An Invisible Impediment to Progress: Perceptions of Racialization in the Nonprofit Sector

Abstract

Popular beliefs about the nonprofit sector suggest it as a place devoted to the public good on behalf of disadvantaged individuals and groups. This dominant view implies an organization’s success or failure as the result of individual decision-making, capacity issues, or inability to behave like successful organizations. This fuels a view of the sector as race-neutral where all organizations encounter the same challenges and in the same ways. In this article, I use interview data from a 2-year qualitative study of Black-led organizations in Madison, Wisconsin to examine how Black-led organizations perceive racialization in the sector and its impact on their work. Findings suggest that Black-led organizations perceive racialization in the sector across key areas understood as central to an organization’s operation: leadership, funding, data, collaboration, and volunteering. I conclude by calling for a more robust theory of racialization in the nonprofit sector that might vary by place.

Keywords

race racialization nonprofit organizations inequality

Introduction

The nonprofit sector is generally understood to be a third sector that represents a public good whereby organizations are created to have an impact on the well-being of disadvantaged individuals and groups (Etzioni, 1973; Salamon & Anheier, 1997). Within this sector, organizations provide various supports and services formerly covered under the social safety net (Van Slyke, 2002). In doing this important work, organizations often experience a common set of challenges related to capacity, management, and funding, among others which are helpful in understanding differences in organizational outcomes (Cairns et al., 2005; Jaskyte, 2004; Lu, 2015).

Recently, nonprofit scholars have called for a more critical look at differences in organizational outcomes and experiences by considering questions around race in the sector (Coule et al., 2022; Weisinger et al., 2016). For instance, some scholars have examined questions about how to increase racial leadership in organizations that begins with establishing diverse governing boards (e.g., Lee, 2022; LeRoux & Medina, 2022). Others have examined the ways in which race affects giving behaviors and priorities of philanthropic entities (e.g., Dunning, 2023; Woods et al., 2023). From a critical perspective, these and other contributions offer insights that challenge perceptions of race-neutrality that sometimes underlie a prevailing belief of the nonprofit sector as a public good. I join this conversation by critically considering how the experiences of organizations led by people of color are affected by racialization in the sector.

This article examines how Black-led organizations (BLOs) perceive racialization in the nonprofit sector and how it affects their ability to successfully carry out their mission. I begin by briefly reviewing literature at the intersection of race and nonprofits, with an emphasis on the burgeoning critical literature, to situate my own work, highlight areas central to the operation of any organization, and to establish these areas as analytic categories within which to examine racialization. Next, I draw on Ray’s (2019) pathbreaking theoretical framework on racialized organizations and extend it to the nonprofit sector to understand the impact of racialization. Then, I analyze perceptions of racialization in the sector through interviews with leaders of BLOs—those organizations with an executive director and a majority of full-time staff all identifying as African American—and illustrate how this affects their work. The paper concludes by discussing what this project means relative to existing contributions around race in the nonprofit sector and its implications for further research including calling for a more robust theoretical framework to better understand the extent to which the sector, itself, is racialized.

Race and Nonprofits

Recently, scholars have engaged in critical work at the intersection of race and nonprofits in key areas that affect the outcomes and experiences of organizations (e.g., Coule et al., 2022; Olivares & Piatak, 2022). A significant part of this work has focused on questions around diverse leadership within the sector (LeRoux & Medina, 2022; Mumford, 2022; Sessler Bernstein & Fredette, 2024). Analysts have documented the lack of diversity in the sector (BoardSource, 2017). Despite this deficit, empirical work has shown the benefits associated with diverse leadership (Brimhall, 2019; Lee, 2022; Zhang & Fulton, 2019). For instance, Gooden et al. (2018) examined how youth were served by African American–led organizations. The authors found that youth had improved academic performance and self-esteem. An interesting part of this study is the operationalization of what constitutes an African American nonprofit. The authors study three organizations that are led by an African American executive director, but do not specify whether or not the leadership power of the organizations, understood to include full-time employees, also identifies as African American. Heckler and Mackey’s (2022) study used autoethnographic data of a Black-led nonprofit but similarly did not clarify what was meant by Black-led. In this study, and following Desmond’s (2014) critique that researchers pay too little attention to objects of study, I define a BLO as being both led by an executive director and a majority of full-time employees identifying as African American because it helps clarify that this group exercises day-to-day leadership power.

Perhaps more than any other area, scholars have also focused a great deal of attention on race and funding (Dunning, 2023; Garrow, 2012). Heckler’s (2019) promising theoretical contribution discusses how White men are the beneficiaries of the legal and economic realities of the nonprofit sector. The implications of this work offer an important explanation for how and why organizations led by people of color may encounter difficulty when trying to navigate the funding terrain within the sector. Following Heckler, Danley and Blessett (2022) examined organizations in New Jersey and documented the power wielded by Whites in high-capacity nonprofits which was a major contributing factor inhibiting grassroots nonprofits from securing funding. The authors concluded, in part, that segregation and concentration of White power in high-capacity nonprofits led to economic segregation that disadvantaged grassroots organizations. Kim and Li’s (2023) work also built on Heckler’s premise and examined whether or not minority-serving or minority-led organizations encounter more financial challenges in the sector. The authors found that these organizations do face more significant financial challenges largely because they face structural barriers and make clear that the nonprofit sector is not a race-neutral space.

