Vu Le is the former Executive Director of Rainier Valley Corps, a non-profit organization in Seattle that promotes social justice by developing leaders of color, strengthens organizations led by communities of color, and fosters collaboration between diverse communities. He also writes the irreverent and indispensable blog Nonprofit AF where he explores common challenges and frustrations of the nonprofit sector and lovingly lampoons philanthropy for its shortcomings. We caught up with him on the sidelines of the Skoll World Forum to hear more about his work and how funders can be better partners to grantee organizations. See more of Vu’s thoughts in this video and the excerpts below.
Elevating leaders of color
Rainier Valley Corps is trying to address two issues. One is the lack of leaders of colors in the non-profit sector and also the fact that organizations led by communities of color really struggle with funding and getting support for their operations and their programs even though they do incredible work.
The original challenge for the Rainier Valley Corps was looking to address the fact that we don’t have enough people of color in the nonprofit sector. We have amazing leaders but often they’re not at the highest level of leadership in. I think that only 18 percent of nonprofit professionals are people of color and yet a huge majority of people we serve are people of color. That dissonance is something we have to address.
Our flagship program was to bring these leaders of color into a cohort, provide training, and then send them to work full time at organizations led by communities of color. This idea that we don’t have enough people of color who want to do this work is a myth. We have lots of people, we just need to figure out how to support them and provide them with fair living wages so they can do their work.
I was actually one of these fellows in a similar program when I started in my career. I got my Masters in Social Work and then no one would hire me—something that’s very common in the sector. When you don’t have the experience, no one would hire you. Well, how are you going to build your experience? So, I found this fellowship program that sent me to an organization that had budget of like $14,000, which I did not know at the time. I was sent there to help the organization to grow and to fund raise and to develop its programs. Through the mentorship and the trainings and the community that I was in, I was able to learn all these skills. After two years I became the Executive Director of that organization.
I think this idea of finding talented leaders who really want to make a difference and build a career in this sector was exciting and people got behind that. We had support from a lot of wonderful foundations that allowed us to launch the program.
Funding with trust
What inspired my book, Unicorns Unite, was we were just complaining about foundations, and I’m sure the foundations were complained about nonprofits too. We often just go to bars and complain about one another. We figured, why don’t we just put all those things out in the open?
One challenge we see is the lack of trust. A lot of the nonprofits feel that we’re treated by foundations the way that poor people are treated in society. Like the fact that a foundation gives restricted funding. ‘We don’t actually trust you with this money so we’re going to dictate what you can use it for.’
I have this exercise that I created called the Bakers Dilemma. Imagine we had a bunch of people trying to pitch their money together to pay for a cake but they each had their own restrictions on what their money could be used for. One person will only pay for eggs. Another will only pay for butter if someone else matches equal amount of butter. No one will pay for electricity and it’s like a sudoku of who’s paying for what. That is an exercise that we would like funders to do to illustrate to them just how ridiculous restrictive funding is.
On the nonprofit side, we go into this pitch mode were we constantly see funders as an ATM machine. ‘How are we going to get money from them?’ I think that we should recognize that we are both working on the same team and we need to treat each other like equal partners.
Uneven playing fields
I was talking to a funder recently about the challenges of getting resources to marginalized communities and communities of color. We were talking about leveling the playing fields so that it makes it easier for marginalized communities to get the resources that they need. Then I had this epiphany: that’s the wrong question to ask. We shouldn’t be leveling the playing field. The playing field will never be leveled. It’s been created by implicit biases and hundreds of years of terrible practices in philanthropy and the nonprofit sector. That field will never be level.
What we need is to create a new field, several new fields. If we really want to get resources to marginalized communities, to the LGBTQ communities, or the indigenous communities, then we need to create just a fund that can only be accessed by these communities. Philanthropy has never reached over 10 percent of funding going to marginalized communities of color. It can’t be, ‘how do we make this playing field a little bit easier for people so maybe they can play the game better’.” The game isn’t good. Maybe we shouldn’t be playing this game.
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