Nonprofits Don’t Really Care about Diversity
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About a dozen people sent me the link to The Voice of Nonprofit Talent: Perceptions of Diversity in the Workplace, a new study produced by Commongood Careers and Level Playing Field Institute. I didn’t read it right away because honestly, most reports about diversity in the nonprofit sector pretty much say the same damn thing and are a total waste of funder’s money.
Does any of this sound familiar?
Nonprofit staff isn’t very diverse. Nonprofit boards aren’t very diverse. Nonprofits need more diversity. Nonprofits don’t know where to find people of color. Nonprofits can’t seem to attract young people. Or gay people. Blah blah blah. Whatevs.
But this study is a little different. Yes, the study focuses on ethnic and racial diversity in the nonprofit workplace, but it’s the first report I’ve seen that doesn’t focus on the fact that nonprofits are ruled by white people.
Instead, it examines the repercussions of what happens when organizations do nothing to change this reality.
I’m Not Making This Up
The numbers don’t lie, people. The research says it better than I ever could. From the Commongood Careers report:
Today’s nonprofit employees are approximately 82 percent white, 10 percent African- American, five percent Hispanic/Latino, three percent other, and one percent Asian or Pacific Islander. The gap in representation is more pronounced in nonprofit governance, where only 14 percent of board members are people of color. Similarly, in specialized functions such as development, less than six percent of roles are filled by people of color. When examining organizational leadership, the gap persists. According to the 2006 report by the Nonprofit Leadership Alliance (formerly American Humanics), up to 84 percent of nonprofits are led by whites, and 9.5 out of 10 philanthropic organizations are led by whites.
Of course, there is much more anecdotal evidence from my peers which bear this out even further, but there’s a start for folks who don’t see why this is such a big deal.
Good Intentions Are Not Enough
The researchers asked 1,600 nonprofit professionals nationwide what they thought about this whole diversity thing and the response was clear: Nonprofit employees believe that good intentions are not enough when it comes to staff diversity.
More specifically, the study showed that most nonprofit employees perceive that their employers claim to value building diverse and inclusive organizations, but that they do little to back up that claim.
What?! Nonprofits are not walking that warm and fuzzy “everyone is welcome” talk? (Um, how about NO.)
Where it really gets interesting is that the report reveals perceptions of diversity and inclusiveness play a significant role in recruitment and retention of employees, particularly employees of color.
“Until the disconnect between value and action is addressed, there will continue to be negative implications for attracting and retaining diverse employees across the nonprofit sector,” said Level Playing Field Institute Executive Director Robert Schwartz, Ed.D. “Diversity commitments must move beyond a tagline on a website, and must be followed by specific and strategic actions implemented in order to ensure that diversity becomes a reality within organizations.”
This is why even if recruitment is successful, retention can be a challenge. Once people of color join the staff of a nonprofit, they need to feel included and supported within the organization – or else they feel like they’ve been duped. Hustled. Hoodwinked.
The Disconnect
- Nearly 90% of employees believe that their organization values diversity. However, more than 70% believe that their employer does not do enough to create a diverse and inclusive work environment.
- More than half of employees of all races – and 71% of employees of color — attempt to evaluate a prospective employer’s commitment to diversity during the interview process.
- More than 35% of people of color who indicated that they examine diversity during the hiring process report having previously withdrawn candidacy or declined a job offer due to a perceived lack of diversity and inclusiveness.
The Repercussions
As the study points out, the disconnect between the value placed on diversity and the actions taken to diversify nonprofit organizations perpetuate a cycle with three key negative outcomes (taken directly from the report):
1. Inability to attract employees of color
In an attempt to create more diverse staffs and boards, many prospective employers seek to recruit diverse employees. As the survey highlights, the top indicator of an organization’s commitment to diversity is the presence of diverse staff at all levels of the organization. If an organization is unable to show diversity on its team, prospective candidates of color may be less likely to join that organization. This is manifested by candidates withdrawing during the interview process, or even choosing not to apply at all.
2. Increased employee dissatisfaction
If diversity is not represented on staff, employees of color may experience a sense of tokenism or alienation in the workplace. Even within organizations that have multicultural staff, many employees of color have reported perceiving bias in the form of lack of professional development or upward mobility opportunities. Employees that perceive even subtle forms of bias—such as feelings like they are treated differently than their colleagues —are more likely to feel demoralized which can have negative repercussions on employee productivity, output, and retention.
