Donor Exhaustion: Is it the Fault of the 'DEI Horde'?

Is there a backlash against diversity, equity and inclusion among Democratic donors? Or are they over-reacting? Has the "fever" broken?

“Left movements often behave in ways that are neither inclusive nor caring….We also don’t put enough thought into how to build alliances with people who aren’t already in our movements. Sure we pay lip service to reaching out, but in practice most of us (even many who claim to be staunchly anti-police) spend a lot of time policing our movements’ borders, turning on people who see themselves as on our side, making our ranks smaller, not larger….Important disagreements need to be hashed out, and many conflicts that arise in progressive spaces are over behaviors that, when unchallenged, make those spaces unwelcoming or dangerous for the people they target. But it’s not a great secret that plenty of people routinely go too far, turning minor language infractions into major crimes, while adopting a discourse that is so complex and jargon-laden that people outside university settings often find it off-putting—or straight-up absurd.”

So writes Naomi Klein in her terrific and provocative new book Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. I’ll have more to say about the book in an upcoming edition of the Connector*. But right now I just want to use that quote to set up what follows. Klein is a veteran of decades of progressive movement organizing. She is, as politely as she can, issuing a warning about illiberal, even authoritarian, behavior on the left. It’s like the one that Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party, put out last November with his essay on “Building Resilient Organizations.” And, I’m sad to report, it appears this behavior is one reason why progressive organizations that do vital, year-round grass-roots organizing work are facing a dramatic decline in current funding.

Last week, after I wrote about the “bat-signal” put out by Movement Voter Project warning of a nine-figure shortfall in donations to progressive organizations along with the dire signs of a concurrent collapse in voter outreach efforts in swing states by groups affiliated with The Movement Cooperative, I got an email from a friend, Sara Robinson, a Seattle-based donor with long experience in progressive organizations. She was moved by my post to ask for suggestions for where she could make a decent-sized donation that would do the most good, but then she added a comment that brought me up short, which I’m quoting with her permission:

"I’m also wondering how much of this fundraising problem has to do with donor exhaustion with the issues Ryan Grim brought forward in that article last year [“Elephant in the Zoom: Meltdowns Have Brought Progressive Advocacy Groups to a Standstill at a Critical Moment in World History.”]. I’ve been in quite a few conversations with people who give six+ figures yearly in which they’re really burned by all the organizations that have abandoned their stations after being captured by the DEI [Diversity, Equity and Inclusion] horde. ...

I need assurance these days that my funds aren’t going to fund endless rounds of DEI trainings for people that the younger staff have decided are problematic; and that the strong leaders we need right now — the ones with the decades of experience that are critical at moments like this — aren’t going to get chewed down to bones and spit out by their own employees....

We do not have time or money to waste on this shit right now. And donors are talking about this a LOT. Nobody wants to invest in any organization that seems liable to drop its historical mission, and fire the people with the killer skills, in favor of imploding in a social justice circle-jerk driven by a bunch of kids two years out of Brown."

Are donors talking about this a lot? And is this a big problem?

The longtime executive director of a nonprofit organization in the electoral arena told me Robinson’s comment definitely aligned with their experience. This person recently stepped down from their position, handing the reins to a strong successor, but told me that the organization’s donors, especially the big ones, needed a lot of reassuring that they weren’t leaving “because there was an illiberal left racial identitarian takeover” at the organization. Another veteran executive director told me that their experience was that “donors are weary of endless organizational dysfunction and public self-immolation,” adding that “DEI” has become a proxy for all of that. A third said it certainly seemed plausible that donors were up in arms, but also asked if they had been similarly demanding assurances in the past that their donations weren’t propping up men who harassed their staff and drove competent women and people of color away.

If you look at the comments on Michelle Goldberg’s New York Times column from last week about the donation drought on the left, particularly the ones that got the most upvotes from fellow readers, there’s no question that in addition to being frustrated by endless and shrill fundraising emails, some people who used to give to progressive organizations are fed up with DEI as they see it being put into practice. For example, someone using the handle “jrd” from New York writes, “Small wonder that The Sierra Club, which now publishes an ‘Equity Language Guide’, an extraordinary 30 pages of speech prohibitions and correct and incorrect thoughts, has lost financial support. Justice Democrats, also noted here, is likely to go begging as well. The word ‘justice’ alone, as currently understood, is sufficient to put up the backs of multitudes. There's nothing like the political program associated with DEI to gut constructive social movements.”

