CCF, Author at CCF - Page 4 of 34

Beyond salary transparency: Be the hiring manager you want to meet

Jan 25, 2022 | Essays

By Rebecca Joseph, consultant and coach

In my experience, few of us are trained, mentored, or coached in how to effectively use the power we hold as hiring managers to force fundamental change in how our organizations actually show up.

I dread job searches. I look forward to them about as much as buying pants online or trying to find the person at a corporate bank who can override the system software to correct an ownership error in an old organizational account. I know that I’m not alone about this.

Not long ago, I asked the development director at a fast-growing nonprofit known for its leadership on racial justice and LGBTQ+ issues how the search was going for their new associate director position. They had a lot to say. None of it was good. The “perfect candidate” accepted a verbal offer, then wanted to renegotiate upon receiving the letter of hire.

The candidate told them she was having second thoughts about taking a job that required a cross-country relocation and, after looking at salaries for comparable positions, felt the offer was too low.

A week later, the development director I talked to was still furious about this, attributing the unanticipated turn of events to an unacceptable lack of professionalism. (Personally, I wondered whether the candidate’s second thoughts might also be related to her interview with the executive director being rescheduled four times.)

If only this was an isolated incident at one organization. It’s not. I know about this next situation because it happened to me.

An international nonprofit looking to hire a development manager for its senior leadership team used its fundraising consultants, a WOC-led firm, to screen candidates. Flexing his over-developed power muscles, the first interview question, asked by the CEO (a white, cisgender man), was, “What would your supervisor say are your strengths and weaknesses?”

That position is still vacant, also.

In the spirit of giving credit where it’s due, both organizations had the right language in their job announcements and included hiring salaries. How could things go so wrong from there?

With all the openings in nonprofits right now and the huge number of people changing jobs, you’d think that there would be some success stories to serve as counterpoint to ones I just shared (and many more that are far worse). I recently asked an online community of development professionals with over 10,000 members about recent hiring experiences that went well. Guess how many people responded?

Exactly two. (A white woman in consulting directed me to her instructional e-book on HR practices. A white man currently working in a nonprofit offered to share his horror stories. He is writing a book, too.)

I have never been an HR professional and have no plans to write a book on hiring. Still, since I’m a few decades into my career, I’ve been through a lot of hiring processes as a candidate, hiring manager, and now as a consultant and coach to nonprofits and people seeking career advancement or in transition.

Why are bad hiring experiences pervasive?

Imagine what can happen if we approach the work of hiring as holistic and transformative rather than transactional.

In my experience, few of us are trained, mentored, or coached in how to effectively use the power we hold as hiring managers to force fundamental change in how our organizations actually show up. As a result, we often reproduce the very same practices that ultimately reinforce white supremacy and other oppressive structures.

We must recognize that harm begins long before a newly hired person works their first day.

I know of a regional office of a large human rights organization where the entire staff assembled to give feedback to a senior human resources director visiting from the national headquarters on a West Coast listening tour. One after the next, associates and assistants shared their stories of struggling to live on the salaries from their full-time jobs. They asked how the organization determines annual pay levels.

Without missing a beat, the HR director responded with, “Based on the replacement cost for the position in that market.”

When we pass off responsibility for using the power that we have to advance justice within our organizations to coworkers or consultants whose primary job responsibilities require them to prioritize the market value of roles, manage compliance, and protect the employer from liability, we cannot expect different results. Yet, nonprofits often delegate the task of hiring to entities with just those kinds of approaches (whatever it’s called — Human Resources, Talent, People and Culture).

Imagine what can happen if we approach the work of hiring as holistic and transformative rather than transactional.

Sounds great, you say, but you don’t have the time/money/support for this? You just need someone to do the work, you say? Last week, you say?

I hear you.

It’s time for a framing intervention when our thinking heads this way. Applying Teng and Nuñez’s distinction between ‘valuators’ — people who make “objective,” “neutral” judgments about the amount, number, or value of something usually determined by a third (typically white) party — and ‘e-valuators’ is helpful here.

Transformational, justice-advancing hiring leaders are e-valuators who:

See value in people, relationships, and actions of the interplay between what’s visible and what’s hidden or obscured.

They recognize their own biases, manage them, and hold themselves accountable to the biases throughout the hiring process.

Use knowledge and thought, emotions and feelings, and intuitive, spiritual knowing to discern value.

They identify the norms and standards of their organization’s hiring practices, including the unwritten ones, that are most likely to elicit feelings of anger, fear, shame, and despair. If they can’t eliminate them, they look for ways to reduce harm and use them.