3. Inability to retain top talent
As the economy begins to improve, the sector will inevitably experience shifts in employee retention, as well as more competition between organizations to attract talent. For professionals of color who place a premium on the importance of diversity and inclusiveness in their career choices, this could mean higher attrition rates amongst previously dissatisfied employees who have been “sitting tight.” As employees leave, organizations experience the financial costs of attrition—up to 150 percent of an employee’s salary—as well as collateral damage to remaining employees’ morale and productivity.
The report also outlines five strategies for organizations to shift from just valuing diversity to actually building and sustaining diversity, which are interesting to think about, though things you’ve heard before: (1) open conversations about race that include executive leadership, (2) effective communications about diversity commitments that include measured results, (3) building partnerships and networks that facilitate effective recruiting, (4) a hiring process free from subtle bias, and (5) taking the time to develop, mentor and promote a diverse staff.
OK. The tools are out there, freely available. The solutions and strategies are not hidden treasure in the depths of the Atlantic. Which leads me to the conclusion that nonprofits aren’t challenged by the “how” of diversity. It’s just that they don’t really care.
Download the full report here: www.cgcareers.org/diversityreport.pdf
Your Take?
I’d love to hear your comments on this issue. Should nonprofits just stop talking the diversity talk if they aren’t willing to walk the diversity walk? Why can’t organizations just be honest in saying they will never prioritize diversity, no matter how many reports get written? (Seems like it would sure free up a lot of HR’s time and make-believe attention being paid to this issue. And future employees wouldn’t be disappointed when they find out that all the warm and fuzzy language about diversity and inclusion they saw on the organization’s website was nothing but lip service.)
Mexico, The Kardashians, and Thanksgiving- Tyler Mostul (LA)
http://tamostul.wordpress.com/2011/11/24/mexico-the-kardashians-and-thanksgiving/
When I was in high school, my youth group went on a mission trip to build houses for people in Tijuana, Mexico. We did this on Spring Break, and we did this for two years. The first year we went, I remember during our debriefing discussions we would discuss what we learned during our time amongst people who own less possessions than we did. We would generally share some form of the same thing, “I just really realize how much I have, and how I take things for granted. I need to be more thankful.” The second year was not nearly as impactful, because I was just reminded again of how I need to be more thankful for the vast blessings God had given me, and not them. My sister occasionally watches the show, Keeping Up With the Kardashians, I cannot help but watch sometimes. In one episode Bruce Jenner thought his daughters were spoiled, and he wanted them to see people who were not. Again, for the sole purpose of them to hopefully become more thankful for what they had. The wealthy and glamorous Kardashian daughters visited a homeless shelter for women and children where they interacted with people and played games with the kids. It was touching. At the end of the episode, they left the shelter touched by the stories of hope and courage of the women and children they had met, and they were also reminded how incredibly blessed they were. They left feeling more thankful than ever that they were not living the lives of the people they had met. What does it mean to be thankful? Does it mean to simply be grateful that our lives do not suck as much as somebody else’s? Or does genuine thankfulness call us to something deeper, something that actually brings equality amongst economic injustice? During this time of Thanksgiving, many people decide they want to tell each other what they are thankful for. Some common things are: family, friends, living in the United States, having a job, food, health, shelter, spouse, and God. I think that all of these things can be very deserving of our thankfulness, and we should be reminded during this time of Thanksgiving of these wonderful gifts. One of the things that I am really thinking about during this season of thanksgiving is that there are people who really don’t have much to be thankful for, if anything at all. It is true, I talk to them every day at work. What am I to do with this reality? There are people who have no family that love them, no friends who care. Who have been screwed by the systems and institutions in the United States, and have no job (many who I cannot imagine ever working or anyone wanting to hire them due to their mental health condition). The food they get is the left over, cheap, nutrient deficient food that people or agencies give them. They are in terrible health and are constantly not feeling well due to the lack of food, or low quality of food they eat. They have no shelter according to our definition, and their best hope at shelter are the emergency shelters that are unsafe; many would rather be on the streets than be in them. They don’t have a spouse who loves them, and their experience of God has been primarily negative mainly due to the pain they have experienced in their life. For some, the social workers who help them get into housing are the closest people they have to a friend or family. A thankfulness that has no active response to this painful