Another reader, going by the moniker “Juvenal,” writes, “I am an older millennial professional living in a wealthy liberal enclave, and many of us are tired of sacrificing at the altar of diversity, equity and inclusion. At work, I must justify my candidacy for promotion by documenting my contributions to DEI. Our school district has already declared standardized testing a vestige of systemic racism, and is moving to mastery-based grading to avoid grade point averages. How will my kids apply to college? My district votes 95% Democrat, but many of us feel the progressive wing is not reshaping the world for the better.”

A third reader, responding to “jrd,” writes, “I worked at one of these progressive ‘justice-driven’ organizations in one of the nation’s most liberal cities. I’ve dedicated my life to furthering liberal causes. But due to the identity-driven politics of my previous org, I am now an independent and I no longer donate to liberal causes. I wanted to help the movements but I wasn’t pure enough in dogma and ideology. Now I’m terrified of my own disillusionment and the consequences of widespread disillusionment in the next election.”

From somewhere in New England, “GRH” responds to Juvenal, writing, “the DEI industrial complex expansion throughout the public schools and the increasingly absurd steps being taken under the ‘equity’ umbrella unfortunately and ironically likely play directly into the hands of the GOP. It could very well have the unintended effect of further undermining support for the public schools.”

Now, it’s possible that these commenters are all rightwing/Russian trolls. But I doubt it. You’d have to be a pretty sophisticated disinformation purveyor to embed your critique of DEI practices inside a progressive worldview. These people seem sincere. And they’re not waving their hands at phantoms, either. The Sierra Club’s Equity Language Guide is an embarrassing use of that organization’s resources. It’s insanely crazy how deaf and blind its authors are, how lamely they try put their boots on the ground, avoid the linguistic minefield, and stand in solidarity with other people disadvantaged, put at-risk, and made needy by historic racism and discrimination. (I’ve just broken twelve of Sierra Club’s guidelines with every word in italics.)

The left may indeed have succeeded in changing the discourse in recent years, and some of those victories, like more inclusive language and practices around sexual identities, are very real and important. But as Klein writes, “changing the discourse did not prevent the world’s ten richest men from doubling their collective fortunes from $700 billion to $1.5 trillion in the first two years of the pandemic; it did not stop police forces from increasing their budgets while teachers have to pay for basic supplies out of pocket; it did not prevent fossil fuel companies from collecting more billions in subsidies and new permits; it did not prevent the Israel police forces from attacking the funeral of the revered Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh after a bullet that was almost certainly fired by an Israeli soldier took her life.”

I don’t have access to the big donors Sara Robinson is referring to, so it’s not clear how much that class is pulling back. Nor is it clear how many of them are or were progressives. And I’ll freely admit the danger of generalizing from a small sample. Several of the people I talked to as I reported out this column pushed back on Robinson’s comment from various angles. One, with years of nonprofit and philanthropic leadership experience, agreed that there’s been a loss of confidence in some longstanding organizations, but also pointed out that the rising focus on long-term power-building and movement infrastructure may be out of sync with donors who are mainly thinking short-term and panicking about 2024. Another friend, Geoffrey MacDougall, a veteran strategist with decades of experience in development who now mentors many early-stage organization founders, told me he believes the funding shortfall is mostly due to us being in “fight mode” for too long instead of “build mode.”

What he means is, “Fighting consumes energy. Building creates it. Fighting is simple, clear, urgent and a priority, unifies your side, provides an enemy, achieves tangible wins, channels anger, feels like you're doing something. But it eats energy, creates an us/them, doesn't have room for nuance or complexity, gets old quickly, doesn't reach out to include other people (only your side). Building allows for hope, builds community, creates space for debate, allows you to ask questions and challenge, reminds you what you're fighting for. A build narrative can be your life's work, whereas a fight narrative can't. But build can feel endless and directionless. Can feel too vague and broad. But most importantly, there's no urgency. Build always comes second. ‘That's great, I want to build that, but first I have to go win this fight.’ So you need both.”

