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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 Leaders Summit- Top 5 things you take from all this
What are the Top 5 things you take from reading all this, seeing the photographs, following twitter feeds? What is missing in the report? (posted below in sections)
What are the essential things you want to put into the conversation that is going on in the summit in Kansas City where the others are gathering today?
Seth McCoy Introduces the Topic- Manifestations of Church
Seth McCoy describes himself as a recovering evangelical. He described his journey into Purpose Driven ministries, on into 6000 member church, and then into a wall. The wall was reading “Resident Aliens” by Stanley Hawerwas. He said he wanted to be strange and show his life as being radically changed by his belief and following of Jesus Christ. His life changed. He went on to work with Greg Boyd of Woodland Hills. Now Seth leads Third Way Community in Minneapolis, MN.
Seth likened his story of being adopted into his earthly family as new folks are adopted into the church and the Kingdom of God. “Churches do not grow by having natural born children. All churches grown by adoption.” But like adopted children it does take a while to feel apart of things. Especially when we came from the non-denominational side of the church. “It is difficult to be a part of a denomination because when we felt like we don’t like things we just go and start a new church. So we need help, like new adopted babies.”
Seth described Third Way Community as a “Contrast Community” as described as Hawerwas. He said they choose the Mennonite way, the Third way. He said growing up he only knew of “Reformation people” and “Catholics” but no other option. He was excited to know of the AnaBaptists. He described that a community like theirs comes to faith from choice. They choose each piece of the theology as well as the desire for community with other like minded theologies.
________________________________________________________
The Urban Leaders Summit will now break into round table discussions again to take up these questions:
- How would you define church?
- How formal does a group need to be in order to be included?
- If a group doesn’t believe in God, but likes singing from the blue hymnal and potlucks can they be a Mennonite church?
- If a group doesn’t believe in God, but is active in social justice, peacemaking and community life, can they be a Mennonite church?
More photos- To catch up, read older posts
Still discussing while on 'break'
Good round table discussions
Discussion turns to INSTITUTION
Bishop Leslie Francisco and Nicole Francisco introduce the discussion on issues of INSTITUTION in the urban Mennonite Church. They began with an engaging video from beyondrelevance.com called “What if the Starbucks did Marketing like the Church?”
Bishop Leslie opens the discussion by asking the question what is our identity and how is it communicated. Does it mean the many posters and banners? Is it important that it is reflected in the name?
Nicole challenged the participants to consider how perception plays into our identity as the mennonite church. Marketing is the Management of Perception. How do we manage the many perceptions in our churches?
Environment plays another important role. The environment must be comfortable and welcoming. Environment must reflect the community you are in. The challenge comes to foster an environment that reflects who are but must be inviting.
We are addressing the issues of the institution. The statistics and facts are often repeated that the global mennonite church is surpassing the mennonite church here in North America. How do answer these questions of who we really are globally and theologically, but hold on to pieces that are only found in certain churches in the US.
When asked ‘What is a Mennonite?,’ Bishop Leslie said that often people of color hesitate. We must be able to communicate without hesitancy. The Franciscos suggest that we must discuss these three points of Identity, Perception and Environment together in our Branding.
Branding includes all three elements, not only how those inside understand it but more importantly how those outside understand it. How important is holding on to the name of “Mennonite Church U.S.A..” They shared the story of their church, Calvary Community Church, Hampton, VA and how they moved from their previous name and identity to their new identity and motto. Bishop Francisco challenges the participants to think about how the branding and the name of the mennonite church should move forward into the future.