truth is not thankfulness, but oppression with the mask of praise to God. I do not wish to make it seem as though the masses that are struggling with poverty and homelessness have nothing to be thankful for in their lives. This would be a very ignorant, arrogant, and oppressive response. I just want to point out that not everybody can easily name things when asked what they are thankful for. For some, Thanksgiving day can be a day of pain and sorrow as they reflect on the situation they find themselves in. I do not want to be someone who tries my best to ignore these people, or at best realizes their pain and turns it into making me feel better about my life. I need to realize that in many ways my extreme thankfulness can cause the depression and misery of another who cannot imagine having a family and friends who love them. Giving thanks to God for what we have, placed in the right context can be a beautiful act of praise to God. However, as I discussed in my last blog (I Am Thankful For Your Misery), there can also be times when giving thanks can do nothing more than further oppression and systemic violence against the poor. What we need is a holistic and active response to thanksgiving. Holistic in the sense that our thanksgiving doesn’t come at the expense of another’s misery, and active in the sense that it leads us to attempt to live in solidarity with those who have been at the oppressed end of the many things we deem “blessings.” The act of thanksgiving can either lead us to do nothing but feel good about how much better our lives are than others, or it can lead us to acts of compassion and justice for those who have not been treated well by their friends, family, and/or country. Thankfulness for blessings commonly leads to demonizing (viewing or treating another as less than human) those who are not blessed in the same ways that we are. For example those who live in houses tend to demonize those who live on the streets. People who are not addicted to drugs tend to demonize those who are. People who live in nice neighborhoods tend to demonize those who live in poor neighborhoods. The opposites of all of these can be true as well. This is done either outwardly through obvious language and action, or more subtly by just doing nothing to question or change this inequality. When thanksgiving doesn’t lead to greater love for suffering humanity, it is useless and a waste of time. We are just ignorantly reassuring ourselves that God has blessed us, while we ignore those God created who are suffering around us. Like I shared about my trip to Mexico, my acts of thanksgiving did nothing to question the injustice around me. I did not wander why it was that the people I was around were living in poverty, I did not question the economic systems that create such inequality. I was just happy that I lived in the U.S. and that God had blessed me in a way that God hadn’t blessed them. The Kardashians were not filled with a desire to stop the injustice of mothers and children living on the streets, they were simply filled with thankfulness. Being thankful that they didn’t have to live that kind of life. It is indeed healthy and honorable to thank God for the life that we have, but we must recognize that for many of us the blessings we have received have come at the expense of somebody else that doesn’t have as much as we do. Holistic and active thankfulness would not celebrate this. May our thankfulness not lead us to feeling good about how blessed we are compared to those who are suffering near and far, but may our thankfulness lead us to question why people are suffering. May our thankfuless lead us to question our own benefit from economic inequality, and may it lead us to change our lives so that we may work to bring the Kingdom of God to earth as it is in Heaven, where all are equal and none are blessed more than another.
We are not poor.
Johanna Bontrager is serving as a year long volunteer in DOOR Denver’s Dwell Program. This was posted on November 5 2011. Johanna blogs at http://www.johannaindenver.blogspot.com/
Titled: “ We’re not poor”
We’re not poor.
As a community, we receive $425 per month for food. That means $85 per person per month or about $2.80 per day. We have combined our resources and shop together, cook together and eat together. The standard for food stamps is about $134 per person per month, or $4.50 per day. We get 62% of what we would if we were on food stamps. Our $85 per month has to cover food, basic house needs (cleaning supplies, toilet paper, etc).
But we are not poor.
We each get a $100 stipend per month. (It’s $94.35 after “they” take out “stuff”.) That is all the spending money we receive. That has to cover any social expenses, personal hygiene and any personal bills.
But we are not poor.
Only one of us has a vehicle. We must rely on the bus, our bikes or our feet for transportation about the city. We do get a bus pass every month, but sometimes a trip that should take 45 minutes on the bus takes almost 2 hours. And there’s nothing you can do about it.
But we are not poor.
We have $180 extra in our food account after 2 months. I have enough money in my personal account to enjoy spin and yoga classes at a local gym. Financially speaking, most of all, we don’t have to pay bills. The $100 we get each month is ALL fun money. Our rent, utilities, cable AND internet is all covered for us. Any maintenance issues that come up in our duplex are passed on to other people to fix and pay for. We have health insurance and steady jobs. We are pretty well protected from emergencies and unexpected financial burdens. We are not poor.