Weave the connections and relationships for leverage, influence, and power in service of more justice.

They recognize that they’re getting paid to spend their time doing this. They’ll have a job and the benefits of a new hire when it’s over. Knowing that most of the people they’ll encounter in this undertaking don’t and won’t, they take care in their choice of words and actions.

They ask job candidates if they would like referrals to other organizations seeking new staff. When they say yes, they follow up by connecting candidates to nonprofits that are hiring.

And imagine what we will change when we all recognize that participating in our organization’s hiring process is work and we insist on compensating candidates fairly for the time they spend preparing for and taking part in interviews, assessments, and assignments. Imagine if we reimburse them for travel and other related expenses, too.

If you’re still in the “I don’t have the time/money/support for this” thought loop, try starting with one small thing like having a follow-up conversation with everyone you’ve interviewed.

Use what you learn to grow your power to be the hiring manager you want to meet. And, please, share your great story so that we can all learn with you.

Rebecca Joseph, Ph.D.

Rebecca Joseph, Ph.D. (she/her) is a San Francisco Bay Area-based consultant, coach, and mentor to rising and established leaders of small and mid-size justice-driven organizations. She has held positions in the nonprofit, philanthropic, and public sectors, as well as in higher education. Currently, she serves as Treasurer of Development Executives Roundtable (DER), on Jewish Studio Project’s board, and is an Allies in Action Amplifier. Contact her at rebeccajoseph18@gmail.com. All tips Rebecca receives through her Venmo (@Rebecca-Joseph-18) will be paid forward to Delgracia Corp. She also encourages direct donations made to them.

The Ethical Rainmaker: Courageous Fundraising Principles with Virginia Community Voice

Jan 19, 2022 | Podcasts

By Michelle Shireen Muri, Freedom Conspiracy Principal and CCF co-chair

Episode Summary

When Community-Centric Fundraising launched their content hub and 10 Principles, thousands of organizations and people took note – and many took action. Lea Whitehurst-Gibson and Bekah Kendrick of Virginia Community Voice talk about how they built and delivered their Courageous Fundraising Principles and how they center community in their work based in Richmond, Virginia, the former capital of the Confederacy. Learn about strategy and tactics in this story!

Find the episode notes and the podcast transcript here.

About the Ethical Rainmaker podcast

In the United States alone, philanthropy is a $427 billion dollar industry, of which 68% comes from individual donors. Yet the practices, theories, and foundation of modern philanthropy and fundraising often ignore the ways in which the industry perpetuates harm.

The Ethical Rainmaker, hosted by Michelle Shireen Muri, is a podcast that hosts authentic conversations grappling with the questions that we don’t often ask in the nonprofit world. Join us as we explore some of the practices that undermine our missions and navigate the way forward with today’s resisters, reimaginers, and the re-creators of the third sector. It’s time to think differently.

Michelle Shireen Muri

Michelle Shireen Muri (she/her) is the co-chair for Community-Centric Fundraising and the host of the new podcast, The Ethical Rainmaker, launching July 29. She is the founder of Freedom Conspiracy, a small collective of fundraising consultants focused on bringing values-aligned practices to clients in the nonprofit and philanthropy spaces. She can be reached at @freedomconspiracy on Instagram. You can send her a tip via Patreon.

How Getting Let Go From my Nonprofit Job Finally Helped Me Stop Pushing for Change

Jan 13, 2022 | Essays

By Nancy Slavin, writer

When my executive director last January told me they were letting me go, I felt my body molecularly restructure. A spiral of energy swirled from my head, through my heart, down my gut, and out to my toes.

For over twenty years, I have been part of a spiritual program that has a useful axiom: “expectations are premeditated resentments.” Most of the time, I know better than to have any expectations but sometimes, I forget. When I was getting ready to birth my first and only child, for example, I expected to have a natural childbirth. I had a plan, midwives, candles, the whole thing. The birth turned out to be long and complicated and, in the end, anything but natural. I spent several years working through my resentments and the parts of that experience I was responsible for, the largest of which were my expectations.

Another expectation I had to work through was thinking the United States government would take care of its people in the form of basic needs and human rights. Quality healthcare, education, food, shelter, and fair wages for employment — surely we can expect those in the land of the free and the home of the brave, right? For me, this expectation came from growing up white in a nice suburb where I had all of these things, every single day.

But, as I grew and read and traveled out of that suburb to see our country a little more, I started to learn how and why my expectations are not met for a whole lot of people. And that prompted more resentments.

