CULTURE SHIFTFoundations hire

senior equity officers 16

DONOR CHAMPIONLongtime leader

steps down and eyes the future 20

POCKETS OF CALMFeel overwhelmed? How to relax and

when to get help 32

the chronicle of June 2020 $12

PHILANTHROPY®

The Race to ConnectThe pandemic has altered the way

groups advance their missions and raise money. Some of the changes will live

on long after the crisis ends.

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THE CHRONICLE OF PHILANTHROPY june 2020 3

LEADING

8 A Technology Turning PointWhen Covid-19 hit, nonprofits had to rethink the way they work, advance their missions, and raise money overnight. Some of those changes will live on long after the public-health crisis ends.

Big Gifts: During the pandemic, fundraisers have turned to technology to court major donors. 10

CEO Searches: Social distancing is changing how charities recruit new leaders. 14

The Chronicle of Philanthropy (i.s.s.n. 1040-676x) is published monthly, 12 times a year by The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inc. at 1255 Twenty-Third Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20037. The Chronicle of Philanthropy® is a registered trademark of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inc. Subscription rate: $86.00 per year. Periodicals postage paid in Washington, D.C., and at additional mailing offices. Registered for g.s.t. as The Chronicle of Higher Education Inc. g.s.t. No. R-129 572 830.

Postmaster: Send address changes to The Chronicle of Philanthropy, P.O. Box 16359, North Hollywood, CA 91615. Member, Alliance for Audited Media.

COMING IN JULY Equity Gains at Risk. The economic catastrophe touched off by the coronavirus threatens the modest progress philanthropy has made. How can the nonprofit world head off losses and create a more just future?

Volume 32, Issue 8 June 2020

THE CHRONICLE OF

PHILANTHROPY

GRANT MAKING

16 Change AgentsA growing number of foundations are hiring senior-level chief equity officers. But observers wonder if some of those grant makers are really willing to transform themselves.

EXIT INTERVIEW

20 Defender of Donor FreedomPhilanthropy has the opportunity to promote upward mobility and help prepare for the next pandemic, says Adam Meyerson who last month stepped down as president of the Philanthropy Roundtable. ON THE COVER: GETTY IMAGES

4 june 2020 THE CHRONICLE OF PHILANTHROPY

LEADING 6 The Face of Philanthropy: Covid-19 has hit the Navajo and

Hopi nations hard, but volunteers are fighting back.

32 Careers: Nonprofit employees are under a lot of pressure right now, but experts suggest steps they can take to relieve stress and stay emotionally healthy.

FUNDRAISING29 Coronavirus Diary: The chief fundraiser at a San Diego

nonprofit that serves the homeless is finding ways to get donors to think about the pandemic’s long-term impact on its work.

30 Canvassing Reimagined: Talking to people on street corners isn’t a good way to raise money right now, so some face-to-face fundraisers are hitting the phones.

OPINION22 Cheryl Dorsey, Jeff Bradach, and

Peter Kim, executives at Echoing Green and the Bridgespan Group, argue to create a more just society after the pandemic, foundations must eliminate the racial funding gap.

24 Alissa Quart, executive director of the Economic Reporting Project, says medical volunteerism allows officials to paper over the inadequacy of the government response.

26 Jacob Harold, executive vice president of Candid, says the nonprofit world’s challenge is to find the right balance of money and attention to address urgent, short-term needs but also create a long-term future that rights inequalities laid bare by the public-health crisis.

FUNDRAISING EVENTS FROM A DISTANCEn HOW 4-H TURNED A

FUNDRAISING DINNER INTO A VIRTUAL EVENT The group met its revenue goals, attracted new donors, and recognized corporate supporters.

n HOW TO HOST COMPELLING VIRTUAL EVENTS Advice from a nonprofit CEO, an events director, and a consultant.

LATEST RESOURCES3 Inspiring FundraisersA salute to those who work "just behind those on the front lines."

Setting Priorities During a CrisisTips for connecting with current donors while attracting new ones.

EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK: A MOMENT TO BUILD TRUST

The day before the White House declared Covid-19 a federal emergency, Dan Cardinali issued a challenge to nonprofits: This was the moment, he said, for organizations to win back the trust of Americans after polls showed a disturbing erosion in confidence.

It might have been easy to miss that call to action in our online edition. After all, the day we published it, many of you were doing the same thing as all of us at the Chronicle — making last-minute preparations to work remotely or otherwise adapt to the pandemic for what we thought would be a short few weeks. (We had classes so everyone could learn how to hold Zoom meetings, which seems quaint now that it rules our days.)

But Dan, who heads Independent Sector, the coalition of nonprofits and foundations that has long worked to advance civil-society organizations, had the long view — and early signs are that he was right. A poll taken by Campbell Rinker for the nonprofit consultants Dunham & Company found that donors are becoming more confident in charities, with 60 percent now saying they do “good” or “excellent” work, compared with 48 percent in 2018. The Edel-man Trust Barometer’s spring update reported a similar finding, as our op-ed columnists Leslie Lenkowsky and Suzanne Garment reminded us in an article we posted the day we sent this issue to our printer.

The rise in trust is not surprising, they say, now that food-bank operators, health-care workers, and so many other nonprofits on the front lines are being hailed as the heroes keeping communities going.

Still, that doesn’t mean that controversy and skepticism have subsided en-tirely, especially when it comes to the work of big philanthropy. That point was driven home in the response to two articles we published online at philan-thropy.com in recent days.

Two scholars, Kathryn Moeller and Rebecca Tarlau, raised questions after New York State announced the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation had been enlisted to help reimagine public education for the coronavirus era and beyond. Judging from the number of people who viewed or commented on the article, their assertion that philanthropy was seeking to gain greater influ-ence and thwart democratic principles touched a nerve.

So, too, did an in-depth report by veteran journalist Marc Gunther, who examined questions about priorities and spending at the NoVo Founda-tion, the philanthropy of Warren Buffett’s son Peter. NoVo, known for its feminist politics and support of activist groups like Black Lives Matter,

announced just a few weeks ago that it was laying off half its staff and ending two programs that benefit women and girls. Peter Buffett told Marc that the shift had been in the works long before coronavirus hit.

NoVo’s priority now, he says, is to demonstrate effective ways to rebuild fad-ed towns like Kingston, N.Y., where he lives. And he vowed that the foundation would give more in 2020 than it did last year.

That drew anger from Rajasvini Bhansali, executive director of Solidaire, a network of progressive donors. “It’s his money, and he can do what he wants,” she told Marc, but “you have to be accountable to others and not just play in your backyard.” But it was the long-term impact that had Bhansali worried, that “this is now going to set a terrible standard for philanthropy at an extraordinary time of great need, when so many people are fighting for their lives.”

Whether we’re reporting news, editing opinion articles, or seeking advice from experts to share with you, we’ll keep documenting what organizations can do to ensure that confidence in the nonprofit world is high — and what puts that trust at risk. Your support as a subscriber makes it possible for us to do me-ticulous research and seek out knowledge that will help nonprofits and founda-tions nationwide. We appreciate your trust in us more than ever as we seek to provide the essential journalism the nonprofit world needs in this moment.

Stay well and stay strong.— STACY PALMER, EDITOR

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6 june 2020 THE CHRONICLE OF PHILANTHROPY

THE FACE OF PHILANTHROPY

Volunteers Fight Covid-19 in the Navajo Nation

Spread out in the Southwest over an area the size of West Virginia, the Navajo and Hopi nations have everything a deadly virus needs to thrive.

Coal mining has left many people with weakened respiratory systems. About one third of residents don’t have running water or electricity. Water is hauled by truck by people like Johnnie Henry, president of the Navajo Nation’s Church Rock chapter house community center, shown here.

That means stockpiling food to wait out the virus and frequent hand washing aren’t options. Many who do have running water fear abandoned uranium mines have contaminated aquifers.

With housing in short supply, it’s common for three generations to live in cramped quarters, which makes it easy for the coronavirus to spread. Health care is often a long drive away through mountains, mesas, and desert. The reservations have just 12 medical centers, where there are shortages of protective gear.

As a result, the Navajo Nation has suffered the highest per capita infection rate and death toll in the country. “We are still surging,” says Cassandra Begay, who is on the leadership team of the Navajo & Hopi Families Covid-19 Relief Fund. “We have not reached our peak yet.”

Begay and 10 other women started the fund in March and have raised $4 million on GoFundMe. Because there are just 16 grocery stores, the group set up 10 food-distribution centers that rotate locations. Volunteers package and sanitize two-week supplies of food and place the goods in peo-ple’s car trunks and truck beds. The drive-through approach lessens the risk of contamination. So far, more than 4,000 families have received the packages.

Meanwhile, Navajo seamstresses have used material purchased by the fund to sew more than 18,000 masks for medical personnel and social service workers on the reservation.

The devastating impact of the coronavirus is no surprise to Begay. She says Navajo people have suffered health and economic disparities since their first contact with white settlers. “Our nation is living in Third World conditions in the most wealthy country in the world.”� n

By Alex Daniels

THE CHRONICLE OF PHILANTHROPY june 2020 7

MORGAN LEE/AP IMAGES

8 june 2020 THE CHRONICLE OF PHILANTHROPY

The California Immigrant Policy Center’s annual Immigrant Day of Action lobby-ing event usually brings more than 1,000 people to Sacramento to walk the halls of the statehouse. They start arriving around

7 a.m. by bus, van, and plane and spend the day meeting with legislators to discuss issues im-portant to immigrants, like extending workplace protections to domestic workers.

The coronavirus pandemic meant a large in-person event wasn’t possible this year, so the organization regrouped. With just a month to plan, the center produced an entirely digital event,

setting up a series of Zoom calls with legislators. It wasn’t easy. The group had to tie together 40 Zoom channels for the 1,000 people who joined in. The lieutenant governor even addressed the gathering. Participants had 100 legislative visits throughout the day.

Cynthia Buiza, the group’s executive director, was worried that people wouldn’t show, that legis-lators might not be interested, or that there would be technical glitches. But it worked out better than she had hoped.

“I was surprised at how engaged legislators were,” says Buiza. “We’ll probably do a combina-tion of physical and virtual events next year so that we can scale up participation and hopefully prove that virtual and on-the-ground organizing can both work.”

Covid-19 has — for the time being, at least —

transformed the nonprofit world’s relationship with technology. Almost overnight, organizations had to make the move to remote work and take as many programs online as they could.

There have been early successes. Nonprofits are finding tech solutions to connect with clients, provide critical services, engage with lawmakers, and more. Some organizations have discovered that working remotely has increased collaboration across departments. But in the rush to action, on-line security hasn’t gotten the attention it should. And there are very real limits on what nonprofit work can be done virtually.

“You cannot give somebody a sandwich over a Zoom call,” says Lucy Bernholz, director of the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford University’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society.

Nimble CollaborationThe decisions that charities are making now

have the potential to significantly alter how they operate, raise money, and provide services — both now and in the future. But for the most part, non-profits are making decisions about technology on the fly. There wasn’t time to appoint committees to figure out solutions; groups had to hustle.

“One of the approaches that we took early on was to just try out a lot of new things,” says J.D. Crouch, CEO of the United Service Organizations, better known as the USO. “We’ve learned a lot from that.”

Nonprofits Go Remote

Technology has helped charities scrambling to raise money and provide services in a suddenly altered world —

in ways that could last for decades.

By ALEX DANIELS, MARIA DI MENTO, and JIM RENDON

LEADING

Best known for its shows with musicians and comedians that entertain troops around the world, the USO moved quickly to refashion in-per-son events so they would work online.

Many of its programs focus on families, par-ticularly spouses, who may feel isolated on base. Instead of holding cookie-making events on bases, the group teamed up with Martha Stewart to stream a baking class on Facebook Live — 18,000 people joined. And baby showers moved online.

When families were locked down in northern Italy, the USO distributed activity boxes with sup-plies to create a piece of art, for example. Families logged into Zoom to do the activities together online. “There’s a physical component to it, but at a safe distance,” Crouch says. “It also has a virtual component to it so that people could feel like they were part of a bigger event.”

The USO also hosts events with bands and celebrities where service members can log on and talk with them and ask questions. It did a recent one with the band the Chainsmokers. And it is creating gaming tournaments where soldiers can compete with others in lockdown on other bases.

Crouch says that working remotely has helped the USO to be more nimble. Using online col-laboration software, departments have worked together in ways they typically hadn’t in the past, and the organization has been able to slash bureaucracy because it has put a premium on moving quickly to try new things. Crouch doesn’t want to work virtually forever, but there

are elements of remote work that he wants to maintain.

“The trick for us and for me, the leader, is, how do I sustain and grow that pattern of activity?” he asks. “Crosscutting teams, solving problems, innovating, working faster — that’s all an import-ant part of it.”

