Funder Relations – Page 6

Funders, back up your equity statements with actual cash to BIPOC communities

Posted on November 30, 2020November 30, 2020 by Vu

[Image description: A rolled-up wad of US dollars, the outer one being a one-dollar bill, held together with a rubber band. The wad is resting on a spread of higher-level bills, including 20s and 100s. Image by pasja1000 on Pixabay]

Hi everyone, thank you to all of you who expressed concerns for my sister on her COVID recovery, which I mentioned last week. She’s getting well enough for us to resume our ongoing sibling bickering over inane things, so I think that’s good.

Before we get into today’s post, on December 10^th at 11am PT, there is a free webinar on Transformational Capacity Building, led by my brilliant colleagues April Nishimura, Roshni Sampath, and Anbar Mahar Sheikh, based on this article I helped write. Fellow organizational development nerds, I hope to see you there so we can explore a more equitable model of doing capacity building. Or at least figure out how to explain what the hell it is to our families over virtual holiday dinners.

As I drove to my sister’s to deliver groceries and minestrone soup, I passed by a home improvement store and noticed the dozen folks standing out in the cold, waiting for construction or landscaping day jobs. As the pandemic progressed, day laborers have been hit hard. Gigs have been drying up, and many workers have families to support.

This year has been a nightmare, but I don’t think the majority of us really understand what is coming. Moratoriums on evictions are ending soon, and 40,000,000 people face being kicked out of their homes. As winter arrives, the levels of poverty, homelessness, pain, and trauma will reach levels we may not be able to grasp and our sector is not equipped to handle.

Foundations, stop playing the reckless game of Funding-Chicken

Posted on October 4, 2020October 5, 2020 by Vu

[Image description: A chicken with reddish feathers an a yellow beak, starting directly at the camera, looking very quizzical. Image by Hannah Oliver on Unsplash.com]

Hi everyone. Quick reminder: The second part of the Philanthropic Reforms town halls is today, 10/5, at 11am PT, where several prominent sector leaders will be exploring policies and strategies on foundations and Donor-Advised Funds to prevent wealth hoarding and tax evasion. This is the follow-up from the first town hall, which I moderated. Here’s the recording.

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Durfee Foundation President Carrie Avery and I were discussing over email the power dynamics between funders and nonprofits. While there is much to talk about, Carrie brought up a really good point that I had not considered before—the term “Foundation Program Officer” is weird:

“Why an officer? An officer makes me think of a police officer, a probation officer, someone in a position of power whose judgment can have a devastating and decisive effect. If foundations want to work with their ‘nonprofit partners’ then why is the person on the foundation side of that relationship called an officer? Language matters. Let’s start a movement to rename this role!”

I agree, and while we’re thinking about new titles, let’s completely reimagine what the role entails. It should be less micromanagey—like a boss who constantly watches over you to make sure you don’t steal office supplies—and more expansive, like a favorite colleague that you can commiserate with and occasionally play pranks on.

Not showing the salary range in job postings is archaic and inequitable. So why do we keep doing it?

Posted on September 14, 2020September 14, 2020 by Vu

[Image description: A magnificent grey/white winged unicorn, floating above the clouds, their wings spread in breathtaking splendor, their long silver horn gleaming in the sunlight, two front legs raised, wisps of ornately curled…smoke…coming out of their mane for some reason. Majestic AF! Image by KELLEPICS on Pixabay.com]

Hi everyone, quick reminder, if you’re free next Monday 9/21 at 11am PT, join me on this webinar to discuss wealth hoarding and tax avoidance. We’ll be focused on these questions: “What are the current rules governing philanthropy, especially foundations and donor-advised funds? How do these operate in practice? Are wealthy people using these vehicles to game the system?”

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Five years ago, I wrote “When you don’t disclose salary range on a job posting, a unicorn loses its wings.” This has contributed to some contentious arguments in our sector, namely about whether unicorns have wings. Since then, however, I’ve been glad to see so much progress being made. Many states now have laws requiring the disclosure of salary information, as well as to make it illegal to ask for candidates’ salary history. An increasing number of organizations in our sector, such as Momentum Nonprofit Partners and NTEN, have started requiring salary to be disclosed on their job boards. Meanwhile, across the pond, Show The Salary and other colleagues are publicly calling out organizations who still engage in salary cloaking, and to their credit, many organizations are listening to feedback and changing their practices.