I am also one of 926,000 nonprofit workers who lost their job during the pandemic; my last day was last year, January 28, 2021. For the first time in my professional life, spanning almost 30 years, I, like many people, enrolled for unemployment insurance. I have worked for nonprofits my whole professional career, mostly as an educator and a teacher, and while I’ve walked away from jobs before, I’ve never been let go.

Ironically, I am grateful my government took care of me while I was unemployed. I received my UI, and I used my time both looking for new jobs and doing a whole lot of healing because, as many on Community-Centric Fundraising’s website and elsewhere have expressed: Working in nonprofits can be traumatic. The cause of that trauma is often intersectional so, depending on your identity, there can be layers of trauma. My trauma, as a white, cis, straight-passing, educated, and married person was relatively low — a lower-case t.

In fact, as a white, educated, suburban-reared nonprofit worker, I had spent most of my career not paying attention to my traumas because they ‘were not as bad’ as so many others with whom I had directly worked and served. I even often felt guilty that I had any feelings at all about my small little traumas when other people’s traumas had been (and still are) so obviously so big. That guilt often kept me from metabolizing my feelings — other times it caused me to respond with a typical trauma response — FIGHT!

I’ve been fighting, in fact, for almost 30 years. I’ve been fighting against my reasonable expectations that people and our government and institutions would do better. I expected that white folks with advantages like I’ve had would, of course, want to work harder for more equitable world for all. I expected when we talked about diversity, equity, and inclusion that we really meant it and we would make the structural changes necessary to incorporate what we talked about. Oh, how I fought because of my expectations. And oh, how I racked up the resentments.

And you know what? We can’t push ourselves to do better from the inside either, especially by white folks like me pushing from a place of guilt or downright shame for how capitalism has advantaged me. Because the consequences of doing so are numbness, burnout, elimination, severe health effects and/or some combination of all those things.

When my executive director last January told me they were letting me go, I felt my body molecularly restructure. A spiral of energy swirled from my head, through my heart, down my gut, and out to my toes. By the next morning, I had taken full responsibility for this circumstance because I had, once again, forgotten the spiritual axiom. I saw all the connections of all my fighting energy and all of my struggle while I worked at that nonprofit, especially during the pandemic and social uprisings and wildfires on the West Coast, which all ignited my anxiety and spun up many expectations about how we all would radically systematize our social and racial justice work. By the end of 2020, I had been so moored in resentments for that organization not meeting the expectations I had been fighting and fighting and now … I was let go.

Not only had I forgotten the axiom, but I also had not really paid enough attention to the Nonprofit Industrial Complex. Frankly, even though I’d been in nonprofits for a long time, being on the development end of things was pretty new for me, so it wasn’t until I started reading Vu Lee’s Nonprofit AF and joining CCF that I began to really understand how the Nonprofit Industrial Complex thrives. Donor dependence keeps staff, especially leadership responsible for the fiscal viability of the corporation, from being able to truly integrate JEDIA (justice, equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility) work into the missions, fundraising, and even strategic planning of the organization.

And just like the Military Industrial Complex and the Prison Industrial Complex, the Nonprofit Industrial Complex is deep and complicated, and we all are mired in those systems. I worked for what is now being recognized as an Education Industrial Complex for almost twenty years. Mission statements may intend to ‘do good,’ but ultimately, even for the employee on the inside, they usually operate in hierarchal, linear ways that have compounding harmful impacts. After all, nonprofits are part of Capitalism, and we cannot push Capitalism to do better from the inside. As Rebekah Giacomantonio argued right here on this platform, pushing for change from the inside of a nonprofit is a setup for painful failure.

My healing during 2021 into this new year has been an intentional effort to reconnect my mind and body once again. The crises over the past nearly two years served only to widen the chasm in our society that has always been there. But the split is not going to be repaired on the outside if I don’t do my work on the inside.

And you know what? We can’t push ourselves to do better from the inside either, especially by white folks like me pushing from a place of guilt or downright shame for how capitalism has advantaged me. Because the consequences of doing so are numbness, burnout, elimination, severe health effects and/or some combination of all those things. It’s like what happened for me when I tried to birth my child. I was so uncomfortable for so long, and I just really wanted relief. I had so many expectations childbirth would be different that, ultimately, I pushed too soon and too hard and my baby’s head got twisted and stuck, leading to complex complications. I’ve often wondered, what if I had just slowed down and allowed for a more organic emergence?

Then, during 2020, I kind of forgot about that question all over again.

