The consultants undertook a process of learning about the Freedom Fund and previously identified DEI priorities by reading the materials from the staff consultation process and meeting with staff stakeholders from human resources, senior leadership, and the steering committee. They used all the feedback from staff to create a vision document that set forth our long-term organizational ambitions across all areas of DEI. They also conducted learning and development sessions with staff, leadership, and board members on key topics like power and privilege and having difficult conversations.
Vision and action plan: We worked with the consultants and staff to create a DEI vision for the organization—describing the kind of equitable, diverse, and inclusive organization we aspired to become over time, to which everyone felt they belonged. Most importantly, this included the significant representation of survivors and other members of the communities we serve at every level of leadership in the organization. We also prepared a concrete and measurable action plan for the next several years. The action plan will allow us to track progress over time and understand the specific policies and changes we’ll be taking to live up to our vision for a more equitable, diverse, and inclusive Freedom Fund. We’ll approach our next strategic plan with a focus on ensuring we can deliver on our DEI vision, among our other goals.
Board action: As part of its own DEI process, the board agreed to broaden the criteria for board membership so that it was no longer a requirement for board members to be funders, significantly increasing the pool of potential candidates. Then, as a number of board members cycled off the board, the board embarked on a global and public search for candidates who would collectively bring a broad range of experience to the board, including membership of communities most affected by modern slavery, lived experience related to modern slavery, expertise on issues facing vulnerable women and girls in our program countries, and governance and finance experience, among other attributes. The board also particularly encouraged applications from individuals who were based in Asia, Africa, and South America.
Looking externally: Our growing effort to integrate DEI into all of our work has also affected strategic decisions and the creation of new programs. We began to take even more seriously our commitment to advancing equity within the broader anti-slavery movement. This had been a focus in our programming from the beginning, which was always centered on engaging with and supporting the most marginalized groups in our core programs. But we also identified new measures we could implement, such as increasing financial support for survivor leaders through our Survivor Leadership Fund and advocating for others to do the same. We’ve launched Freedom Rising, a leadership program that specifically supports women, survivors, and early-career leaders to diversify the leadership of anti-trafficking organizations globally. We’ve also created an Employment Pathways Fellowship to provide opportunities for survivors of trafficking to work at the Freedom Fund.
We still have a way to go and quite a lot of work to do if we are to embody our vision of being an organization that is not only inclusive, transparent, and representative of the communities most affected by modern slavery, but also serves as a leader for better DEI in our sector. For me, I now recognize that good intentions aren’t enough on their own. Leaders and their teams must proactively and systematically create new policies and practices to give effect to those intentions.
DIVERSITY, EQUITY, AND INCLUSION ACTION POINTS
Embrace Humility and Learning
Recognize that just because your organization pursues positive change doesn’t mean it is sufficiently inclusive, or appropriately representative of those it serves or of society more broadly.
Invest in the work needed to ensure your organization is inclusive and appropriately representative, as this will give it greater credibility and legitimacy with those it serves.
As CEO, lead the DEI process, but do so in a way that aims to bring along all staff.
Internalize that DEI isn’t a one-and-done exercise, but one that needs to be woven into your organization as an ongoing process of changing and strengthening your culture.
Model inclusive language and behavior, in both interpersonal interactions and public communications.
Understand that DEI processes can be confronting and disruptive, and that the CEO has a responsibility to help the organization navigate them in a way that increases the effectiveness of the organization, rather than undermining it.
* In our case, the expectation was that board members, or the foundations they represented, made a grant each year to the Freedom Fund of several hundred thousand dollars at a minimum. As you can imagine, that significantly restricts the pool of eligible candidates for the board.
* Other common phrases and acronyms are: diversity and inclusion; equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI); diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ); justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI); diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA); gender, equality, diversity, and inclusion (GEDI); and diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB). Definitions are drawn from websites of United Way, equity.unitedway.org; YW Boston, www.ywboston.org; Mission Met, www.missionmet.com; Public Lands Alliance, www.publiclandsalliance.org; and Bravely, workbravely.com.
