to Race to Lead, the percentage of people of color seated in the Executive Director/CEO role has remained under 20% for the last 15 years. This week, we experienced the largest civil rights movement in our lifetime, but we continue to be challenged by racism within our sector. How? The answer dates back to the origins of nonprofits in this country.

The History of Nonprofits

It is challenging to summarize the vast history of the nonprofit sector. However, its origin dates back to the Progressive Era (1920s) when social activism collided with vast wealth growth in the United States. Organizations, such as the YMCA, were created during this time but were often led by white women connected to wealthy families. The ways issues, such as poverty, substance use disorder, and child abuse were addressed from their world views.

As the United States entered the 1940s and World War II, people found it increasingly important to band together to serve communities in need. During that time, the United States government increased their involvement in the nonprofit sector by providing significant grant funding and contracts to organizations such as the Red Cross, who were largely white led due to Jim Crow laws and other policies that made Black Americans second-class citizens. While these organizations served their communities in some important ways, it did not address the underlying racist policies Black people faced and often perpetuated them. For example, NPR reports Black families that were prohibited from buying homes in the suburbs in the 1940s, '50s, and even into the '60s, because of explicitly bias policies referred to as redlining by the Federal Housing Administration, gained none of the equity appreciation white people gained.

As the country moved into the 1960s and 70s, the U.S. experienced both the Civil Rights Movement and the creation of the IRS tax code known as 501(c)3. The Civil Rights Movement exemplified that Black communities knew how to organize and serve their communities but were not given equal opportunity to do so. Black families continued to lack access to public education as many white families fled to the suburbs, which is referred to as “white flight.” School districts, like Prince Edward County in Virginia, chose to close their schools entirely instead of integrating them.

In this era of the nonprofit sector, government programs and organizations made it more difficult to serve people of color by creating unnecessary guidelines to receive services. We continue to see the impacts of this in programs in use today, such as the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which creates a poverty cliff so steep that the program penalizes individuals as they strive towards economic self-sufficiency. While this is not a complete list of every historical marker that has played a role in why the nonprofit sector continues to be predominantly white, it  does help shed light on how we got here.

Racial Inequities in the Non-Profit Sector 

In order to understand the inequities that exist within the Non-Profit sector, we have to understand how they began. The White Savior Industrial Complex refers to the institutional merging of practices and processes that validate white privilege. Slavery is an example of this ideology. It reflects racial trauma that began over 400 years ago. In response to the race-based creation of privilege and oppression, slaveholders served as an intervention to provide basic needs and “humanization, civility, and morality” in exchange for the exploitation of labor. Following slavery, the White Savior Industrial Complex created institutions that were rewarded for “saving” the less fortunate while simultaneously engaging in policies and practices that maintain systems of oppression.

The belief that people of color need saving often disregards the potential people of color have to transform oppressive conditions within their own social context. A direct example of the social harm the White Savior Industrial Complex causes is the orphans taken from other countries from their parents to local agencies in order to meet the demands of western adoptive parents. Realistically, communities of color are well off without the interventions of white saviorship. For example, Black Wall Street portrays the potential Black communities of color have. It was the wealthiest community in the United States, but in 1921 it was destroyed by the Tulsa Race Massacre and burned down by white mobs. Black and brown people know the potential of their communities, but this potential is often limited by the perpetuation of privilege within institutions. With cultural underrepresentation, there is still a long way to go. Nonprofits do not adequately represent the communities they serve from the top down. While, often well intentioned, their practices are informed by the biases that, in parallel, perpetuate white privilege. For example, in 2018, the Center for Effective Philanthropy reported, “55% of nonprofit CEOs believe that it is very or extremely important for the senior leadership team to reflect the population the organization seeks to serve, but only 23% believe their senior leadership team actually reflects the population they seek to serve very or extremely well.” One of the biggest problems in the nonprofit sector is that leadership does not portray the racial and ethnic diversity of America. Instead, if diverse at all, frontline workers are often at the forefront as people of color. What is being done to change this?

 The Black Lives Matter Movement and Its Personal Impact on Us

Allison’s Story:

I have worked in the nonprofit sector for eleven years, which is the entirety of my professional career. I received my masters in social work in 2016 from VCU where we learned extensively about trauma. I never expected the death of George Floyd to trigger me the way it did. For the past several years, I have been raising red flags about white dominant culture that permeates within our sector. However, my voice was not listened to, and I have experienced sadness, anger, and grief as a result. I was labelled as angry, intense, impatient, all of which are adjectives often associated with Black women. In the nonprofit sector, we are working to improve the lives of the most marginalized populations, often people of color, but we lack representation to do so. When I attended meetings, I would take mental notes of how many people of color were in the room, and it was often only me. I had to ask myself before I spoke up in meetings, “Is my question worth the risk of being overlooked because I am Black?” While working on the creation of a strategic plan, my colleagues and I were asked to do a journaling activity where we wrote out some of the race/equity issues we were dealing with personally at work. The activity fell flat, because there was no time to discuss what was written, reconcile them, or hear an apology. We came and left with our hurt feelings. Our key lesson learned was that sharing experiences that deal with race is triggering, and if we do not do the work to acknowledge these feelings, we end up causing more harm to ourselves and others. People of color in the nonprofit sector are often told that this is just how it is, so they  learn to play the game. I want this sector to change. I want there to be more leadership opportunities, not just internships for people of color. I want other people experiencing racism or microaggressions in the workplace to know that they are not alone and we do not have to remain silent about it.

