Calling Out, Calling In, and Calling Upon One Another

(Photo courtesy of American Leadership Forum Silicon Valley)

Being a nonprofit CEO is a weird, often lonely gig. You straddle responsibilities to a lean staff, volunteer board, donors, and the community at large. The pressure to raise money, measure success, and chart growth is relentless; time to connect with others is scarce. About one in four nonprofit CEOs vacates their post annually and 72 percent report some degree of burnout at any given time. Leaders of color face additional challenges. They are compensated less on the whole than their white counterparts, have fewer ties to funding sources, and report often feeling pressured to represent their entire demographic group.

Dave Mineta, an Asian American leader, became a first-time CEO and president of Momentum for Health in 2015. “Being in the top seat, with that 50,000-foot view of how we want our agency to be seen and what role we want to play, I’ll admit I felt alone and intimidated,” Mineta says. He knew he wanted to change the perception of Momentum for Health as a primarily white-serving organization and increase cultural competency across its team of providers, but he didn’t know where to begin. It wasn’t until he joined a group of fellow CEOs, convened through American Leadership Forum Silicon Valley (ALF), specifically focused on deepening knowledge and skills around diversity, equity, and inclusion, that he crystallized an anti-racist vision.

“I watched other leaders and really modeled off what they did,” Mineta says. Within three years of his participation in the ALF program, Momentum for Health established a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiative and DEI board committee; hired a DEI consultant; and launched a series of internal trainings on implicit bias, historical trauma, and how to have courageous conversations. Momentum for Health now uses data to analyze leadership composition by race and to inform its hiring, recruiting, and [retention] practices. “I would draw a straight line from the personal and relational work I did through ALF to the progress we have made as an organization,” he says. Now in its fourth yearlong cycle, the ALF Fellows Program has served 42 leaders to date.

Emergent From the Start

The DEI-focused subgroup Mineta joined originated in early 2017, when Shiloh Ballard, an ALF Senior Fellow and first-time executive director at the helm of the Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition, faced allegations of racism from someone in her organization’s broader community. “It caused me to do all the textbook white fragility stuff,” she says. “I asked this person to grab coffee so I could try to better understand, and I'm sitting across from someone who literally sees me as the devil. Whether I thought they were right or wrong, the fact that they were so agitated caused me to do much deeper reflection.”

Ballard began reaching out to other nonprofit leaders, asking how they thought about centering race and equity. “Where is the playbook?” she asked, but nobody seemed to know. She gathered a few peers and pitched them on the idea of a CEO learning and support group.

Through personal invitations, the initial group expanded to include 10 leaders of diverse racial backgrounds. “Initially, I felt like this was my work to do, and I didn’t want to ask any people of color to help me through this,” Ballard remembers. “But other founding members disagreed and felt like there could be greater mutual benefit by opening it up.” This proved important, especially given that over a third of nonprofit leaders of color say they lack social capital in the field, and 38 percent report having never received peer support or on-the-job mentorship.

Ballard tapped Jenny Niklaus, ALF’s chief facilitation officer, to run the meetings. Relationships among leaders quickly became the focal point. The group was established as a space where white leaders could see what leaders of color face—the stresses of code switching, impostor syndrome, and unfair and disparate expectations. Leaders of color would see white leaders struggling to unpack how their privilege affects others, learning to use their positional power, and understanding when and how to step back to create a more nurturing environment for differing perspectives.

“My context at the time was fear,” says Tamara Alvarado, then-executive director of the School of Arts and Culture at the Mexican Heritage Plaza in East San Jose and a member of ALF’s first CEO cohort, who identifies as a first-generation Chicana. “Trump had just been elected and half the [United States] was really shocked and really worried. Many of the immigrant families we served did not want to come out of their homes. Their kids’ attendance in schools dropped off a cliff overnight.”

Despite some initial skepticism about adding yet another meeting to a full calendar, Alvarado found the group’s early convenings welcoming and transparent. “It turned out to be just what I needed,” she says. “People led with their personal wish to see a better future in a very destabilized moment.”

Cohort as Curriculum

Niklaus errs on the side of being loose, often open-ended in how she structures the group. She builds on issues and challenges that surface in real time, rather than imposing set lessons. “With complex issues like DEI, moving toward outcomes too quickly cuts off a critical piece of group development,” she says. “It’s far more important for people to be in dialogue around racism, how they’ve perpetuated it, understand intersectionality, and only then decide what they’re willing to change. Now that you see it, you can’t unsee it. Staying open, allowing for some divergence, in the end, yields stronger outcomes.” ALF and Niklaus are committed to creating spaces for what they call “productive tension,” moments of potential conflict buffered by the development of group agreements, trust, and a willingness to take risks.