My healing during 2021 into this new year has been an intentional effort to reconnect my mind and body once again. The crises over the past nearly two years served only to widen the chasm in our society that has always been there. But the split is not going to be repaired on the outside if I don’t do my work on the inside.

This past year, I have done (and will continue to do) more committed healing through writing, therapy, exercise — and most recently, through a somatics course for White Racial Justice Organizers. In 2020, I deflected my own needs, ignoring complexities of my own physical and mental health, ostensibly for the good of the organization I worked for, but I suffered the consequences. Indeed, as adrienne maree brown says, we are all “in the age of consequences for inhumane choices.” My inhumane choices meant I had to stop forcing myself and others to “make something happen.”

As my (and many others’) government help ends, I have started work at a different nonprofit because the above-mentioned baby is now almost a teenager, and I have bills to pay. I appreciated Giacomantonio’s ending points about how to survive if you must stay in your nonprofit job or, if like me, you’re choosing to accept another one. I suggest you read them too, and to contribute to that conversation.

Here’s the sum of what I’ve learned from my time healing this year: Have no expectations but continue to do your Work with the capital W.

I believe wholeheartedly in what the Community-Centric Fundraising movement is doing and I will work to follow the checklist and principles in my new position, but I will not have expectations that leadership will respond accordingly, even though I will continue to share articles like this one from Kim-Monique Johnson that make helpful suggestions to ameliorate the pain of the nonprofit sector. I’m more committed now than ever to paying attention to how to effectively see positive results at my place of work and in my life.

Here are some additional commitments going forward:

I will center in my body every day, at least twice a day, feeling for any expectations and releasing nascent but fomenting resentments, primarily about the Nonprofit Industrial Complex, but also about all those other industrial complexes too, which we all navigate every day.
I will continue to do racial climate liberation work outside my nonprofit job. On the outskirts of the nonprofit industrial complex, I can still act radically and specifically. I am a leader in our county’s Showing Up for Racial Justice chapter, and a volunteer on our countywide Equity Coalition. I will continue doing volunteer work for true JEDIA, with other people in my community informing what energy I bring to the nonprofit sector.
I will continue to write my own creative and personal analysis and story of what it means to be a white, educated, cis, straight-passing, married, able-bodied, mother, and woman of a certain age. Mostly what it means, as someone with a lot of advantage and social power, is I am here to lift up and show up for people in co-creative ways, for the sake of our collective liberation.
I will give myself and many others the space to find our own alignment with the natural processes of earth, with organic ecosystems, with loving communities, practice mutual aid and lead to healing and grace.
I will continue to read and follow Black, Indigenous, and people of culture leaders who are the founders of the movement.
I will remember (like, re-member) the words I heard in my very first week of my very first nonprofit job: “Remember, change in [fill-in-the-blank] is like pouring molasses in the winter.”

I realize you may be reading this and thinking, “But Nancy, we don’t have time!” If you’re thinking that, I’m guessing you’re a white person. I encourage you to read how Urgency is one of the Characteristics of White Supremacy and step back from that ledge. Although, I mean, I get it. I got it. I feel you. I had to both evacuate because of fires and get through eight days without power after a major ice storm only two weeks after I lost my job.

But you know what I did in that ice storm? I sobbed and grieved the depths of climate devastation and then I danced and twirled in my living room. Because I knew my urgency had pushed me right out of an income that helped support my family and many friends and fellow writers and Patreons I care about. My deemed-not-important ‘little t’ traumas were still traumas for which I had a response and, over time, turned my body into a hard, thick tension cocoon. I can’t live in that tension any longer. Not for a second more.

I am now committed to living my life from my heart, a place full of love and trust. I now allow my body (and expectations) to dissolve into goo (molasses!) and in the process, I relax into an embodied human still working toward an equitable and abundant world for my child and future generations.

Nancy Slavin

Nancy Slavin (she/her) is a writer, editor, poet, mom, spouse, and GenXer. Not necessarily in that order. She was a longtime rural community college English and writing instructor as well as a violence-prevention and anti-oppression educator. She now works in development for a mid-size nonprofit. You can find more of her writing at nancyslavin.com, or on her new newsletter, The Nano, on Twitter at @nancyslavin1, and on Instagram at @nancyslavin1.

Underpaid staff don’t need motivation, they need dollar bills and benefits

Jan 10, 2022 | Essays, The Hub

By Chris Talbot, communications professional and perpetually underpaid nonprofit laborer

I understand that it may be a challenge, but I’m here to tell you, underpaying nonprofit workers isn’t a reality, but a series of choices …

“Financially, [working at a nonprofit] can’t work for a lot of people. And in fact, with a nonprofit our size — boy, you almost have to be in a committed relationship with somebody else with an income, because you’re not — it’s hard to support yourself on what we can pay people, in Denver.”