Chloe’s Story:

I have worked in the nonprofit field for six years. My education includes my completion of the Minority Research and Law Institute at Southern University, and in August 2020, I will complete my Masters of Public Policy at Liberty University where my research has been concentrated in racial equity and trauma. As a survivor of childhood trauma and survivor of PTSD, I came into the nonprofit sector with a strong desire to make a difference in the lives of individuals who share similar experiences. While I am resilient, the death of George Floyd contributed to layers and layers of already existing trauma. As a result, I found myself drowning in desensitization, sadness, heartbreak, exhaustion, and rage in the days that followed. I had flashbacks of George Floyd using his last breaths to state, “I can’t breathe” and then flashbacks of Eric Garner iterating, “I can’t breathe.” I found myself experiencing symptoms of PTSD. As a Black woman, I am often immersed in spaces where I do not see myself represented and put into predicaments where I have to decide to speak up when witnessing just plain racism. While my hard work is always needed, it is often taken advantage of and underappreciated. I recall memories and conversations where I have been told, “You’re quite impressive - for your age,” “There are hundreds of other people that can do your job,” “You are unapproachable,” “I asked myself, “Does she ever smile,” “You’re angry, aren’t you?” When another injustice for the Black community presents itself, I am told that I should be grateful that I am asked what I think about it. I have sat in conversations about bringing my whole self to work and in the same week, been told, “We dress for comfort. You do not want people to pay more attention to what you are wearing than what you are saying.” I have to be mindful of how I speak, what I wear, how I regulate racism, and who I am as a whole person. These memories carry the wounds of microaggressions. I find myself in predicaments where it takes more than one Black person or ally to amplify my voice to make it validated, seen, and hopefully heard. I envision a world where biases, racism, and representation are not just a topic of conversation but instead, an institutional intolerance. 

What Nonprofits Can Do Now 

Nonprofits should transform all internal and external policies and practices into a model that is explicitly anti-racist. While many organizations are shifting to the external practices of racial equity, this should begin internally and from the top down. It is worth making the investment to bring on an external race/equity consultant to work with the staff and board in order to move the organization forward. Before hiring a consultant, be sure to ask them what their own race/equity journey has been and if they cannot answer that, do not hire them. Ask a consultant to help your organization create a race equity task force and develop a way to evaluate staff in their annual review on their work around these issues. 

Nonprofits need to take a critical look at their hiring practices and ask critical questions as to why they struggle to find qualified candidates of color such as, “Is the pay so low that a person could not live off of it as a single person? or “Do we tend to only interview people who are from our own circles?” Organizations should adopt a policy to pay their interns because unpaid internships leave students of color left out as they are often supporting themselves through school. 

When staff raise concerns that they are being treated unfairly or are experiencing microaggressions because of their race, believe them. Rather than suggesting they are misunderstood, acknowledge that whether it was intentional or not, the impact it has made is real. In addition, acknowledge that the skills and expertise staff of color bring to an organization are different and should be compensated as such.

White allies can support their Black colleagues by acknowledging when white people take a person of color's ideas, for example, you can say “Yes, that is exactly what X just said.”

As your organization takes steps to address these issues, staff should be allowed time to step away from their work to recover. Discussing experiences within the workplace that were hurtful is exhausting, and staff will need time before they jump right back into the work. Staff who have endured negative experiences for a prolonged period of time may need more paid time off.

 Require a commitment from all staff to transforming the organization, and make a transition plan for staff who can no longer remain at the organization.

Our hope is that as our country mourns the unjust deaths of Black people, the nonprofit sector will take a step back and consider how they should respond. In doing so, they should start with an inward analysis.

About the Authors

Allison Gilbreath is a policy analyst for foster care with Voices for Virginia’s Children, the commonwealth’s only independent, multi-issue child policy and advocacy organization and an Adjunct Professor for the School of Social Work at VCU. She can be reached at allison@vakids.org

Chloe Edwards is support staff to the Campaign for a Trauma-Informed Virginia at Voices for Virginia’s Children and founder of The See Me #iamhere Campaign at www.SeeMeiamhere.org. She can be reached at chloe@vakids.org.