By now, most, if not all of us, are aware of the many Karens of the world. If you are unsure about your neighborhood Karen she is the lady who is the first person to insert herself in a situation that has nothing to do with her. She can be seen calling the manager — (cue the infamous Karen meme). We have seen Karens show up in many spaces and continue to be problematic.
Essay Archives
5 reasons your development planning sucks
When I first read about community-centric fundraising via Vu Le’s Nonprofit AF blog, a lightbulb went off in my head. Everything that felt icky to me about donor-centric practices was articulated. Once I started seeing more articles like this, I knew I was on the right track with shifting the narrative at my own organizations.
So, why does your development planning suck?
8 ways to make fundraising more accessible for people with disabilities
In early 2019, I brought together a group of community members to form the Seattle Cultural Accessibility Consortium, which connects arts and cultural organizations to information and resources to improve accessibility for people of all abilities. We have several workshops per year on accessibility-related topics and help organizations with accessibility planning.
White supremacy culture in professional spaces is toxic — to dismantle it, we must first be willing to name it!
Now, most workplaces, especially in the nonprofit sector, exhibit and practice white supremacy culture. It is a group of characteristics that, “are used as norms and standards without being pro-actively named or chosen by the group.” Characteristics such as perfectionism, quantity over quality, paternalism, and individualism uphold white supremacy culture in our work environments.
Six reasons why tiered event sponsorship needs to go!
Recently, I was included in conversations about fundraising for an annual conference. My colleagues and I discussed sponsorship levels and benefits.
Subsequently, I was invited to a prospect call with a funder for a $5,000 sponsorship. On the call, my team answered all possible questions about why we do what we do, what every line item in our budget means, and how we can help amplify the funder’s brand visibility.
After an hour, the answer to the $5,000 sponsorship was a disappointing “no.”
Why being gaslit by white people isn’t just emotionally violent, it’s racist
“Well actually …”
This is how gaslighting always begins.
I was meeting with my ED to tell her that I was quitting my position at Mesa Arts Center. Even though I came prepared to explicitly detail the reasons I was leaving, I was still surprised she bothered to ask why. If she’d been half cognizant of the chaos erupting in our department over the past 22 months, it should have been obvious to her. She hadn’t earned my honesty, but I was honest with her anyway.
As a white woman, do I have a responsibility to disrupt philanthropy?
Recently, I was given a task by a mentor. My assignment was to ask others to describe me. (Super cringy exercise, but personal growth is uncomfortable, right?) Of all of the many ways I was described by old friends, co-workers, and acquaintances, no one — not a single soul — called me a quitter … But this is the third time that I have taken — and then quit — a fundraising job.
Radical transparency: Confronting nonprofit governance to truly eliminate discrimination and harassment
In Canada, the pre-pandemic nonprofit sector is a multi-billion-dollar-per-year sector that employs 2 million Canadians. However, the pandemic has laid bare the number of
structural and systemic inequities within our sector. Knowing this, can we confidently
expect the nonprofit sector to lead on issues of racism and other deeply rooted forms of
systemic discrimination?
My love of Ori’ dance, as seen through a community-centric lens
Ori’ dance was an important part of life in ancient Tahiti and was often performed in religious ceremonies, social gatherings, and everyday life. It was used by the Tahitian people to pass down traditions to younger generations so that they can tell the stories of their ancestors. Each individual dance tells a story through hip movements and hand motions.
Reparations: How we white relatives must try to pay back the unpayable debt
As a child, I was taught in school that slavery ended in 1865, all thanks to the benevolence and heroism of President Abraham Lincoln. After that, there was some unrest in the 1960s, and Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Fortunately, slavery is now a relic of the past. Now, we know so much better, and every February is Black History Month.
Like most white children who were indoctrinated with this false history, I accepted that I was innocent, and that this history had nothing to do with me.
Nonprofit Industrial Complex 101: a primer on how it upholds inequity and flattens resistance
To imagine new worlds, we need words that reflect our current one. Audre Lorde tells us, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” and I think this is why there is such a proliferation of new language on the left — we are describing forces we have purposefully been given no words to describe — new words to talk about gender, race, and identity — new words to talk about a diversity of internal experiences — new words to talk about the oppressive ways society is organized.
Why I decided to give up complicity in order to be an anti-racist volunteer manager
Four months into a previous job as a volunteer manager at one of the oldest nonprofit organizations in the region, I sat down to talk with one white mentor, who privately shared his prejudice toward his Black mentees.
He wasn’t the last to do so.