A Major Systems UpgradeSince the middle of March, the American

Heart Association’s call center has been run from employees’ home offices, kitchen tables, and back

porches. It’s a lot easier to do the work with a large screen instead of a laptop, so the call center’s 120 workers lined up like customers at a fast-food drive-through. Members of the I.T. staff carefully loaded the screens, bundled up in Bubble Wrap, into their cars.

That was the easy part.The order to work from home came as the call

center was in the final stretch of a major technol-

The race to digital has spurred many successes, but nonprofits are also discovering what is lost online.

ISTOCK

THE CHRONICLE OF PHILANTHROPY june 2020 9

Continued on Page 10

10 june 2020 THE CHRONICLE OF PHILANTHROPY

Winning Big Gifts — From a DistanceDuring Covid-19, fundraisers are turning to technology to interact with wealthy donors.

When the United Service Organizations wanted to reach out to big donors in May, it went out of its way to avoid staid reports and bring the organization’s programs to life on a videoconference call.

Its regional vice president for Southwest Asia spoke from Dubai about the group’s work in the region. The regional president of USO West in Los Angeles stood in front of the Mercy, the medical ship docked in that city, which at the time was providing medical support for the city. He told donors about the group’s efforts to provide services to those working on the ship.

“It allows donors to so easily have access to what we’re doing,” says JD Crouch, the USO’s CEO, who plans to continue to use video calls with donors. “I think it’s going to allow the frequency of contact to go up, and it’s going to allow us to pull people into the conversation from across our organization.”

Just like the USO, other nonprofits nationwide are seeking alternative ways to reach affluent donors now that longstanding approaches like home visits, lunches, dinners, and other in-per-son gatherings may be out of the question for many months. Those donors are crucial to many organizations’ survival plans because they aren’t suffering the same loss of jobs and other income that’s hitting the lower and middle classes espe-cially hard. And experts say now that donors aren’t distracted by busy travel and event schedules, this is the moment to build close and personal ties to them so they will give again and again.

Some groups are finding that old-fashioned techniques like a simple phone call work best in unsettled times, while others are creating educa-tional sessions or thanking donors by video. Still, it’s not clear what will work in the long run, espe-

cially because some nonprofit experts say wealthy donors might over time end up recoiling from an onslaught of so many virtual charity events.

“Because videoconferencing has now become integrated into so many parts of people’s lives and everyone is living on videoconferencing and get-ting tired of it, fundraisers are competing against that fatigue,” says Lucy Bernholz, director of the Digital Civil Society Lab and a senior research scholar at the Stanford University Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society.

Some fundraising experts say to counter that concern, the wisest move is to focus on efforts that

maximize interaction, a move they say may have been smart even in the days when big in-person events could be held.

“When you’re at a gala with 500 people, you only have a few minutes to really say hello and en-gage with a donor,” says Sunil Oommen, a former fundraiser who founded a New York consultancy. “If you do it more one-on-one, the opportunity for relationship-building is that much deeper and the cost is much lower.”

Oommen says fundraisers should also be plan-ning for the long term since donors and prospects will be far less likely to allow nonprofit officials into their homes. And they’ll need to discuss masks, hand sanitizer, and other precautions with people

who do consent to visits. Those conversations will be less awkward for fundraisers who’ve estab-lished closer relationships with donors, he says.

Not Going SilentAs fundraisers experiment with new ways to

interact with donors, they’re sometimes venturing out of their comfort zones.

Jennifer Dow Rowell, development director of the Community Overcoming Relationship Abuse, a San Mateo, Calif., domestic-violence charity, known as CORA, is recording 60-second person-alized videos that she emails to wealthy donors to thank them for their support and update them on the group’s programs and clients. The response from donors has been positive.

“At first I thought it might be goofy, and then I realized it is absolutely the only way I can make eye contact with our donors at this point. It’s the closest I can get to being in-person,” she says. “They are not professionally polished; every now and then a cat wanders into the frame, or you can spot some workout gear in the background, but that’s how our lives are now, and it feels very hu-man. I have gotten great feedback; it isn’t unusual for someone to email me back and comment on the video. I can also see when videos are replayed, something I doubt ever happens with voicemails.” Rowell continues to call big donors to update them as she normally would. But she says many fundraisers are unsure whether donors are up to hearing from them right now. Even the wealthiest philanthropists are dealing with personal issues and uncertainty brought about by the pandemic. Still, Rowell says, it’s important to make the call, even if you’re simply checking in to see how a donor is doing.

“They’re supporters for a reason, and it’s our job to let them know what’s happening and to give

ogy upgrade. The association was going to replace its five-year-old call software with a cloud-based system.

There are always challenges with a new tech-nology system, but the Heart Association had more than its fair share, says Chip Sugrue, vice president for customer strategies. At the same time it was preparing for the migration, it had to coach call-center workers on how to answer coro-navirus-related health questions. Then leaders had to figure out how to train workers on the new system remotely.

The switch was scheduled for May 4, the day before GivingTuesdayNow, a nationwide fundrais-ing drive that would lead to a surge of memorial and tribute donations. Working remotely would tax the new system even more because calls were routed from the cloud to the call center to the staff members who were at home.

Ultimately, Sugrue decided to go ahead with the move. “There were no hiccups,” he says.

But while some nonprofits are thriving in the digital world, others are struggling.

Catchafire sees that struggle; it is a company

that connects skilled volunteers with charities that need professional help. Volunteers generally work with groups that have 20 or fewer employ-ees to do things like optimize an organization’s website or databases, set up Google Analytics, or deepen project- or financial-management skills.

In mid-March, Catchafire sent out a survey to thousands of groups it has worked with asking what new needs they had because of the Covid-19 pandemic. It quickly heard back that groups were in dire need of help adapting to remote work, fundraising in this new environment, and con-necting with other leaders.

Between mid-March and mid-May the group connected volunteers and groups on over 2,300 projects, about 70 percent more than any previous two-month period.

Some projects focus on the basics. One vol-unteer, for example, helped employees at the Bucks County Housing Group, which provides services to homeless people outside of Phila-delphia, get comfortable working remotely. He offered recommendations for working effectively at home — things like trying to separate your work space from your living space and creating time

Continued from Page 9

Donors who never attended in-person events are showing up at virtual ones.

By MARIA DI MENTO

to connect with staff. Then, over a Zoom call, the volunteer demonstrated how to use Zoom and SharePoint collaboration software.

Tech’s DownsidesMastering videoconferencing hasn’t been a

problem for the Trust for Public Land. The ques-tion instead is whether the tool makes sense for community organizing.

“It’s great to hop on a Zoom meeting with a colleague that I’ve been working with for years where we can have a somewhat transactional con-versation,” says Owen Franklin, the group’s state director for Pennsylvania. “But when you’re trying to connect with people who have a whole host of lived experiences, a Zoom meeting isn’t going to work.”

When the pandemic hit, the trust was in the early phases of developing a project called “Heat Capture,” which will use public art to explore the threat climate change presents to poor, urban neighborhoods without easy access to parks. Too often, climate-change discussions involve long time horizons and stories about ice caps melting

and don’t consider poor residents of dense urban neighborhoods who, Franklin says, are on the front lines of global warming.

Franklin and his staff began organizing Zoom meetings of residents and an advisory commit-tee to discuss which artists might be involved and how the project might eventually take shape. It became clear that videoconferencing wasn’t up to the job. Some participants didn’t have an appetite for the medium and preferred a follow-up phone call. Providing translation services for the several languages spoken by residents is difficult in the physical world. On Zoom, it was a nonstarter.

Franklin says the organization may have to invest in new technology, train staff members or people in the neighborhoods they serve, or hire people with technology expertise. Being part of a nationwide organization is helpful, he says, because employees share ideas with each other regularly. Still, it’s difficult to spend a lot of money, especially when it isn’t clear how long the pub-lic-health crisis will last.

One thing is clear to Franklin: Building con-Continued on Page12

THE CHRONICLE OF PHILANTHROPY june 2020 11

them the opportunity to offer support if they can,” Rowell says. “If it’s a reduced amount, that’s fine, and if they can give more than expected, then celebrate and honor that. But the last thing any of us should be doing is going silent.”

Rowell recently heard from a donor who usu-ally gives about $100,000 annually and has now decided to give $110,000 in each of the next three years. But she has also spoken with donors who plan to reduce their giving because they’ve lost money in the stock market.

“We recognize that this impacts everybody, including our wealthy donors, so we approach it from a place of empathy and understanding and also really clearly communicating the needs and how they can continue to support our work,” says Rowell. “Even if it’s in a modified way, we still need them on board with us.”

Budgets in FluxYoung New Yorkers, a charity that provides art

therapy and other programs to help young people accused of breaking the law, started using vid-eoconference meetings with big donors several weeks before most people began working re-motely. But founder Rachel Barnard doesn’t know whether her group will continue to use video calls extensively after physical distancing ends.

Right now, she’s most concerned about raising enough money to keep going and how the econ-omy is going to affect what she can raise over the next year. She’s using both videoconferencing and phone calls to try to confirm funding from existing donors and foundations for her group’s next fiscal year, which starts July 1. A number of wealthy donors who confirmed gifts in the first two weeks of March called in May to say the ups and downs of the stock market changed their financial situation more than they had expected

and they are rethinking whether or how much they can give.

“I’ve done five different budgets, and I’ve presented three to the board,” Barnard says. “I’m constantly readjusting the likelihood of getting repeat funding.”

That’s something no amount of new technol-ogy or creative fundraising strategy can solve, she says. “Change is always an opportunity, but change also means some things will inevitably be lost,” Barnard says. “I really don’t know how the dust is going to settle yet.”

A New PerspectiveThose unknowns are being keenly felt across

the nonprofit world. The fundraising consultancy Marts & Lundy surveyed 200 colleges and uni-versities, private schools, and health-care institu-tions, 85 percent of which said they had developed new ways to measure the performance of big-gift fundraisers since the coronavirus crisis started, disrupting the economy and putting big donations at risk.

Many of those surveyed said they see this time as an opportunity to “enhance relationships and refine donor strategies.” To emphasize that those priorities are important, nonprofits are revising performance measures to ensure they are eval-uating fundraisers based on their work to build long-term ties to donors and not simply on how much money they raise.

Penelepe Hunt, a principal at Marts & Lundy, says that makes sense because “we know that when donors feel a stronger engagement and attachment to an organization, they tend to give more, so these deeper conversations will have a long-term effect.”

Fifty-one percent of the nonprofits in the report said the public-health crisis led them to make

greater use of digital tools to engage big donors.Nonprofits that are using online tools reported

more participation from donors in these online settings than they would normally see at in-per-son events.

Hunt says nonprofits told her that donors who never attended in-person events are now showing up to virtual ones because it’s easier for them. They don’t have to get dressed up and travel to the event. She cautions, however, that Zoom fatigue is real, and charities can’t rely on online events to reach donors unless the events are creative and interesting enough to hold people’s attention.

“If you put on a boring Zoom call, no one will come to it just like they won’t come to a boring gala,” Hunt says. “It’s got to be something that engages them.”

Jim Rendon contributed to this article.

MANSURA KHANAM

AN EYE ON NEXT YEARNo amount of technology can temper the uncertain fundraising

landscape, says Rachel Barnard, founder of Young New Yorkers.

“ We had this rush to working at home, and now we have to step back and ask how do we make these systems secure.”

n�

12 june 2020 THE CHRONICLE OF PHILANTHROPY

nections with people in high-poverty neighbor-hoods is critical to the project’s success.

“We need to be able to have authentic engage-ment in whatever environment we’re in, and this is the environment we’re in,” he says. “We are here to deliver on our mission so we will make the investment.”

Security To-Do ListsTaking steps to make sure technology sys-

tems are secure and resilient has long been on nonprofit leaders’ to-do lists, says Marnie Webb, chief community-impact officer at TechSoup, a nonprofit technology group. But most never had the time or, in some cases, the money to imple-ment safeguards like ensuring their group’s files, accounting information, and client-management database were securely in the cloud instead of on a hard drive or a server in their office.

Webb says that when the pandemic hit,

organizations quickly started to address those issues and others. But she thinks nonprofits will soon begin to realize they probably need to put more thought into whether they have a secure-enough setup to support their staff using virtual private networks and ensure they are not transmitting data in an unsecured environment — and if they’re making the best use of their software.

“We had this rush to working at home, and now we have to step back and ask how do we make these systems secure,” Webb says. “We’ve had a lot of questions about this sort of thing and how to go from just using a video call on Zoom to actually using features like breakout rooms and being able to facilitate meaningful planning sessions with boards or constituencies.”

No matter how good the software is, some of the most important things that nonprofits do can’t move online.