Beyond leadership and funding, there are other areas important for an organization’s operation that have generated attention from scholars including data, collaboration, and volunteering. Here, I want to specify that I am referring to data in terms of the kind of information organizations are expected to collect to help external actors understand their work and whom they serve. Schneider (2003) found that sector expectations about data contribute to gaps between different organizations, particularly those that are based in minority communities. Stoecker (2007) found that while nonprofits did collect data, they actually did not use much of it. Building on the findings of these contributions, this study raises additional questions about how data expectations in the sector affect the day-to-day work of organizations led by people of color and what it may also mean for their clients.

There has also been interest in questions of collaboration and race (Leach & Crichlow, 2020; Siddiqui et al., 2023). Snavely and Tracy (2002) found rural communities to be better sites for the cultivation of trust between organizations. However, they also found that poor race relationships were contributing factors to whether successful collaborations were able to be formed between organization. Scholars have also been interested in the negative implications of collaborating including what Leach and Crichlow (2020) call recolonizing—the act of using collaboration to control or exploit people within communities. In addition, there has also been evidence where collaboration of different visions of improving community can lead to different views on collaboration (Nickels & Clark, 2019).

A final area at the intersection of race and nonprofits is volunteering (Mesch et al., 2006; Sundeen et al., 2008). Disparities in volunteering have been documented by scholars (Musick et al., 2000). These disparities are often the result of a range of factors. According to the work by Rothwell (2012), racial segregation leading to trust deficit has a negative impact on volunteering. Jo et al. (2023) found community racial composition affected minorities’ volunteering decisions. However, there is evidence that Black people are inclined toward volunteering (Boyle & Sawyer, 2010).

The literature at the intersection of race and nonprofits, including the critical contributions, has contributed to an important conversation that raises questions about the race-neutral perception of the nonprofit sector. It has done across key areas that are central to the successful operation of any organization within the nonprofit sector: leadership, funding, data, collaboration, and volunteering. In this study, I use these as analytic categories within which to understand how BLOs perceive racialization. Here, I want to briefly note that my understanding of racialization follows Feagin’s (2016) White racial frame which explains how White people have a racialized worldview that negatively influences how they perceive race. I contend such a frame exists within the nonprofit sector and contributes to racialized perceptions.

Racialized Organizations and the Nonprofit Sector

Victor Ray’s (2019) theory of racialized organizations proposes a theoretical framework within which to understand how organizations are racialized. He defines racialized organizations as “. . .meso-level social structures that limit the personal agency and collective efficacy of subordinated racial groups while magnifying the agency of the dominant racial group” (p. 36). A central part of his theory offers four tenets that explain how racialized organizations enhance or limit agency; legitimate the unequal distribution of resources; establish Whiteness as a credential; and embrace racialized decoupling. In the foregoing, I briefly explain and extend each tenet to the nonprofit sector.

The first tenet posits that agency is shaped by virtue of an individual’s position within a racialized organization. This usually means that non-Whites often find themselves in a lower or marginalized position that results in diminished agency, whereas Whites occupy a higher, privileged position that enhances their agency. In particular, within racialized organizations, Ray contends that agency is shaped by how non-Whites’ time is both controlled and stolen. Non-Whites’ location within a racialized organization ensures they are limited in their capacity to affect power centers of the organizations including governing procedures. The theft of time from non-Whites, as Ray argues, occurs because their position within a racialized organization equates to lower wages, employment discrimination, and financial discrimination—all of which force non-Whites to spend more time meeting basic responsibilities. The concept of time is similarly important and may have a differential impact in the nonprofit sector given that organizations provide services (e.g., Frumkin & Andre-Clark, 2000), are required to report data (e.g., Thomson, 2010), adhere to regulatory requirements (e.g., Kerlin & Reid, 2010), rely on volunteering (e.g., Garner & Garner, 2011) and, of course, pursue funding (e.g., Smith & Phillips, 2016). Ray also suggests that racialized organizations shape agency by limiting how people of color express themselves emotionally. Within the nonprofit sector, positive emotions have been linked to increased donations and volunteers (e.g., Paxton et al., 2020).

In the second tenet, Ray argues that racialized organizations legitimate the unequal distribution of resources by establishing an organizational environment rooted in Whiteness. According to Ray, this environment sanctions White organizations as an ideal type while non-White organizations are seen as problematic deviations (Heckler, 2019). In similar ways, the nonprofit sector features an overrepresentation of Whites that dominate the landscape and situates their interests as the ideal type (Danley & Blessett, 2022). For Ray, the implications of such an environment result in disproportionate allocation of resources to non-White organizations, lack of diversity in leadership, and the legitimation of a White-dominated structure that becomes reflexively accepted as normative. These implications may also matter for the distribution of funding in the nonprofit sector which features funding disparities (Roth et al., 2015), diversity deficits, and stereotypes about non-White organizations’ capacity (Adetimirin, 2008).