* In their more entrenched forms, these barriers are often called “systems of oppression,” i.e., a combination of prejudice and institutional power that creates a system that regularly and severely discriminates against some groups and benefits other groups: “Social Identities and Systems of Oppression,” National Museum of African American History and Culture website, accessed February 15, 2023, nmaahc .si.edu/learn/talking-about-race/topics/social-identities-and-systems-oppression.
† See, for example, john a. powell, “Bridging or Breaking? The Stories We Tell Will Create the Future We Inhabit,” Nonprofit Quarterly, February 15, 2021, https://nonprofitquarterly.org/bridging-or-breaking-the-stories-we-tell-will-create-the-future-we-inhabit/.
* For example: “Closing Campaign Bootcamp,” Campaign Bootcamp website, December 22, 2021, https://campaignbootcamp.org/blog/2021/closing_campaign_bootcamp/index.html; see also Ryan Grim, “Elephant in the Zoom,” Intercept, June 13, 2022, theintercept.com/2022/06/13/progressive-organizing-infighting-callout-culture and Thomas B. Edsall, “Democrats Are Having a Purity-Test Problem at Exactly the Wrong Time,” New York Times, June 29, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/29/opinion/progressive-nonprofits-philanthropy.html.
† Microaggressions are “brief and commonplace verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward Black, Indigenous and other people of color.” “Living United: A Guide for Becoming a More Equitable Organization,” United Way website, equity.unitedway.org/sites/default/files/file /united-way--equity-toolkit.pdf.
* Racial privilege is: “Race-based advantages and preferential treatment based on skin color (often experienced without any conscious effort or awareness), “Living United,” United Way website.
† White supremacy is: “The existence of racial power that denotes a system of structural or societal racism that privileges White people over others, regardless of the presence or absence of racial hatred,” “Living Guide,” United Way website.
* We had good hiring practices in place, except that they didn’t make a proactive effort to identify diverse candidates. To address this deficit, we revised job descriptions to remove unnecessary barriers (e.g., educational degrees or years of experience where not relevant) and to include wording that encouraged applications from marginalized groups; changed employment contracts to be non-gender-specific; continued to ask recruitment agencies for a clear breakdown of what they are doing to reach diverse networks and to challenge anything in our job descriptions that would cause a barrier for diverse recruitment; broadened our advertising market to include more inclusive notice boards, appealing to underrepresented and systematically marginalized candidates; actively sought to attract more diverse candidates for all positions being hired, including considering recruiting in program countries for what would previously have been “headquarter posts”; increased diversity of team members involved in interview panels for recruitment, with special attention to including hot-spot representatives; and continued to support our human resources team to attend ongoing external DEI trainings.
CHAPTER 7
The Board
Invest in the Relationship
Boards are a unique and curious leadership structure.
—Anne Wallestad1
Nonprofit boards take many forms, often shaped by the organization’s origin story and its purpose. A couple of organizations I have been closely involved with illustrate that quite starkly.
On June 16, 2016, Jo Cox, a member of the British Parliament, was brutally stabbed to death by a British white supremacist while she was on her way to meet with members of the public in her constituency. Jo was forty-one years old at the time, married, with two young children, aged five and three. She was a close friend of mine. We had first met in 2005 when she was working for the UK humanitarian charity Oxfam GB. We had celebrated at each other’s weddings. Jo was the very first colleague I hired when I was setting up the Freedom Fund—and she worked with us for six months before embarking on her parliamentary career.
Following Jo’s murder, close friends banded together with her husband, Brendan, determined to honor her work and legacy. We organized a memorial event in London’s Trafalgar Square that was attended by thousands. Condolence messages poured in from public figures ranging from President Obama to Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai. We then decided to set up a charitable foundation that would carry forward Jo’s commitment to bringing communities together and combatting hatred and exclusion, particularly in politics. I became chair of the board, and the rest of the board (six members in total) comprised Brendan and close friends of Jo, all dedicated to the issues she cared about and her legacy. The foundation has stayed true to its mission. It has brought millions of people together across the UK through its annual “Great Get Together” street parties and community events. It has been active in campaigning for action against all forms of abuse and intimidation against people in political life, particularly women. I stepped down as chair in mid-2019, to be succeeded by another friend of Jo’s, former British government cabinet minister Jacqui Smith. The board has continued to evolve, too, with only one of the original members still remaining— but all current members still have a close connection with the causes Jo was so passionate about.