When the pandemic started, Community Over-coming Relationship Abuse, a San Mateo, Calif., domestic-violence charity, acted quickly to move administrative staff to remote work and change how it serves clients who were already experienc-ing trauma and now face additional danger as they shelter in place with their abusers.

“They’ve seen large-scale job loss, and some tell us their domestic partner is weaponizing the virus against them and intentionally exposing them to it as a method of control and abuse,” says Jennifer Dow Rowell, the development director.

The group posts tips on social media about how to find a safe place from which to call its emergen-cy hotline. It now provides telehealth counseling services and case management by videoconfer-ence.

But housing is a real-life, in-person endeav-or. While the organization has kept its shelters up and running, it has reduced the numbers of people housed there to cut down the risk of transmitting the coronavirus and turned to motels to bridge the housing gap. That has meant significant additional costs. Before the pandemic,

Continued from Page 11

Continued on Page 15

COURTESY OF ALVIN AILEY AMERICAN DANCE THEATER

USO

HOME STUDIOAn Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater student participates in one of the organization’s classes offered via videoconference.

GREAT EXPECTATIONSThe singer Ciara and her husband, NFL player Russell Wilson, joined a virtual baby shower thrown by the USO for military moms-to-be stationed at the Fort Hood Army base.

https://idonate.com/grow/

Laurie Martinelli was well into the process of interviewing for the top job at a Boston legal nonprofit when Massachusetts went on lockdown due to the coronavirus. She had recently met with Project Citizenship’s exec-

utive search committee, which wanted Martinelli to next meet with the group’s founding executive director, the woman she was applying to replace, as well as the senior program director, who oversees workshops for more than 700 individu-als with legal permanent-resident status seeking citizenship each year.

But at that point, everything had shut down, and those interviews had to be held over Zoom.

Navigating a job-interview process virtually was challenging.

“When you’re meeting with someone face-to-face, you know that you’re connecting with them just by the way you interact with each other or maybe your eyes meet or something,” Martinelli says. “On Zoom, you don’t have that opportunity.”

Each online conversation she had after that presented a different view into the organization, its response to the crisis, and its aspirations for its future leader.

The staff members were candid about their immediate concerns and their focus on how they could continue delivering the organization’s mis-sion digitally for clients who didn’t have comput-ers at home.

The trustees had a bigger-picture agenda: They were more focused on finding a leader who could help achieve their grand vision of organizational growth.

But despite the disconnect, both Martinelli and the search committee were sold. Martinelli says those conversations with the staff were critical in helping her understand the group’s day-to-day operations and ultimately decide to accept the executive-director job.

Today she’s in the process of learning about the organization and plans to start working half time in June alongside the outgoing executive director, who will also scale back to half time.

If the coronavirus pandemic had not hap-pened, she probably would have had a week or so of overlap with the outgoing executive director. But Martinelli thinks this additional time together will be useful. “Ultimately, it’s going to help the organization,” she says.

Whether they work together virtually from their homes or at the organization’s offices in Boston’s Faneuil Hall (which Martinelli has never seen) is still up in the air. Beginning on June 1, the organization will allow one person to be in the office at a time.

“In the same way that it’s an interesting thing for an organization that’s never hired somebody just on Zoom before, it might be really weird and unusual, especially at the senior leadership level, for somebody to accept a role when they haven’t met in person,” says Kathleen Yazbak, founder and president of the nonprofit executive search firm Viewcrest Advisors, which was involved in Martinelli’s hiring. But it’s happening.

Some groups took a pause on job searches so

that everyone could adjust to remote work. While some organizations have instituted hiring freezes, for the most part, groups are pressing ahead in filling key roles.

“We’re finding that nonprofits are moving ahead and filling those really mission-critical positions,” says Ericka Miller, partner at nonprofit search firm Isaacson Miller. “In some instances, the pandemic has further enhanced the impor-tance of their mission.”

For organizations considering a leadership transition before the pandemic, “now more than ever they need a capable, effective, forward-look-

ing leader who can successfully navigate a poten-tially new landscape coming out of the pandem-ic,” Miller says.

In some cases, that requires re-evaluating the organization’s needs and adjusting expectations for the role.

At several organizations Yazbak has worked with in recent months, hiring committees have been asking questions like, “Is the role the same? Are the needs the same? Is the profile of the leader that you need the same?”

While the organization’s long-term aspirations tend to stay the same, organizations are empha-

14 june 2020 THE CHRONICLE OF PHILANTHROPY

ANNE MCDONOUGH

NEW ON THE JOBLaura Brower Hagood, who was named executive director at the Historical Society of Washington, D.C., in March, is getting to know her new colleagues over Zoom.

No Pause in the Quest for Innovative Nonprofit CEOsJob searching during the pandemic raises new questions for organizations and candidates.

By EDEN STIFFMAN

Rowell says, her group would place clients in a motel for two or three days while working to get them somewhere safe.

“Now we’re having to put people in motels for weeks on end,” Rowell says. She estimates the extra costs will total at least $50,000, and more as the outbreak drags on.

Seeing What SticksThe question going forward is which of the

changes charities have instituted since the Covid-19 outbreak started are temporary and which will be woven into the fabric of the nonprof-it world.

When it became clear that the coronavirus wasn’t going to end anytime soon, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater pivoted to a digital strat-egy for all of its program areas.

Ailey, like many other performing-arts groups, has taken its programming online to reach au-diences. The dance company launched Ailey All Access on its website, where people can stream a set of recorded performances, classes, and other content free.

While these offerings are no substitute for live performances, the dance company has had some

success in keeping its audiences engaged and attracting newcomers from around the globe, at least for now. The group will continue to provide that content for some time.

Online offerings like these are stopgap efforts, says Bernholz of Stanford’s Center on Philanthro-py and Civil Society. “Whether any of that sticks, I don’t know,” she says. “In some cases, they have been useful raising money, but I think that’s the kind of thing that’s useful for a very short period of time.”

Bennett Rink, Ailey’s executive director, says the company’s online offerings and its “Still, We Dance” online fundraising campaign have brought in a lot of first-time donors but acknowl-edges those gains could be temporary.

What he believes will endure well beyond this period of sheltering in place is the online educa-tional offerings the organization has created for both professional and junior-division students in the Ailey School. That content includes dance classes, dance-history courses, wellness instruc-tion, and other offerings.

The school had never offered online courses, but Rink says one of its long-term goals was to provide distance-learning programs.

“We always wanted to be able to reach more people globally through our classes; we had just not gotten around to it,” he says. “We’ve been able to move those strategic objectives forward very quickly, and I think that will have a long-term benefit for us.”

Continued from Page 12

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THE CHRONICLE OF PHILANTHROPY june 2020 15

sizing leadership qualities like creativity and nimbleness, flexibility, and adaptability.

“In early February, they might have thought or hoped they were hiring somebody for big growth,” says Yazbak. “But I think they need to really think about what the next two to three years require the most and focus there.”

Fundraising Track RecordDevelopment experience and financial literacy

are more important than ever. Organizations are asking candidates how they think about the future and whether they understand what donors are grappling with.

“We’re seeing an increased interest in finding a leader who has a demonstrated track record of bringing funding into an organization,” Miller says. “There’s an even greater emphasis on that piece of the role and wanting to understand how the candidate thinks about generating revenue in these somewhat uncertain times.”

While neither Miller nor Yazbak has seen hir-ing organizations reduce compensation expecta-tions, there is the recognition that budgets could be tighter in the future and that funding could be harder to come by.

Transparency on the part of hiring organiza-tions is critically important right now, Yazbak says. In a few cases, her clients have had finalist job candidates sign nondisclosure agreements before opening up their books and asking candi-dates to participate in scenario-planning sessions. That’s not unusual in normal times, given the lag time between when nonprofits file financial reports and when that data becomes public, but in the Covid-19 environment, some groups are al-lowing finalists to delve into budgets and internal strategy documents a bit earlier, Yazbak says.

“Everybody appreciated the transparency of it — certainly the leaders going into new roles,” she says. “Candidates actively participated and were able to share thoughts and ideas around the scenario planning that ultimately they would be inheriting.”

Small-Group InterviewsFor organizations beginning their search at a

time of social distancing, the basic principles still hold, Miller says.

Nonprofits should work to develop a diverse candidate pool. And talking to people who have worked with the candidate before — when you can’t meet in person — is especially important.

In most states, face-to-face meetings aren’t possible right now for job seekers and hiring orga-nizations. Conducting video interviews has had pluses and minuses.

To make the most of video conversations, search-committee members and candidates must be well prepared. “People are being really inten-tional about what they’re trying to learn in every conversation,” Yazbak says.

Small-group conversations, as opposed to including everyone on a big board or employee group, can help Zoom calls feel more personal, she says. “If we have one, two, or three people

on the call, you can really get to know somebody better.”

Those interviews can be recorded and shared with a broader group when that makes sense.

In some cases, recruiters say, nonprofits and job candidates have more opportunities for conversations than they might have had in a traditional face-to-face arrangement. It’s easier to continue conversations on a follow-up video call than it is to travel from one conference room to the next in a typical job-interview day.

If the new role requires relocation, candidates may have logistical concerns.

But that hasn’t stopped some hires. “We’ve seen some searches that go all the way to conclusion without face-to-face meetings with client organi-zations and candidates,” Yazbak says.

Learning the Ropes at HomeFor leaders who begin their roles during the

pandemic, the process of getting to know the organization has many challenges.

In March, the Historical Society of Washington, D.C., announced Laura Brower Hagood would be its new executive director. She posed for photos on the steps of the Carnegie Library, where the organization’s offices are located.

She gave a month’s notice to the National Building Museum, where she held the develop-ment-director role. And she was set to begin her new position in early April.

But just days after Hagood’s appointment was announced, Washington’s cultural organizations shut down. Hagood hasn’t been able to clean out her old office, and she hasn’t seen or set up her new space. Instead, the new CEO is working like many employees across the country — at home on her laptop.

“The announcement of my position was liter-ally the last thing that happened before our entire world fell apart,” she says.

Her first week on the job, she walked in to a set of staffing cuts. “No one wants to start like that,” she says.

She’s technically on furlough and took a 25 per-cent pay cut but continues to work full time.

Hagood was lucky enough to have met her col-leagues in pre-Covid times. Her interviews began in January, and she had met some people through past work with the organization in the early 2000s.

But even though board members and others have been happy to answer her questions and join calls to assist with her orientation, getting to know her new colleagues doesn’t look anything like what she had imagined.

“I had envisioned weeks of coffees and break-fasts and lunches and cocktails and glasses of wine — and formal meetings, too — in order to get to know the community,” she says. “I’ve had to really pivot and learn to get to know people on the phone and through Zoom,” she says.

“You’re trying to fill in the gaps of what you don’t see, and you hope that you’ve got it right,” she says. “It’s kind of like reading a text where a third of the words are missing. You have to make assumptions about what words go in those blanks. It’s just not the same.”

At some organizations, remote work has spurred greater collaboration among departments.

n�

By ALEX DANIELS

The Next Step in Promoting Equity

16 june 2020 THE CHRONICLE OF PHILANTHROPY

Without someone keeping careful watch, people who need help the most could miss out on the federal support Congress sent to nonprofits and local governments in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

The Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation in North Carolina is looking for just that kind of sentry: a chief equity officer.

Babcock advertised for the job months ago. Getting someone into the position is even more critical now that the crisis has hit, says Justin Maxson, Babcock’s chief executive.

“Undocumented immigrants across the South are a population it’s likely to totally miss. And ru-ral communities generally struggle to access com-plicated federal resources,” Maxson says “This is a total redefinition of the federal role in our lives. There’s a lot of potential for upside, but it can miss a lot of people without paying attention to equity.”

Maxson has narrowed the field of applicants to a few people. In April, as most of the country continued to work remotely, Maxson decided to make a final decision once he was able to conduct face-to-face interviews.

At first, Maxson thought an outside organiza-tion could help get the foundation properly focus on equity. The grant maker had been working to ensure that everyone on staff, including the receptionist, program officers, and board mem-bers, considered the effects of racism each day as they went about their work. But teams of advisers weren’t steeped in the foundation’s workplace culture. Their help, says Maxson, would only go so far.

Promoting equity throughout the foundation’s hiring, promotion, grant making, strategy devel-opment, and investing was too important a job — and too sensitive — to leave to outsiders, he says.

“It just became apparent that we needed

More grant makers are appointing senior-level people to focus exclusively on ways to help share power and promote diversity and inclusion.

MEYER FOUNDATION

CATALYST FOR CHANGEThe Meyer Foundation’s Aisha Alexander-Young says succeeding as an equity leader takes time and patience.