Ray’s third tenet argues that Whiteness is a credential that magnifies the agency of Whites while diminishing the agency of non-Whites. Within organizations, as Ray contends, perceptions of race-neutrality become reified because credentials are understood as objective pursuits that signal achievement or capacity. In addition to citing scholarship challenging these assumptions, Ray points out that socially constructed views about race become a pseudo-credential that trumps a traditional race-neutral credential. In other words, within racialized organizations, Blackness becomes a negative credential used to diminish the agency of Black people. Similarly, credentials are used to establish the nonprofit sector as a race neutral-space which has contributed to a lack of leaders of color (e.g., Medina & Partner, 2017); though few substantive explanations have emerged to explain this deficit. Moreover, Whiteness has also been shown to be a credential in establishing volunteer pools that have been overwhelmingly White (Guttentag, 2009). In addition, as resources have become increasingly competitive, the nonprofit sector has encouraged partnerships and collaborations as an optimal way to meet the needs of clients (e.g., Gazley & Guo, 2020)—often a requirement for organizations led by people of color who receive less resources.

The final tenet argues that racialized organizations establish equity commitments that are often separate from everyday practices and policies which reinforce inequality. Superficial championing of equity commitments is central for the maintenance of race-neutrality within these organizations. Historically, racialized organizations have been incentivized to embrace equity commitments to comply with laws. Yet, as Ray contends, while these policies aimed at ensuring equal treatment might exist, non-Whites’ reporting of discriminatory actions often leaves them further marginalized. Ray argues that an important implication of the separation between an equity commitment and practice is the diminished agency of non-Whites whose legitimate discriminatory concerns are ignored which decreases the likelihood that they will raise issues. The nonprofit sector has been an important site for a similar separation as foundations have been shown to be a part of an elaborate nonprofit industrial complex which suggests well-funded foundations express commitments to supporting social justice organizations only to undermine their work (Rodriguez, 2017).

Ray’s theory of racialized organizations and tenets are important for challenging a belief that organizations are race-neutral structures. However, Ray’s focus is primarily on what happens within organizations. Crucially, I extend his theory to examine how BLOs perceive racialization in the nonprofit sector. In particular, his tenets are used as an analytical lens to evaluate the perceptions and experiences of BLOs.

Method

Following Coule et al.’s (2022) call for methodological pluralism in nonprofit studies, this is a qualitative study which reflects a belief that to fully understand how individuals perceive reality, it requires getting close to and hearing directly from participants (Creswell & Creswell, 2017). To accomplish this aim, I use qualitative interviews which afforded an opportunity to make visible the racialized perceptions of BLOs (Rubin & Rubin, 2011). In doing so, and following the critical work of Small and Calarco (2022) that sets a standard for how to evaluate qualitative work, I seek to represent the experiences of BLOs as they understand them—by achieving cognitive empathy in a manner consistent with Berger and Luckmann’s (1967) canonical premise that reality is socially constructed.

I conducted interviews between 2018 and 2019 with executive directors of 15 BLOs in Madison, Wisconsin. I chose to study Madison for two key reasons. First, a 2016 report, Race to Equity, documented significant racial disparities facing Black people in a number of key areas suggesting Madison as a context where an oppressive system undermines both people of color and organizations led by them (Feagin et al., 2001). Second, Madison was an important case because it deviates from canonical empirical sites, such as Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York, that have long dominated social science inquiry without recognizing the promise of studying other places that might prompt us to question long-standing assumptions about the nature and impact of social problems (Krause, 2021).

I defined an organization as Black-led if its executive director and a majority of full-time employees identified as African American thereby cementing day-to-day control in the hands of Black people. The decision to interview BLO executive directors is because they occupy a central role in virtually every aspect of the organization and are heavily tied to success or failure (Mintzberg, 1979). In addition, as shown in the findings, I often use BLO and Black-leader interchangeably to reflect the unique organizational dynamic. The organizations in this study are broadly categorized as anti-poverty given that they are providing services to people of color facing economic hardships (Peck, 2008).

To identify BLOs, I surveyed the landscape of nonprofits in the city using the Madison Community Foundation website which listed roughly 4,000 registered organizations with 501(c)(3) status. The number of BLOs was substantially smaller and I was able to identify 20 active organizations that met the inclusion criteria, which was not surprising given that Madison is nearly 71% White based on 2020 Census data. In addition, I used a contact at Community Shares, a local philanthropic foundation, to confirm the number of BLOs and identify potential participants who might have been more recently recognized under the 501(c)(3) designation.

From there, I began contacting organizations using publicly available email addresses and phone numbers gathered from their websites. I first sent a standard message via email and waited 3 days for a reply. Based on the initial email, 5 BLOs responded and agreed to participate with 2 declining to participate and the remaining 13 did not reply. Next, I reached out to the remaining 13 via phone leaving a standard voicemail message and followed up via email. Therefore, 10 of the 13 agreed to participate in the study which brought the total number of organizations included in the study to 15, which represents a 75% response rate of anti-poverty BLOs that I identified and sought to interview. The BLOs in this study included 15 organizations with 501(c)(3) status. Of the 15 organizations, 3 were led by Black women with the remaining 12 led by Black men. BLOs included in this study had a median of three full-time employees with five BLOs having just one employee.