Yvette Alberdingk Thijm, the executive director of WITNESS, the Brooklyn-based human rights nonprofit, from 2008-2023, told me that in her experience as a fundraiser she had not seen any evidence of donor exhaustion with the DEI cause. “In fact, we experienced quite the opposite: the right kind of donors are partners in the organization achieving its mission and vision, and their gifts were/are prompted by (what I saw as an astute) analysis of the broader landscape and their assessment of WITNESS' relevance and effectiveness to affect human rights change in what continues to be a very challenging human rights landscape. We did and always have practiced radical transparency, treating the donors as full partners. That includes highlighting organizational strengths and weaknesses and being clear about where we can grow and improve. When WITNESS after the murder of George Floyd (as a global human rights organization catalyzed by the video recording of the beating of a Black man, Rodney King, by the L.A.P.D.) undertook an internal review of the organization with the conviction that it could do better on DEI, that process was welcomed by our donors. Never questioned.” [Emphases are hers.]

Another leader of a major nonprofit think-tank concurred with Alberdingk Thijm’s defense of organizations doing the hard work of addressing internal management issues around diversity, equity and inclusion: “Making an organization or company work well actually costs money and that has gotten sort of put into this DEI bucket. No, the organization isn't going to change structural racism or whatever, but it can be a better run place and it costs money to do that. If you want the organization to be functional, as somebody who's giving money to it, you should be giving them general support and supporting them in building infrastructure that is about running a good organization where people are happy to work.”

That said, Alberdingk Thijm agreed that many donors are more short-term and transactional in their bearing, and that many American donors, small and big alike, feel overwhelmed and helpless right now. Not necessarily because of an organization addressing important diversity, equity and inclusion issues but because, having put tremendous effort on stopping Trump, they feel exhausted by that experience and worried that their strategies haven’t been working.

I’m left with two big unanswered questions. First, how much of the disconnect between donors and progressive organizations is a sign not of despair or frustration but rather the messy sign of movements in transition? Some of the organizations that are struggling today may no longer be fit for purpose, and if a few big trees fall in the forest that may also open up space for better designed and run organizations to flourish. Second, how much of the worry expressed by donors like Robinson is relevant to organizations doing the work today? The think-tank leader quoted above told me in no uncertain terms that they believed “the fever has broken” and that the worrisome internal issues that were so distracting a year or two ago have calmed down.

—Related: A new report by Oliver Hudson and Mwikali Muthiani for Millennial HR titled “Understanding the Pathology of Large INGOs” digs into many of the same issues addressed above, though with much more of a focus on international nonprofit organizations. Based on interviews with 12 CEOs, ex-CEOs, senior leaders, board members and five major funders, the report details the challenges presented by weak boards, charismatic leaders who are poor managers, complex organizational structures, structural racism and neocolonialism, employee activism and philanthropic confusion. Tl/dr: It’s a mess out there. (P.S. I hunted but could not find an explanation anywhere for the name Millennial HR, so I can’t tell you if the company chose it with any sense of irony.)

—Also related: A recent report by New Working Majority’s Kati Sipp, Alina Sipp-Alpers and Dani Paez titled “We Need Bread and Roses Too” surveyed (in English and Spanish) nearly four hundred organizers working for movement organizations about their salaries and years of experience, finding that starting salaries across all job types began stagnating about 15 years ago and at almost every level of work, people are badly underpaid. Most starting salaries are below $50,000 and many are in the $20,000-$40,000 range, like $15-16 an hour for canvassers.

—Also quasi-related: Big corporations are letting go of lots of their chief diversity officers and laying off thousands of diversity-focused workers, the Wall Street Journal reported back in July.

Odds and Ends

—If you need a refresher on deep canvassing and how/why it works, check out Adam Barbanel-Fried’s article “Getting Personal to Build Power and a Better Tomorrow” in The Forge.

—Ford Foundation technology fellow Dizzy Zaba writes about a recent retreat they attended in Maine focused on the intersection of technology and democracy, focusing on what they learned about “the impending catastrophe in how we administer elections.”

End Times

How it started/How it’s going.

*Are you reading Naomi Klein’s Doppleganger now? Let me know if the comments—if there’s interest and critical mass, I’ll figure out how to set up a book chat by Zoom to discuss it together.