(Illustration by Raffi Marhaba, The Dream Creative)
Across sectors, organizations in the United States have long placed barriers between women of color and leadership positions. Women of color are significantly underrepresented in corporate leadership roles and face systemic obstacles in the nonprofit sector where, even with advanced education and experience, they are less likely to hold leadership positions than white men, white women, or men of color. When they do attain leadership roles, challenges persist; the intersectional threats posed by patterns of misogyny and racism intensify, rather than lessen. Leadership roles involve increased responsibility, accountability, and potential risks for all people. For women of color stepping into leadership circles historically dominated by white men, the heightened risks include diminishment, harassment, prejudice, and inadequate support.
But while this moment in US history, marked by heightened racism and xenophobia, is subjecting women of color nonprofit leaders to increased pressures and risks, it is also generating greater civic engagement and providing them with more opportunities to lead. Today, organizations and society have an unprecedented opportunity to honor and support the leadership of women of color, and to transform the culture and systems within which all Americans live.
Seizing the Moment
In 2020, an estimated 26 million people took to the streets to call for racial justice and protest the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers. And still today, people in the United States, including across tribal nations, continue to face a racial reckoning that demands action from groups and organizations in every sector.
The two of us have supported social change through philanthropic and nonprofit executive leadership roles for several decades. During that time, the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner, among others, have sparked similar protests. These too have raised public awareness, and evoked empathetic responses from political and business leaders. But each moment of heightened engagement has lasted only a few news cycles.
In the past, people’s expectations for progress were limited, but today’s reckoning feels different. The initial spike of outrage in 2020 was more dramatic; 76 percent of Americans said that racial and ethnic discrimination was a major problem, up from 50 percent in 2015, when Freddie Gray died in police custody. New organizations led by people of color have emerged at the local and national levels in the wake of the uprisings, and government action has been more significant and sustained. In 2020 and 2021, at least seven states created a commission or task force focused on racial justice. There is now a collective ethos that says out loud, “We have to do better.”
At the Edge of Glass Cliffs
Given the current environment, the leadership of women of color is vital and urgent. In historically male-dominated leadership circles, these women’s capacities, worldviews, and experiences are sorely needed for balance. Women of color, whose communities and voices have long been marginalized, offer perspectives and insights that are crucial to dismantling racism as American society evolves toward greater equity and greater consideration of the needs of all. Yet many are struggling; they lack adequate support to meet what their organizations and society demand of them. Many women of color leaders, for example, are expected to bring about equity and justice within and outside of their organizations, but do not receive the resources, including funding and team collaboration, they need to create sustainable change.
Several reports from the Building Movement Project, a national nonprofit that catalyzes social change in the nonprofit sector through research, partnerships, and trainings, found that nonprofits often place women of color at the edge of “glass cliffs”—that is, in precarious leadership positions where the risk of failure is high. Organizations often expect them to fix decades-long problems within a few short years but provide little personal and professional support. This endangers their job success and careers. In particular, women of color leaders have expressed that the current climate—marked by the COVID-19 pandemic, racial reckoning, and organizational challenges—has taken an immeasurable toll on their psychological, physical, and emotional well-being.
This is compounded when organizations deny the humanity of women of color by minimizing the past (including the intergenerational trauma of slavery and continued oppression), minimizing harmful behaviors by writing them off as so-called “microaggressions” (a term that fails to capture macro impacts), and minimizing the taxing nature of their work and these very patterns of minimization. This prolonged stress often results in burnout—the exhaustion of physical or emotional strength, or motivation. Women of color leaders also experience frustration with the lack of proactive systemic change they see around them; many organizations make only reactive, cosmetic, and incremental changes, such as hiring a diversity and inclusion officer without giving them decision-making authority, or updating the organization’s website to showcase a new commitment to addressing structural racism without addressing internal racial inequities.
A Way Forward
This moment of increased pressure on and risk for women of color leaders is also a moment of opportunity to turn society’s heightened awareness of racial justice into long-lasting and equitable practices. Making the most of this opportunity requires honoring and supporting women of color, and creating the conditions for them to lead. Bringing their much-needed perspectives to bear on seemingly intractable problems can begin to heal society’s deepest wounds and actualize its full potential. Funders and organizations can rise to the challenge by acknowledging the vulnerabilities of everyone involved in their work, integrating internal and external change, and creating an environment that cultivates collective care.
1. Acknowledge the deep vulnerabilities within organizations. Many large philanthropic, nonprofit, and government organizations have good intentions but lack awareness and understanding of racial hierarchy and social justice, particularly among white leaders whose perspectives are limited by their lived experiences. This presents a point of deep vulnerability for people with positional authority who don’t understand or know how to remedy racial injustice but who are expected—by themselves and others—to understand problems and know how to address them. People in these positions may not openly acknowledge that they have inadvertently perpetuated injustice and need support to learn how to avoid doing it again. Indeed, everyone wrestling with the troubling legacy of racial hierarchy and facing change struggles to some degree—whether with impatience, frustration, fear, pain, grief, or confusion.