When conducting interviews, I used an interview protocol that asked questions across five categories including entry into the nonprofit sector; organizational impact; engagement with the philanthropic community; organizational capacity; and collaborative engagement within the sector. Following the work by Rubin and Rubin (2011), these categories contained accessible questions corresponding to the key challenges facing nonprofit organizations because I wanted respondents to focus on their own experience rather than be stymied by jargon-infused questions. Each interview was conducted with an executive director in-person, typically at the organization’s headquarters or at a mutually agreed on space (e.g., coffee shop) and lasted an average of 45 min. All interviews were recorded and transcribed within 3 days of completion.

Immediately following each interview, I prepared a memo that included a summary of responses and my own initial reflections of responses. Beyond this approach and following the prescription of Auerbach and Silverstein (2003), I employed a coding process that aimed to move from transcript to the research issue based on the question: how do BLOs perceive racialization in the nonprofit sector? The analytic process included inserting interview data into each category on a spreadsheet and initially searching for repeating ideas and eventual themes that are reflected in the findings section.

A final point concerns the Institutional Review Board (IRB) process which was granted an exemption for this study by the UW-Madison’s Minimal Risk IRB. Despite the implication of minimal risk, this was a difficult study to undertake. Chiefly, since BLOs were already marginalized in the sector, they were hesitant to participate and speak candidly for fear of being further marginalized. As such, pseudonyms are used to limit the prospect of respondents being identified. The voices of BLOs in this study are essential because they reflect a unique lived experience that has been a basic tenet of critical race discourse (Ray, 2023).

As with any study, there are limitations associated with this work. One limitation is while the response rate was significant, there were other BLOs who were unwilling to participate, and their perspectives would have broadened our understanding of how racialization is perceived by BLOs. Yet, crucially, a fundamental aim of qualitative work is not statistical generalizability (Erlandson, 1993). Instead, as Small (2009) pointed out, the success of qualitative methods must be judged by how effectively they represent the perspectives of those under empirical observation. In this way, respondents’ perceptions in this study represent an idiographic understanding of racialization in the sector (Guba, 1978). A second limitation was the timing of this study which was conducted before George Floyd and related racial unrest which might have affected perceptions of racialization held by BLOs. A final limitation concerns the decision to use qualitative data. I do not mean to suggest using qualitative data is somehow insufficient. Indeed, questions drive methodological decisions and my research question very much necessitated qualitative data. However, these data are limited because they provide an in-depth view of a small group of BLOs that raises questions about generalizability. However, as noted, the goal of this study is not generalizability and is, instead, to acquire a deep understanding of how BLOs perceived racialization which was captured through rich interview data (Becker, 1996). The validity of these data is the result of a conscious effort to consider alternative explanations about perceptions of racialization (Maxwell, 2008), particularly because there is a belief among some scholars that all organizations experience the same challenges in the same way regardless of who leads them (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983). Ultimately, a central contribution of these data is how they challenge the aforementioned belief by illustrating the unique perspectives of BLOs.

Findings

The findings below used data from interviews that represent general BLOs’ perceptions of racialization in the sector. As noted earlier, I used the literature on race and nonprofits to create analytic categories within which to begin thinking about BLO’s perceptions of racialization. Within these categories, I use Ray’s framework to show how perceptions of racialization resulted in BLOs being seen as community leaders to diminish agency; using funding to control and legitimate unequal distribution of resources; demanding neoliberal data to limit BLOs agency; collaboration as exploitation to limit BLOs agency; and Whiteness as a credential for volunteering.

BLOs Seen as Community Leaders to Diminish Agency

BLOs reported experiencing challenges to their leadership from White leaders within the nonprofit sector that raised questions about their legitimacy. One way this occurred, as Mark recalled, was through a tendency to derisively refer to Black leaders as community organizers:

I have been seen as really polarizing in the community because of my connection to Black people. They [funders and white organizations] don’t like the style that I communicate with and that makes me come across as polarizing. They also paint you into a box as a community organizer based on this connection to Black people. I correct them because I don’t want to be deemed solely as a community organizer or Black leader. I am a nonprofit executive. Sometimes there are people who try to define our leadership to one particular dimension and that is problematic. I don’t have a problem being referred to as a Black leader. I am proud to lead a Black organization. The problem is that we are only seen as being capable of speaking on issues that specifically impact Black people. But, at the same time, we have expertise in a lot of areas but that is often ignored in the sector.

Historically, as Mark alluded to above, being known as a community organizer has positive implications for Black leaders (Morris, 1984). However, in this instance, White leaders’ depiction of Black leaders as community organizers results in diminished agency because this view avoids seeing Black leaders as actual nonprofit executives; a designation that Mark and other leaders understood as central to their ability to credibly navigate the sector. In addition, part of this successful navigation is tied to the ability of leaders to develop and leverage social capital (King, 2004). Thus, delegitimating BLOs by reducing them to community organizers, rather than nonprofit executives, limits their agency and further marginalizes them within the sector in a manner that impedes their ability to carry out their social equity agenda on behalf of clients.

