Diversity: The differences between us—such as race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, ethnic background, ability/disability, language, and socioeconomic background—based on which we experience systemic advantages or encounter systemic barriers to opportunities. A diverse staff and board bring together people with different identities, perspectives, and qualities. However, having a diverse staff or board does not in itself mean that your organization is inclusive. For example, you can have a diverse staff but a homogenous leadership team, or you can have diverse members on your board who are rarely listened to.

Equity: Equity is about helping all people reach the same level of success, even if that means disenfranchised people are given opportunities (through tailored support and development opportunities, for example) that help get them to the same places that majority groups have historically operated within. It means more than equality. Equality focuses on the same treatment of every individual. In a perfect world, that would be sufficient, but people operate within broken and unfair systems, especially those who have any sort of minority status.

Inclusion: While diversity and equity are proactive steps, inclusion is an outcome of those efforts. Inclusion gets accomplished when systematically disenfranchised people actually are and feel welcomed and experience a sense of belonging. This includes not just the presence of individuals from a range of backgrounds, but their voices being heard in the running of the nonprofit. Inclusion means diverse groups of people should participate in decision-making conversations and have available professional development opportunities and ongoing training.

Justice: This is long-term equity. Justice means dismantling barriers to resources and opportunities in society so that all individuals and communities can live full and dignified lives.^*

Belonging: Belonging involves everybody, from both majority and minority backgrounds, feeling that they are a part of the group and identifying with it. It means more than just being seen—it means being able to participate in co-creating the culture of the group you belong to. Belonging embraces differences and learns from them. It is sometimes used as a concept distinct from, and broader than, inclusion.^†

WHAT IS A DEI PROCESS?

Being a diverse and inclusive organization means that a wide range of people with different skills, perspectives, identities, and experiences participate in the running of the organization. It allows you to draw on the broadest range of talent. It will give your organization greater legitimacy and credibility with those you serve, and with staff, funders, peers, and members of the public.

Consider the opposite. How will staff from historically disenfranchised groups feel in an organization that excludes them from leadership and the running of the organization—one where they do not feel welcome, where they often feel slighted or discriminated against? How will the individuals and communities you serve react if your organization does not include them in its staff or makes little effort to be more representative? How will other staff feel? What will this do for your mission, impact, and culture?

INTERVIEW

What Does DEI Mean in a South Asian Nonprofit?

Asif Shaikh is the founder of Jan Sahas, which means “People’s Courage.” It is a community-centric nonprofit working intensively in more than twenty thousand villages and urban areas of ninety-eight districts across thirteen states of India and supporting the community-based organizations across South and Southeast Asia. It works with the most excluded social groups on safe migration and workers’ protection, and the prevention of sexual violence against women and children. In 2022, Asif received the Gleitsman Activist Award from the Harvard Kennedy School, whichhonors “exceptional leaders and innovators who have sparked positive social change and inspired others to do the same.” Here are a few of his observations on DEI in the complex context of South Asia, with its caste system and the strong role that religion plays in politics, society, and daily life.

In South Asia’s caste system, there is a group known as “untouchables,” or Dalits. They are often discriminated against by other castes. I am a Muslim Dalit. When I first started this organization, I only wanted to work with Dalits, to improve their situation. But I soon realized this was not an effective strategy, because while many non-Dalit people discriminated against Dalits, there were many other non-Dalits who wanted to support our movement. It’s like the civil rights movement in the US—even though that was advocating for rights of Black Americans, it did not call itself a movement of Black Americans or limit itself to them; it sought to mobilize everyone to the cause. We need to do the same in South Asia. This was also the belief of Dr. Ambedkar, founder of the Indian Constitution. As a Dalit he believed that all Indians, not just Dalits, had to work to eliminate this form of discrimination.

We also need to understand that Dalits are not a single group. In fact, Dalit is a manufactured term and refers to more than one thousand different sub-castes, and often members of these sub-castes discriminate against other sub-castes. As a Dalit, I often receive discrimination from other Dalits, for example. Some Dalit-led NGOs only employ Dalits from one of the sub-castes, ignoring all the other subcastes, and hence discriminating in their own way.

In fact, South Asian NGOs working on issues relevant to Dalits often lack diversity. Many of them are run by non-Dalit caste leaders, even though typically their field staff are Dalits. The same problem exists with philanthropic foundations and consultancies—the majority of their senior staff are non-Dalit.