GIVING

someone on staff whose job it was to make equity everyone’s responsibility,” he says. “You’ve got to have somebody getting up every day and going to bed every night thinking about equity,” he says.

Upper-Level ManagementBabcock is the latest in a growing number of

grant makers that have created an upper- management position to navigate matters of equity. Carmen Anderson, a longtime program officer at the Heinz Endowment, was named the Pittsburgh grant maker’s chief equity officer in January. Lindsay Hill became director of diversity, equity, and inclusion at the Raikes Foundation in 2018. Aisha Alexander-Young at the Meyer Foun-dation and Pamela Ross at the Central Indiana Community Foundation have stepped into similar roles in the past few years.

Chief equity officers face considerable obsta-cles. They must pry old habits from a foundation’s grasp and challenge cultural norms that may drive the way a grant maker chooses the people it hires and how it spends its money, says Jeanné Lewis, vice president and chief engagement officer at Na-tional Committee for Responsive Philanthropy.

That can mean helping people who are not in the majority feel comfortable about talking with their co-workers about how they are treat-ed because of their race, sexual orientation, or

disability. Or it might mean helping employees point out ways the foundation’s grant making unconsciously favors white-led nonprofits. A chief equity officer introduces these topics to the entire staff and board, even if doing so poses a challenge for some staff members who would rather ignore the problem.

“The work is inevitably uncomfortable,” Lewis says. “A senior-level executive needs to be at the helm driving it so the rest of the staff understands that it’s important.”

For the Meyer Foundation’s Alexander-Young, succeeding as an equity leader requires patience.

At one of her early interviews at the Washington, D.C., grant maker, she was asked to identify some “low-hanging fruit” to tackle first to make Meyer a more just, equitable foundation. To herself, she thought: The fruit this tree bears is rotten. There are no quick wins.

While Alexander-Young would like to see wholesale changes, she says she realizes that changing a decades-old institution won’t happen right away. Staff members aren’t expected to have everything figured out from the get-go.

“We’re not asking people to come in perfect or be full experts in the history or current realities of systemic racism,” she says. “We’re asking people to have some awareness and willingness to learn.”

Authentic RelationshipsPamela Ross, who helped run a statewide

foster-care program in Arizona, returned to her native Indianapolis in 2016 to take a job as a pro-gram officer at the Central Indiana Community Foundation. Ross felt there weren’t enough people of color in philanthropy, and a job at her home-town community foundation was an opportunity too good to pass up.

The foundation was participating in training developed by the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond called “Undoing Racism.” Less than two years later, Central Indiana decided it needed

a person on staff to lead a sustained effort, and Ross was named vice president for opportunity, equity, and inclusion.

The foundation couldn’t be a genuine partner to its grantees if it was still “running away” from issues of race and equity, Ross says. So the staff training continued.

“It’s a majority white organization, and people were being challenged in their whiteness, in who they were as a person,” she says. “My job is to make sure that we had a culture of shared power, where people can use their voice and agency to create change in the organization but to also create brave

spaces for conversations where people feel they can grow and not be pushed or shoved into it.”

Ross’s work extends well beyond helping co-workers talk about race.

She has pushed the foundation’s human- resources department to widen its pool of appli-cants for open jobs. With her input, the foundation removed its $25,000 minimum for new donor- advised-fund accounts to attract a broader profile of donors. And it created a fund to support grass-roots organizations that are much smaller than its typical grantees, which tend to have budgets of more than $250,000.

“The problem is, organizations at that level are typically white-led, aren’t close to the problems on the ground, and don’t have authentic relation-ships” with members of the community they are trying to serve, Ross says.

Follow-Through Is KeyHaving a point person on equity can be a sign

that the organization is making a real effort to transform itself, says Kerrien Suarez, executive director of Equity in the Center, a foundation- supported effort to promote equity in philanthro-py. A stand-alone position, particularly if it reports directly to the foundation president, acknowledges the significance and breadth of that work, she says.

“A chief equity officer position creates formal institutional accountability in the same manner that a chief financial officer ensures everyone stays in compliance with the Internal Revenue Service code and stays out of jail,” says Suarez. “The difference is that finance is transactional. Equity is not compliance work. It’s transforma-tional, not transactional.”

But just because a foundation has created the position doesn’t mean that it will follow through and make meaningful improvements.

“The word equity, to an extent, is becoming trendy,” she says. Often organizations, whether they are nonprofits or businesses, use the terms “equity” or “diversity, equity, and inclusion” inter-changeably, Suarez says. Diversity and inclusion efforts focus on hiring staff or making grants to people from different backgrounds with a goal of broad representation. Foundations that place a value on equity look to ensure people have the same access to resources, career advancement, and power regardless of their background.

When a foundation creates a chief diversity officer, or a “DEI” officer position, Suarez says, it could mean that an organization is “checking the

The Next Step in Promoting Equity

Chief equity officers face considerable obstacles. They must challenge the cultural norms that drive whom foundations hire and which nonprofits receive grants.

THE CHRONICLE OF PHILANTHROPY june 2020 17

Continued on Page 18

18 june 2020 THE CHRONICLE OF PHILANTHROPY

box” rather than really trying to transform itself. For a foundation to demonstrate its commitment to equity, its work must go beyond attracting more professionals who are people of color or directing a portion of its grants to community-based orga-nizations led by people of color, Suarez says.

A single person beating the drum for equity can have a profound effect throughout a foundation if the person in that position controls a budget and wields decision-making power. If not, staff members may not feel that equity is one of their core responsibilities, argues Michele Kumi Baer, philanthropy project director at Race Forward.

Baer, who worked as the diversity and inclusion coordinator at a different nonprofit, said, “There were some moments when the position felt a bit tokenized.”

One way to avoid that is to augment a chief eq-uity officer’s work, she says. At the Seattle Founda-tion, which has contracted with Baer as a consul-tant, Alice Ito, serves as senior adviser on equity and reports to the grant maker’s president. She also leads a committee composed of staff members across the foundation’s departments that develops policies and practices to promote equity.

In addition to mobilizing staff throughout the entire organization, it is essential that the

person assigned the duty of leading on equity be an expert, says the Meyer Foundation’s Alexan-der-Young. Too often, she says, foundations hire people without proper experience or assume that people of color will take up the task.

“Black people and other people of color don’t come out of the womb with a full education in the understanding of race and systems,” she says. “You need someone or a team of people who have that knowledge and understanding to be able to dismantle something that was built very strategi-cally with very strong support beams.”

The CommitmentBabcock’s new equity officer won’t likely use a

strict equity litmus test on where to send grants. A black-led community-organizing group in Mississippi might answer questions on a grant application about equity differently than an im-migrant-led organization in Alabama or a white-led economic-development organization in South Carolina, Maxson says. Some grantees, he says, are more well-versed in equity issues and practic-es than others, and there is room to learn.

Carmen Anderson, who became the Heinz Endowment’s first chief equity officer in January, is also working to educate staff at the foundation and

grantees it supports. For instance, it became appar-ent that the foundation had not made disability a part of its equity focus. With its Pittsburgh neighbor the FISA Foundation, Heinz hosted local disability leaders, Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation, and Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, president of RespectAbility, a group that has pushed foun-dations to make people with disabilities more of a priority, for a one-day educational session.

Anderson says Heinz serves a lot of people with disabilities through its grant making but hasn’t done a particularly good job specifically recogniz-ing both the needs and contributions of disabled people.

“Owning that and being transparent about it was one important step for us because it demon-strates where we are vulnerable,” she says. “If we can own it, it is our hope that our grantees can own it as well.”

But, Anderson says, learning about equity is a prelude to changes in the way the foundation will award grants.

“At this point, it’s primarily education. But over time we want to get to the point where we can say, ‘You know, we’ve been down this road a way, and we’ve had opportunities to learn and understand. And if you’re going to be an ongoing partner, it does matter if you’re committed or not.”� n�

Continued from Page 17

MRBF

THE PATH AHEADThe Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation is recruiting a chief equity officer so it has someone who can focus on the topic full-time, says chief executive Justin Maxson. The new hire will consider how program areas, like Babcock’s affordable housing work, do — or do not — advance equity.

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By Maria Di Mento “ We’ve made an important difference in protecting philanthropic freedom: the freedom to decide how and where to give away one’s charitable gifts.”

PHILANTHROPY ROUNDTABLE

EXIT INTERVIEW

Philanthropy Freedom Fighter

For the better part of two decades, Adam Meyerson has been a powerful advocate for conservative donors, arguing for philanthro-pists’ right to give as they choose and the importance of honoring donor intent. At the

end of May, he stepped down as president of the Philanthropy Roundtable, a national membership organization for foundations, individual philan-thropists, corporate giving programs, and others.

When Meyerson joined the Philanthropy Roundtable in October 2001, one month after 9/11, the organization was much smaller than it is today. He was the third president in the nonprof-it’s 29-year history and its longest-serving leader so far. Previously, he served as vice president for education affairs at the Heritage Foundation. He also worked as an editorial writer at the Wall Street Journal from 1979 to 1983 and as managing editor of American Spectator in the 1970s.

During his nearly 19-year tenure leading the Roundtable, the organization’s revenue grew from $1.8 million to $9 million, and the staff expanded from six to 30. Meyerson plans to stay on for six months to help his successor, Elise Westhoff, with the transition.

Meyerson talked to the Chronicle about what he is most proud of accomplishing during his time leading the Roundtable and where he sees philan-thropy heading in the coming years.

Why is now the right time to step down, and what went into your decision?

I think of it as part of my professional obligation to do this while the organization is strong. Be-cause we’re in a strong position and have a great reputation for our conferences — hopefully we can do conferences again — and for our publica-tions, our services to donors, our great work on philanthropic freedom, I thought we were poised for another period of growth, and so it was good to have somebody new come in.

My departure is part of a succession-planning process. In fact, the board and I started talking

about this in the fall of 2018. It was kind of a joint decision. I told them I’d work with them to try to make this succession work, and they’ve got a great successor. We have very ambitious plans for the future, and I think our best days are yet to come.

Of which programs and efforts during your tenure are you the most proud?

We’ve made an important difference in protect-ing philanthropic freedom: the freedom to decide how and where to give away one’s charitable gifts. Our Alliance for Charitable Reform has success-fully protected philanthropic freedom against multiple legislators and regulatory threats coming from political leaders in both parties in the federal government and in a number of states.

We’ve worked to protect the freedom to support an unpopular cause or to develop an untested and unconventional hypothesis, to participate in the political debate without fear of IRS harassment, to create a family foundation that will exist in per-

petuity or to spend down, to choose your grant-ees, including in this time of “America First” the freedom to give overseas. We’ve advanced one’s First Amendment right to give anonymously and to protect the independence and action of donors and foundations.

I think we were a key coalition partner, along with our sister organizations in philanthropy, in protecting the charitable deduction, and we still want to make that universal because charitable giving is not just for rich people; it’s for everybody. The charitable deduction is crucial to philan-thropic freedom because it tells the political lead-ers that when you give your money to charity, that money belongs to civil society, it doesn’t belong to the government.

We’ve also had a big impact in encouraging individual givers to pay more attention to the concept of donor intent, and we played a key role in [education]. Thanks to charter schools, school choice, and other reforms made possible by philanthropy, we know that children of all races and income levels can achieve high perfor-mance when they have great teachers and when parents can select the best learning environment for their kids. There are now dozens and dozens of high-performing charter-school networks and some private-school networks for low-income children, and nobody thought that was possible before.

What about the future of philanthropy excites you?

One of the most exciting developments is the explosion of services for donors and foundations. Donors today have more choices, more infor-mation, and more analytical tools for making philanthropic decisions. There are some very high-powered organizations actively serving philanthropists. We’ve now got Arabella Advisors, Bridgespan, Goldman Sachs, Fidelity Charitable, Charter School Growth Fund. It’s making it a much more entrepreneurial, data-driven field.

The growth of donor-advised funds is just phe-nomenal. They simplify and democratize giving, making it much easier for smaller donors to enjoy the benefits of organized philanthropy; they’re not just for the very biggest donors.

I’m also totally fascinated by the competition among foundations now to seek outside invest-ments. There’s always been an effort to find co-funders, but now you’ve got Blue Meridian Partners and the different aggregation funds and Pew Charitable Trusts going from a foundation to a grant-making public charity. Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors opened up its work to ad-vising hundreds of others, and you’ve got the Koch Foundation now raising lots of money through its Stand Together Foundation for social-service organizations.

This in many ways is changing the character of philanthropy because it’s often been said that philanthropy and foundations are accountable to no one except their own boards and their own

expectations. But if you’re going out trying to raise money from other funders, that gives you a kind of accountability. You have to win funders’ confi-dence; you have to show them the results. If you want repeat investments, you’ve got to show them what you did.

Where does philanthropy need to go in the coming years?

