Until recently, I worked at a feminist nonprofit. The founders were so assured in their politics that they placed the word “feminism” in the organization’s name. This was when the work was a project—with no executive director, no board, no bylaws, and no expectation or even reason to uphold worker protections.
Everybody was in it for the love of the mission, and it was wildly successful. As opportunities rolled in, the founders decided to institutionalize their feminist project by establishing a 501c3.
I was the second staff member hired. The first, the organization’s inaugural director, had sought to change the way gender was conceptualized within our work to move away from binary notions of gender, which should have served as a guide for how the organization could pursue political education and develop itself towards its mission.
But over time, and with new leadership, politics were treated more as an impediment than as a part of our mission. For example, developing a material commitment to complement the organization’s Black Lives Matter statement was a challenge, as was sustaining a disability justice praxis, or taking a clear stance against apartheid, genocide, and settler colonialism.
Leaning both on provocation and intention, I began to assert that we ought to rename the organization, replacing “feminism” with “women” to more accurately reflect our focus on the representation of careered, cisgender women. (The organization, not surprisingly, did not budge.)
As the gap between leadership approach and organizational values persisted, the tension became more concrete, showing up materially in staff not getting paid for taking on executive responsibilities and dysfunctional communication patterns.
When my friends and I seek employment at feminist nonprofits, it’s not because we believe naively that that work will immediately radically disrupt the interlocking systems that oppress us. We fully recognize the limits of working within a sector that both relies on the generosity of wealth hoarders and is subject to oversight by the US government. But we do know the space that these nonprofits take up in movement work means there are resources within them that we can utilize for more radical change.
So, if we must be employed to make a living, we might as well try to align the different ways we work as much as possible.
That said, our complaints about how our labor isn’t valued in our workplaces are no different from our friends who are employed at organizations that hold no political claim. Regardless of mission or field, the labor of people at the bottom of a hierarchy—of any gender, and especially Black workers—is always at risk of being rendered inconsequential and disposable.
The fight for better working conditions is one and the same as the fight for a feminism that doesn’t limit its aims to a politics of representation.
When my coworkers and I gave up on informal means of resolution and decided to form a union, it was because we were facing major transitions—an expected loss of funding and an executive director who was planning to depart the organization—for which we had no plans in place. Leadership’s delay tactic here was to regularly meet to discuss succession but never actually formulate a plan, no matter what staff proposed.
Eventually, my coworkers and I leaned into our organization’s claims of valuing nonhierarchical structure and consensus-based decision-making: We developed our own succession plan to address not just the looming leadership gap but also our concerns around the direction of our programming, funding, and our organizational structure. There’s probably a #nonprofitboss TikTok that captures the polite and equivocal response we were first met with before we started to be treated as a threat.
Soon enough, what we knew to be true was made clear to us through various forms of retaliation against the staff: There was a hierarchy in place, and protecting the woman at the top would take priority over any of our attempts to sustain our organization.
We now know that the fight for a better workplace—one providing equitable pay for our labor, transparency around organizational finances, consistent practices of consensus-based decision making, and a horizontal structure that mutually benefits all workers—is one and the same as the fight for a feminism that doesn’t limit its aims to a politics of representation.
Our struggle continues, with me working now on the outside while my coworkers continue the struggle from within. I am proud of my coworkers who have stood up—and challenged shallow feminist politics within our workplace
