In the last two years, I’ve shut my door to working directly with the nonprofit sector more and more.
Why?
Because if we are not paying our people enough, and giving the best benefits possible, then WE ARE
NOT
HELPING
!
Not powerless but tired
Because I’ve been an employee advocate for over 15 years, and I’ve done 15 online conferences to try to get nonprofits to treat their workers better, and I don’t really see that happening. It feels like a lot of my advocacy went into a black hole. I was talking with people who already agreed with me at these events. And while that was nice, I didn’t have the political or organizing education to make a dent in how people got treated otherwise. I don’t feel powerless but I do feel tired.
I mean, sure, in 2021, I got experts to come in and talk about better pay structures, forming more democratic structures inside nonprofits, and forming unions inside nonprofits.
This presentation helped some people see a way to gaining more power in their organizations, but honestly I don’t know how much it really helped the average nonprofit worker just trying to get by. People are scared to lose their jobs. The cost of everything is going up and they don’t have the courage to unionize. And it’s understandable.
The premise of capitalism is, “Make money, OR ELSE be homeless and die.”
Nonprofits with all their veneer of altruism and kindness, are no exception. Planned Parenthood does union busting.
Since the pandemic started, we have seen a wave of unionization in nonprofits, and that does make me a bit more hopeful.
But I also don’t want to keep fighting an industry that grinds us down each day and tries to tell us to be grateful for the pennies, we get to be grateful to do what we LOVE! Meanwhile we have the same stagnant wages, the same bad policies, and the same checked out leadership. This was covered extensively in “Uncharitable” by Dan Pallotta.
Let me begin in the middle.
Let me tell you a story.
After being an intern at Planned Parenthood, early in my fundraising career, I was working in a nonprofit that was stuffy and odd. In a weird little office away from their main location.
The boss was bombastic and liked to think she was “friends” with her employees. She decided she didn’t really know me, and wanted me to open up more.
I chose not to do that.
She told me if I came in late 3x she would fire me. So one day I lost my job for coming in 3 minutes late to work. And that was it. She looked for a reason to fire me, found one, and I was out.
I was actually so relieved to be out of that job, it paid like crap and the benefits were non-existent since she fired me before my first 3 months were up.
Frankly, my job was data entry in a fundraising office. I didn’t have to go meet and greet. I didn’t have to put on a happy face. I could just go there and do my job and go home, and that was all I really wanted.
She wanted a PERFORMANCE of intimacy from me that I did not want to give her.
Has that ever happened to you? People wanted you to open up, and acted like they were OWED some part of you?
After this job I decided right there that I was not going to put on an act, for anyone, whether or not I wanted to keep a job. I was just going to be who I was.
Has this cost me work and opportunities? I’m sure it has. But the pain was better than the pretending.
The pain was better than what would have come next.
What would have come next? Probably invitations to continue to open up to someone who hadn’t earned it, who didn’t deserve it. And who wasn’t safe to open up to. Clearly, if she felt like she was owed it, she would not take no for an answer, and press until I capitulated or got out.
You don’t owe anyone your heart-to-hearts, your true feelings, or even more than a polite mask you wear to get through the day.
I take heart from the protests for Palestine and walkouts I’m seeing on campuses, the people who are striking in hospital systems around the country. We don’t talk about this enough. Their complaints add up, and become newsworthy.
A shut door can be a complaint and a survival strategy
Lately I’ve been reading Sara Ahmed’s Complaint. It’s a beautiful work, reminiscent of the first time I read Gertrude Stein, and Bayo Akomolafe, and yet so empowering and feminist at the same time. She writes,
“Withdrawal becomes a political action given the demand for access and upon whom that demand falls, how some have to make themselves available for others.”
Basically, you won’t succeed unless you open when we tell you to.
NO. I stay closed.
I want to be in a sector that pays people more, and better, and consistently, and upholds unions.
I complained, and I withdrew. They were worse for having lost me. That’s been true of every nonprofit I ever worked at. The professional managerial class has been virtue hoarding for awhile, and what if we just withdrew from that?
So I moved to government contracting.
How did this work?
Well, I started out in government contracting as an income stream in 2012, so I started slow. Just one or two contracts, here and there, because I wasn’t really focused on it. I had fundraising books to write, fundraising courses to teach, online nonprofit conferences to run, and I did that, and did it well, right up until 2020.
2020 – It all ground to a halt.
Everything I was trying to do stopped working, and I couldn’t make myself want to start working on “getting out there” again.
George Floyd was dead, Breonna Taylor died, we protested in the streets, we continued to fight undeclared wars, and nonprofits made token statements, but did not acknowledge the structures at play.
The ahistorical perspective, the lack of true accountability, the blatant hypocrisy of the sector, the neoliberalism, was too much for me to ignore. I had started to get educated on systems of oppression, socialism, methods of rationality, and my mind could not go back.