Philanthropy has some big opportunities over the next 10 years. One is a huge opportunity to preserve the American dream and advance up-ward mobility. This includes support for schools where low-income children can excel, commu-nity colleges, apprenticeships, and other pro-grams that connect people with mid-skilled jobs, programs that help people start new businesses, especially in low-income communities, and pro-grams that strengthen marriage and the family, which have always been connected to upward mobility.

Given the crisis that we’re in right now, philan-thropy also has a crucial role in helping us prepare for future pandemics. This includes major invest-ments in research on vaccines and therapeutic testing and the underlying science and support for our doctors, nurses, and first responders who are risking their lives and health to protect us. And also just making sure we have more capacity in the health system.

Do you have any concerns about philanthro-py’s future?

I’m worried about the alarming decline in household giving to charity, even before the tax reform of 2017. That probably made it worse, but it was going on before then, and this is going to be devastating to America if it isn’t reversed. Charita-ble giving is essential to our character as a people, and it’s essential to our greatness as a country. It’s never been just the province of the rich, but now we’re seeing that it’s becoming more dominated by the rich. That’s a problem for our country, and

it’s a problem for foundations. At the Roundtable, we’ve grounded the defense

of foundations as part of the larger culture of char-itable giving, and we’ve always wanted to have the charities speak for foundations. If we’re starting to see domination by the wealthy in charitable giv-ing, that will be unhealthy. The culture of volun-tary giving has been so central to our country, and it’s very important for communities. I’m worried about what will happen in many communities across the country that have depended on giving by ordinary people.

What’s next for you?I’m not entirely sure yet. My goal is to con-

tinue serving philanthropists, helping them strengthen their communities and expand opportunities for people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds. I don’t know what form that will take yet, but I’m not retiring. I intend to stay active in this field.� n�

THE CHRONICLE OF PHILANTHROPY june 2020 21

As Adam Meyerson leaves Philanthropy Roundtable, he says donors must play a vital role in preparing for the next pandemic, but he bemoans the ‘alarming decline’ in household giving.

By now the ruthlessness of the coronavirus pandemic is clear. It has not only brought devas-tating deaths and economic destruction and the suffering

that comes with both but it has also exacerbated the tolls of racism and pre-existing inequity in our nation.

Echoing Green and the Bridg-espan Group recently collaborated to research the depth of racial inequities in philanthropic funding. Based on what we see in our work, two of the biggest factors holding back philanthro-py’s efforts to advance social change are rooted in race. One is understanding the role of race in the problems philanthropists are trying to solve. The second is the sig-nificance of race when it comes to how philanthropists identify leaders and find solutions.

Many grant makers try to take a colorblind approach to reviewing grants as a well-meaning effort to advance equity. But that is actually the crux of the problem. Race is one of the most reliable predictors of life expectancy, academic achievement, income, wealth, physical and mental health, maternal mortality, and so much else that make a difference for a person to achieve well-being. If

socioeconomic difference explained these inequities, then controlling for socioeconomic status would eliminate them. But it does not. This means do-nors who care about supporting social change must take more deliberate action to achieve racial equity.

Consider the fight against teen smoking in the United States, which has seen an impressive decline overall, with philanthropy playing a

pivotal role. However, when disaggregated by race, the data tells a different story. The majority of prevention programs and policies have targeted teens, thus missing the adult window, which is when African Americans typically start to smoke. Although African American teens smoke at much lower rates than white teens, by the time they are adults, the rates are about the same — with tragic results because African Americans die at much higher rates from smoking-related illness.

Likewise, during this pandemic, the racial-justice or-ganization Race Forward reminds us of the importance of “explicitly naming race as a factor that informs how we assess ‘Who is most vulnerable? Who is burdened? Who benefits?’” if we want to ensure that our response,

OPINIONALISSA QUART A shadow medical safety net of volunteers springs to action 24

JACOB HAROLD Disaster giving offers lessons for how to recover and rebuild 26

The Racial Funding Gap Can’t Continue in the Pandemic

President of Echoing Green; co-founder and managing partner of the Bridgespan Group; partner of the Bridgespan Group

DAVID CUTLER FOR THE CHRONICLE

22 june 2020 THE CHRONICLE OF PHILANTHROPY

By CHERYL DORSEY, JEFF BRADACH, and PETER KIM

THE CHRONICLE OF PHILANTHROPY june 2020 23

practices, and policies to this crisis and others achieve equitable impact. Otherwise, even our best societal response runs the risk of exacerbating racial disparities that already existed or perhaps even creating new ones.

Funding leaders of color is a significant piece of this puzzle because these leaders often bring strate-gies that intimately understand the racialized expe-riences of communities of color and the issues these communities face. Unfortunately, by and large, such

funding is not happening today.Take Echoing Green’s applicant pool, a group that is

considered among the most promising start-up non-profits. Looking just at its highest qualified applicants (i.e., those who progressed to its semifinalist stage and beyond), revenues of the black-led organizations are 24 percent smaller than the revenues of their white-led counterparts, and the unrestricted net assets of the black-led organizations are 76 percent smaller than their white-led counterparts. The stark disparity in unrestrict-ed assets is particularly startling as such funding often represents a proxy for trust.

Disparities persist even when taking into account factors like issue area or education levels. For example, among organizations in Echoing Green’s Black Male Achievement fellowship, which focuses on improving the life outcomes of black men and boys in the United States, the revenues of the black-led organizations are 45 percent smaller than those of the white-led organi-zations, and the unrestricted net assets of the black-led organizations are 91 percent smaller than the white-led organizations — despite focusing on the same work.

Ford President Darren Walker tells us: “As funders, we need to reject the impulse to put grant making rather than change making at the center of our worldview. Listening, learning, and lifting up voices who are most proximate and most essential to unlocking solutions is critical to the type of change making that we seek. This requires examining what gets in the way of trust.”

These inequities are neither new nor limited to Echoing Green’s applicant pool. Organizations led by people of color, including Philanthropic Initiative for Race Equity and Change Philanthropy, a coali-tion of seven organizations that promote inclusive-

ness and equity, have been sounding the alarm about this issue for quite a while. To further understand what drives the racial funding gap, Echoing Green and Bridgespan conducted interviews with more than 50 leaders, includ-ing nonprofit executives of color, philanthropic staff, and leaders working to address this issue. Through these conversations, we consistently observed leaders of color hitting barriers across the full arc of fundraising efforts:

Getting connected to potential supporters. Leaders of color have inequitable access to social networks that enable connections to foundations and influential peo-ple in philanthropy.

Building rapport with potential donors. Interperson-al bias can manifest as mistrust and microaggressions, which inhibit relationship building and place emotional burdens on leaders of color.

Securing support for the organization. Grant makers often lack understanding of culturally relevant approaches, leading them to over-rely on strategies with which they are familiar and specific forms of evaluation that may not be accessible to organizations that face chronic challenges getting adequate financing and other support.

Sustaining relationships with current supporters. Grant-renewal processes can be arduous if mistrust remains, and funding may stop if the grant maker has a white-centric view of what is a strategic priority and how to measure progress.

The existence of these barriers is a sign of how ra-cial bias — both personal and institutional, conscious and unconscious — creeps into all parts of the philan-thropic and grant-making process. And we know the racial funding gap stymies efforts to achieve results. But such disparities also matter because without taking active antiracist measures to ensure equity in funding, philanthropists inadvertently contribute to inequities in society.

We cannot expect philanthropy to work honestly to address racial inequities without claiming responsibility for the roles our organizations have played in helping to create the current reality. For Bridgespan, our own focus on rigorous measurement has led those we advise to overlook the potential of organizations that don’t fit the narrow definition of “good” such measures create. We have also enthusiastically promoted philanthropic big bets — efforts to persuade wealthy donors to take on am-bitious social-change efforts — often without acknowl-edging how such large gifts might magnify inequities in funding.

As for Echoing Green, we continue to help leaders of color get their organizations off the ground despite knowing how difficult the barriers will make it to maintain support from the funding community as they try to grow. Our collaboration hopes to contribute to the ongoing efforts of the many fighting for equitable funding.

When our organizations started this research together almost a year ago, we had no idea that the time to share our work would come in the midst of a global pan-demic. But the pandemic only makes this issue even more urgent. Just as Covid-19 has been devastating to communities of color, many nonprofits led by people of color are at risk of not surviving this pandemic either, vulnerable because of chronic underfund-ing.

As talk increasingly turns to the desire to get back to normal, the racial disparities we see in philanthropy and society should be a wake-up call that getting back to how things were is not good enough. Philanthropist Tricia Raikes powerfully writes: “It’s fashionable, but false, to say that the coronavirus doesn’t discriminate. The virus discriminates because our systems discriminate. ... Today, we can buy groceries and masks, but tomorrow, we should fix a system that leaves people reliant on food banks and treats essential workers as expendable. By giving for change, not charity, we can begin to bridge our divides and build a better future.”

It is up to each of us to decide now if we want to be part of the problem or part of the solution for that better future. Funding more organizations led by people of color and increasing grants to those that already receive support is part of the solution. Are you ready to act? n

Cheryl Dorsey is president of Echoing Green. Jeff Bradach is co-founder and managing partner of the Bridgespan Group, where Peter Kim is a partner. They are the co-authors of “Racial Equity and Philanthropy: Disparities in Funding Leaders of Color Leave Impact on the Table.”

Philanthropy can’t honestly address racial inequities without admitting our organizations’ roles in helping create them.

After Armen Henderson finishes his day job as a doctor of internal medicine and assistant professor at the University of Miami Health System, the 35-year-old starts a

second shift. Wearing a respirator mask and gloves, Henderson spends his eve-nings administering donated Covid-19 tests to Miami’s homeless population.

Henderson devotes 20 hours a week to this treacher-ous unpaid work, describing it as “civil disobedience” because he and a team of 50 volunteers were breaking the Dade County stay-at-home order before it partially expired in mid-May. So far, the group has administered 150 free Covid-19 tests to homeless people, several of whom were rushed to the hospital by ambulance.

Henderson is just one strand of a medical shadow safety net that has exploded during the pandemic and is now a crucial source of care. The network is made up of nonprofits and regular folks working far outside the purview of major charities or even the medical establish-ment. They perform the kind of basic care that should be provided by local or federal governments but that is mostly absent at a time when “the supposed social safety net” has shredded, says Henderson.

The shadow network seeks medical volunteers with posters bearing slogans such as “We want you for medi-cal work now,” evoking the collective efforts and sacrifice during World War II. Many states have allowed retired or inactive doctors to volunteer during the pandemic. For example, in addition to asking for donations of respirator masks, Boston Medical Center is looking for volunteers who are “able to provide support and services to the homeless who are isolated and quarantined.” Across the country, psychologists and social workers are offering free telecounseling to the distressed during the pan-demic. Meanwhile, thousands of people are designing and sewing face masks in their homes to give to medical workers.

But all this generosity speaks to an American para-dox, revealing what’s best about our country and what’s worst about our ill-prepared and ungenerous federal government. Henderson, who is black, also experienced another layer of the push-pull response to volunteers: policing of volunteerism and, in his case, racial bias. Henderson gained unwanted attention recently when a Miami police officer handcuffed and detained him as he was loading his van with boxes and bags contain-ing tents he was distributing to the homeless. He was charged with illegally dumping trash in his neighbor-hood. The incident was caught on video and led to an internal investigation by the Miami Police Department, which found the officer’s actions were justified. Hender-son, who believes he was a victim of racial profiling, is pursuing a lawsuit.

The expectation of volunteerism in times of crisis and an attendant lack of federal support for volun-teers has a long history in the United States. Clara Barton, founder of the

American Red Cross, famously said she was “offering a hand up, not a handout,” implying that handouts to the poor were a source of shame and that it was more

dignified to receive aid from peers than from the gov-ernment. Nina Eliasoph, a sociologist and the author of Making Volunteers: Civic Life at Welfare’s End, says the historical response to disasters was “‘Let’s get volunteers to aid their fellow citizens!’ Over and over, the idea was that getting the federal government involved would undermine community spirit and would degrade the recipients’ morality.”

President Ronald Reagan said as much when he remarked, “The size of the federal budget is not an appropriate barometer of social conscience,” and asked for volunteers to fill the gaps. George H.W. Bush famous-ly lauded the “thousand points of light.” And Marvin Olasky’s 1990 treatise The Tragedy of American Com-passion, beloved by politicians on the right, argues for “a biblical model for fighting poverty,” according to one reviewer, evoking a past when sickness and economic suffering were handled by wealthy ladies-who-lunch without “meddlesome” government interference. In oth-er words, volunteerism has long been the bedrock of the conservative movement and, to some extent, the United States at large.