Financial obligations aside, we have each other. There are 5 other people available to help with just a phone call. We not only have food to eat, but we have people to eat with. Beyond our own little Wolff Den, we each have family and friends that support us and worry about us “living in the big city”. We have church families here in Denver and back home. We have a puppy to snuggle with. We are not poor. We rich with blessings and an abundance of love.
A visit to Occupy Chicago
Originally posted at http://young.anabaptistradicals.org/2011/09/27/a-visit-to-occupy-chicago/#comments
Yesterday I went downtown to visit the new Occupy Chicago encampment in front of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. The loose gathering of activist began their occupation on Friday and continued through a raining weekend. They were inspired by the Occupy Together movement which started at Wall Street in New York two weeks ago.
On a rainy Monday morning I found them still enthusiastically yelling slogans up through the vast canyon walls shaped on one side by the Chicago Board of Trade building and the Reserve bank on the other. Here’s a slideshow of the photos I took:
Click the full screen button in the lower right hand corner for best viewing.
I’m still pondering this Occupy Together movement. It’s easy for me to get excited about people standing up to corporations, but I also am conscious of the dynamic that Jonathan Matthew Smucker highlights in this thoughtful article. In short, questions the tactic of Occupy Wall Street and points out its lack of focus on context, organizing and leadership. His description of the movement that came out of the Seattle protests in 1999 ring true to my experience:
If your big introduction to collective action is a moment like November 30 in Seattle, it’s quite understandable, however mistaken, to try exclusively to replicate such magic. It’s like arriving at a farm during the harvest. Wow, all this delicious food is everywhere, and all you have to do is pluck it from the vine! You just want to keep harvesting and harvesting — why would anyone try anything else?! That the harvest was only possible through planting, watering, and diligent tending (including weeding!) escapes your notice. And this isn’t entirely your fault; if the farm had more resources, your elders would be taking the time to give you a better orientation.
On the other hand, I know how powerful apathy is. If the Occupy Together movement can crack that shell wide open, who knows what is possible?
And then of course there is the wild card of Anonymous who claims to have identified the police offer responsible for macing the women in this video:
It seems to me that Anonymous throws a significant unknown disruptive factor into the mix that Smucker may not have accounted for since there isn’t a clear historical precedent. In the protests after Seattle, police officers operated with impunity. That impunity may be crumbling.
“Revolution is fun, wage slavery is boring.” the young man at the Reserve bank yesterday yelled. I found myself feeling the generation gap as I pondered this slogan, but I admit there’s also part of me that hopes they will yell loud enough to wake us all up.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 27th, 2011 at 12:54 pm by TimN and is filed under Economics, Wealth, activism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Urban Ministry Gathering at Pittsburgh 2011
Are you headed to the MCUSA convention in Pittsburgh? If so, consider joining us for the following event:
Urban Ministry Tour Review: Pittsburgh Edition
When: Thursday, July 7th 4:45pm-6:00pm
Where: Room 328
Urban ministry practitioners and participants from the Urban Leaders Summit held in Kansas City are invited to join together for a time of networking and vision casting. How do we take the lessons learned from the Urban Ministry Listening Tour and begin to strengthen the work or our urban congregations, pastors, and leaders?
In an effort to better serve urban congregations, Mennonite Church USA denominational ministry and Mennonite Mission Network commissioned an eight-month listening tour. From January to September of 2010, Hugo Saucedo, the Mennonite Voluntary Service director; Glenn Balzer, the director for DOOR (Discovering Opportunities for Outreach and Reflection); and Marie Voth, the DOOR assistant; visited pastors and urban leaders in 18 locations across the country, culminating Nov. 17-19, 2010 in an Urban Leaders Summit in Kansas City.
The tour began in January 2010 and wrapped up in September 2010. It included visits with pastors and urban leaders from the following 18 locations/regions:
- · Philadelphia, PA · Phoenix, AZ · Washington DC/ Baltimore, MD
- · Chicago, IL · Los Angeles, CA · San Francisco, CA
- · Raleigh/ Durham, NC · Atlanta, GA · Minneapolis/ St. Paul, MN
- · Seattle, WA · Dallas, TX · San Antonio, TX
- · Tampa/ Sarasota, FL · New York City, NY · Cleveland, OH
- · Denver, CO · Portland, OR · Hampton/ Newport News, VA
The recommendations from the tour included:
• Developing a two- to four-person listening team to further strengthen relationships and help urban congregations network.
