Uncomfortable questions

There are a lot of uncomfortable questions being asked in the nonprofit and philanthropic sector at the moment. Who are running the foundation? How many BIPOC people are on your staff? How many in management? What does your agency’s policy around awarding grants look like? How much of the money you are granting reach underprivileged populations? Or, how much money are you actually granting each year?

These and many other questions are necessary and long overdue.

Recently we have seen that when an uncomfortable, but necessary question, is asked, it is met with disdain, or outright condescension. It happens in the media, but also in the philanthropic and nonprofit sector. I have personally faced this more than a few times, when after posing a question, I was told variations on “why don’t you just stay with what I’m good at.” Perhaps it was because I was ‘just’ a woman. 

The responses to decent and appropriate questions are a representation of what many of us experience when we approach someone in a transactional situation, for example, a donor – very often a white, privileged individual. 

Reading blogs and articles, and listening to podcasts and spending time on webinars lately, have sharpened these impressions. Asking relevant questions and expecting respectful responses shouldn’t be an anomaly. Nonprofits deserve to be heard and have for a very long time, and increasingly so, been put in situations of deferring to the money; the power of the seemingly frivolous yay-or-nay in a grant application process. With that I mean that the donor-centric model has not only reigned for a century or more, it has gotten worse. Philanthropist are viewed as the new benevolent strata and are getting credit for not only being on top and successful – they are now the only ones who can solve the problems that they actually caused, which Anand Giridharadas so eloquently expands upon in his book Winners Take All. 

I didn’t push back at the time. But we’re at a pivotal moment where both questions and answers deserve, and increasingly are getting, their due attention. 

It is no longer enough to tolerate inadequate replies in the quest for raising money, forwarding a pressing issue, or promote a policy that is evident; it is also not acceptable to deprive anybody from speaking their truths when constituents and clients are suffering, however uncomfortable this is to those that control the purse strings. 

The uncomfortable, to be brave and bold, is required at this moment. To ask those questions regardless of the treatment or reply, is necessary.

Photo by Simone Secci on Unsplash