The notion of being seen as a community organizer was also accompanied by certain expectations about the purpose of BLOs. In particular, as John recalled, there is an expectation that BLOs demonstrate leadership in ways that conform to White’s expectations about what a community organizer does:

I gave a presentation to a potential funder on the characteristics of leadership. And one gentleman [representing a white-led organization] got up and asked: “why are these Black women having all these babies in Allied Drive [prominent local Black community] and their fathers are nowhere to be found and why don’t they want to get married.” I told him this is a stereotype and was not true and I know a lot of Black men and women who are together in this same area. I offered to take him to the community and get educated. He declined.

Here John’s experience is an example of how BLOs’ agency is diminished by the belief that these organizations should spend time addressing social issues, such as marriage, because they are important to White leaders as a vestige of disrupted beliefs that peddled a belief that Black families were somehow irreparably broken despite evidence to the contrary.

Despite efforts by Whites to diminish their agency through a community organizer caricature, BLOs demonstrated agency in a commitment to using their organizations to address the broader issues facing their clients—even if those issues extended beyond their organizational mission as Tyrone pointed out:

We have one boy in a poor [Black] family who has issues and is living in a house with 15 relatives. His older sister is a high school dropout. He has a brother who is a father of 2. They are facing homelessness and eviction. So, we are helping all 15 of them. We are helping his sister get a GED. We are helping the brother get prenatal care. They weren’t talking to anybody and tried to do it on their own; they were shocked by the help we were giving them. They didn’t have to make 50 phone calls [to different organizations and government services] to get the help they needed.

In this instance, it would have been easy for this BLO to only offer support consistent with its mission because doing anything else carried the risk of not being seen as a credible nonprofit and potentially being accused of mission drift (Jones, 2007). Yet, as this quote demonstrated, BLOs frequently recognized the varied challenges facing clients and the complicated social services system that makes it difficult to get consistent support. Thus, BLOs in this study routinely exercised agency by moving beyond their stated mission to help clients which reflected their unique understanding of challenges facing clients.

Using Funding to Control and Unequally Distributed Resource

Funding was the most significant challenge facing BLOs in Madison. This challenge was not associated with adhering to reporting requirements or even to the well-documented racial disparities in how nonprofit is funded (e.g., Danley & Blessett, 2022). Instead, the challenges reported by BLOs shed light on unequal distribution of resources and how the agency of White funders was magnified by exercising what I call racialized control—funders’ use of potential or actual funding to cultivate relationships with BLOs; claiming credit for supporting marginalized organizations while also inhibiting their capacity to challenge structural racism in the city. This type of control was described by Brenda when trying to seek funding from a White-led organization to address employment disparities facing Black people in the city:

I met with a [white-led] foundation and submitted a letter for a potential funding opportunity and got selected. But, when I went to meet with them in-person I felt like somebody was going to treat me like a picaninny [derogatory term for Black children]. The way the conversation was going, he was talking about all the Black people he was hanging with. I thought about it as him saying let me tell you about all these Black people I control. When I was sitting there, I thought I was just one more Black person in a basketball game that he gets to manipulate with funding.

Brenda’s experience illustrated how a White funder used their power to exercise agency over a BLO through a quasi-paternalistic relationship that resulted in being able to control the organization. Moreover, as White funders exercised control, BLOs reported experiencing limited agency that prevented them from speaking out on controversial issues, such as police brutality, hiring discrimination, and voting rights among others, that uniquely affected clients being served by these organizations as Jonathan recalled:

When a report came out that highlighted the racial disparities present in the Black community, I expressed my opinion to several different people and talked about how bad the condition was for Black people in Madison. After speaking out, a major [funding] organization made clear that it was not my responsibility to discuss these issues. They wanted to censor me. The same organization called a meeting with a significant number of other organizations in the community, not to address the substance of the report, but to discuss how to respond to the resulting criticism. The real issue was that me speaking out was taken as calling white people racist. And I learned from my white friends that there was nothing worse in life than being called racist. One white friend told me that next to the death of her child, being pegged a racist is the worst thing in life. And so, the damning report, and me speaking out, offended and threatened my organization.

Here Jonathan’s audacious effort to speak out against racial disparities is an example of racialized decoupling because the White funder initially expressed a commitment to social justice work of this organization, but did not put forth effort to really tackle the inequality expressed in the report. Moreover, Jonathan’s public statements were seen as critiquing the funder as being complicit in the persistence of structural racism facing people of color in the city.

Another way that BLOs reported being controlled by funding was the usage of what I called racialized strings—threatening to take away funds from BLOs when they engage in activities or publicly address issues of racial injustice that a funder disagrees with (Allen, 2017). Steve recounts a meeting requested by a funder who was frustrated by his public support of Black Lives Matter:

I had issues with a [white] funder that began treating me like an enemy. The leader of that organization was very powerful and controlled a lot of businesses. It’s like being on a plantation. She told me that when you step out of line people will use a whisper campaign and take their money away from you. She said, “that’s what we do here.” She was basically letting me know what she would do if I stepped off the plantation. And it happened, one of the funders came to me and pushed a piece of paper across the table indicating how much they were funding my organization. And then the funder said I was the 2^nd largest recipient of their funds and that I was not doing what they asked me to do and basically told me if I kept it up my funding would be at risk.