• Creating a variety of opportunities for urban people working on similar issues to gather for focused conversations.
• Developing a clear path for potential urban congregations and other groups to enter conferences and the denomination.
• Providing marketing and communication resources that recognize that some congregations may not want to use the name Mennonite.
All urban leaders are invited to join us to discuss our next steps for networking and collaboration within Mennonite Church USA?
Connecting with the Homeless
by Robert Morrison
I love homeless people. I love them all.
I wish that I didn’t have to; I wish that there were none to love. I get angry that people, thousands upon thousands of people, go to sleep each night without shelter. I get angrier that our world is a place that not only allows homelessness to occur but that it is also a place that convinces so many of these people that homelessness is not only better than ‘home-more-ness’, but that homelessness is what they deserve.
Sometimes it’s difficult to live here in Los Angeles because, any time I leave my house, it’s virtually guaranteed that I am going to see someone suffering and, sometimes, I don’t even have to leave. On the job, it’s easy to get frustrated with our clients. Lately, there seems to be an influx of people in our shelter who can’t follow the rules. The rules aren’t hard, at least not for someone like you or me. They’re simple things like respecting employees and other clients or not bringing illegal drugs on the premises. It’s heartbreaking to watch someone escorted out of shelter by the police because they were threatening other residents or sexually harassing employees. It’s heartbreaking because you know that he’ll be sleeping on the streets tonight.
It’s hard to have compassion for a man like this who’s screaming and spitting all of the worst names at you or your colleagues as he is forcibly removed. The only way I can have the patience to deal with people like this is to lean on the never-ending patience of God. I have to believe that this man can be changed. After all, he once acted in movies next to Sinatra and Brando and I can order his Grammy-winning album on Amazon. I have to believe that he’ll be back one day and that he’ll be better and nicer.
Off the job, it’s difficult for me not to stop and talk to every person I see or, at least, buy them a snack. I struggle with the fact that I don’t have enough time or resources to do this. Whenever I see someone who is homeless, the first thing I feel is fear. It’s not a fear for my safety, but a fear that maybe this night is the person’s last or that, if I walk by without acknowledging his existence, it will just drive him one step deeper inside a mind warped by drugs, mental illness, social isolation, or a combination of it all. (And, then, I have to ask myself is that perception is just my own prejudice?)
This week, in my Bible study, we talked about how the mature Christian feels tension and uses that tension to grow in faith and wisdom. While I won’t claim maturity, that is tension that I feel on the surface every day. Am I supposed to talk to this person? Do I have the time? Is this important right now?
Often the people I see on the job and off are what my co-workers jokingly call ‘bomb blast victims.’ (Humor is a great method for coping.) These people are dirty. They’ve got hair that’s shoulder length and twisted into dreads by the outdoors and entwined with trash from bits of paper to food or anything else. They trudge along, usually wearing a combination of two or three mismatched coats, and torn jeans, often over-sized. Their skin is usually soiled with black streaks like those on your mechanic’s hands and arms and they inch along, head down and shuffling their feet, weight shifted on their toes and bending their knees less than a person in normal stride. When you get close, they smell like something between stale urine and old beer. If you speak to them, they often refuse to respond or seem unable. When I see these people, I am dumbfounded.
What do you think when you see someone like that? Honestly? I know that I think that I’m better than him, that he has likely done something to deserve this. The darkest part of me believes that he does. I think that I must save him.
Paul writes in his first letter to the Corinthians (3:21-23) that everything is ours, everything, and that we are Christ’s. This reminds me that we are all the same. Compassion, I think, is the acknowledgment of this fact. It’s the realization that my bomb blast victim’s suffering is my own my suffering and that he is my equal. It’s remembering that my responsibility is not saving him, but to include him, to pull him closer with the love of God.
Father Gregory Boyle, founder of Homeboy Industries, reminds me in Tattoos on the Heart that we are to radically include those who are excluded and leave Jesus to do the saving, much like the men who tore the roof off to lower the paralyzed man to Jesus to be healed. The men did not heal their friend. They just included him. They had compassion. Boyle reminds us, too, that Jesus didn’t just send money or chat with those on the outside, theses outcasts, the tax collectors, the prostitutes, and the lepers. He touched them, hugged them, kissed them, and dined with them. He included them.
