Community-COnscious Organizing
Building coalitions that work for everyone
Why does community-consciousness matter?
There were over 1.5 million nonprofits in the U.S. in 2019 [1]. With only a limited amount of available aid, organizations have to compete for many of the same grants, donors, connections, and resources. This becomes a problem when people of color and other minority groups are not able to equally compete with majority leadership.
Based on a nation-wide survey of thousands of nonprofit employees, researchers found that recent diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs are not actually changing what the nonprofit sector leadership looks like. 58% of workers surveyed worked for organizations where the leadership was less than a quarter people of color [2], and many nonprofit workers of color said they wanted to take on leadership roles but felt that their race stood in the way of this. One woman surveyed shared, “I am usually the only or one of a handful of BIPOCs [Black, indigenous, and people of color] in the room. It’s such an isolating, frustrating, and infuriating dynamic...The lack of leadership of color at every organization I’ve worked at has impacted not only the running of the organization, but my own professional and even personal development” [3].
“The lack of leadership of color at every organization I’ve worked at has impacted not only the running of the organization, but my own professional and even personal development.”
Figure and quote from "Race to Lead Revisited" (click image to read the full report)
Organizations lead by people of color are overall less funded, less connected, and more vulnerable to collapse than organizations lead by white people [4]. Workers of color are held back from doing the work they want to do because they do not “fit” organizations or positions [5], because they are expected to be the “token” worker of color [6], and because they may face particular backlash if they speak up against white coworkers.
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So what can we do to fix this? One important step is to carefully consider what it means to be an ally—viewing equity through what we know about the systems in the U.S., and avoiding making issues about oneself which should be focused around listening to others (e.g. avoid lingering on white guilt in conversations about U.S. race relations). In their analysis of the #NODAPL movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline, Andrea Sullivan-Clarke explains, “treating #NODAPL like a concert event, with its attendant cultural appropriations, compounds the damage done to Indigenous people” [7]. Being an ally is a continual relationship with marginalized groups and people, maintained by “recognizing [one’s] privilege and affirming the sovereignty of those they seek to serve” and “learn[ing] about the people independently, without imposing a burden on marginalized communities” [8]. Allies that do not sincerely learn about and respect vulnerable communities are not helping to fight existing injustices.
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[1] National Center for Charitable Statistics (NCCS), “The Nonprofit Sector in Brief 2019,” 2020.
[2] Frances Kunreuther and Sean Thomas-Breitfeld, “Race to Lead Revisited: Obstacles and Opportunities in Addressing the Nonprofit Racial Leadership Gap,” 2020, 21.
[3] Kunreuther and Thomas-Breitfeld, 19.
[4] Kunreuther and Thomas-Breitfeld, 27.
[5] Kunreuther and Thomas-Breitfeld, 20.
[6] Kunreuther and Thomas-Breitfeld, 25.
[7] Andrea Sullivan-Clarke, “Empowering Relations: An Indigenous Understanding of Allyship in North America,” 2020.
[8] Sullivan-Clarke, 2020.