But this sometimes confused passion for volunteer-ism has its limits. It should never replace federal and local government efforts or more formal philanthropic work. Eliasoph argues that Americans incorrectly view volunteerism as a seesaw — if government aid goes up, the value and prevalence of volunteerism goes down. The seesaw is a false construction, however. Countries with the world’s highest volunteerism rates, such as the Netherlands, Denmark, Canada, and New Zealand, also all have strong government-supported social safety nets.

Too often the call for more volunteers allows gov-ernment leaders to paper over the systemic causes of suffering. “We shouldn’t exist. It shouldn’t be us volunteers,” says Henderson, whose current budget is $10,000. “But we do what we have to do as the

government forgets about poor people.” His team has found very sick individuals living, infectiously, on the street. “They are sitting on benches and interacting with restaurant owners and others,” he says.

Groups similar to Henderson’s have sprung into action across the country in the last few months. They include GetUsPPE, which solicits donations of masks and other medical necessities and distributes them to

Volunteers Are Building a Medical Social Safety Net in the Pandemic. Is That the Smartest Approach?

Executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project

By ALISSA QUART

24 june 2020 THE CHRONICLE OF PHILANTHROPY

philanthropy.com

READ MORE OPINION ONLINE

n Let’s Make This Crisis the (Grand)Mother of Invention, by Marc Freedman, Carol Larson, and Trent Stamp

n Gates Foundation’s Tactics to Remake Public Education During Pandemic Are Undemocratic, by Kathryn Moeller and Rebecca Tarlau

n Women Face Job Losses, Abuse, and More in the Pandemic. Philanthropy Can Step In to Help, by Kavita N. Ramdas

n Nonprofits Won’t Survive Unless the Federal Government Helps More Medium-Size Groups, by Susan N. Dreyfus and John MacIntosh

THE CHRONICLE OF PHILANTHROPY june 2020 25

hospitals. A local branch, GetUsPPE Chicago, is mostly composed of medical students — some 500 strong — and is student-led and completely volunteer. One of its leaders is Tricia Pendergrast, 27, a first-year student at Northwestern University Medical School. She helped crowdsource cash donations to purchase respirator masks and head coverings that protect health-care work-ers from infectious particles. The cost was astronomical because of a so-called Covid surcharge — $13,000 over the normal cost to fly rather than ship them from China to the United States.

But the equipment couldn’t wait. “I knew young health workers who were writing living wills and send-ing banking information to spouses because their work was now so incredibly dangerous,” says Pendergrast. “I couldn’t take it lying down.” So every day after finishing her medical classes, which are now all online, Pend-ergrast jumps into her voluntary work, setting off for local hospitals, delivering donated gowns, gloves, and handmade masks sewn by a crafty posse of University of Chicago students.

The shadow network also includes people with no connection to the medical field. Sam King, a 37-year-old Sacramento, Calif., project manager at a technology firm, donates both time on his home 3D printer and personal funds to OpShieldsUp.org, whose volunteers use their home printers to make face shields for doctors and nurses. “I truly believe this is a fight for our lives,” King says. “We are all working to support our critical life-support system.”

While the medical shadow safety net has grown

substantially during the coronavirus pandemic, it has long been a source of care in other crises. Henderson, for example, along with a network of other advocates in Florida, typically does volunteer disaster-recovery work during hurricane season, including creating “pop-up shelters” throughout Miami for those who can’t afford to leave their homes. Henderson says he grew up in poverty in Philadelphia where his parents, with ap-proximately $35,000 in combined income, supported “four kids in dilapidated housing where factories spewed chemicals into the pipes and schools closed because of asbestos.” Those experiences intensified his commitment to treating others suffering from poverty and neglect, especially people of color.

His commitment, along with that of many others, during the worst health crisis in a century speaks to the good that can arise from tragedy. But it also underscores another tragedy — the lack of basic equipment and essential services in the wealthiest country in the world, which has resulted in needless illness and death.

Says medical student Pendergrast: “I wake up every day and hope today is the day that GetUsPPE Chicago won’t exist. I hope that day is coming very soon.” n

Alissa Quart is executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and the author of six books, most recently “Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America.”

The confused passion for volunteerism has its limits: It shouldn’t replace philanthropic or government efforts.

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Celebrating 65 years of shared intelligence for the greater good.

Natural disasters birth new communities out of the rubble of the old. After earthquakes, hurri-canes, and tsunamis, people have no choice but to reimagine the structures of society. Histori-ans have shown that

instead of chaos and van-dalism, disasters often lead to widespread acts of com-passion, mutual aid, and a visceral sense of community. When confronted with disas-ter, people will create what author Rebecca Solnit calls a “paradise built in hell.”

The novel coronavirus is a slow-motion disaster, one cast with a peculiar uncertain-ty. It is hard to act and harder to plan. We can track case counts and market swings by the minute, but we don’t know if we will be back at work or school a year from now.

Through it all, our sense of time is thrown off. Is this a moment for speed or for patience? The pandemic has left the world of nonprofits and charitable giving with acute challenges and difficult questions. Does our nonprofit lay off staff now to save our organization’s future? Should our foundation draw more from our endowment to increase current grant making? Should we shift our organization’s strategy to focus on immediate needs or continue our

long-term plans? Each of these is a question

about time during a period when many organizations have little time to waste: Most American non-profits have only enough liquidity to maintain operations for a few months.

As nonprofits struggle to address rising need, the “5 Rs” framework from the field of disaster response of-fers lessons that might help

the nonprofit world think about how to act, plan, and even build. The most immediate needs are Rescue (save the person trapped in the rubble) and Relief (give shelter

to the family that lost its home). In the medium term, attention shifts to Recovery (find temporary housing) and Rebuilding (re-create what was lost). The last step is building Resilience (ensure the resources are in place for the next calamity).

The 5 Rs provide more than an elegant organization-al framework. The different stages evoke the emotional challenges felt by people facing a disaster — raw fear, endless logistics, and an uncertain future.

Everyone working in philanthropy and at nonprofits need to adopt a similarly thoughtful approach to ad-

In the Covid Cyclone, Philanthropy Can Lean on Lessons From Disaster Aid

Executive vice president of Candid

By JACOB HAROLD

In the middle of a disaster, nonprofits may focus on immediate needs. As the dust settles, they can shift to long-term thinking.

26 june 2020 THE CHRONICLE OF PHILANTHROPY

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dressing the coronavirus disaster. As we wrestle with how and when to act, let me propose four principles to guide us through the uncertain months ahead.

All time horizons for social good are moral. The ar-gument between addressing immediate symptoms and structural causes can fall into a game of moral one- upmanship. Some insist that it is immoral to ignore immediate suffering. Others argue that it is immoral to ignore underlying causes.

In reality, all time horizons of action for social good are moral. Each one is an expression of the best impuls-es of the human spirit. We gain nothing by disparaging the good act of another just because it operates on days instead of years, or years instead of days. Your personal inclination may be to focus on the long term. (Mine is.) But we must honor those who focus on the needs right in front of us. And the converse is just as true.

Social good involves an interplay of time horizons. The world is complex. Social change operates at varying rates. Any serious effort to make a better world must recognize the interplay of the immediate and the lasting. A crisis-driven innovation at a food bank might offer an insight for future planning. A deep dive into long-term causes might reveal how to help right now.

Our challenge in the nonprofit world is to find the right balance of funds and attention across these time horizons. In the middle of a disaster, donors and non-profits may choose to focus on immediate needs. As the dust settles, we have a chance to shift our thinking to the longer term. And let’s remember that we are not acting alone. Together, we can offer a range of time frames that balance current and future needs.

This is not a rainy day; it is a cyclone. Over the last 20 years, America’s nonprofits have added about $2 trillion to their collective net assets. Those resources are con-centrated in a subset of nonprofits and foundations that justified savings as preparation for “a rainy day.” That foresight made them stronger. Now that the thunder-clouds are bursting, it is time to use that strength.

Individual organizations should be free to choose how they allocate their resources. But they must make those choices in the context of the chaos around us, not the equilibrium they’ve come to expect. Organizations with greater resources have a greater responsibility — not just for themselves but for their communities.

This moment offers the potential for transforma-tion. In times of equilibrium, our institutions preserve the status quo. This is not a time of equilibrium. The flux around us offers a chance to rearrange and reimagine, to fix the problems we’ve long seen.

Organizations are already stepping into the breach. Nonprofits are transforming their operations — because they must. Donors are offering flexibility to their grant-ees — because anything less would be unthinkable. Non-profit leaders working on nearly every cause are opening themselves to new forms of partnership and leadership structure — because they have no choice. This crisis can-not go to waste; now is our chance to repair what has long been broken. This is our chance to build that paradise out of hell. n

Jacob Harold is executive vice president of Candid, an organization that conducts research and analysis on nonprofits and foundations.

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Father Joe’s Villages is a 70-year-old charity that serves people expe-riencing homelessness in San Diego. Kristin Wiggins, senior director for development, spoke to the Chronicle about how the group has tackled the challenges of the Covid-19 crisis.

When the pandemic hit, the focus of our programs team was: How do we protect our clients, staff, and volunteers?

We’ve moved people from our shelters into the conven-tion center downtown, where they are spread out six feet apart, and meals are handled differently than before. We have a federally qualified health center. That team has been working with the city and county and even advising the Centers for Disease Control on the right way to protect those who are homeless.

Donor TrustIn California, the first closures

began around March 12. Over that weekend, I wrote a plan anticipating that we would all be shut down. My team jumped on it, and we present-ed it to our CEO on Monday morn-ing. The emergency-response fund launched on the website by the end of the day.

On Thursday of that first week, we announced a $400,000 matching gift that came from a longtime support-er. Once we met that $400,000 goal, we came out with an extension of

that first match. We were sending a minimum of two emails a week to donors, as well as more custom ones to the higher-level donors.

Donors really responded. I keep telling my team it’s an example of the work they do day in and day out to build trust with donors. It’s because this agency has established that trust that donors responded so quickly and so generously.

Twenty-two percent of the donors who had responded over the previ-ous eight weeks gave multiple gifts. Thirty donors who hadn’t made a gift in 2019 gave major gifts of $5,000 or higher. Some hadn’t made gifts in many years. Donors who weren’t major donors before but responded during this crisis gave $1.7 million.

As we look to the future, how do we make sure that we continue to steward those donors?

Stepping UpFor people who are homeless, it’s

a really uncertain time. The des-peration around finding food has increased.

It required us to step up and to fill in that gap. We’ve expanded our daily meal service. We’ve added two locations downtown. We used to congregate in the dining room; now we can’t do that. We shifted to to-go plates and put in partition walls to protect the staff and volunteers.

We relied on 72 volunteers a day just to deliver food service at Father Joe’s. When almost all of them pulled back, we took the staff from

other parts of the agency and filled in. So someone who normally works in a thrift shop for us is now working in the kitchen because that’s what’s needed. We have been able to make sure that all things are covered and at the same time not lay anybody off.

A Peer-to-Peer GalaOur gala invitations were ready

to mail on March 13. We stopped the mailing and turned our gala into a virtual event.

Thankfully, we had secured just shy of $200,000 in sponsorships and table commitments prior to the shutdown. We gave donors the opportunity to pull their gifts back, and all but one said, “Absolutely not.” We were thrilled by that.

We encourage board members to bring people to the gala who are not as familiar with our mission. We wanted to try and find a way for them to still do that.

We provided our board members and table hosts with sample copy for invitations to their guests, trying to create a peer-to-peer model in a gala scenario. It’s done really well. As of this morning, we’re $26,000 away from our goal.

The online auction wasn’t as suc-cessful, but I’m not surprised. It had travel packages and restaurant gift certificates and all of the things that you can’t do right now. It just wasn’t where people’s heads were at.

‘Wait-and-See Scenario’Now that the peak of this crisis

seems to be over, we’ve seen the response from our donors slowing down. We’re going to have to live in this period of not having a vaccine for a good number of months. How do we make sure that donors know how this crisis will impact us long-term?

For example, the most successful part of our employment program is a 14-week culinary-arts program that trains folks to work in commercial kitchens and restaurants. Will our clients be viable candidates for those jobs when there are thousands of people with steady work histories that are also looking for those jobs? How will we need to shift program-ming with that in mind?

Similarly, we have a therapeutic child-care program on our campus, and it has a summer camp. The kids we serve have been impacted by not being in school for the last couple of

months. How will we shift our sum-mer program more toward academ-ics to prepare these kids to hopefully go back to school in the fall?

We’re in a wait-and-see scenario. Now that we won’t have major-donor stewardship events this summer and we can’t run executive tours of our campus, how can we engage people in meaningful ways?

We will be doing a conversation on Zoom with the CEO and with the doctor who runs our federally qualified health center. It’ll be limit-ed to 40 people. We’re targeting the major donors for this first round, but I could see us doing a virtual town hall with the leadership.

