During the first week of June 2020, teams of workers and their managers came together across the country to share how they were responding to the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis and to chart out what — if anything — their own company or nonprofit could do to contribute toward the reckoning with racial injustice that was rapidly taking shape.
On June 2, one such huddle was organized by the Washington, D.C., office of the Guttmacher Institute, the abortion rights movement’s premier research organization.
Heather Boonstra, vice president of public policy, began by asking how people were “finding equilibrium” — one of the details we know because it
was later shared by staff with Prism, an outlet that covers social justice advocacy and the impacts of injustice.
She talked about the role systemic racism plays in society and the ways that Guttmacher’s work could counter it.
Staff suggestions, though, turned inward, Prism reported, “including loosening deadlines and implementing more proactive and explicit policies for leave without penalty.” Staffers suggested additional racial equity trainings, noting that a previous facilitator had said that the last round had not included sufficient time “to cover everything.” With no Black staff in the D.C. unit, it was suggested that “Guttmacher do something tangible for Black employees in other divisions.”
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The belief was widespread. In the eyes of group leaders dealing with similar moments, staff were ignoring the mission and focusing only on themselves, using a moment of public awakening to smuggle through standard grievances cloaked in the language of social justice. Often, as was the case at Guttmacher, they played into the very dynamics they were fighting against, directing their complaints at leaders of color. Guttmacher was run at the time, and still is today, by an Afro Latina woman, Dr. Herminia Palacio. “The most zealous ones at my organization when it comes to race are white,” said one Black executive director at a different organization, asking for anonymity so as not to provoke a response from that staff.
These starkly divergent views would produce dramatic schisms throughout the progressive world in the coming year.
At Guttmacher, this process would rip the organization apart. Boonstra, unlike many managers at the time, didn’t sugarcoat how she felt about the staff’s response to the killing.
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That the institute has spent the course of the Biden administration paralyzed makes it typical of not just the abortion rights community — Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and other reproductive health organizations had similarly been locked in knock-down, drag-out fights between competing factions of their organizations, most often breaking down along staff-versus-management lines.
It’s also true of the progressive advocacy space across the board, which has, more or less, effectively ceased to function. The Sierra Club, Demos, the American Civil Liberties Union, Color of Change, the Movement for Black Lives, Human Rights Campaign, Time’s Up, the Sunrise Movement, and many other organizations have seen wrenching and debilitating turmoil in the past couple years.
In fact, it’s hard to find a Washington-based progressive organization that hasn’t been in tumult, or isn’t currently in tumult....
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“So much energy has been devoted to the internal strife and internal [bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse] that it’s had a real impact on the ability for groups to deliver,” said one organization leader who departed his position. “It’s been huge, particularly over the last year and a half or so, the ability for groups to focus on their mission, whether it’s reproductive justice, or jobs, or fighting climate change.”
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“Most people thought that their worst critics were their competitors, and they’re finding out that their worst critics are on their own payroll,”
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For years, recruiting young people into the movement felt like a win-win, he said: new energy for the movement and the chance to give a person a lease on a newly liberated life, dedicated to the pursuit of justice. But that’s no longer the case. “I got to a point like three years ago where I had a crisis of faith, like, I don’t even know, most of these spaces on the left are just not — they’re not healthy. Like all these people are just not — they’re not doing well,” he said. “The dynamic, the toxic dynamic of whatever you want to call it — callout culture, cancel culture, whatever — is creating this really intense thing, and no one is able to acknowledge it, no one’s able to talk about it, no one’s able to say how bad it is.”
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Sooner or later, each interview for this story landed on the election of Trump in 2016 as a catalyst. Whatever internal tension had been pulling at the seams of organizations in the years prior, Trump’s shock victory sharpened the focus of activists and regular people alike. ...
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At the ACLU, as at many organizations, the controversy quickly evolved to include charges that senior leaders were hostile to staff from marginalized communities. Each accusation is unique; some have obvious merit, while others don’t withstand scrutiny.
What emerges by zooming out is the striking similarity of their trajectories. One foundation official who has funded many of the groups entangled in turmoil said that having a panoramic view allowed her to see those common threads.
“It’s the kind of thing that looks very context-specific, until you see a larger pattern,” she said.
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... “Maybe I can’t end racism by myself, but I can get my manager fired, or I can get so and so removed, or I can hold somebody accountable,” one former executive director said. “People found power where they could, and often that’s where you work, sometimes where you live, or where you study, but someplace close to home.”
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It’s become hard to hire leaders of unmanageable organizations. A recent article in the Chronicle of Philanthropy noted that nonprofits were having an extraordinarily hard time finding new leaders amid unprecedented levels of departures among senior officials. “We’ve been around for 26 years, and I haven’t seen anything like this,” Gayle Brandel, CEO of PNP Staffing Group, a nonprofit executive search firm,
told the trade publication, explaining the difficulty in finding executives to fill the vacancies.
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Executive directors across the space said they too have tried to organize their hiring process to filter out the most disruptive potential staff. “I’m now at a point where the first thing I wonder about a job applicant is, ‘How likely is this person to blow up my organization from the inside?’”...
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Beyond not producing incentives to function, foundations generally exacerbate the internal turmoil by reflexively siding with staff uprisings and encouraging endless concessions, said multiple executive directors who rely on foundation support. “It happens every time,” said one.
“They’re afraid of their own staffs.”
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The pushback against callout culture, which might be surprising on a surface level, is bubbling up in Black movement spaces. “In the movement for Black lives, there is a lot of the top leaders saying,
‘This is out of control. No one can be a leader in this culture. It’s not sustainable. ...