And so, I struggle within myself to come from this place, where I am helping these people as my peers and equals, loving them and letting God direct their healing instead of a place where I am superior and I am saving them because, let’s face it, if it’s just me, I’m bound to fail and to fail spectacularly.
Robert Morrison is spending a year in the DOOR Hollywood Dwell program living in community and exploring urban ministry. He works at PATH. Robert also takes time to blog about his experiences here.
Defining Church
by Glenn Balzer
When does a gathering of people become more than a gathering? More specifically, when does a gathered group become a church? And who gets to define what a church should look like? How critical are committees and ordained staff in defining church?
According to scripture, when two or three are gathered Jesus is there. Not one word about a building committee, ordained bishops or youth ministry.
Have we made church too complicated?
At a practical level it makes sense to conduct ourselves decently and in order. It is empowering to have a set of rules. It also helps us to define who can be in and who is out.
The downside to tightly defined rules for what makes a church a church is that it leads to legalism. Jesus, the head of the church, was not known for being a legalist.
When we put the power to decide what makes a church a church in the hands of a committee, it is at best disempowering and at worst discouraging to new creative expressions of church.
Is there a downside to shifting the responsibility of defining church from conference (leadership) to the group requesting membership? I suspect this kind of shift would be empowering and freeing for everyone involved. Instead of having to insure that a procedure was followed, time would be spent listening to stories and figuring out how both sides can come together. Relationship would take precedence over procedure.
Having a more open approach to defining church has the potential to radically reshape denominations. This may make some people uncomfortable. That said I believe the benefits far outweigh the costs.
Stability
by Krista Dutt
Two men are sharing stories about being married, struggling to be married, joys and problems with being a dad and traveling so much, what iPhone carrier is the best, and what’s great about living in Colorado. Good conversation.
Two women and a man talk about the helpfulness of Southwest Airlines compared to the horror stories of other major carriers that they share. They talk being at a live hockey game, the ability of tonic water to take out stains (a lesson an airline attendant taught the man), and the cold winters of Denver. I should have jumped in to share about Chicago winters at that point. Good conversation.
It’s fascinating to be listening to these fairly deep conversations on a Friday night flight while finishing The Wisdom of Stability: Rooting Faith in a Mobile Culture by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove. It feels a bit strange to be reading such a book on a plane. It feels a bit stranger to be a part of an organization that welcomes people to come spend a weekend, a week, a summer or a year and be reading this book.
While DOOR doesn’t necessarily allow for participants to build stability in the wonderful ways that Wilson-Hartgrove shares, DOOR has taught me the importance of building roots and a life of stability. If I don’t live and work in the neighborhood I am teaching about, can I really be authentic? Can I be a tree of support to others if I myself do not have a root system that goes way beneath the surface of small talk?[i] In my quest to know it all and see everything, have I given up deep rooted relationships?
Similarly to Wilson Hartgrove and others named in the book, my travel has at times made me long for putting down roots. My travel has made apparent that, without working on it, faith can become uprooted. Stability is hard. My hope is that while good conversations can happen on a plane, more and more of my good conversations happen on my front porch and in my neighborhood.
[i] Wilson Hartgrove uses a tree metaphor throughout the book, but describes the image in depth in the chapter “Roots of Love.”
Krista Dutt lives and works in Chicago IL. She is the National Program Director for DOOR.
The $1 Meal
By Austin Brown
After telling the teams of young adults that they each had only one dollar to find their dinner for the evening, I saw the faces of most students light up (though others were clearly terrified.) But they all were active participants, heading out in the cold together and then returning to the sanctuary with bellies not quite full.
When the first two teams returned, I allowed them to have a little discussion just to pass the time. I wasn’t surprised to find that one group had considered lying to try and evoke some pity from a restaurant owner, but couldn’t do it. However, I was shocked when the other group responded, “We did.” The second group was made up of three Caucasian women and one Mexican American man. The young man, Jose, told us of his plan- he went into McDonalds, claimed he had just been at the drive through window, and that the staff forgot to give him two Big Macs. The staff asked for a receipt, so Jose lied and said he left it in the car with his friends, but that he was in a hurry and just wanted the two burgers. Jose went so far with the lie that the manager of the McDonalds was called out. Jose continued to lie to the manager and got so far, that the only way to end the conversation was for him to huff and puff and storm out of the McDonalds.