This was the moment my Executive Director (ED) finally admitted that what I was being paid wasn’t enough to support me. I was just one month shy of six years into my position at the organization, and she didn’t say this quote directly to me. She said it on a podcast that she was featured in as a nonprofit leader.

A better, more equitable, time to have voiced this would have been before I accepted the position, moved my spouse and cats to Denver, and before I found myself facing the financial consequences of her decisions to a) not to pay a livable wage, and b) not even disclose that it wasn’t something she saw as a possibility.

Just like GrantStation’s apology regarding the horrible idea for a webinar titled “Motivating Underpaid Staff,” this type of acknowledgment makes the situation sound like a fixed reality — that underpaying is a ‘reality’ in the nonprofit sector, and there’s no feasible way around that.

Underpaying in the nonprofit sector isn’t a ‘reality,’ it’s a choice

Rich, white leaders will never feel the consequences of these choices and rarely know what it’s like to live in poverty. As such, they need to stop thinking that they can contrive the solutions …

I understand that it may be a challenge, but I’m here to tell you, underpaying nonprofit workers isn’t a reality, but a series of choices made by (mostly rich, white) nonprofit leaders since the nonprofit sector was first thought into existence in 1867. These white leaders were also the ones who then alleged that undervaluing workers was an immutable fact of working in the nonprofit sector. (The epitome of saying, “I don’t make the rules,” after, in fact, making the rules.)

It’s 2022 and we already know that the nonprofit sector works best when it employs people who understand the causes and the communities being served. For most social issues nonprofits, that will mean BIPOC, LGBTIQA2+, disabled, and other minoritized employees.

We also know that in order for non-social issues nonprofits (like the environmental nonprofit I work at) to bring cultural competency and innovation to the problems they work to solve, they need workplace diversity as well. And like I covered in my first article, passion exploitation can damage marginalized employees’ long-term financial security because we don’t typically have the generational wealth to weather it.

Rich, white leaders will never feel the consequences of these choices and rarely know what it’s like to live in poverty. As such, they need to stop thinking that they can contrive the solutions (or attend a paid webinar titled “Motivating Underpaid Staff” from someone who, according to her LinkedIn profile, hasn’t done any nonprofit work — really — I looked) to this inequity.

They need to be listening to us, the underpaid workers and the minoritized workers, for what we need.

My ED continued the interview on the podcast by admitting that she found the fact that we aren’t paid a livable wage embarrassing, and when she finds a way around our low pay, “That will not be the situation at our organization.”

Well, lucky for her, I have some concrete ways that she (and all the organizations that are currently paying substandard wages) can pay a living wage today! (Or at the very least create spaciousness for employees to make a living wage.)

But first, I want to discuss what not to do. Complete with real-life examples rich, white leaderships have devised during my 20 years in the nonprofit sector.

Pizza parties, discounts, and becoming my landlord are not solutions to small paychecks

The reason that I say that the rich, white nonprofit leaders need to step aside and allow their workers’ to decide what their compensation package should look like (if paying more currently isn’t on the table) is that they come up with the most asinine solutions when left to their own devices.

I’ve received surprise pizza parties, discounts to expensive shops, and one organization I worked for even tried to become my landlord, giving me super-reduced rent in a property the nonprofit owned (great in theory, really bad in their execution). All of these ‘benefits’ were less than useless in different ways.

Occasional surprise pizza parties are useless for everyone but especially useless for someone with as many allergies as me. Every rich, white leader in every job I’ve ever worked at thought the solution to employee dissatisfaction was a surprise pizza party. As if lactose and gluten were the perfect ingredients to make us forget that we were continually pushed to produce more with less.

Food is an excellent resource to provide (especially when your pay rates make food a luxury), but a one-time pizza slice isn’t it. If you’re going to offer food, offer a gift card to your employees’ neighborhood grocery stores so they can have agency in what they buy and consume.

Discounts to expensive shops are also useless when your pay makes it “hard to support yourself.” I can’t say which shops my rich, white ED got discounts from (because they all have discretion clauses), but just know that they are very expensive outdoor outfitters. If I get a 40-50% discount from those stores, that’s still $53.40 for a flannel shirt (I just looked it up). I can’t afford $53 shirts, no matter how much I want to support the company or how nice the shirts are.