This quote illustrated the risk to funding that BLOs routinely faced in the sector. However, it is also an example of how the agency of BLOs is limited when they attempt to engage in activities inconsistent with a funder’s priorities.

Despite efforts by funders to use funding as a mechanism of control, BLOs often responded in ways that sought to reassert their agency by pursuing alternative strategies to be more competitive for funding. One such strategy I call racialized finesse—a sensationalized account of already existing hardships experienced by people of color aimed at securing resources—distinct from the work by Bhati and Eikenberry (2016) in its application to racial minorities. Cheryl used this strategy after years of being denied funding:

I was frustrated with being denied funds so I requested successful applications to review from a number of funders to see what people [white-led organizations] were doing to get funding. After reading, I immediately thought funders needed to change the process because it encourages a finesse. I thought back to when I was in school writing for a scholarship and sitting down with the advisor and she wanted me to finesse my story. I didn’t need to add anything; my reality was already hard to overcome, but she wanted me to finesse the story even more. That is what I saw in those proposals; in too many instances, funders encouraged finessed stories, which increased the likelihood of getting funding.

This quote highlighted the initiative Cheryl took to better understand why he was unsuccessful in securing funding. However, crucially, this effort also revealed a part of the funding process that legitimated the unequal distribution of resources in favor of White-led organizations who were willing to offer a sensationalized view of hardships faced by clients.

Neoliberal Demand for Data to Limit BLOs’ Agency

BLOs understood data as an important way to determine the legitimacy of organizations within the sector (Beer, 2015). However, they reported facing the challenge of conforming to neoliberal data reporting requirements that forced them to reduce their clients to quantitative data points consistent with the standard for credibly measuring outcomes. BLOs expressed concern that the reduction to data points did not adequately capture the complex circumstances of their clients, with one leader, Sarah, lamenting: “I’m like dang, they don’t want no stories?” Sarah’s exasperation with such a narrowly accepted form of data represented a general tension between BLOs and the sector:

We want to capture what they [clients] are experiencing and the impact of the work. We have created a qualitative theory of community transformation based on data from community meetings, interviews, and observations and put some strength behind what we do. We are capturing data that allows us to tell the story we want to talk about; what Black people want, what they are facing; what their outcomes are—funders might not want this, but we want it.

This was an example of BLOs’ desire to exercise agency by recognizing the need for and power of telling the stories of their clients. In addition, for BLOs, it is these stories that provided a holistic view of their clients’ experiences in a manner that helps these organizations best meet the needs of those whom they serve.

Even as BLOs endeavored to exercise their own agency in terms of data preferences, they worried about what such a demand would mean for their clients. For instance, BLOs expressed deep concern that such demands could lead to what I called data trauma—an extension of racial trauma (Comas-Díaz et al., 2019) in that it also included the intense demand for data that required clients to constantly present their hardships including addiction, domestic abuse, unemployment, and others in an effort to gain access to support. This concern was captured by Kenny:

Every number our clients call they have to tell them [government services and white-led nonprofits] complex stories about all the issues they are facing. You have to fill-out paperwork and all these other things. Meanwhile, the same issues persist, and clients don’t have assistance they need. It causes our clients to be suspicious and they continue looking to organizations like mine who do not require this information.

It was apparent to BLOs that the neoliberal demand for data was problematic for the impact it had on their clients. However, their skepticism of data trauma also highlighted how important their organizations were to clients who could not find necessary support elsewhere. Exercising agency by raising the specter of data trauma further illustrated the challenges faced by BLOs when trying to measure their work based on expectations within the sector as Benjamin asserted:

Our work is not measurable. Most funders are looking for measurable results. We have accomplished some really important things, but we have been unsuccessful in quantifying some of the work that we do. How do you measure work with a student who is coming from a family with so many needs that we support? I like to tell my story about how my organization is supporting people and am always told this is a nice idea, but it is rejected because of the measurability thing.

Ultimately, the quantification of and neoliberal demand for data along with the requirement to produce “measurable” results placed BLOs in a proverbial box. On one hand, they understood the data expectations, but they also recognized how this demand could potentially harm their clients. And so, BLOs faced a data requirement that legitimated the unequal distribution of resources because they were often forced to place the well-being of their clients above forcing them to provide intrusive and traumatic information that would meet funder demands.

Collaboration as Exploitation to Diminish BLOs Agency

BLOs in this study reported routinely supporting clients with a complex set of circumstances and understood how forming collaborations could be helpful in addressing these needs. However, in predominantly White Madison, BLOs perceived collaborating with White-led organizations as a largely exploitative experience. One way this occurred was by BLOs being relegated to a secondary role and having White-led organizations claim credit for their work as Quinton recalled:

That is also part of why collaboration is so tough because we don’t want someone to come in and take over our programs. Collaborating should be a give and take process or a compromise situation. I have been a part of situations where a different, more well-known white organization wants to come in and take over or control the work we are doing. What I have been doing and working on, they want to take it as if it is their own without doing any work. They offered to promote it and get more publicity but required their name to be put on it and my organization removed. I rejected their offer and wondered why it couldn’t just be about supporting clients whom I was already effectively working with.