Though I was more than a little disappointed that the group lied, especially after I told them to explain they are from DOOR if they were going to ask for anything from the community, I concluded that it was still a teachable moment because so often we demonize the poor for lying, especially homeless people. Yet two groups immediately started concocting a lie as soon as they only had $1!
When the other teams returned, we began to debrief the experience together. All the teams had an amazing experience, except one- Jose’s. Apparently as they were walking through the streets, some high school students saw them pretty far away but could nonetheless make out that they were white and shouted “Get out of our neighborhood, you white crackers. You don’t belong here.” The girls admitted to being a little shaken up by it but still processed the experience beautifully and didn’t consider it a horrible night (they even found some good in it). Jose didn’t comment except to say that the kids were yelling at the girls, not at him, because he isn’t white. The discussions continued and then it was Jose’s turn; he had been rather quiet during the debriefing.
“You have to tell me what you’re thinking,” I said. He folded himself up in his seat, tucked his feet underneath him and said, “I don’t mean to offend you, but I didn’t like this activity. I felt it was patronizing to the community that we would pretend to be homeless and ask other people for money. We, who go to a $40,000 per year school, should not be on the streets asking anyone for anything.” I admit was a little offended, but I was not going to take his feelings from him. I responded that I’d let him own his experience, but that there is one thing I wanted to make clear: I specifically told everyone to tell people they are from our organization, so that community members could make an informed decision about helping or not helping. No one was supposed to be tricking others.
After I finished, the group leader had a few things to say as well- mostly about not being able to deny how well the exercise worked for many people in the group. Jose readily agreed that he was glad that it worked well for some, but stood his ground. Then he seemed to go a little off topic. He responded, “I’m glad it opened the eyes of some people, but I just don’t think any of us can know what it’s like to be them, to be poor. And us trying to pretend is just wrong. You know, I’m Mexican American, obviously, and I go to a white school, and I have white friends, and I’m making it. I determined to do something with my life, and I am. You are making the line between “us” and “them” clear, because we could never understand, especially not in an hour and a half.”
Now I was confused. I couldn’t figure out how all of these statements fit together: pretending to be homeless, not letting being Mexican hold him back, driving a wedge between us and them… I understood everything he was saying as an individual conversation but I couldn’t figure out the connection between them and what all of that had to do with the $1 Meal!
So I went out on a limb. I said, “Jose, there is something I don’t understand here. Your group was the only group to try to con people out of food, and, in fact, it was you specifically who lied over and over again. There seems to be a disconnect here. How can the person who is morally opposed to this activity be the one person who lied repeatedly during it?”
He nodded slowly and then his life story came spilling out. “This is not my first time. I didn’t grow up in a rich house. My family was on food stamps, and sometimes we didn’t know where our next meal was going to come from. I have gone to sleep hungry. I have had to try and con people out of money or food so that we could eat. But I’m here now. I’m making something of my life. But even now, when I walk by old women they sometimes cross the street. I’ve seen people tuck their purses underneath them when I walk by.”
The group had clearly never heard this story before. And now I finally understood how all this fit together in Jose’s head. Being a minority among white people day in and day out. Truly having Caucasian friends and trying not to think about the differences in their backgrounds. And then came the $1 Meal. First Jose is identified as white because he is with white women. Something in him tells him that surely those kids know he is not white. And yet, these are his friends. And he is about to go lie for them, just as he would do years ago for his own family. But even as he walks through those doors, he believes they will never understand. His white friends will never understand what it is like to be poor, what it was like to be him growing up, what it is like to have to do what he is about to do: lie. Because you just can’t learn that in an hour and a half, in East Garfield Park, on a mission trip, when you go to a $40,000 school.
I understood where he was.
Jose is still talking to me even though he had a troubling experience, and even though I put him on the spot, and even though he spilled what he has clearly been keeping to himself. I hope the group will continue to acknowledge all that Jose is: a fellow student, but also a Mexican-American with a very different history from them. I hope that even Jose has learned more about himself and feels a new level of trust among his friends as a result of the $1 Meal, even if he didn’t like it.
Austin Brown is the DOOR City Director in Chicago. This story comes from a Discover group experience in Chicago.
