CHAPTER 6
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Embrace Humility and Learning
It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.
—Audre Lorde1
By the end of its first year, the Freedom Fund had scaled from one staff member to seven. All our staff were white, and most had graduate degrees. Our board comprised one woman and five men, all white. Our staff, based in London and New York, oversaw our existing programs in India and Nepal and planned expansion in Thailand and Ethiopia. While we had a number of Indian and Nepali consultants based in those countries, it’s safe to say that our staff and board were not representative of our society as a whole, let alone the communities in the low- and middle-income countries we served.
Only in 2018 did I belatedly begin paying more attention to diversity. Prompted in part by unfolding #MeToo scandals, my priority was to work with the board to ensure it had a better gender balance. I was not thinking more broadly than that. Efforts to improve the board’s diversity were constrained by the fact it was explicitly a donor board,* significantly limiting the pool of potential candidates that could fit its financial requirements. Our efforts to make the board more representative of the communities we served started a year later when one of our founder organizations encouraged us to appoint someone who had personal experience of labor exploitation to the board and offered to make one of its seats available for this purpose.
By early 2023, the picture had changed. We had eighty-two staff members—thirty-five identified as white, and the remaining forty-seven identified as Arab (French), Asian, Asian (South), Asian/White, Black, Black (African), Indigenous (Newar Janajati), Mediterranean, or Parda. Nearly three-quarters of our staff were women. Over half our staff lived in our program countries. On the senior leadership team, we had three women and two men. One was South Asian, and the rest were white and from the US, Canada, UK, and Australia, respectively. In the organization as a whole, four staff members identified as survivors of trafficking, including one member of our senior leadership team. Our board of eight had four women and four men; two were from low- and middle-income countries, and one had personally experienced labor exploitation. The organization was far more diverse than when it began but was still working at becoming more representative and inclusive.
I’m recounting these figures to give you a snapshot of the Freedom Fund’s progress, or lack of it, during its early years. Diversity is not just about numbers, but if you don’t start to become more representative of your society and those you serve, then you can’t take the next steps to become more inclusive. I share these details somewhat warily, as I’m fully conscious that talking about our halting progress on DEI opens us, and particularly me as leader, to criticism. But I think many leaders struggle with how best to approach DEI, especially when they didn’t think about DEI from the outset. I hope by sharing my own experiences, missteps, and learnings, I can help others better understand its importance and identify ways to help their organizations evolve.
Why did we take so long to become more diverse? Largely because this was the path of least resistance. We were growing in a hurry. In those first few years, we recruited staff who met our technical and educational requirements, without looking beyond those requirements to identify what other attributes were of critical importance, such as firsthand experience of the issues we were working on. Nor did we think to change our recruitment criteria and processes to expand the pool of potential candidates. We did not feel under any pressure to do so, because we were in good company with our peer organizations, most of which were similarly unrepresentative. When I started as CEO of the Freedom Fund, the four largest anti-slavery organizations in the UK and US were led by white men and had largely homogenous leadership teams. We also took comfort that our work, partnering with frontline organizations in countries with a high burden of slavery, was very much about supporting and shifting power to vulnerable communities. Progress externally allowed us to overlook our lack of progress internally.
Our efforts became all the more urgent following the murder of George Floyd and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. Our staff in the US and UK started asking what more we planned to do to ensure that our operations and culture were more inclusive, representative, and actively addressing racism and other systemic injustices. Our staff in low- and middle-income countries raised concerns about the need for staffing across the organization to be more representative of the countries we worked in, and to ensure that staff working in those countries received the same treatment and opportunities as staff in London and New York.
For my part, I initially felt somewhat uncomfortable with the pressure to do more. Like so many others, we publicly acknowledged the importance of Black Lives Matter and produced a statement about our commitment to DEI. I hesitated to go further, out of nervousness and uncertainty about what such actions would require and how they might change our focus on external impact. I took comfort that our staff surveys regularly reported high levels of satisfaction, and I thought that was more important than embarking on an uncertain process of internal reflection on DEI. I was also conscious that the board reflected a range of views on what action was required, and that we might struggle to reach agreement with the board on the best way forward, creating unnecessary friction in the process.
But staff continued to push for more, and I started doing more reading and reflecting on power and privilege. I came to the overdue understanding that we couldn’t credibly tackle entrenched power dynamics in the regions where we worked if we didn’t first look inward. I realized that we wouldn’t be as impactful as we hoped to be if we didn’t better represent the communities we served within our own staffing. Such representation—if done well—would enhance our legitimacy and credibility in the eyes of these communities and would also ensure that we had a deeper understanding of the challenges they faced and the outcomes they desired. All of that would contribute to greater impact over time. I also understood it was important to take action to maintain the staff’s longtime support of the culture we were so proud of.
So, three years ago we began a concerted process and, since then, we have come together around a shared understanding of how to move forward on DEI and have significantly stepped up our efforts. I’ll detail those efforts at the end of this chapter, with the hope that you will find them informative as you consider your own organization’s DEI efforts. That said, we are still very much a work in progress. In fact, one of the things I’ve come to understand is that DEI is invariably an ongoing process, not a one-off exercise.
When you are a leader, DEI deserves your close attention. While you may believe your nonprofit is diverse, your staff and other stakeholders may not agree. You may think all staff members are treated similarly and have equal opportunities to progress, but what is their experience? You may be a very small organization and think that DEI is not a priority, but it will be to those you serve, and once your organization is bigger, undoing entrenched patterns of behavior becomes much harder. You may think that because your mission is about tackling power imbalances in the outside world you don’t need to look internally, but you do. DEI should be a priority for any nonprofit leader. Done well, it ensures your organization is a better place to work for all staff and has greater legitimacy and credibility and, hence, impact.
I don’t intend this chapter to be a full primer on DEI, and I highly encourage you to seek out the many excellent resources on this topic written by activists, experts, and nonprofit leaders. It is not written for those who already have a deep understanding of DEI, as I am still learning myself. Rather, it’s intended as an introduction to the topic, for those leaders who are starting to grapple seriously with DEI. It will focus particularly on the role of the CEO.
WHAT IS DEI?
Diversity, equity, and inclusion is a catchall phrase for three distinct but related ideas. Diversity is about the presence of difference. Diverse here means people with different identities, experiences, perspectives, and qualities. Equity is about the process of fairness, a step toward full inclusion. Inclusion is about ensuring people with diverse backgrounds feel and are welcome in the organization. A diverse staff, in and of itself, is not sufficient; full inclusion requires that all staff voices, especially those from systematically marginalized backgrounds, are heard in important decisions and aspects of the organization.2 Done properly, it should result in a workplace where all staff feel welcomed and experience a sense of belonging.
COMMON DEI TERMS*
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.
