Truth to Power is a regular series of conversations with writers about the promises and pitfalls of movements for social justice. From the roots of racial capitalism to the psychic toll of poverty, from resource wars to popular uprisings, the interviews in this column focus on how to write about the myriad causes of oppression and the organized desire for a better world.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Steve Dubb: What led you decide to write Reimagining Nonprofits and Philanthropy and what are your hoping readers take from the book?
We need to be more present in general media. We are not really seen. We are kind of like air.…No one appreciates air until they really need it.
Vu Le: I am really hoping that it gives people permission to think things differently and not to accept that the way we have always done things is the way it should be. So many of our philosophies and practices are things that have been made up. They are archaic and they don’t work for our communities anymore, so people need to start thinking about doing things differently, especially in light of everything going on right now sociopolitically. We need our sector to be a lot more effective. Not just to do the work but to fight against fascists.
SD: In the book, you describe some mock shows, such as The Amazing Free Supply Race, Nonprofit and Afraid, and Nonprofit, the Musical. They are in jest but critique nonprofit dysfunction. Could you talk about these “shows” and describe what cultural changes you are seeking to encourage?
VL: We need to be more present in general media. We are not really seen. We are kind of like air. Other sectors are like food. People can see food. They appreciate food. But the work that we do is often times like air and no one appreciates air until they really need it.
The Amazing Free Supply Race, for example, points to the sort of scarcity mindset that we all have, but all that the public expects of us. People will just donate the stuff that they don’t want anymore, like used clothing or expired food. They kind of expect that we will just take it and give it to poor people.
It is rather insulting. And we really need to one, get out of that mindset and two, train people to get out of that mindset as well.
Nonprofit and Afraid is talking about how people don’t understand what nonprofits do. They have all of these assumptions about nonprofits, about how we run, and assume that they can run nonprofits better than we could, as if it were really easy. So, that was kind of making fun of what we deal with on almost a daily basis—all these well-meaning, very annoying donors and the general public.
Yeah, we do need to be seen more. How do we increase people’s knowledge? Maybe one of those ways is to be more creative, such as with a musical. It might actually be fun.
SD: You have a chapter on “The Nine Horsemen of Nonprofit and Philanthropic Ineffectiveness.” Those include suppressed imagination, risk aversion, and scarcity mindset. If nonprofits are in a rut, as you write, how do they get out of that rut?
VL: One is acknowledging that we are in a rut. To solve a problem, you have to acknowledge that you have a problem.
I think that many people in the sector refuse to acknowledge that we actually have a lot of issues. I don’t think foundations would acknowledge it.
And it is not just that we need more funding. I think there are some deeper acknowledgements that we need to make, including the fact that conservative right-wing movements have run circles around progressive nonprofits. We don’t acknowledge that.
We don’t acknowledge that what they’ve been doing has been a lot more effective than what we have been trying to do, so step one is really acknowledging that, and step two is learning from what works. What works is what conservatives have been doing, which is to pack the judiciary, to build institutions like the Heritage Foundation, to support political candidates, to really dominate the media, and support their leaders as individual leaders and not just cogs in programs and organizations.
We need to start thinking broader—actually believing in our vision statements and then thinking about what it actually takes to reach those visions.
SD: Could you take on some of the nine horsemen and say how the sector should deal with them, like a suppressed imagination?
VL: Almost every single nonprofit and every single foundation has a very lofty vision statement, like “We envision a world without poverty, without racism.”
But afterward we don’t focus on that anymore. We don’t actually believe we will achieve that vision. So, we focus on what’s practical—what we can actually do that maybe helps the world get slightly less bad.
I talk about in the book when we were talking about defunding the police. Many people were like, “There is no way we are going to have a society without a strong police presence.” So, I think that’s an example of what happens when we suppress our imagination. We need to start thinking broader—actually believing in our vision statements and then thinking about what it actually takes to reach those visions.
SD: You write that “nonprofits’ jobs are to run programs and services, and funders’ jobs are to fund nonprofits as long as they’re doing good work.” That sounds good, but it risks perpetuating funder dependency. How can movement and nonprofit actors negotiate these tensions?
VL: I would like us to get over this idea of dependency and start thinking about what is effective so we can actually solve these issues and go out of business.
I think this is what conservative movements do well. Funders over there, they fund for 20 or 30 years at a time, according to the Covington report that came out in 1997 that studied the differences between conservative and progressive organizations.
One of the lines that struck me from the report was that conservative funders fund two decades at a time. They don’t worry about dependency. They just worry about: “How do we reach this vision? Are they aligned with our values? How do we reach this goal to pack the Supreme Court with nine right-wing justices?”
They don’t think, “Oh my gosh, is the Heritage Foundation going to become dependent on my donations? They just think, “Is this organization going to be effective in doing what we need it to?”
SD: What would be your 20-year project? Let’s assume you have progressive funders that will do what you just described.