Organizations that want to support women of color leaders must make space for people to name and acknowledge their vulnerabilities, and then address the dynamics and individual needs underlying them. Fostering engagement, group cohesion, and sustained focus in the face of prolonged discomfort requires care, skill, emotional intelligence, and patience. Indeed, initial efforts to grapple with these issues may look and feel like failures. An organization might set a deadline for achieving racial equity among staff, for example, only to find that missteps along the way and the ubiquity of racial issues render the timeline unrealistic. It is important to remember that this kind of learning is messy and iterative.
2. Create comprehensive strategies for internal and external change. Women of color leaders are often balancing impossible tensions: tending to their organizations’ internal needs while also focusing on their external missions, or working to fulfill value-driven external missions while their organizations’ internal cultures fail to live up to those values. Organizations looking to support them need to integrate internal and external change into a comprehensive body of work.
In 2016, for example, the Women’s Foundation of Oregon and local volunteer teams conducted a 14-stop listening tour across the state. It heard from more than 1,000 women and girls, resulting in a report called “Count Her In.” Closely integrated with and informed by that external work, the organization undertook significant internal change, revamping its values to align with what it heard and publicly announcing its ongoing commitment to anti-racism in 2018. It also hired a woman of color who embodied the organization’s new values as its executive director, welcomed multiple board members of color, and made its grant application and reporting processes less cumbersome to ease the burden on grantees. The board also made a conscious decision to empower the executive director to pursue her vision without justifying her actions. It provided her with coaching, authorized her to bring on new staff, and increased her spending permissions.
3. Curate an environment of grace, humility, and collective care as part of racial healing. It is vital to cultivate grace, humility, and collective care in social sector organizations, especially when someone—whatever their gender or color—takes the courageous step of naming vulnerabilities and inequities. This means respecting everyone’s humanity. It means treating one another with compassion, kindness, and goodwill. It means finding humane ways to hold people accountable, asking what healing and repair could look like during conflict, and listening and responding in affirming ways to the voices of people doing difficult, often-undervalued work.
These ways of being and interacting don’t happen automatically; people need to learn and practice them. Currently, more than 70 US colleges and universities are working to infuse grace, humility, and collective care into their campus communities by implementing the Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation (TRHT) framework. Launched by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation in 2016, it aims to replace the legacy of racial injustice with a belief in the inherent value of all people. The approach includes methodologies that engage 10-24 people in the sharing of personal stories, in response to specific prompts, and provides opportunities for deep listening within well-facilitated, compassionate spaces. By building authentic, trust-based solidarity on college and university campuses—where the enrollment of women, particularly women of color, continues to increase—these practices help prepare future leaders.
Leadership Programs and Other Supports
Ultimately, the challenge is to transform individual organizations as well as society, through the development of equitable systems, practices, and institutions. It is to create a world that values, honors, and supports all leaders. Realizing this transformation requires that organizations set universal goals, such as equal opportunity to lead, and then create strategies specifically designed for different groups.
Strategies for women of color leaders must include leadership programs and other supports specifically designed for them. Many models of leadership development are built on outdated assumptions, including the notion that individual development alone can shift an institution, that simply will not work. Women of color leaders need development support that includes stress management, for example, and opportunities for self-healing and self-compassion.
The National Collaborative for Health Equity's Culture of Health Leadership Institute for Racial Healing is an example of a program that responds to the expressed needs for support, affirmation, healing, and community among leaders of color who are working to address structural racism. Mostly virtual, it provides an 18-month sharing and learning experience that includes TRHT methodologies, as well as one-on-one coaching. Currently, 80 leaders, mostly women of color, are engaged in the program and benefitting from access to monetary, informational, and relational resources, as well as self-healing and self-compassion modalities. Many participants report that this is the first time they have ever experienced this degree of affirmation and individual support.
Additional examples of efforts devoted to this work include the General Service Foundation’s Healing Justice program, which aims to cultivate the wholeness and well-being of institutional and grassroots leaders; the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice’s 2019 report “Healing Justice,” which documents what healing and safety can and should look like in social justice movements; Tsuru for Solidarity’s Healing Circles for Change model, which helps guide groups through a healing experience of community, connection, and empowerment; and Community Change’s Women’s Fellowship, which builds the leadership of formerly incarcerated women of color through an approach that includes online peer coaching circles where participants share knowledge, provide accountability, and build interdependence.
Organizations can take lessons from leadership and support programs like these to heart. We are all immersed in a society and culture permeated by the fallacy of racial hierarchy and other scales of human value that divide us and negatively impact our day-to-day lives. That fallacy obscures a deep, life-affirming truth: We are all connected. Though we each walk different paths and experience different struggles, we are an interdependent family. Affirming this understanding by honoring the full humanity, gifts, and genius of women of color leaders and supporting them as they wish and need to be supported, organizations and the rest of society will transform.
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Read more stories by Gail Christopher & Deepa Iyer.