Wealth hoarding, tax avoidance, and how nonprofits are complicit

Posted on September 8, 2020September 11, 2020 by Vu

[Image description: A squirrel, looking alert, standing among green blades of some type of plant. I think they’re a squirrel, but I can’t see their tail so can’t really be sure. Either way, this image has nothing to do with the content of this post. It is there to help calm you down while we discuss a serious topic. Image by JoeBreuer of Pixabay.com]

Happy September, everyone. Holy hummus, it’s September! Fellow parents with school-age children, I hope you are doing ok. Hang in there. We’ll make it through this together. When things get tough with virtual schooling, just remember the old adage: “The days are long, but the years are—You better not be playing Minecraft again! Get back to your Zoom class this instant or no media the rest of the day! And you! Those loose fruit snacks you found under the couch are covered with dust! Throw them away, or at least rinse with water before eating!”

I know we all have a lot on our minds, and unfortunately I must add one more thing for us to think about. Three months ago, I wrote “Have nonprofit and philanthropy become and white moderate that Dr. King warned us about?” Since then, I have been grappling with the question of how effective our work is as a sector. Are we actually doing good in the world, or have we tricked ourselves into believing that we are while in reality we’re allowing inequity and injustice to proliferate? The reality is that we’re doing both, and it’s important for us to untangle these dynamics.

Recently, I read the Gilded Giving report by the Institute for Policy Studies. It examines the trends in giving in our sector and what it means. It paints a picture that is not pretty. Here are several points we should pay attention to:

Starting in 2010, a bunch of billionaires signed a pledge to give away half their wealth. Since then, their combined wealth has actually doubled. From $376 billion in 2010 to $734 billion as of July 18, 2020.
Over the first four months of the pandemic, when everyone has been struggling, the 100 living Pledgers who were billionaires in March actually INCREASED their wealth by $213.6 billion, or 28%, from 758B in March to 972B in July.
Small individual giving has been in decline over the past two decades. Between 2000 and 2016, the percentage of households giving to charity has dropped from 66 percent to 53 percent.
Large gifts, however, have been increasing. Households making over $1M claimed 33% of all charitable deductions in 2017, up from 12% in 1995.
The number of foundations in existence increased by 68% between 2005 and 2019, from 71, 097 to 119,791. During this period, their assets more than doubled, from $551 billion to $1.2 trillion
Donor-Advised Funds (DAFs) have grown even more rapidly in number and assets. DAFs have no legal mandate to pay out anything each year. Donors take tax breaks immediately when they transfer their wealth to DAFs, but they are not legally required to actually distribute those funds to nonprofits.

9 crappy paradoxes that shape nonprofit and philanthropy

Posted on August 2, 2020August 3, 2020 by Vu

[Image description: A golden retriever puppy, lying on the ground, their paws on the sides of their faces, looking sad and adorable. Image by birgl on pixabay.com]

Hi everyone, quick announcement: Please put August 10th at 12:00pm Pacific Time on your calendar for Community-Centric Fundraising’s first town hall meeting. Sign up here and we’ll send you the zoom link. Until then, the (CCF) Hub is designed to provide alternatives to our default white-centric fundraising narratives. It features about three new thought-provoking pieces of content each week, including “How prospect research can help nonprofits become less racist and more inclusive,” “What I Learned from Losing Two Jobs in the Fight for Racial Equity,” “‘You want a director of what now?!’ When orgs that are hiring are too lazy to know what they want,” and the first episode of the Ethical Rainmaker podcast, where CCF Co-Chair Michelle Muri and I talk about fundraising and equity. Check it out!

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I’ve been spending a lot of time flossing while thinking of how to categorize the challenges in our sector (What, like your quarantine activities are so much more interesting). Many of the stuff we deal with falls under the category of “well-meaning people inadvertently making nonprofits’ jobs harder.” Here are a nine. I’m going to call them paradoxes, though some of these are not paradoxes exactly, but are more like dilemmas, conundrums, or shenanigans. I’ve written about a few of them, but they keep coming up and remain a problem, so it’s good for us to review and have common language to push back. If we want our sector to succeed, we need to be aware of these paradoxes and control for them.