VL: Conservatives have their Project 2025. They have made no secret about it. They are proud of it. They are like, “This is our vision.” And it’s an awful vision.
We need an equivalent of that, that names our vision: We should have society where there is not so much wealth inequality in the first place, where we have universal basic income, where we have universal healthcare and education is free, and minimum wage is tied to inflation, which means it should be $24 an hour by now, progressive visions about climate, about everything. New Mexico just passed universal free childcare, so it is possible. It’s just that we’ve been so beaten down. We are just so afraid.
Our sector has become one giant White moderate, always trying to please everyone, always trying to be civil instead of actually embracing our values.
I would think about a society where we don’t have billionaires, a society where corporations and individuals pay their fair share of taxes, and government is not run by rich White men and actually reflects the population. We should have all those things. And I think we can. If we just go ahead and start working on that instead of always being on the defensive.
SD: When I wrote about Project 2025, I mentioned that. It would be nice if there was a project on the other side.
VL: It would be! That is going to be the secret to winning. Look at Zohran Mamdani in New York. He is unabashedly progressive, and he gets a ton of voters because of it. It’s not because he is trying to be all centrist.
I talk about White moderation as one of the horsemen of ineffectiveness. Our sector has become one giant White moderate, always trying to please everyone, always trying to be civil instead of actually embracing our values and saying this is what we want.
SD: You devote a chapter to reimagining fundraising. What are some of the leading ills of the current system and how might the community-centric fundraising you advocate remedy some of them?
VL: Right now, we have a system that caters to the whims and interests and feelings of donors. And we’ve been trained to tell these donors that they are heroes. And that what they care about is completely valid.
And then we turn our sector into the SkyMall catalog of causes for donors to pick and choose from. Not to say that donors are terrible people—most of them are great. But what does it do when we condition them to think that they should focus on whatever they care about—instead of asking what is equitable, what do we all need to focus on to build a stronger community for all of us?
We turn our sector into the SkyMall catalog of causes for donors to pick and choose from.
One of the things community-centric fundraising attempts to do is to get donors to examine where their wealth comes from and to ground their giving in social justice and end this nonprofit “hunger games” that we have been playing. The current system rewards people who are able to play the hunger games most effectively. And that has not been good for our communities.
SD: How do you get beyond the hunger games?
VL: We have a philosophy in fundraising of “Get us as much money for your organization as possible.” Your role as a fundraiser is to meet your annual goal. It is not about achieving justice or equity; that is a secondary goal. Your main goal, and what you’re measured on, is whether you achieve this financial goal.
We need to shift away from that, and shift toward justice as the primary goal of fundraising. It would force us to think differently. For example, maybe sometimes we don’t apply for a grant. Maybe we help another nonprofit do their work. Maybe we back away from the limelight sometimes.
For instance, there was a mass shooting at a campus, and they sent out an email asking folks to give to this other [affected] university, which in many ways is blasphemous to the way we have been taught to fundraise. But it shows how necessary it is for us to think about doing it in an ecosystem or community-minded way. All of our missions are interrelated, and we need to treat them that way.
SD: You call for boards to shift from exercising “power over” to “power with.” For example, you suggest at least half of the people on executive hiring committees be staff. Talk about “equitable governance” and what benefits nonprofits might gain from adopting these practices?
VL: With community-centric fundraising, it’s really about thinking about the broader ecosystem. And with governance, it’s the same thing.
Right now, boards are mostly focused on the survival of their organization. Boards don’t think about the ecosystem. They have not been trained to think about the ecosystem. They just think about their own specific organization.
And if you think the survival of the organization depends on a bunch of money, of course you’re going to get people who have money or who are connected to money onto your board, who are mostly going to be White people. That’s why there is such a lack of diversity among board members.
I think it is more important than ever that we expand the duty of care to not just the people at our own organization but the entire community.
This causes a problem when so many of the issues that we are trying to address affect people of color and other marginalized communities. So, we have a whole bunch of rich, mostly White individuals having the most power in terms of controlling the values and the strategy of these organizations that are mostly trying to help marginalized communities.
So that is something that boards need to understand. Once they understand that, they start thinking about, “OK. What else do we need to do? Maybe we need to not be so focused on money as the primary factor of who we recruit onto the board. Maybe we need more board members from the community, or who have experienced homelessness before, or whatever. That’s the sort of equity mindedness that we need boards to adopt.
SD: How do you implement this idea of training boards to look out for the broader ecosystem? What does “duty of care,” “duty of loyalty” look like in that context?
VL: Well, take the duty of care. What are we caring for? We are caring for the organization, sure. But I think it is more important than ever that we expand the duty of care to not just the people at our own organization but the entire community—even the entire world right now.
We have got to start thinking more expansively and start caring about everyone else too. Because when we only care about our own organization, we have the nonprofit hunger games.
In the book, I mention how this one executive director got yelled at by his board chair, because he wanted to share a grant opportunity with another nonprofit leader and got into trouble because of that.
