Real Talk about Equity and Non-Profit Financial Administration
By Kathryn Leigh Goetz, President & CEO and Tecoria Jones, BSF Board Member, representing the National Parent Café Leadership (NPCLT) team.
Be Strong Families has charged itself with doing the work it takes to be an organization that promotes equity in everything we do and as part of who we are. We know that part of equity leadership is consciousness — the value of centering equity, the desire to lead equitably. Part of equity leadership is creating a culture of inclusion and minding how we relate to each other; part of equity leadership is hardwired into policy. When we created the workshop: Parent Engagement through a Lens of Equity, we included political, social, and economic equity as a three-legged stool. When we reflect on our history, values, involvement in racial equity efforts, we can be proud of how our work sits balanced in equity.
We know that equity is not a one-and-done. Living equity is not only about completing a training or having a conversation, participating in initiatives, or conducting an audit and implementing a checklist. It is having the ongoing intention to mind what is happening, how equity is being embodied. Doing this requires continuous focus and commitment to reflective practice and self-improvement. It’s so easy to slip up, without even tracking that opportunities are being missed. It’s important to be vigilant. Two concrete examples that occurred within Be Strong Families might be instructive for other non-profit organizations:
Payment of Parent Leaders and Others with Lived Expertise: As CEO, I have been a major advocate for at least the past 20 years of paying parent leaders the same as one would pay staff to do the same work. This was a hallmark of Strengthening Families Illinois, a foundation of Be Strong Families, and hardwired into our participation nationally with other groups trying to figure out parent engagement. We know that this means creating a budget and including appropriate stipends in that budget (by appropriate we mean compensation that is aligned with what a staff-person would be paid for doing the same work). In practical terms, it means that for Be Strong Families, members of the National Parent Cafe Leadership Team who provide Parent Cafes for the organization need to be viewed as and compensated as training consultants. As part of an internal audit last year, we discovered that this wasn’t happening consistently. In practice, the “we know” had become more like “some of us believe.” Several of us in key leadership positions who should have known, didn’t know what was actually happening in our compensation practices. Somehow, internally, a serious disconnect had emerged invisibly, over time. Parent leaders and the staff who interacted with them most directly brought the issue to the forefront and we corrected the disparity. The lesson here is vigilance, internal communication, consistently reinforcing shared values and taking steps to ensure that financial policies and practices mirror stated values.
IT / Laptop Policy: Like most organizations, Be Strong Families has always had a commitment to providing staff with technology to do their jobs. As a virtual organization with staff around the country, this means ensuring that staff members’ home offices are equipped to facilitate their efficiency and effectiveness. However, in recent months, it became clear that the policy we had for ensuring equitable access to equipment was inadequate, undermining its intention, and unintentionally creating a digital divide. The issue was that in practice, the quality of equipment the organization was providing made it so that staff members who could afford to were using their own equipment. This went undetected, unnoticed, except that our expenses for equipment were declining (which some saw as a positive). Declining equipment expenses, however, while perhaps helpful to the single bottom line, are not overall a positive. Why? It is in an organization’s interest to provide staff with the best quality tools the organization can afford — and to realize that when this doesn’t happen — the cost is in productivity, competency, efficiency, brand, and staff morale. This is a cost incurred every single day and in contrast, the differential between sub-par equipment and more than adequate equipment is approximately $500 — a one-time expenditure. Our process for re-creating a better policy was for someone (in this case me) to initially draft something and send it around for comment. We circulated it internally to those with more technical expertise than I have, both staff, their IT spouses, and then our IT consultant firm vetted the document. We finalized the policy based on feedback and designed implementation.
Of course, non-profits need to protect their budgets. And it is possible to do that without undermining integrity and values. Financial decisions communicate organizational priorities – especially what gets cut and how the cuts are made when they’re necessary.
The moral of the story and the intent behind sharing these two examples is that it’s important for Be Strong Families and other non-profit organizations to live their values related to equity, especially when it comes to financial decisions. It’s too expensive to sacrifice equity in order to save money, but sometimes, because the focus is on the finances, the equity dimensions aren’t tracked. When it comes to living equity there’s nothing too small to ignore and the commitment must be to continual learning and ongoing assessment.
One of my takeaways is that it’s super important for leadership to listen and respond to staff discomfort, unease, dissatisfaction and/or factors getting in the way of their optimal work experience. Part of the response needs to be asking the question: Is there an equity dimension to this? If so, how can I address that aspect?
Just like with parent engagement, the foundational commitment is based on knowing and believing at the deepest levels that living equity is a better way than the alternative. However, good intentions are not enough. Truly manifesting equity entails humility, vigilance, and sustained struggle, with honesty and transparency, in its service. Complacency and focusing only on the positive aspects of what you know, what you have done, what you believe will put your equity work in a small, closed box. Transformational equity is about building the box to do the work.