Monthly meetings include check-ins to assess how each participant is feeling personally and professionally as they enter the room; mindfulness and somatic practices; group discussion; and check-outs to ensure that each group member’s voice is heard and accounted for an additional time before closing. Members read and consider works by scholars, activists, and social sector experts such as Shawn Ginwright, Edgar Villanueva, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Valarie Kaur, Resmaa Manakem, and Sonya Renee Taylor. They study the Continuum on Becoming an Anti-Biased, Multicultural Institution framework created by Crossroads Ministry. Everyone also gathers for an immersive two-night retreat, which provides space away from day-to-day responsibilities and encourages further reflection and bonding.

From the outset, the group has been very intentional about its terminology. For example, members prefer “DIELB” (diversity, inclusion, equity, liberation, and belonging) to “DEI.” The logic is that diversity is the starting point, equity is impossible without a deep understanding of inclusion, and the ultimate goal is liberation and belonging. Participants also refer to one another as “accomplices” in addition to “allies,” a term they feel signifies active partnership and mutual responsibility.

“Oftentimes, when you're in spaces with diverse leaders of major institutions, there is a lot of posturing,” says Poncho Guevara, executive director of Sacred Heart Community Service and a founding member of the ALF group. “But when you have people acknowledging how white supremacy culture impacts all of us, you create a sense of trust and vulnerability around how we're all complicit and none of us has the answers. We begin to see each other as human beings and how these systems really trap us.”

In addition to deep personal investigation as leaders and laying the relational groundwork for collaboration across nonprofits, the goal is for organizations to answer: What are we doing that perpetuates white supremacy, and what can we do to dismantle racism?

Signs of Progress

Michele Lew, who identifies as an Asian American leader, stepped into the role of CEO at The Health Trust in 2018 and signed on for the second ALF cohort focused on DIELB the following year. “Our mission is about health equity, but I don't think we ever used the word ‘race’ in any boardroom discussion. It was still just very polite talk about ‘vulnerable people’,” Lew says. “I was not necessarily comfortable bringing race up, especially as a person of color in front of a predominantly white boardroom, but through ALF, I started to hear from my colleagues about how they were doing it. We were very honest. To sort of commiserate with people who had done work that hadn't gone perfectly, that made me feel better about taking more risks.”

Self-reporting among CEOs who have completed the program to date shows that all have opened up a dialogue about DIELB with their staff and boards; all have applied an equity lens to review and amend existing policies; all have implemented new staff and board practices; and all have called on a fellow CEO from their group as a thought leader or partner in taking these steps.

In 2020, when crimes against Asian Americans spiked nationally and in Santa Clara County, where Asians comprise the largest ethnic/racial group and where The Health Trust is located, Lew felt personally affected but refrained from commenting publicly. Then one day, a Latina staff member came to see her in her office. “She says, ‘Hey, why aren't we talking about this?’” Lew recalls. “Something inside me that was like, ‘Oh, it seems sort of self-serving,’ switched to realize, ‘Like, yeah, it's not about you.’ I appreciated that staff felt comfortable having that conversation. I don't think it would have happened four years ago.”

Leaders have also found ways to engage funders in conversation, first in one-on-one meetings and then in group discussions with six Silicon Valley-based foundations. These sessions are opportunities to talk about DIELB-related challenges affecting both philanthropy and direct service providers, and speak openly about the power differential between the two sectors. “Since joining the program, we’ve seen nonprofit CEOs feel comfortable saying no to funders when they make certain requests,” Niklaus says. “That’s a huge shift in how those dynamics have historically played out.” Several participants have gone on to work within philanthropic organizations after completing the ALF cohort, bringing insight from the grantee side along with them.

After the third ALF cohort began in 2021, a larger racial equity coalition including participants of all three cohorts started to form. The Race Equity Action Leadership (REAL) Coalition is a network of nonprofit leaders jointly created and facilitated by Sacred Heart Community Service and the Silicon Valley Council of Nonprofits. “When George Floyd was murdered and Black Lives Matter took to the streets, we were primed to jump,” says Kyra Kazantzis, CEO of Silicon Valley Council of Nonprofits and a member of ALF’s third CEO cohort. “We wrote a letter to the City of San Jose signed by almost 100 nonprofits. We asked for the creation of an office of racial equity and an evaluation of alternatives to policing, both of which happened. Before that, it was unheard of that a nonprofit would step out and say something about policing. That was just the beginning.”

Since 2020, the REAL Coalition has further refined its mission, vision, and strategy, and amassed several advocacy wins. In its first year, the group helped create a mobile community response, a multi-disciplinary mental health team central to its reimagining public safety agenda. They weighed in on recovery spending at city and county levels, pushed forward eviction prevention measures, enshrined Juneteenth, and amended the three-year Welcoming San Jose Plan for civic, economic, linguistic, and social integration on the basis of inclusivity. In year two, major wins included the formation of COVID-19 recovery and alternatives to incarceration task forces, the addition of equity language in the San Jose city charter via Measure I, stopping a strong mayor proposal designed to extend then-Mayor Sam Liccardo’s term by two years and increased his powers in office, and ongoing advocacy for a more just affordable housing policy. Today, the coalition is comprised of 145 organizations, many of which continue to convene weekly.