Are we not trying to create a better world for all of us? That reaction makes very little sense, and I think the board member thinks, “Well, this is my duty of obedience and care and loyalty, and that’s what I am doing.”
But are we actually meeting our duty of care if we operate in that way? Because now it creates a hunger games that affects everyone negatively.
SD: If you wanted to encourage this mindset of a duty of care to community, how do board members need to be trained differently?
VL: We really need to talk about this and give them permission to be expansive in their thinking. And this includes thinking about how other organizations are doing in the ecosystem
What does that look like? Maybe it means you as a board member meet with other organizations. Maybe there are some meta boards—board members from different boards getting together once a quarter. “Hey, this is what my organization is doing. What are you up to?”
I would love it if a bunch of different board members of different organizations got together once in a while and said, “Hey. We actually have this really important advocacy issue here. Would love it if every single board member would bring this up to your organization. Talk to your executive director about that and see if there a way we can all support this one issue.” Whether it is gun control, whether it is immigration, instead of operating in silos, there are ways. And I think it is actually exciting to envision board members thinking beyond the survival of their own organization.
SD: You write about the need for developing an “equity 201” to address deficiencies in diversity, equity, and inclusion programs that were evident before current attacks, and to build an “equity mindset’ that moves people toward liberation. Can you expand on this?
VL: People from marginalized communitas have been very frustrated with the way DEI had been going, even before the current attacks on DEI. There was a lot of what my friends called “fakequity” and “equity offset.”
Sometimes even I get caught up in this. I heard from one person who said, “Vu, my CEO, she always forwards your blogs on equity to all of us. She thinks that doing that is enough. But nothing changes.”
So, great, now I am used as an obstacle to actually prevent equity from happening. So that is a form of equity offset when you do something that is necessary but not sufficient, and you think it is sufficient.
There has been a lot of lip service to equity. And yes, we really need to think about things that we should just consider standard practice by now: disclosing salary ranges on job postings, for example. Putting captions into all your images and videos. We should not be arguing about that anymore. There is just so much data on that now.
We need to start thinking about the next level. This is where some of the exciting work about DEI is. I think about talking to donors about where their wealth comes from—and engaging with them in a conversation about reparations and restoring stolen land. That is really exciting. That is where equity 201 should be.
SD: You credit nonprofits for civil rights, healthcare, and environmental gains, but nonprofitization has also been a tool of elite containment and control of movements. How can nonprofits do more of the transformative advocacy that you support and avoid demobilizing tendencies?
VL: I love nonprofits. I think we have done some incredible work. And also I think that we have been weaponized to launder the conscience of a lot of inequity and a lot of people who have been benefiting from inequity. People or corporations or wealthy individuals that avoid paying taxes for example and then give a much smaller fraction of what they should be paying in taxes to nonprofits. And they get a press release. And everyone is praising them.
It’s a manner of laundering their conscience and preventing them from doing what is right. So, I think to stop that, we need to be a lot more thoughtful about how we operate.
We can’t just be thankful for stuff. We need to start questioning things. We need to start encouraging our donors and our funders to think about the systemic conditions that allow them to hoard so much wealth in the first place.
One of the nine horsemen I mention in the book is self-protectionism. We all need to start thinking about, how do we actually do this in such a way so that we’re not needed? What are the systemic factors that we need to address here?
Every nonprofit leader who works in the sector needs to start examining how they are benefiting from the existence of inequity, and what they are doing to mitigate their complicity.
SD: You express optimism that a new world of democratic renewal can follow the nation’s current period of reaction. What gives you this optimism?
VL: Despite all the challenges that we have, there are still really amazing organizations doing incredible work. I list a few of them in the book: The Solidaire Network, UnKoch My Campus, the work around ranked choice voting and democracy vouchers.
There are people doing brilliant things all the time despite all the challenges that we have. I get very inspired. It is even more inspiring because the challenges against us are so many.
We still get to do things. Despite the lack of funding, despite society not understanding us, despite the fact that we are underappreciated like air—we still get an incredible amount of work done.
And I think that as we go along in terms of everything we are experiencing right now, more and more people will get angry. Often, what topples autocracies is people getting angry and realizing that the system they are in is awful. And they will start to organize and lead revolutions. I am hoping that is what happens here.
SD: Is there anything else you would like to add?
VL: One of the questions that I might ask myself is, “Vu, you mention fascism. If I am a nonprofit leader, why should I care about fascism? It just seems like a heavy term.”
Well, whether we like it or not, we are undergoing a fascist regime right now. And it’s been attacking civil society because that’s one of the first things that fascist governments do. They attack the press, they attack civil society, they attack anything that might challenge them. And we stand for justice, so they are going to attack us.
We need to get our act together. We don’t have time for some of these ineffective philosophies and practices that we have just taken as best practices over the past several decades. We need to really focus and set aside everything that does not serve our people, and that includes protecting democracy and fighting against fascism.