That discount is only useful to those who are paid decently — namely, the rich, white ED who attained the discount or my co-workers who are “in a committed relationship with somebody else with an income.” It’s not a benefit I can use, so it’s not a benefit that I actually have and can’t be used as a substitute for pay.

And let’s close out this section with the ultimate non-benefit I’ve received: the workplace as a landlord with cheap rent. In theory, this might have been a good idea if my landlord/ED held herself responsible for the housing and had respect for work-life balance. But in this situation, living onsite meant that I was basically on-call at all times. I had random people the nonprofit served at my door, board members dropping by during our events to ask me for things when I was off-the-clock, and was called to “check on” things in the main building more than once.

But that wasn’t the worst of it.

On one particularly cold February night, the pipes under the trailer froze. The ED and building manager hired plumbers who started a small fire under the trailer to thaw them. When the steam hit the sewer, it was all over. Sewer gas and some raw sewage came up through all the pipes in the trailer. I suddenly found myself unhoused in the dead of winter and turned to my workplace for help (as the landlord that had made this horrible decision that led to my current situation). The word was, this was my problem and I had to take care of it off business hours or using my limited PTO.

So, in mid-February, I found myself working full-time, while being unhoused and couch surfing with my friends. On top of that, trying to salvage my belongings and breathing in that sewer gas resulted in my left lung partially collapsing. Between the medical bills, the eating out (since I didn’t have access to a kitchen), and signing a rental agreement outside of my price range with the only apartment available in the middle of winter, I ate up my savings created by this cheap rent, and then some.

Benefits, like housing, are only as useful as the equity-consciousness of the organization providing them. If the organization had helped me find new housing, provided health insurance or assistance for my partially collapsed lung, and given me paid time off that didn’t drain my reserves to figure things out, that benefit wouldn’t have been a dud. But, when you’re a rich, white person who sees substandard wages as an embarrassing fact of nonprofit work, who thinks of the bottom budget line of an organization before the employees that do the work, and who treats your employees as disposable, you’re not going to think of, much less offer those things.

I know that organizations like to streamline their benefits so everyone has the same benefits, and they consider it the ‘fair’ thing to do, but if you’re doing your hiring right, your employees will be diverse and have different needs.

Other useless benefits I’ve been offered include a 401(k) with no match (how can I put money into a 401(k) if I am not guaranteed I can meet my immediate financial needs?) and a yearly meeting with a wealth management advisor (what wealth are we managing?). That’s not to say that these aren’t useful things to offer. Just be aware that they are not an alternative to providing livable wages and will only be useful to your employees who are “in a committed relationship with somebody else with an income.” You need to offer something useful for your employees who aren’t in that kind of relationship.

So what can white, rich leaders provide?

First, rich, white leaders need to ask their workers who are not rich or white what they actually need. That’s the first thing.

I know that organizations like to streamline their benefits so everyone has the same benefits, and they consider it the ‘fair’ thing to do, but if you’re doing your hiring right, your employees will be diverse and have different needs. Find out what those needs are and try to meet them.

Ask people who don’t have the same lived experience as you what they would love in a workplace. If you aren’t sure what you can offer or if your employees aren’t sure what they can ask for, here are some examples of things I would love to see across all organizations regardless of pay:

A 30-hour work week worked at a speed that allows for spaciousness.

Tons of research all over the world have already concluded, long ago, that working more hours doesn’t make us more productive and workplace burnout (caused by the workplace’s culture — it is literally never the employee’s fault they burn out, so, no, yoga and more pizza parties are not solutions) is REAL.

At my current job, I used to put in 45-50 hours a week, working manic hours just trying to stay ahead of the deluge of tasks I was continually given. And when I completed an entire pile, what happened? Was I given time for rest? No, I was given a new heap of difficult and time-sucking tasks with insufficient, cheap, or free tools to complete them. Nowadays, I refuse to work more than 40 hours a week. It’s not worth the strain on my mental well-being.

Additionally, when we’re given too many tasks to do, or encouraged or forced to work as fast as possible, we don’t create the spaciousness to do so thoughtfully. That’s when inequities can start to creep into our work.

The 40-hour work week, like low pay in the sector, is a standard we don’t examine enough. That standard originated during the Industrial Revolution to combat employers who forced their employees to work long hours, every day. The 40-hour work week is just a number labor activists came up with as the maximum we should be giving to work. And yet, nowadays, we use that number as the minimum of “full-time” work.

Best-known science says that “long work hours erode health.” (For a deeper dive, check out Lauren Brooks’ “The 40-hour work week is more harmful than helpful. Here’s what to do instead”). In this underpaid nonprofit worker’s opinion, 30 hours should be the max you ask of your employees (while still paying full-time benefits).