Every person who makes a gift over $500 is getting a personal call from a member of our team. Our highest-level donors might get a drop-off at their doorstep that in-cludes a quarterly impact report and a personal note from their gift offi-cer. A lot of our donors are elderly, so we’re making sure that those calls are not just solicitations but that we’re checking in on people.

Uncertain Giving ClimateWe’re trying to be creative about

operating under this new scenario and also recognize that this could go on for another month, or it could go on for six months. We can’t rest here. As long as our retail operation is closed, development needs to fill a gap of about $500,000 to $600,000 a month.

We hope our donors will continue to support us as generously as they have. We also know that we haven’t felt the long-term impact of the economy yet, but it is coming.

If employment doesn’t make a quick recovery, I expect that we’re going to see our donors in the zero to $500 range — who need to tighten their budgets to make it through — pull back. We need to focus on continuing to engage major donors. They may need to fill the gap.

It’s been a really rewarding peri-od of time for fundraising because people tell us on the phone that they’re praying for us, that they see us as heroes in the community. I don’t know that the folks working in food service at Father Joe’s saw themselves as heroes. It’s been neat to share with them that our donors are thankful for the work that they do. It’s been an unexpected, beauti-ful thing.� n�

As told to Emily Haynes

FATHER JOE’S VILLAGES

‘AN UNEXPECTED BEAUTIFUL THING’Raising money isn’t easy right now, but Kristin Wiggins, chief fundraiser at Father Joe’s Villages, is buoyed by donors’ gratitude.

CORONAVIRUS DIARY

A Fundraiser Helps Donors Take the Long View

THE CHRONICLE OF PHILANTHROPY june 2020 29

30 june 2020 THE CHRONICLE OF PHILANTHROPY

FUNDRAISING

Canvassers Move From the Street to the Phone

Face-to-face fundraisers have returned to the streets in Hong Kong, Norway, and Taiwan, but it will be a while before canvassers appeal for

donations on sidewalks across the United States. As fundraisers adjust to the new confines of the pan-demic, many large charities with established canvassing programs are turning to telemarketing to continue reaching new donors.

Oxfam America employs fund-raisers to canvass in four cities, but it suspended all face-to-face fund-raising on March 13. A week later, the charity began asking these fundraisers to call past donors.

“I just wanted to really try and find a way quite quickly that we could continue offering our staff hours,” said Ali Jones, national face-to-face fundraising manager at Oxfam America.

Jones’s 24-person team managed the quick pivot from canvassing to telemarketing because the gift-pro-cessing app it uses, Evergiving, rolled out a telemarketing feature soon after cities around the world locked down. Face-to-face fund-raisers were able to use the same technology they used on sidewalks to make calls to donors from home.

Initially, the fundraisers weren’t appealing for donations; they were only asking past supporters how they were faring. Some donors responded with a new contribu-tion or signed up to give monthly,

Jones said. If recurring donors told callers they wanted to cancel their monthly donations, Oxfam Ameri-ca fundraisers asked if they’d con-sider pausing it for a few months instead. That proactive outreach has made a difference, Jones said.

“It gives flexibility to the donor but also for us it really helps on the retention side,” she said. “It’s been a positive experience so far.”

The team has called more than

18,600 people. In May, callers asked existing monthly donors to increase their gifts. Historically, Oxfam America’s canvassing efforts aimed to recruit at least 600 new donors monthly. As of May 21, the calls had brought in 81 new monthly donors, 64 one-time donations, and 111 in-creases to existing monthly gifts.

Although hard data is not yet available, some fundraisers — es-

pecially those searching for a mix of means to reach new donors — are encouraged by the early reports on telemarketing revenue since March. Face-to-face fundraising had been an established way for many big charities to recruit new donors. Even with opportunities to raise money by phone, those charities still have an extraordinary amount of ground to make up, industry leaders say.

“When something like this

happens and it impacts the channel that brings in your largest number of sustainers, it’s really hard to replace that,” says Sherry Bell, president of the Board of Directors for the Pro-fessional Face-to-Face Fundraising Association, which supports char-ities and fundraising companies in self-regulating their canvassing efforts.

Less DiversityIt’s unlikely that telemarketing

will be able to make up for reve-nue lost by pulling canvassers off the streets for months, says James Good ridge, chief executive of Ev-ergiving. The rates of new donors pledging monthly gifts to charities over the phone, he said, are “not going to come close.”

Fundraisers like to describe the way they draw in donors as a funnel: Potential new donors enter through the mouth of the funnel and fund-raisers try to engage them. The fun-nel narrows as donors are cultivated, with some falling out of touch and others becoming donors or regular contributors. The wider the mouth of the funnel, the more opportunities you have to turn people into sup-porters. Street canvassing is thought to broaden the funnel by relying

on foot-traffic volume rather than established donor data.

“It is, for us, the most proven method of growing our sustainer program significantly and quickly,” Melanie Sovern, senior marketing manager at Doctors Without Borders USA, said of face-to-face fundrais-ing.

Of the 36,000 donors who began giving monthly to Doctors With-out Borders USA in 2019, the vast majority — 25,000 donors — signed up after an interaction with a street canvasser, she said. Even so, Sovern has hopes for the charity’s new efforts to call past donors to ask how they’re holding up and make cold calls to recruit new monthly contrib-utors.

“This is a win-win situation,” Sovern says. It allows experienced street canvassers to continue con-necting with prospective donors.

But not all the benefits of face-to-face fundraising translate to telemarketing. For example, street canvassing’s catch-all nature helps increase the racial, ethnic, and age diversity of donors, Sovern and Jones say. That’s an edge that could be lost if fundraisers can only appeal to donors whose phone numbers they have.

Face-to-face fundraisers’ focus

Charities that rely on face-to-face fundraising to recruit new donors will have a lot of ground to make up.

By Emily Haynes

ALI JONES/OXFAM AMERICA

ON CALLForced to stay inside due to the coronavirus pandemic, the face-to-face fundraising team at Oxfam America meets virtually before calling donors.

on monthly donors aims to help charities keep going during lean months. The strategy, which is more popular in Britain and Canada, has gained traction in the United States since the Great Recession. A recent study of 201 nonprofits recorded a 22 percent growth in monthly gifts from 2018 to 2019, compared with an 8 percent growth in one-time gifts.

Recession FearsIt remains to be seen, however,

if donors will still choose to give monthly while the economic effects of the pandemic continue.

“We’re aware that there has al-ready been an economic downturn, that things may get worse before they get better,” said Sovern.

In addition to telemarketing by former face-to-face fundraisers, Doctors Without Borders USA has launched digital campaigns to reach new monthly donors by email and display, search, and social-media ads.

The group’s health-care workers are on the front lines of the pandem-ic in more than 70 countries, includ-ing the United States. In appeals for recurring gifts, Doctors Without Borders USA points to their work, as well as its other emergency-response efforts.

In April, a group of the charity’s major donors offered a $100,000 gift if 1,000 new donors pledged recur-ring contributions online by the end of the month. The charity met that goal on April 30.

The increased need for reliable revenue during the pandemic could encourage more charities to double down on efforts to recruit recurring givers. “A lot of organizations believe that now is an opportunity for them to grow their monthly giving pro-grams in a way in which years ago — three months ago, six months ago — you would have fought an uphill battle,” said Steve MacLaughlin, vice president for data and analytics at Blackbaud.

Fundraisers should contact pre-

vious one-time donors and ask them to give monthly and demonstrate to new donors how their gift supports the mission, MacLaughlin said. “This is not a time to stop or put the brakes on a fundraising program. We saw that happen in the past recession,” he added.

As Sovern put it: “The urgency is there. We need the sustainers.”

Face-to-Face ReimaginedThat urgency has encouraged

more collaboration among non-profits and the companies that hire street canvassers — a development that Bell at the Professional Face-to-Face Fundraising Association says has been a bright spot during the fog of the pandemic.

Since March 10, the association has convened weekly conference calls to update nonprofits and face-to-face fundraising firms on local and national policies and how the industry is responding at home and abroad. The calls are open to

members and nonmembers of the association. Participants also dis-cuss how nonprofits and face-to-face fundraising companies can pre-pare for fundraisers’ return to city streets — and how those fundraisers can support charities’ efforts in the meantime.

Pausing canvassing programs has allowed charities and the companies that run canvassing programs to rethink how face-to-face fundraisers can do more than just acquire new monthly donors.

Bell points to efforts to imagine new roles for canvassers in cultivat-ing donors. Goodridge, at Evergiv-ing, hopes to find more points of virtual contact between face-to-face fundraisers and new donors so that fewer people cancel their monthly gifts after just three months.

Face-to-face fundraising compa-nies, Bell said, are hoping to “show that they’re not a one-trick pony.”� n�

Eden Stiffman contributed to this article.

Online Fundraising ComplianceF R E E G U I D E

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D O W N L O A D T H E G U I D E H E R E

harborcompliance.com/online-fundraising-compliance-guide

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32 june 2020 THE CHRONICLE OF PHILANTHROPY

CAREERS

‘ Be Gentle’: How to Stay Healthy Emotionally During Social Isolation

These days, the drumbeat of bad news never seems to end. Current events remind us of some of our nation’s darkest moments. The fast spread of

the coronavirus and the loss of life call to mind the influenza pandemic of 1918. Unemployment rates rival those of the Great Depression, and supply-chain problems draw com-parisons to World War II. The longer it lasts, the more this crisis feels life-altering.

“A moment like this, a pandemic moment, is a trauma moment,” says Teresa Mateus a trauma specialist and co-founder of Trauma Response & Crisis Care for Movements, which offers training, online support groups, and one-on-one peer- support sessions that are geared to activists but open to everyone. Mate-us says that during a crisis like this, it’s normal to feel sadness, anger, and grief, and those emotions make us feel vulnerable.

During the pandemic, nonprofit workers have been particularly hard hit. On top of dealing with the virus on a personal level, fundraisers are grappling with canceled events and uncertainties about how to communicate with donors. Leaders are dealing with layoffs, curtailed programs, declining revenue, and increased demand for assistance. They’re having to reimagine in- person services and events as virtual offerings, and many are losing out on government loans.

“It’s not some kind of lack of capacity, of not being strong enough, that’s creating this sort of fragility that we’re all having right now,” Mateus says. “It’s a function of our stress response to a traumatic expe-rience, which is being felt individu-ally as well as collectively.”

We are entering a period of “complicated grief” that we don’t quite know how to manage, she says. Some people have experienced death in their families without any of the grieving rituals that help peo-ple cope with loss.

But even those who are not mourning a loved one have a com-munal sense of grief that Mateus calls “secondary grief.” It is similar to emotions people experience when

a loved one is suffering, and it’s im-portant to acknowledge the grief and permit yourself to feel it, she says.

Nonprofit employees at organi-zations that have undergone layoffs and furloughs who still have their jobs may feel a sense of survivor guilt, says Mateus, and that can cre-ate a sense of excessive responsibili-ty, a feeling that we must do more.

“There’s been a lot of talk about productivity in this moment, feeling like you have to give more, you have to do more, the moment requires more,” she says. But that doesn’t allow much room for us to take care of ourselves, she cautions.

Slow DownThe key to getting through this

tough time is to be “gentle and gen-erous” with yourself. Here are some ways to do that.

Pay attention to your breathing; it’s a regulatory system for our bodies. Often when people are in distress, they either forget to breathe enough or they hyperventilate, Mateus says. Something as simple as slowing down your breathing can signal your mind and emotions to slow down, too. Try the three-part breath used in yoga, which involves the belly, the ribs and lungs, and the chest. This simple exercise involves “fully expansive breaths that we feel through the whole center of our bodies,” she says, to “decompress

the stress that is building in our bodies on any given day.”

Find an activity that helps you slow down physically. “Wheth-er it’s listening to music that you enjoy, taking time to read a book that you’ve been working your way through, whether it’s writing in a journal and reflecting on what you’re feeling and experiencing, or walking your pet if you have one,”

Mateus says. The idea is to find something that helps you discon-nect from the urgency of the mo-ment.

Create pockets of calm and build rhythms into your day. Mate-us suggests stopping to pay attention to the lunch you are eating or taking a break for a couple of hours in the middle of the day. Try not to suc-cumb to the push to be productive all the time, she advises. Commit to a schedule, and close your laptop at a set time each day, for example.

“When you’re working from home, it can be very tempting to not set healthy work boundaries, but it’s really important that people set up a schedule for the day,” says Darcy Gruttadaro, director of the Center for Workplace Mental Health at the American Psychiatric Association Foundation. “Set up your schedule in a way that everyone in your home is clear on what’s happening when,” she says. Schedule breaks and designate blocks of “no screen time” to ensure you get a break from the news and social media.