“The relationships we built and nurtured within ALF became the kernel of our ability to work so quickly, powerfully, and efficiently,” says Guevara, who co-founded the REAL Coalition. “The key is dialogue and trust. It’s being able to gently but clearly call each other in because we're in a trusting relationship. You can say, ‘Hey, I know you're busy, but I need you to do X, Y, and Z because even though it's not an issue your organization works on, it matters to us that you show up.’ That kind of network is very, very hard to establish, and to maintain.”

Community and Funding Challenges

Even when an anti-racist agenda is prioritized from the top, the path to organization-wide agreement and implementation is rarely smooth. Boards approve annual budgets and members are often also large donors, so building consensus is critical but can be complex.

Walter Moore, president of Peninsula Open Space Trust and a member of ALF’s first CEO cohort, struggled to get his board on the same page when it came to an equity vision. “Early on, I got pushback from a few members who felt like we were characterizing the work as environmental justice when we’re not really an environmental justice organization,” he says.

Moore pointed hesitant board members to data he and other CEOs had reviewed during ALF discussions proving that diverse organizations are higher functioning overall. This lens resonated, and he was able to get the broader buy-in he needed. “Without the ALF group, I would not have had the language or patience to cope and keep asking the board for resources,” he says. Today, Peninsula Open Space Trust has a director of DEI, an Inclusion Council comprised of both board members and staff, a staff diversity committee, and four organization-wide DEI goals. All levels of the organization value the ongoing task of evolving its historic focus on land conservation toward ensuring that protected land benefits all people.

During Dave Mineta’s time in the ALF CEO group, there was an election for City Council in San Jose. “One day, a member of our group showed us an absolutely flat-out racist image from the [Chamber of Commerce’s] political action committee campaign mailer,” he says. The REAL Coalition sprang into action, drafting a shared public statement in response to the image, calling for accountability, and naming the organizations involved in the political action committee behind the scenes. “We were the loudest voices. It was our discussions coming alive, we were poised for something just like that,” Mineta says. As a result, the committee broke up.

“We did galvanize a whole community response,” says Greg Kepferle, CEO of Catholic Charities of Santa Clara County, also a member of the second ALF group and the REAL Coalition. Unfortunately, the change did not stick. “We've [seen] since then that people just regroup under another name and under another umbrella, and keep doing the same old racist BS, but the battle has to keep going,” he says.

The group, particularly those in the REAL Coalition, has faced other challenges at the level of policy and systems change. “As a direct service organization, you’re midstream, pulling babies out of the middle of the river, making sure people have what they need. The REAL Coalition is looking to go up the river to figure out why babies are coming down in the first place. But many of the organizations in the REAL Coalition receive public funds, so now you're organizing to dismantle the system that's allowing your very organization to exist. You see the contradiction there,” says Rev. Ray Montgomery, executive director of People Acting in Community Together and a member of the third ALF cohort.

The Way Forward Is Together

At the time of the group’s founding, there was nothing similar in the space. The racial reckoning ignited by the murder of George Floyd three years later spurred a proliferation of DEI-focused affinity groups, funder-hosted convenings, and institutes. Within a crowded landscape, this group remains unique in its member-driven origin and peer-to-peer recruiting, the neutrality of ALF as its facilitator, and its tight geographic footprint.

Because participants are all based in or serving Santa Clara County, many share funding sources and political representation. All are subject to the same systems and policies, and have mutual interest in agitating for change. Relationships naturally extend beyond the yearlong engagement, creating a sense of community that enables collective action and supports individual leaders to stay in the profession longer.

The program is now in the middle of its fourth cycle. The current group is ALF’s largest to date with 12 leaders instead of 10, and younger on the whole. Recent discussion turned to the topic of executive sessions—the portion of board meetings closed to staff—including when and why organizations use them, and at what point they can become simply an expression of power or unintentionally drive a wedge between an organization’s board and its CEO. The group has yet to determine the specific commitments and actions it will pursue together, but with the overnight retreat next month, planning is underway.

“Early on as an executive director, I thought my job was to figure out how the game was played, to understand the rules of engagement in order to access more resources. Now, it’s like, sure, understand the game, but also understand how flawed it is and how it's built on historical inequities and racism, generational wealth, and personal capital,” says Anjee Helstrup-Alvarez, executive director for Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana and member of the third ALF cohort. Since completing the CEO group, Helstrup-Alvarez co-founded Cultural New Deal, another ALF-based affinity group focused on inclusion and equity in the arts.

“It's one thing to call it out and to be self-righteous about it. But it’s another thing to be in community and say, like, ‘Well, can we imagine a different reality? Let's build new worlds together. Let's create something grounded in our collective values so that it won't feel like you always have to produce more or be more, so that it feels less like extraction and more like evolution.’”

Read more stories by Stefanie Demong.