So, what about the employers who know they are paying substandard wages? Consider a portion of those 30 hours full-time if you know you aren’t paying a competitive wage. This allows spaciousness for your employees to get a side hustle to cover the difference without spending every waking hour working. To determine the portion, find equitable salary bands for the job and base your full-time hours on it. (For more on salary bands, check out Erika Chen’s “Pay equity: performative or palpable?”)

For example, using Glassdoor, I found out that a Communications Manager in Denver, working in the nonprofit sector with an employer size of 0-50 employees, and 4-6 years of experience would make at least $56k, with the average base pay of $81,362. Remember that. We’re going to come back to these numbers in a moment.

In July 2020, Colorado finally enacted a minimum salary! And it’s a salary that is set to increase significantly each year until 2024! Huzzah! In April 2021, my ED learned about the minimum salary (and said she wished I had told her when I found out, to which I responded “I assumed y’all knew and, since nonprofits were exempt, decided to keep me where I was at.” LOL). I received a 17% increase to match it. And after getting a 10% increase at the beginning of this year, I am happy to report that I am making Colorado’s new minimum salary of $45,000.

Let’s go back to those numbers from Glassdoor. That means I make 80% of the low end of that salary band. So, if we use the standard of 30 hours per week as the full-time minimum hours, that would amount to 24 hours per week to remain full-time. Those hours would help me get a side gig and/or build my business while giving me time for rest. (If you, as the employer, don’t like that idea, maybe you ought to just pay more. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

We also need to talk about ‘unlimited PTO.’ Unlimited PTO should be given and it should come with a guideline of how much time must be taken within the year and a discussion that time off is time off, not time to catch up on back burner projects and not time to continue checking email. (Since studies have shown that people with unlimited PTO actually tend to take off less than those with limited PTO and tend to work more during that time).

For marginalized and underpaid employees, this can be a mental wellbeing game changer. I don’t know how rich, white leaders thought I was going to have my job at the forefront of my mind the day after mass graves of Indigenous children were discovered — how was I meant to be engaged the day after the Pulse shooting — how was I meant to be present the day after the Atlanta spa shootings. These were terrorist actions enacted against members of my communities. My mind wasn’t on communicating our latest news in community science projects. It was on these communities and in my own thoughts.

With unlimited PTO, I could have taken the time I needed to sit with my emotions, call my relations and community members, heal, and find ways to volunteer to help with the communal healing.

With unlimited PTO, I can also get my therapy during business hours to help me deal with the accumulated stress of working in a predominantly white, cisgender, and heterosexual institution.

With unlimited PTO, your employees who are guardians can truly tend to the children or other dependents under their care.

Unlimited PTO means that your workers will truly have a work-life balance they can’t have when they are limited to [insert random number] weeks and a short sabbatical after [enter random number] years of work.

I’ll never get over the first time I was asked to “donate” my PTO to a co-worker who had a particularly horrible year and had used all hers up early. I felt for her, but why did I need to donate the time I needed away from my desk? Why didn’t leadership just provide what that employee needed? What did they think they stood to ‘lose,’ by treating that employee like she was valuable and cared for?

Offer free childcare during work events to your employees. (This would also be an excellent value-added service to the people you serve). And allow spaciousness and flexibility for parents to care for their children during work hours. (I’ve never understood why we don’t already do this as the nonprofit sector where women make 73% of the total workforce, and 70% of women in cisgender heterosexual relationships with children say they do most of the child care.) Obviously, there is a need.

Thank goodness I don’t have any children because I Googled the average cost of care per month here in Denver and it’s $1,300 for one infant child! Between rent and childcare, that would be more than my entire take-home pay for the month!

Close down the office for at least one week for a reset for all staff. This would also be paid time off, which staff could use (or not) as they needed. But the office would be “closed” even for staff who decided not to use it, meaning they wouldn’t be inundated with new tasks during this time. Decide as a staff group when that happens (and stagger it if your nonprofit can’t logistically take off that time together). Maybe it makes sense for your staff to take one week off during the summer, eliminating child care for a week and giving time for staff to spend time with their kids. Maybe it makes sense at the end of the year because of what you do. Maybe the communities you serve need you at both of those times, but there’s another time that works in your schedule to take a week off to reset and rest. There are a ton of organizations that already do this (including two that I recently interviewed with — The Center on Colfax and RedLine Contemporary Art Center).

These ideas are all from my beautiful mind, but do check in with your workers to see what it is that they need, individually.