While this leader expressed an understanding of collaboration, his perception that a White-led organization wanted to take over and claim credit for a program is another example of how the agency of BLOs is diminished in Madison. However, it also illustrated racialized decoupling in that White-led organizations endeavored to collaborate to solve a problem but ultimately tried to co-opt efforts already underway by BLOs.

More than the potential to lose control of their programs, BLO’s also perceived collaboration as an opportunity for White-led organizations to gain access to their predominantly Black clients—a population that expressed skepticism of the motives of White-led organizations. This reality was captured by one leader, Justin:

What I have learned is that Black clients are the resources. So, you have white-led organizations who have the money but can’t connect with the Black clients. Our worth is that we can connect with Black people on the ground and build capacity with them while white-led organizations cannot.

The difficulty encountered by White-led organizations to connect with Black clients led these organizations to pursue what I call racialized access— the intentional and temporary engagement with BLOs through collaboration to gain access to targeted communities who would otherwise be suspicious of White-led organizations and the philanthropic community as one leader, Maurice, recalled:

We [BLOs] have tried to do a lot of work with white-led nonprofits, but it has not always been an equitable collaboration. We have bad blood with white-led organizations that prevent successful collaboration. They assume our connection to Black people can be leveraged so that they can take credit for reaching our population by putting on superficial programs. There are several white-led organizations that did work in the predominantly Black part of the city. They had the money but couldn’t reach the same audience that we could. They had this program idea and mentioned our name to get access and never gave us credit for the work that we actually did.

This was another instance in which BLOs perceived collaboration as an opportunity to exploit access to Black clients. However, crucially, while the exploitative efforts were successful, this example also showed that there may be limits to using Whiteness as a credential given that White organizations encountered difficulties accessing Black clients.

Given that BLOs in the study often perceived White-led organizations to exploit them for access to clients, they often avoided collaborating with White-led organizations as Benjamin pointed out:

I find that white-led organizations use you as a platform to move their agenda along. For example, we have a lot of Black clients, but to make the program work white-led organizations have the resources, but they shift the bulk of the responsibility [to be] placed on our shoulders. You will find people in this city saying that I am hard to work with because I don’t play that [expletive]. When it comes to working with families, they are precious to me. And for me, if I feel like you are out for show I won’t partner with you.

This is an example of BLOs exercising agency by protecting their clients from being misused by White-led organizations. However, the decision by BLOs to reject collaboration with White-led organizations had the unintended impact of creating a legitimacy hierarchy among BLOs based on their willingness to collaborate by virtue of White funders’ efforts to sew divisions among these organizations. Richard recalled this effort when meeting with a White funder:

Sometimes donors try to get you to say negative things about other Black-led organizations. They also speak negatively about other Black-led organizations. I remember a grant competition where the white funder knew there were a few Black-led organizations who were pursuing the same grant and they tried to diminish their work while supporting mine. It creates tensions as opposed to opportunities for collaboration.

Efforts to pit BLOs against one another was particularly problematic given that these organizations represent such a significant minority within the Madison nonprofit landscape. Leaders described these efforts as White funders placing organizations into two distinct categories: Old Black Madison (OBM) and New Black Madison (NBM). The former, OBM, included BLOs with leaders who are born and raised in the city and were identified by White-led organizations as more willing to collaborate while the latter, NBM, included those BLOs with leaders who are transplants to Madison and seen as more hostile to collaborating with White-led organizations. This categorization legitimated the unequal distribution of resources because it permitted White-led organizations, who are the powerbrokers in the city, to make arbitrary decisions about which BLOs were deemed worthy of collaboration and subsequent support.

Where collaboration is concerned, BLOs perceived that their programs would be co-opted and exploited for access to their already vulnerable clients. When they dared to exercise agency by refusing to collaborate with White-led organizations, they faced the prospect of being typecast as unwilling to collaborate which further isolated them within the sector.

Whiteness as a Credential for Volunteering

BLOs in Madison reported having potential access to a robust volunteer base. However, the city’s volunteer base was not race-neutral as 71% of the population identified as White according to 2020 census data. In addition, given income and life expectancy disparities between Whites and Blacks, those people with “biographical availability” (McAdam, 1986)—people who have extra time because they are young and receive parental income support or are retired with a pension, are the most likely source of volunteers. This reality affirmed the power of Whiteness as a credential because it exposes the belief in the sector that White people, including those without any documented relevant skills, are appropriate volunteers for BLOs.

