Diversity in philanthropy: a demystification

Pitfall 1: knee-jerk diversity

The racial justice protests of 2020 led to a sharp rise in the number of diversity consultancies. Bain’s newly created diversity, equity and inclusion practice (DEI) already has dozens of staff. Companies are racing to try and appear to be listening to the social sentiment and convince their customers and employees: indeed, 53% of those aged 18-34 say they would not work for a firm that failed to speak out during the protests.

This will no doubt lead to some knee-jerk reactions. I recently heard the phrase “We urgently need a Black CEO” uttered at a Board meeting. A few years ago, during the #MeToo peak, similar things were being said about women, in all sincerity. The thinking was, and still is: if we just had a bit of token diversity at the top then we could go on with our business as usual.

Not quite.

Pitfall 2: hijacking diversity

In 2018, a candidate League member invited us to review their human resource practices with regard to sexual harassment. After a wave of complaints and scandals, the Secretary-General, a man, had just put in place a two-women committee to review and treat all the cases. He encouraged the the staff to speak “in all confidentiality” to the committee.

One woman on the committee was the director of human resources. She had a widespread reputation for having covered up the scandals. In addition, in the words of one of the employees we interviewed, “You tell her something confidentially at noon, and by the end of the day everyone in the organization knows it.” The other person on the committee was the Chief of Staff, widely regarded as the chief bully in the organization.

Needless to say, the “committee” went nowhere, the Secretary-General failed to remedy matters in any meaningful way, and we were forced to reject the organization’s membership application. 

Diversity as inclusive hiring + listening

At the Altruist League, we hire local analysts in dozens of countries, and diversity comes naturally as a consequence. However, for our technical team, developing our data set and the machine learning model, it is more of a struggle. Software engineering is traditionally non-diverse. When we put out a job announcement, 99% of the applications come back White and male. 

Finding and retaining minority talent in artificial intelligence is hard, and takes active searching on our part. And even hiring isn’t the end of the road. We must ensure that people of color and women are then put in a position to succeed within an enabling culture. But once an inclusive culture is in place, all we need to do is keep listening to everyone, and they will tell us what kind of an organization they want us to be.

This is the crucial point: what diversity is and how it is put in place cannot be decided by the uniform-looking group at the top: it must emerge bottom-up in an organization!

Diversity in philanthropy: principles

What lessons for philanthropy, then? The sector has evidently a tremendous diversity problem. In the US, just over eight percent of foundation leaders are diverse, just over six percent of money goes to diverse communities. How to improve this disheartening picture? Three guiding principles come to mind:

1. Convince yourself that diversity is good. 

Are you reacting to public pressure and the news headlines, or do you think that diversity of views can indeed help your organization? Don’t be politically correct just because everyone else is. Some business evidence of the importance of diversity is good. But many popular arguments for diversity are slim, unconvincing, misleading or downright patronizing to women and ethnic minorities. Take the time to read around to understand why you are doing this in the first place, and whether your reasons are business, moral or both.

2. Be honest and transparent

Nobody expects you to become an overnight diversity champion. We already know that more than 80 percent of foundation staff is White; among CEOs the proportion is even higher. This doesn’t change quickly. But you must be open about your intentions, and let the your partners and the public keep you accountable for them. Keeping a blog or sending a newsletter with regular updates on your progress on diversity is a good idea. Even better if those updates read honest and invite criticism, rather than sounding as press releases.

3. Trust

If you trust your minority staff to take funding decisions, and your partners on the ground to do the work without overbearing oversight, which is the essence of the Altruist League’s model, then over time you will be transferring ever more power and resources to the causes which promote diversity at the grassroots level. What diversity is and how the policies related to it should be implemented is not to be determined by the foundation leadership but by its staff and allies. This is a test for all true leaders in all organizations – can you relinquish control in order to improve performance? Those able to do it will keep their relevance in the post-2020 world.