And guess what, leadership! You can pay your employees more, today!

Why is it when there’s a budget shortfall, the first places that are cut are the fees for useful tools and employee compensation? Why is it never the printing budget for events?

All that and now I’m going to say that you can pay your employees more. You are choosing not to.

How often as nonprofit workers have we seen money not listed in the budget magically get diverted for random trinkets to make our events flashy? How many professionally crafted awards and plaques are suddenly affordable when someone in leadership decides what an event needs to increase attendance is a rich honoree?

Why is it when there’s a budget shortfall, the first places that are cut are the fees for useful tools and employee compensation? Why is it never the printing budget for events? (No one actually wants that commemorative, professionally printed program guide. Plus, an online version is more accessible since you can include a translation add-on, and it can be read by a screenreader!)

These are choices you’ve made rather than increasing salaries you know are unlivable.

Already cut the printing budget for events? Well, there’s no reason why, if you are an ED tasked with the budget of your organization, you can’t take that cut instead of expecting them to.

I literally can’t wrap my head around this common and wholly inequitable practice. In every position of relative power I’ve had (volunteer coordinator, Assistant Master-at-Arms in the U.S. Naval Sea Cadet Corps, manager of AmeriCorps members at a nonprofit), I had a strict rule never to make someone else do what I was not willing to do myself. I don’t remember how I decided that was a thing, but I made that choice and I stuck with it. If the bathrooms at our Division had to be cleaned, I was always right there with my volunteers, because I’m not an asshole.

In the case of nonprofits, if the ED is making the decisions leading to the budget shortfall, someone else shouldn’t be paying for it!

I’ll leave my employers alone for a minute (sort of — all of this, of course, applies) and look at a job listing I recently saw that listed a salary range for a Philanthropy & Community Engagement Coordinator with a salary range that was 84-91% the Colorado minimum salary. I decided to look at the organization’s 990s (because I’m nosy and that’s what they’re there for, right?), and their net income was $25,135 in 2020. That’s significantly lower than the previous years, but it’s still a pretty sum. That’s enough to increase nearly four employees from 84% of the Colorado minimum salary and meet it.

The ED made $80,346 in that same year. The average salary for a nonprofit Executive Director of Business Development (Executive Director alone wasn’t an option in Glassdoor, as far as I could find) in Denver is $65,726. This ED could take that cut of $6,500 to bring that position up to the minimum salary in this state and still make 112% more than the average Executive Director in the area.

None of your employees should be living under a minimum salary or wage when you are making more than the average salary. Hell, they shouldn’t be making that little if you’re making above the minimum salary yourself!

Sometimes to be equitable, you need to make the same amount as your employees. I promise you, if you are a rich, white ED, you can weather that better than your marginalized employees can.

In fact, there are a number of organizations (Sylvia Rivera Law Project, AS220, Sociocracy For All, and Sunrise Movement) that have already enacted the same salary band for all employees, no matter what the position. Their operationalization of this varies. Some have the same flat salary and some have a range and employees are invited to let leadership know how much they need within that range. And what could be more equitable than removing hierarchical models of ‘worth’ amongst employees that are all necessary to move your mission forward?

If you expect your employees to live below a livable wage because of the importance of your mission, you can certainly make less than you ‘should’ for that mission. And if you don’t like being expected to bring all your knowledge and experience to a position that doesn’t fairly compensate you, maybe as leadership, you should do something to improve those conditions now rather than considering it an unfortunate ‘reality’ for your employees working in the nonprofit sector.

Chris Talbot

Chris Talbot (they/them) is a queer, trans nonbinary, mixed-race artist, activist, and nonprofit employee. When they aren’t working the day job, they spend their free time editing art and literature magazines, writing and illustrating educomics to help folks affirm their nonbinary pals, creating a graphic novel to describe what it’s like to be nonbinary in a gender binary world, cuddling their cat, and quad skating in the park.

You can find Chris at talbot-heindl.com, on LinkedIn, Instagram, Bluesky, and Twitter — and tip them on Venmo or PayPal or join as a patron on their Patreon

The Ethical Rainmaker: How To Feed A Movement with Tomme Beevas

Jan 6, 2022 | Podcasts

By Michelle Shireen Muri, Freedom Conspiracy Principal and CCF co-chair

Episode Summary

TV celeb and James Beard Award-winning chef, Tomme Beevas talks about how the lynching of George Floyd – less than two miles from his restaurant, played out in the creation of Pimento Relief Services, a truly community-centered organization in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Learn about liberation in action through this inspiring story!

Find the episode notes and the podcast transcript here.