Despite having access to a robust volunteer base, BLOs routinely encountered White volunteers who lacked cultural competency whose absence can negatively affect clients. This lack of cultural competency and its negative implications was explained by Steve:

There was a young lady, a white woman, who was pursuing a graduate degree and wanted to volunteer. I thought she would be good based on her profile. And she asked if I could give her a success story; I told her the story of when I went to pick up a Black client and took him to the doctor to get three teeth pulled and he wanted to take medicine at home because he couldn’t afford to fill the two-dollar prescription, which I paid. She replied in a sarcastic tone: “come on, he couldn’t afford two bucks?” Afterwards, I walked her back to her car and she gets into a brand-new Maserati. Great person, but she would never step in our place because she could not appreciate the circumstances of the man and our clients. She clearly lived a privileged life and did not understand the struggles of our Black clients.

This quote provided a stark example of how Whiteness can be used as a credential to engage with BLOs but also how such engagement when divorced from cultural competency can negatively affect the work of these organizations.

BLOs often responded to the potential dangers of having White volunteers who lack cultural competency and could potentially harm their clients by strategically seeking to identify volunteers who can adequately support their work. BLOs reported relying on individuals who were formerly clients that could serve as long-term volunteers and even potentially work for the organization which Mark described:

As a service organization, in the course of providing services to [Black] clients, they end up becoming more than a volunteer. We have worked with Black people who have come through our doors and not have the capacity to change their own circumstances but are now leading change. They become a permanent fixture in our organization and use their experiences to develop ideas and programs that support Black people who deal with issues that they have been able to overcome.

In this way, BLOs exercised agency in resisting the pressure to merely use an overwhelmingly White volunteer base that could not necessarily help them carry out their organizational mission. Instead, BLOs benefited from providing meaningful support that equipped clients with a deep understanding of and appreciation for their mission which expanded the volunteer base to include those capable of helping others overcome structural barriers.

Discussion

This article contributes to the robust set of contributions on questions of racialization in the nonprofit sector (e.g., Kim & Li, 2023). This study is very much consistent with and using Ray’s theoretical framework as a lens through which to extend these previous contributions. For instance, scholars have documented the challenges associated with achieving racial leadership in the nonprofit sector (e.g., Suarez, 2010). My findings find a similar challenge but also show that black leaders are perceived to be more akin to community organizers than nonprofit executives. Scholars have perhaps spend more time on funding than any such issue including documenting funding strategies, how funding decisions are made, the existence of funding disparities, and alternative funding models (Alexiou et al., 2020; Crittenden, 2000; Hughes & Luksetich, 2004; Weinryb, 2020). My findings show funding disparities facing BLOs, but they also illustrate that such disparities may be tied to a paternalistic view of BLOs that calls into question their legitimacy and capacity to properly manage allocated funds (Soss et al., 2011). Data have also been a topic of interest with some scholars conceptualizing a data environment, evaluation expectations of funders, and information challenges facing nonprofits (Bloodgood et al., 2023; Stoecker, 2007). BLOs faced similar challenges with collecting and managing data, but they also are operating in a sector with neoliberal data expectations that may induce trauma in their clients. Collaboration has been a basic expectation of nonprofit work (Brecher & Wise, 2008). Scholars have been interested in understanding the costs and benefits of different collaborations including between nonprofits and government (Peng et al., 2020). BLOs in this study similarly understood the importance of collaboration, but they also reported experiencing challenges with being exploited for access to their clients. And, of course, scholars have shown the value of volunteering for the successful operation of nonprofits. In addition, BLOs in this study had access to a robust volunteer base, but this base was structurally racialized and reflected the biographical availability of Whites who often did not possess the cultural competence and empathy necessary to work with vulnerable Black clients.

Conclusion and Implications

In this article, I have shown how BLOs perceive racialization in the nonprofit sector across key areas and how their efforts to do work on behalf of clients are undermined. Crucially, the challenges facing BLOs should not be taken as disparate, isolated issues that coincidentally occur. Instead, the very existence of these varied challenges portends a unique opportunity for a compelling research agenda that begins with a larger theory of racialization in the nonprofit sector. Put more simply, we need a theoretical framework to understand how the nonprofit sector, itself, is racialized. Such a theory should draw on a multidisciplinary perspective, including the sociology of race, in a manner that explains how, why, and in what ways is the nonprofit sector, itself, racialized. Such a theory must also take care to specify the actors and mechanisms—perhaps connected via a complex schema—that facilitate the process of racialization. From there, scholars will be armed with a theoretical framework to study the experiences of marginalized organizations, including those led by Latinx individuals, within the sector and better understand the extent to which racialization might vary across place.

Beyond the potential for future research, this work can be used to contribute to more equitable outcomes for BLOs in the sector. For instance, these data can contribute to more equitable funding practices that include revised application materials that give additional consideration in funding decisions to the unique connection that BLOs have with clients which position them to have a greater impact. In addition, these data should prompt funders to be more respectful of the impact of data requests and express more openness to how qualitative data more effectively capture the impact of BLOs’ work. These and other practical implications are central to a menu of best practices and policies that lead to a more just sector.

Footnotes

Data Statement

The data are not publicly available due to ethical, legal, or other concerns.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Gregory D. Wilson

Author Biography

Gregory D. Wilson (PhD in Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2023) is an Assistant Professor of Management and Public Affairs at The Ohio State University. His research interests include race, nonprofit organizations, and inequality with a particular emphasis on understanding how and why the sector, itself, is racialized.

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