So lots of work needs to be done to promote diversity in South Asia, particularly around caste and religion. In our own nonprofits we need to recruit from a much wider range of groups and make sure that people from excluded communities are properly included. It is constant work. It is not just a good practice on its own; rather, you need to be thinking about it for everything you do. When you recruit a person, when you appoint a board member, when you select a geography [in which] to work, when you engage with any stakeholder or in any kind of activity—in everything you do, you should ensure diversity and inclusion. And not just our organizations—foundations and consultancies also need to do much more, too, if they are to change and support change. If each and every player in the ecosystem engages properly on diversity and inclusion, then we would be much better placed to change communities.³

DEI isn’t a one-and-done exercise. It needs to be woven into your organization. The process of integrating it is a continuous one. Getting serious about DEI often requires changing and strengthening your culture, and leaders should be fully committed to the work, listening, and introspection it entails. Too often leaders who come reluctantly to the table think they can “deal” with DEI by hiring an external consultant, running a couple of all-staff sessions, and then ticking the DEI box. But this will not achieve any significant change, and it certainly won’t change your culture. It may well prove counterproductive if the process is superficial. Rather, you should approach the process as you would with any important investment in your nonprofit’s culture.

Similarly, nonprofits often make eloquent public statements about their commitment to DEI, thinking that might be sufficient, but it’s not. Genuine commitment is proven by the investment of resources and energy in the process. An organization with good intentions can easily acknowledge how much it falls short, and commit to making changes, but then let those changes get lost in the long list of projects on the to-do list. This is especially true when nonprofits are understaffed and morale is low. If DEI is siloed, treated only as a human resources issue, or handed off to a junior-level staff member with little support or buy-in from senior leadership, your success will be limited. Instead, efforts should be integrated across the organization, with all of senior leadership understanding that they will be held accountable for progress.

The answer isn’t to simply add to workloads by asking for volunteers to take on responsibility for DEI on top of their existing roles. Only concrete steps will drive forward the process. This can include some or all of the following measures:

Allocate space in your budget for expert advice, staffing, and training as necessary.

Engage expert consultants, but keep in mind that consultants are most helpful for kick-starting the process and identifying a plan of action. In the long term, only your organization itself can carry out the substantive changes to culture, processes, and structures, and sustain the process of continually assessing progress.

Shift workloads so that a senior-level staff member can take on responsibility for DEI and have the capacity to do so by passing off some of their other responsibilities to another colleague.

Form a voluntary, representative, rotating DEI committee from among staff. Ensure that staff feel comfortable raising concerns or questions with those on the committee.

Shift job descriptions so that one person on each team serves as a trained DEI focal person or, if your organization is large enough to warrant it, hire a full-time DEI staff member.

Solicit input from across the organization to develop a DEI vision and a plan with concrete and measurable steps on everything from recruitment to training to staff development, and track performance.

THE CEO’S ROLE

The CEO needs to lead DEI efforts and do so in a way that brings along all staff and gives them an active role in shaping the process and outcomes. I’ve found that treating DEI as a key component of our culture (and not as something separate to it) helped me better understand that it is central to building an inclusive and representative organization. It has not been an easy process. I had long been one of those nonprofit leaders who thought that my organization was doing pretty well on culture, including DEI, and was taken aback when some staff asked what more we were going to do to make our organization more diverse and inclusive. It felt like a challenge to my commitment to positive change. And it was—as it should be.

The real test of our commitment to the values we espouse is how we respond when we recognize that our organizations do not fully reflect them. Failure to respond appropriately can turn this conversation into a challenge to the leader’s authority. This is a fear of many CEOs new to the process, but the challenge to authority usually comes when the process is poorly handled, not as a result of the process itself. That’s an important difference.

DEI processes can be particularly fraught for organizations when a big divide between leadership and staff already exists. Often leadership wants to focus on external engagement and impact, thinking that’s where the organization can make the biggest contribution (and perhaps unconsciously or otherwise wanting to avoid tough internal discussions). Staff, on the other hand, may want to focus first on the internal manifestations of inequity—things like how a lack of diversity or unequal compensation impacts staff well-being. Their argument is often that the organization needs to “clean house” first before looking outside (but may also sometimes be more focused on prioritizing their own concerns over those of the community they serve).