It so happens that when I first met Jo in 2005, I was vice president for advocacy and research at the International Crisis Group in Brussels. Jo was in town to lobby us on a humanitarian campaign she was leading for Oxfam on the atrocities unfolding in Darfur. Crisis Group had also been established in response to tragedy, in this case by a group of prominent statesmen who despaired at the international community’s failure to anticipate and respond effectively to the tragedies in Somalia, Rwanda, and Bosnia in the nineties. However, its governance structure was very different from the one we subsequently set up for the Jo Cox Foundation. Crisis Group had a board of over fifty trustees. This included eight former presidents and prime ministers, seven former foreign ministers, a couple of billionaire philanthropists, and a host of other eminent foreign policy figures. This reflected the founders’ strategy to create a professional organization to serve as the world’s eyes and ears for impending conflicts, with a high-profile board that could mobilize effective action from global policymakers.2 Crisis Group quickly grew into a highly influential foreign policy outfit. Of course, a board with fifty members was far too unwieldy to effectively govern the organization, so much of the governance responsibility was delegated to a thirteen-person executive committee and other subcommittees. The board would meet for three days, twice a year, with the first day dedicated to committee and governance business, and the last two would bring the whole board together to discuss key global conflict developments and trends.
I share these two stories to illustrate ways in which the motivation to establish nonprofits can heavily shape the approach to their governance. However, despite the different configurations, all boards share the same broad governance responsibilities, which we will now explore.
WHAT DO BOARDS DO?
As CEO you are legally accountable to the organization’s board, which has the power to hire and fire you. Implicit in that power is the responsibility for evaluating your performance. Other responsibilities of the board include signing off on the strategy, ensuring the organization is on a sound financial footing, and managing significant risks. As one leading governance expert puts it:
Assuming the purpose of the organization is clear, the role of the board ought to be to ensure the organization has the right strategy, resources and governance to achieve this purpose in the context it operates in.3
As noted above, nonprofit boards take many forms.* Some are composed of founders of the organization or friends and colleagues of the founder. Some are donor boards, comprising the main funders of the organization. Some will be expert boards, with board members having subject matter knowledge on the issues your nonprofit works on (e.g., medical experts for health nonprofits), deep familiarity with the needs of the community in which you work, or other relevant technical expertise (such as legal, financial, or communications). Many are a mix of all of these. Some boards will be diverse and have strong representation of the communities they serve, but many do not. While the board has formal responsibility for appointing new board members, the CEO and colleagues usually play a leading role in the identification of candidates, and their induction, once appointed.
Despite their central role, nonprofit board members are almost invariably volunteers. The board may meet quarterly or more or less frequently* but, however often they meet, board members will engage with the organization a fraction of the time the CEO and other staff members do. There is a real information asymmetry between board members and the CEO. Therefore, the CEO needs to make sure all board members have the information they need to carry out their role effectively and support them in doing so. At the very least, you should ensure new board members go through an induction process to familiarize them with the organization’s work, strategy, and senior leadership team. Thereafter, the CEO should do their best to ensure that all board members are actively engaged and fulfilling their responsibilities.
At this same time, the CEO should ensure that a clear demarcation exists between the roles of the board and CEO, and that the board doesn’t overstep its role and start managing staff. The board should engage in governance, not management.
THE CEO’S RELATIONSHIP WITH THE BOARD
The relationship between a CEO and the board is of critical importance, and sometimes fraught. Ideally, the board is cohesive, with a clear understanding of its role and responsibilities. The board chair is the primary interlocutor between the board and the CEO. That relationship is key, and, given its importance, one that every CEO should invest in.
