Are nonprofits democratic?
As electoral politics become more divisive and violent in the United States, and as we become more aware as a society of the need to address centuries of systemic injustices, there has been an increasing call for nonprofits and community-based organizations to engage in democratic activities. To mobilize their bases to participate in elections. To carry out voter education. To take a stand on issues. There has been urgency to clarify 501(c)3 law regarding partisan activity.
This is deeply important work and all organizations should be doing it. But that tried and true question also pops up for me again – what are we doing on the inside to match what we preach on the outside?
Nonprofit governance
Think about the “governance” of your organization. Boards are legally required to govern nonprofit organizations. The actual legal requirements of a board are few. Yet there is a pretty standardized way most boards work – regular meetings with Robert’s Rules of Order, officer positions, voting on decisions to be made, financial oversight, hiring, firing and evaluating the executive, and, if you’re lucky, the board is actively and helpfully involved in fundraising. Typically, boards are quite removed from the everyday work and experience of the organization.
If you work at any dominant culture organization your day-to-day work life is “governed” (in a loose sense of the word) by upper management. You may have input, there may be feedback loops, and cross-functional teams. But at the end of the day the what, when, and how of forty+ hours of your week is largely dictated for you. And if you aren’t upper management yourself it is likely you have little insight into how and why decisions are made in the organization.
Technically, a board is a representative governance structure. But we all know boards are usually handpicked from elite, privileged peers. Do they represent the staff? Do they represent the communities an organization works with? How are they deemed fit to be representative? You may have been a part of a nonprofit that included 1 or 2 “beneficiaries” of the nonprofit’s organization on the board – was this done well? Or was it tokenizing? And what about upper management – they have representative power of the staff – but is it actively earned or was it solely bestowed as a function of their position?
Making nonprofits more democratic
This all adds up to not sounding very democratic to me. Similar to DEIB initiatives – we can’t authentically call for change externally when we aren’t doing any of that work internally. We should be honest about how undemocratic our organizations are, regardless of how well-intentioned they may be. And we should be honest about how the current system doesn’t have to be this way and at times hasn’t been this way in the past – it just seems fixed now. How can we build microcosms of democracy and freedom in our community institutions – which can be building blocks to broader societal change?
And, hey, I can hear the push-back now “we would never get work done if everyone involved in the organization voted on everything! And how do we even define ‘who is involved!?’” And maybe that’s true – at an extreme. But can we be more expansive in our imagination? Please?
Judy Freiwirth, for example, calls for organizations to adopt a “community-engagement governance” framework that draws on participatory representation. The key principles of this framework include:
Community impact at its core
Governance as a function, rather than a structure; no longer located solely within the confines of the board’s structure
Governance decision making and power is shared and redistributed among key stakeholders, resulting in higher-quality and better-informed governance decision making and mutual accountability
Democracy and self-determination, rather than dependency and disempowerment
No one right model: an underlying contingency approach
Governance functions distributed creatively among stakeholders
Transparency, opens systems, and good informational flow between stakeholder groups.
There are possibilities. We can be more creative than we think.
What is one policy you can change or system you can adjust today in your organization to make it a little more democratic?
Resources
For this post, I drew on sources from the book: Eikenberry, Angela M., Roseanne M. Mirabella, and Billie Sandberg, eds. Reframing Nonprofit Organizations, Democracy, Inclusion and Social Change. Irvine, CA, Melvin & Leigh Publishers, 2019.
For more on how the nonprofit sector become professionalized and “businesslike,” due to neoliberal forces of the 20th century, see the chapter “Critical Perspectives on the History and Development of the Nonprofit Sector in the United States” by Billie Sandberg.
For governance structures of non-profits and the possibility of community-engagement governance framework, see the chapter “Nonprofit Governance from Critical and Democratic Perspectives” by Barbara A. Metelsky, Chao Guo, and Angela M. Eikenberry.