You work at a nonprofit right? Let me ask you a few questions.
Why do you feel like you have to change the world?
Why is the world resting on your shoulders?
Who made you in charge of the world’s problems?
Because in nonprofits, this is how we are set up.
Because of white supremacy, we seek Power OVER. Not Power WITH.
So this leads to white savior complex.
It leads to all white boards or all white leadership of a nonprofit.
It leads us to set up nonprofits to “help” brown people all over the world when often our imperialist policies created the problems they are having in the first place.
As Slavoj Zizek says, “When we are shown scenes of starving children in Africa, with a call for us to do something to help them, the underlying ideological message is something like: “Don’t think, don’t politicize, forget about the true causes of their poverty, just act, contribute money, so that you will not have to think!”
We are trained to put a bandaid on a problem, instead of looking at the deeper cause of the problem.
It’s easier to say, “Give today to fund a mosquito net for a child in Ecuador” instead of “Help us look at why our government has systemically been destabilizing Latin American countries for three decades.” Not as snappy. Doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Also because that would require us to question our foreign policy, question our system of government, and question imperialist colonialist mindsets.
Part of the problem is how we respond to the problem.
You see, we SAY we want equality. We SAY we want to treat everyone well at our organizations. But our actions go against our policies, and we need to look at that.
How can we get our actions to match our policies?
According to the Economist, in 2008 Norway required listed companies to reserve at least “40% of their board seats for women on pain of dissolution. In the following five years more than a dozen countries set similar quotas at 30% to 40%. ”
Today 35.5% of Norway’s boards are women. Over 10 years later, has anything really changed for women at other levels of organizations? The Economist says no, not in any meaningful way.
In the US in 2020, 20% of corporate boards are women.
We could clearly do better here not just in gender, but in racial equity.