CASE STUDY

How a Mishandled Approach to Racial Justice Issues Led to an Exodus of Staff

The divide between leadership and staff proved damaging for the Guttmacher Institute, a prominent reproductive health and rights research nonprofit based in Washington, DC. It showed how a badly handled process can disrupt an organization.

Over several years, staff on Guttmacher’s public policy team made a number of complaints about racial tokenization, verbal abuse, discrimination by leadership against employees of color and people with children, and retaliation against staff who raised some of these concerns. These complaints went largely unaddressed by leadership.

During a meeting soon after the murder of George Floyd, these grievances came to a head as staff made a number of requests for internal changes to better support Black staff and other employees of color. Their demands included looser deadlines, better-designed leave policies, and more racial equity training. Leadership resisted these requests, arguing that the focus should be external rather than on internal problems in the workplace, and downplaying the direct connection between racist violence and the need for greater equity within the organization. A senior leadership team member became frustrated that staffers kept talking about “workplace problems” instead of “police brutality.”

On the other hand, a number of staff believed that managers took advantage of the moral commitment staff felt toward their mission and allowed workplace abuses to go unchecked. Leadership’s refusal to acknowledge and address these issues—and their insistence that those raising grievances were “self-centered”—led to great turmoil and eventually a significant exodus of staff. In the end, more than 80 percent of Guttmacher’s public policy division left over an eleven-month period, including every caregiver and the only two staffers of color.⁴

This case is illustrative of the divide that often exists between leadership and more junior staff. Too often, leaders take the approach that if their organization is doing good, it must be good. They focus outward—on the community served, and programmatic outcomes, failing to recognize (or choosing to overlook) that their organization is not sufficiently representative of that community and other marginalized groups, or sufficiently inclusive. And sometimes staff (or a small group of staff) focus disproportionately inward—on the internal makeup of the organization and the DEI process, and don’t give enough thought to the primary responsibility to deliver change to the community being served. Of course, the two objectives should be able to coexist and reinforce each other, and that’s what a good DEI process seeks to achieve.

As CEO, you can and should play a critical leadership role in advancing DEI in a few specific ways: prioritizing DEI within broader organizational goals, balancing involvement with ceding power to colleagues, modeling behavior, striking the right balance between internal and external focus, and ensuring the process doesn’t unduly disrupt your mission. You don’t have to have all the answers, but you are responsible for creating the context for solutions. When we embarked on a substantive DEI process at the Freedom Fund, I was clear that it had my full backing.

But you also need to step back and create space for others. While you, along with the board, are the ultimate decision-maker, DEI won’t be embedded in the organization unless you allow staff to buy into the process and express their needs and priorities. If staff feel like they will be expending energy voicing concerns, experiences, and ideas only for the senior leadership to intervene at the end and undo the whole process, they are less likely to engage. The best way to handle this is by supporting colleagues to lead the internal process. At the Freedom Fund, we established a representative DEI steering committee, with a high degree of autonomy and a remit to consult broadly across the organization, reporting in to the senior leadership team.

DEALING WITH DISCOMFORT

These processes, done properly, do shift power within an organization, and that can be confronting for some leaders. Sometimes, the issues staff raise may be surprising or upsetting to hear. As relatable as you may aim to be, problems around diversity and inclusion in the workplace do not always trickle up to leadership. Sometimes staff don’t feel comfortable raising them or assume nothing will be done. Sometimes managers hide these issues from senior leadership in order to save face. Sometimes what you might perceive as a culture of positivity actually compels staff to keep things to themselves. And unfortunately, sometimes you might close your mind to these challenges, unwilling to listen or unsure of how to address deep-rooted issues. Whatever the case, it’s all the more important that you recognize and acknowledge these concerns and issues, despite how far they may be from your own experience.

The process of imagining a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive organization often means considering changes to organizational traditions, structures, practices, and values. You may instinctively go into “protective” mode, raising concerns about how such changes would impact effectiveness, ability to raise money, relations with the board, and other practical concerns. I’ve certainly had to work hard to check my sometimes-reflexive responses along these lines. This is why the strength of your organizational culture is of such importance. A good culture will better support a thoughtful, ongoing process.

