Y’all, it has been a long long time since I felt ready to post again here. But last week, I was on a board committee call for an awesome nonprofit where I volunteer. We’re choosing a consultant to help structure our first-ever real fundraising campaign, and suddenly we had one of those Moments where there is a clear fork in the road of our organizational equity journey.
I thought I’d share what I wrote to my fellow committee members about it, as always in case it’s relevant to any of you nonprofit and philanthropy peeps out there:
Hi folks – I really appreciated today’s meeting with the potential consultant. After sitting with his response to my question about how he thinks about equity in fundraising, I feel that he missed the mark on something crucial.
His comment that “if someone is in a position to make a major gift, they probably did something right to make that money or not lose what they inherited, so they probably have observations of value to offer” is a very been-there-done-that attitude for me… I mean, I lived my fundraising life that way for years, and I’ve come to believe strongly that it’s not healthy for the organization.
Absolutely, we should always be listening for observations of value from people who care about and know about our work – but that is orthogonal to the question of how much money they can give.
Having more money doesn’t mean that their advice on what our org should do is necessarily worthwhile, unless maybe it’s specifically about how to connect with more folks like them for funding; they’re closest to that topic, so they’d have that expertise.
But equity really needs to mean centering the people who are closest to the issues, including centering them as leaders in how to solve for the issues we exist to address.
Our organization’s staff are close to the issues day in and day out, so their leadership matters; our clients and their families of course have direct expertise too in other ways, so we’d look to them for observations to guide our work in appropriate ways. If we have donors who actually work in/know about issues in our specific field, great! Yay! Let’s honor their input because of their knowledge, not because of their money.
I could give a bunch of examples of absolutely crappy, demeaning programmatic advice that I’ve fielded from well-meaning rich folk over the years.
I could also give way too many examples of times when people closer to the issues offered me insights that I declined to accept because I was focused on the donors’ happiness, aka egos, usually aka white fragility.
I raised a bunch of money that way, yeah – but I could probably have helped my orgs to greater impact by using my own positionality as a leader to listen and center the leadership of the non-money folks, instead of narrowly seeing money as the most important stepping-stone on the path to impact.
Please don’t get me wrong, I think this consulting company is a very credible option and I appreciated the staff bringing them to the table; they just are not at the forefront when it comes to rethinking how fundraising can either perpetuate or break cycles of inequity that permeate the nonprofit sector (just like every other sector, alas).
As we look at starting a fundraising program here for the first time, I’d like us to build equity into our practices every step of the way.
So far, the responses to my message have been positive… keeping fingers crossed for the official committee debrief later this week. I’m hoping for a substantive discussion that steers us towards the other potential consultant candidate, who did a great job of describing how their work aligns with the principles of Community-Centric Fundraising.
Onwards… for this org and for our whole sector. 