Ahmed writes about Haunting- when home becomes unfamiliar
When your bearing on the world loses direction”
I felt haunted.
“Closing the door can be a survival strategy” – Sara Ahmed
One person Ahmed interviewed said,
“I pulled the curtain, closed the door, and I never opened my door for a year. I only kept it open a crack, and only students could come in. I did not let anyone in who I did not invite there.”
At first I left it halfway open, and still took the odd nonprofit client here and there in 2020, and 2021. I did my coaching, and podcast, and worked on figuring out who I wanted to be, if not a nonprofit employee advocate, and fundraising consultant.
If you’re not getting paid enough to work with nonprofits, if they’re nickel and diming you as a consultant, you are not alone.
I felt like I could get some contracts here and there, but sustaining work was not what they were willing to pay for. And I was tired of the grind. Honestly, truly, tired of people demanding discounts and generally being unwilling to pay a fair amount for my expertise.
2022 (Staying Still)
In 2022, I did not go anywhere. I didn’t get on a plane. And that felt good. It felt like I was starting to feel my way towards a place of letting go, of the sector that had fed me, for sure, but not enough. Not enough to save and live less precariously.
So in 2023, I shut my door.
My brother died suddenly in August, and I was grieving.
I pulled the curtain, closed the door, and went to the woods.
There I was alone with my tears, and I let the trees hear my pain.
After putting out more than 1,000 blog posts, 3 books, 10 courses and a weekly newsletter for over a decade, I barely wrote online at all. I just… sat with my grief.
And I started to realize a lot of things I had been involved in were not for me. An activist group. A friendship or two. Assumptions I had made about my family. It felt like the more I was silent, the more I listened to myself, the more the blinders came off. And I could start to really feel what was for me, and what was not.
Every time I thought about going back to the sector, just to do a little work, here and there, a small voice inside me said, “no”. And then it got louder. And louder.
Violence can be shut out with a door. Violence can be shut IN- behind the door. I choose to stand on the outside of the sector and look in, and say NO to the violence that is enacted INSIDE when people are not paid enough to survive.
I withdraw my labor and my attention from a system that gaslights us and destroys us.
It is ridiculously freeing to strengthen the muscle of letting go and saying no. Have you worked on this?
If the nonprofit sector is the only one you’ve ever known, this process can be scary.
But you don’t have to do it alone.
Collect tales, leave trails.
Listen to stories of other folks who have left.
Maybe there’s a trail out for you too.
Reframing my expertise
In 2023 I invested in a platform that found RFPs for nonprofits and government all over the country, and started applying to all of these RFPs. I won exactly zero of these RFPs. But I did not give up.
By 2024, I was working with nonprofits only through government contracts. I was teaching fundraising, but through government work, and that felt more sustaining to me. I redid my website to reflect this new mode of working.
I went to one nonprofit conference…. and felt like it wasn’t worth it, being there.
When I tried to connect with people, I felt the disconnect. It wasn’t my world, anymore.
There were a few bumps in the road, but I started to get mentorship, get my WBE certifications, write proposals for local RFPs, and show up more at local government contracting events. I have a partner that applies to RFPs with me. And we worked hard in 2024.
This paid off in 2025 with new work!
By the end of the year, my company got awarded a few contracts as a prime and as a subcontractor, and the contracts were for 5 years. At the year mark of my brother’s death, I was still broken, still grieving, but I started to have a place to stand.
Now- The Nonprofit Sector was a phase- and this is the next phase.
Now in 2025, it’s almost the second anniversary of his death, and I feel his spirit with me. It feels like he’s proud of me. I wish he could be here to see it unfold.
The wellpaid work is coming in faster and faster.
Before this would have freaked me out, but now I’m learning about automation and project management. And it feels right.
I have support with my team, and I feel so grateful that we are going so far together. Sure, it took awhile to start getting contracts, but now that we have them, we are focused, motivated, organized and happier together doing this work than we would be doing it apart. I’m so grateful!
Complaints participate in the weakening of structures
I complained over and over about the sector. And I do believe it participated in the weakening of the structures we take for granted.
You can complain too. Your complaints matter.
As Ahmed says,
“The more we complain, the more they have to justify.
Arguments can stop working.
Justifications can become tired.”
I want you to feel this and understand this.
The justification that “we just can’t pay more” has become TIRED.
That doesn’t work on us. Pay us more so that we can save.
Their argument that it’s better to work in the nonprofit sector instead of “selling out” to go to another sector has stopped working on me. It’s a thought terminating cliche, and it’s just not true.
You can leave. You can shut the door. And you can go on to do something more fun for you.
Maybe it’s government contracting.
If you’re curious about it, let me know. I can connect you with resources.
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