As I’ve also learned, the CEO’s role—its boundaries or the fact of you occupying it—may be questioned, by discussions of things like adopting a less hierarchical management structure and the need for better representation of marginalized identities in leadership. This is when it is critical, as a truly mission-focused leader, for you to step away from concerns about self-preservation. Your ultimate goal is to seek what is best for your organization and mission, and to be open to change, if change means a healthier and more impactful organization.

All of this requires quite a bit of introspection: you won’t be ready to lead an organization committed to DEI unless you are consciously learning and reflecting with humility. This means committing actual time and energy to read about, examine, and discuss your relationship to systems of power and privilege. You might choose to join a reading group or find a mentor who can help you work through these issues. While you don’t need to feel like a DEI expert, you cannot leave the educational or practical work to other colleagues, specifically women and people of color, who are often expected to take on the undue burden of DEI work in the workplace.⁵

As the main representative of the organization, the CEO has a responsibility to embody its values and aspirations. You should take the role of modeling inclusive language and behavior seriously, both in interpersonal interactions and public communications, admitting shortcomings and being willing to be held accountable for mistakes and harms caused.

WHEN DEI PROCESSES GO WRONG

Believing in the importance of DEI is quite different from effectively operationalizing it, as we’ve explored above. Even with the best will in the world, embarking on a broad-ranging process can be a profound challenge.

A number of nonprofits have experienced significant turmoil during their DEI process, and some have even imploded.^* This is not the norm, and many of those organizations, but certainly not all of them, likely had problematic cultures to begin with. Regardless, given our first obligation as leaders is to the mission and the people we serve, we must understand how these processes can strengthen our work, not derail it.

There are a number of scenarios in which addressing DEI can be particularly challenging, even for organizations with a healthy culture. In one scenario, fundamentally divergent views exist within the organization—from board members all the way to junior staff—about what diversity and inclusion mean. While DEI is about tackling injustice and inequality within our organizations, that straightforward declaration carries a lot of weight. To some it might mean issues of discrimination and different treatment within their nonprofit, such as tackling microaggressions,^† reviewing recruitment policies to ensure a wider pool of candidates, and making leadership more diverse and inclusive. To others, the statement might speak to the fact that structures in our society have systematically excluded and discriminated against people of color and other minority groups, and their concern is that this is being replicated in their organization. And to others, a strong focus on DEI may feel exclusionary, and make them feel like they don’t fully belong to the organization.

Our perspective can shape the language we use. Many will talk about barriers to inclusion as systems of oppression and structural impediments resulting from, or leading to, racial privilege^* and white supremacy.^† Others will feel defensive and even distressed by that language and the accusation (to their mind) of their active wrongdoing. And some, in turn, will be upset at that reaction, and see it as white fragility—defined as a defensiveness among privileged white men and women, which cannot be accommodated as an acceptable viewpoint. The reality is that the terminology used can carry a lot of weight and can’t always be readily adapted to the sensitivities of all those involved. Often the most important first step is to help everyone involved get to a shared understanding of the language and concepts to be used, as a step toward more substantive engagement.

In other scenarios, there is broad buy-in to the importance of a process, but the process itself is badly managed by the board or leadership or staff or all of them, resulting in increased dysfunction. You can easily find many examples of such dysfunction, some of which are described in an Intercept piece titled “Elephant in the Zoom: Meltdowns Have Brought Progressive Advocacy Groups to a Standstill at a Critical Moment in World History.”⁶ I have mixed views on these examples. I tend to believe that if a DEI process exposes conflicts in an organization that are powerful enough to derail it, then there is a good chance that significant problems with its culture (including around exclusion and discrimination) already existed, had long festered, and were probably undermining the organization’s effectiveness in any event. But that won’t always be the case, and quite clearly badly run processes, such as those that are focused only on difference and not interested in encouraging inclusion and a sense of belonging for all, can be highly destructive.

While DEI processes can be challenging and sometimes disruptive, that’s not a reason not to engage in them. (In fact, “disruption” can often bring about productive changes in the long term.) Rather, these challenges highlight the critical importance of the CEO being invested in the whole process, ensuring the necessary resources and support are available and that a good culture is in place to help the organization get the most out of its DEI efforts. To make this discussion more concrete, I’ll conclude this chapter with an overview of how we have approached all of this at the Freedom Fund over the last couple of years in the hope that some of this may be of use to others embarking on this process.