The Black Emotional and Mental Health Collective created a daily planner (available on philanthropy.com) that can help you build struc-ture and self-care into your work-day. It was designed to help remote employees avoid overworking.

For more tips on working from home, consult the American Psy-chiatric Association Foundation’s

guide “Working Remotely During Covid-19: Your Mental Health & Well-Being.”

Connect regularly with people who are important to you. Most people have maybe four or five intimate friends, people who could really rescue them in a time of crisis, says Peter Yellowlees, a practicing psychiatrist and chief wellness officer at University of Califor-

nia–Davis Health. “My message to people is actually reach out to them more than normal.” For example, he and his siblings are connecting by video during this period of isolation. “We’re having a weekly family call because we are spread around the world. So that’s a good thing that’s going to come out of this [isolation]. We will actually be closer.”

Focus on one or two tasks you want to do well each day. There are so many external factors we can’t control these days and hundreds of things we may feel compelled to do, Mateus says. To avoid being overwhelmed by all the tasks that need attention and feeling a lack of control, identify one or two goals each day and focus on them.

For example, Mateus says, in her role as a nonprofit leader, when the Covid-19 crisis hit, she felt tempted to create new online programming for her community, such as medita-tion sessions, but she soon realized that other groups already have that covered. So she focused on long-term goals instead.

Ask yourself what your nonprofit does well that will support the com-munity in the long term, and focus on strengthening that program or activity, she says.

When to Get HelpIt’s important to know what reac-

tions are normal at a time like this and when you should seek profes-sional help.

Anxiety is a normal response, says Yellowlees, but you shouldn’t spend all day worrying.

“It’s important to take care of your health and mental health on a day-to-day basis so that it doesn’t reach excessive levels, so that you can keep your stress under control,” says Gruttadaro. Many people expe-rience interrupted sleep, and that is to be expected, says Yellowlees. Peo-ple experience deep sleep only when they feel safe. But if you can’t sleep at all, if nightmares overwhelm you, or if you wake up with panic attacks, you may need more support, he advises.

The stress of a pandemic can also lead to agoraphobia, an anxiety dis-order in which people avoid places and situations that frighten them.

To avoid feeling overwhelmed by all the tasks that need attention, pick one or two to focus on each day.

By Margie Fleming Glennon

“They don’t want to go and walk the dog or get out and smell the dai-sies — all of which are good things to do,” Yellowlees says. People also may experience changes in appetite, concentration, or mood, he says. “They’re signs that you should seek professional help.”

“We need to address the things we have control over,” says Grut-tadaro. “You have control over getting help for yourself.”

Gruttadaro suggests tapping into employee-assistance programs if your organization has one. “Now may be the time when you want to work with a counselor or a therapist to help you get through this difficult time,” she says. If you seek medi-cal attention, though, consult your primary-care doctor first, she and Yellowlees advise

People who have existing men-tal-health conditions like anxiety, depression, or substance use should keep following their treatment plans, Gruttadaro says. “You should check in with your mental-health provider if you notice that your symptoms are becoming more sig-nificant.”

Mateus offers an additional cau-tion: If you have previous experienc-es of trauma, grief, or loss, traumatic feelings may resurface. “Moments of intensive stress in crisis can bring up past pains that we often think that we’ve worked through,” she says. “And we don’t expect it.”

For example, after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the number of people calling sexual-assault

hotlines spiked, Mateus says. “One would think that those two crises have nothing to do with each other,” she said, “but it was just a fact of people being in a collective place of stress that brought up past pain.”

Pay attention to your emotions, past memories of trauma or grief, and seek support for unresolved issues from the past.

If you are experiencing suicidal thoughts, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at (800) 273-8255, or text HOME to 741741 for free crisis counseling from Crisis Text Line. Both are available 24 hours a day.

Virtual TherapyOne bright spot for people who

need support right now: Almost all mental-health providers are offering therapy virtually. Yellowlees, who has been practicing telepsychiatry for 25 years, says that with the onset of social distancing, most doctors and therapists began offering video ap-pointments — many for the first time.

Video therapy can be surprisingly intimate and more egalitarian, he says, likening it to when doctors made house calls. One benefit is that the patient is in comfortable and familiar surroundings, which puts the doctor and the patient on a more even playing field.

“I often encourage people to use their phones or iPads rather than a computer,” he says, “because then they can pick them up and show me around the house; they can show me the garden.”

Free and low-cost resources are more accessible now, too, because many providers are charging people according to their ability to pay during the crisis.

Many support sessions for people battling addiction have gone virtual. For example, Alcoholics Anonymous is offering meetings online now, which it hadn’t done before the pandemic, according to Mateus.

“There are a whole lot of very nice tools that you can literally put your earbuds in and have a therapist in your pocket,” says Yellowlees. For example, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs offers a free app called Covid Coach that provides information to help people cope during the pandemic and has tools for self-care and to encourage emo-tional well-being.

He also recommends the VA’s CBT-I Coach, an app that addresses insomnia through cognitive behav-ioral therapy, an approach that helps change people’s negative patterns of thinking to improve their health. The apps, however, are not meant to replace professional care related to Covid-19 or mental-health condi-tions for people who have insomnia.

Unfortunately, we’re in this for the long haul, Mateus says. Public life and our emotional response to the pandemic aren’t going back to normal anytime soon.

“We’re going to need to be gentle with ourselves for a while,” she says. “There are parts of this that will lin-ger beyond any kind of designated end point for the virus itself.”� n�

ISTOCK

THE CHRONICLE OF PHILANTHROPY june 2020 33

FREE MENTAL-HEALTH RESOURCESNational Suicide Prevention Lifeline1-800-273-8255 available 24/7

Crisis Counseling from CrisisTextline.orgText HOME to 741741 available 24/7

Tracc4Movements: Covid-19 Care Resourcehttps://www.tracc4movements .com/covid-19-community-care

The Director of Corporate and Foundation Relations is responsible for the creation of plans and implementation of strategies for corporate and foundation relations for the University in consultation with the Vice President for University Advancement. She or he manages the fundraising efforts for corporations and foundations with multiple interest areas across the University; provides leadership in identifying and executing strategies that will achieve the goals and objectives for successful corporate and foundation partnerships and private funding from corporations and foundations; develops annual goal setting and fundraising plans and directs related activities in support of these goals and objectives; manages a portfolio of major organizational gift prospects and coordinates with the staff to identify, cultivate, solicit and steward companies and foundations in support of University corporate and foundation relations goals; works collaboratively with administrative and academic leadership, committee/council volunteers and University Development staff to ensure fundraising success; works to engage department heads and faculty in the partnership/fundraising enterprise.

POSITION QUALIFICATIONS:

MINIMUM:• Bachelor's degree• 5 years of a mix of successful fundraising and corporate and foundation relations experience

PREFERRED:• Master's degree• Experience working in an academic setting

Candidates must have the communication skills and cross-cultural abilities to maximize their effectiveness with diverse groups of students, colleagues, and community members. Candidates must communicate effectively and perform well in the interview(s).

A complete application will consist of a cover letter, resume, names and email addresses of three references submitted in this online application system at https://www.schooljobs.com/careers/iupedu.

Director of Corporate and Foundation RelationsForefront, the Illinois hub for education, mission-drivenadvocacy, thought leadership, and collective action forgrantmakers and nonprofits, is searching for its nextleader. We provide education, advocacy, thought leadership,and facilitate collective action around issues that areimportant to our Members and to the sector. For a complete opportunity profile, pleasevisit, www.mortengroup.com/Forefront.

Transformation through assessment, education, and action

SEEKS PRESIDENT/CEO

Post your job ad today: Philanthropy.com/HiringSolutions

of our job postings are for fundraising positions.76%

34 june 2020 Executive THE CHRONICLE OF PHILANTHROPY

THE CHRONICLE OF PHILANTHROPY Executive June 2020 35

Leslie Gordon, who officially joined Food Bank For New York City on March 30, 2020 says that the most consistent thread in her life has been the desire to make a difference. What a difference she has made with the organization, staff, community and vulnerable New Yorkers in such a short time! While she joins Food Bank during an unprecedented time in our city’s history, she is humbled to be stepping into a talented, diverse and passionate organization with such a rich legacy of serving New Yorkers in need. As the city’s major distributor of emergency food for our neediest neighbors, Leslie is fueled by Food Bank For New York City’s commitment to support the needs of New Yorkers who relied on the organization as part of their daily lives before the COVID-19 crisis, as well as those who are now facing hunger for the very first time because of the pandemic. With her sleeves rolled up, Leslie is working on the ground with Food Bank staff to help guide the strategies to keep Food Bank’s mission running, including implementing new safety procedures, identifying new funding sources, creating and implementing innovative ways to continue to serve New Yorkers.

Our Mission Since the start of Food Bank’s Covid-19 response on March 7, nearly 15 million meals have been provided to New Yorkers in need under Leslie’s leadership. This is the equivalent of 17,434,609 pounds of food distributed, which is 20 percent higher when compared to last year during the same time period. We have worked with our site partners implementing CSFP senior food kit distributions to perform home delivery to reduce seniors exposure and manage to still provide services to self-isolating seniors. More than 67,000 meals have been provided to nearly 6,000 Senior New Yorkers in need. To better address the needs, Food Bank conducted food distributions throughout the city, described as Pop-Up Distributions. These essential distributions are managed directly by Food Bank Staff and occur at iconic locations where greater needs can be met, such as Barclay’s Center and throughout various NYCHA sites. So far, approximately 167,915 meals or 201,498 lbs. of food have been provided. Food Bank For New York City continues to partner with World Central Kitchen to continue its efforts in distributing take-out meals to families in need. With this amazing partnership, more than 32,000 meals have been distributed to 9,000 households in need. A recent partnership with UBER-EATS led to an average weekly delivery of 735 food deliveries directly to homebound New Yorkers in need. Nearly 9,000 pounds of Girl Scout cookies have been distributed to our Hospital Heroes on the front lines! Approximately 1,479,764 meals or 1,775,717 lbs. of food have been provided in partnership with organizations such as Women in Need (WIN), Administration of Children Services (ACS), Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), Community Response Partners and local Hospitals. With the schools being closed for the remainder of the summer, we worked with new school partners to hold several distributions that moved 12,500 meals or 15,000 lbs. of food to 1,500 people in the school community.Food Bank For New York City has recently partnered with Good Plus+ Foundation to provide essential baby diapers, baby wipes, baby food, baby wash, baby clothes and shoes, personal hygiene and beauty essentials, lunchboxes and backpacks to our wonderful families, member agencies, community partners and community hospitals in New York to help our families in need during this crisis. Leslie has also empowered her Recruitment Team to hire 400 recently unemployed New Yorkers as emergency temporary employees in response to the pandemic. This newly created workforce of temps were recently laid off from the culinary, hospitality, retail, Broadway, ride share, medical, corporate, nonprofit, warehousing, and event sectors. Some of the temps on our workforce were also in college and expecting to start their first jobs this summer. Food Bank has been able to provide these temps with an opportunity to earn income while still being able to help their fellow New Yorkers in need. They have been able to pack emergency boxes of food and essentials, and have been able to distribute food, hygiene essentials, and millions of meals and essentials throughout all five boroughs. Leslie has been an on the ground leader; working with an energized, resilient, dedicated and passionate staff, Board of Directors, donors, volunteers, the community and local government to make sure the needs of the many families impacted by this pandemic are being taken care of.

Our Career OpportunitiesWe’re building a culture where amazing people (like you) can do their best work. Join us and you’ll find a culture of teamwork, professionalism and mutual respect, and most importantly, a life-changing career. We are considered essential by our state government during this Covid-19 pandemic and will start back hiring soon. Come make a difference! Please email your cover letter, salary requirements, your resume and the job you are interested in to recruitment@foodbanknyc.org to submit your application. Please continue to follow us on www.foodbanknyc.org and all of our social media platforms.

Our Leadership

, who officially joined Food Bank For New York City on March 30th

.

Our Mission

Our Career Opportunities

recruitment@foodbanknyc.orgwww.foodbanknyc.org and all of our social media

Our Leadership

Learn More About What You Can Do Now

As the COVID-19 crisis continues to affect our personal and professional lives, CCS Fundraising is here to support you.

We know that the principles of fundraising don’t change, but sometimes we must find new ways to implement them. During this challenging time, we are continuing to offer our perspectives and lessons learned from over seven decades of nonprofit advisory leadership. Our new page, Strategies During COVID-19 provides best practices and optimal strategies to help your organization build a path through this crisis and beyond.

Visit: ccsfundraising.com/strategies-during-covid-19ccsfundraising.com | info@ccsfundraising.com

STRATEGIESDURING

COVID-19