Philanthropy New York is pleased to share a new, watershed report on diversity in the philanthropic and nonprofit sectors.
Benchmarking Diversity: A First Look at New York City Foundations and Nonprofits is the first study of its kind for the New York philanthropic sector, the first nationally to examine the racial and ethnic demographics of foundations and nonprofit organizations at the same time, and the first to ask nonprofits how they define/describe a minority-led organization.
Two years ago, we realized that our work on diversity had proceeded ungrounded by any research-based knowledge about the racial and ethnic makeup of New York-area nonprofits and foundations, their institutional data, and their organizational capacities. Partnering with the Foundation Center, we created two surveys, one of which we sent to philanthropic organizations (including all Philanthropy New York members) and the other to nonprofit organizations in the New York metropolitan area. The surveys were mailed and responses collected between September 2008 and April 2009.
As one of only a few regional associations to have completed this type of research, we are already sharing our work with other regional associations, as well as with other colleague organizations. We are also committed to working with other local and national diversity initiatives and, especially, with our members.
We have invited several foundation and nonprofit leaders to comment on Benchmarking Diversity: A First Look at New York City Foundations and Nonprofits. To read their thoughts on our report, click here.
Philanthropy New York will host a members briefing to introduce and examine the report’s findings on Tuesday, October 13th, and a second introductory program on Thursday, October 29th will be held for our nonprofit colleagues as well as funders.
Benchmarking Diversity is not definitive, but it does help narrow our knowledge gap:
- It focuses primarily on racial, ethnic, and gender identity, and to a limited degree on sexual orientation and people with disabilities.
- The core data invites various interpretations and analyses, and provides the groundwork for future research, but does not present a singular conclusion, story, or prescription for action.
- We recognize that our results were generated from a self-selected pool of respondents, and that this may affect the completeness of our findings.
Nonetheless, we believe the findings add substantially to our ongoing work around diversity in our sector.
In closing, we invite you to:
- read the report as a whole. No one statistic or query tells the entire story, and this issue deserves a thoughtful evaluation;
- engage in in-depth conversations within your organizations and with your peers;
- suggest areas for future education and research;
- participate in our programs and initiatives on diversity and related issues in the coming months and years; and
- examine and consider the resources, mission statements, model policies, and other practices that support a more diverse, inclusive sector.
We aspire to work towards a sector where notions of diversity, inclusiveness, and transparency are seamlessly woven into the fabric of its practices, which will result in stronger, more skillful, and more effective institutions that reflect the communities they serve. We invite everyone in the philanthropic and nonprofit sectors to discuss our report and join us in this work.
To download a copy of Benchmarking Diversity: A First Look at New York City Foundations and Nonprofits, please click here.
We encourage our colleagues to comment on Benchmarking Diversity: A First Look at New York City Foundations and Nonprofits. Please do so in the Comments section below! (Your comments will also appear on our website.)
Philanthropy New York, the Foundation Center, and Diversity in Philanthropy certainly need to be commended for simply uttering the word “race” in this report and tackling the issue of diversity. The report itself, however, was perhaps prematurely released as a full-fledged study. With all the problems with tiny sample sizes and other qualifications made throughout it, it should have probably been released as a preliminary discussion paper. The very professionally packaged report might be providing the casual reader with inaccurate information that they might try to generalize for both the city’s foundation and nonprofit sectors.
Extremely small sample sizes and bias present very serious problems for this study. While the response rate for the 95 of Philanthropy New York’s membership that responded was 33 percent, this foundation sample size was only 1.4 percent of the total 7,000 New York foundations that the study estimates. The same with the nonprofit sample of 540, which represented only 10 percent of the nonprofits approached. In terms of the nonprofit sector, it was not clear if large nonprofits like hospitals and universities were included. These issues, despite the authors’ valiant attempts to minimize their importance, render this more of a pilot study than even a preliminary analysis of the many important topics it attempts to address. It should, therefore, be read with great caution.
These problems of sample size and self-selection create the serious problem, as the authors admit, of overstating the degree of diversity in both sectors. The foundation sample is disproportionately made up of the larger foundations and may be made up of those proudest of their diversity records. The nonprofit sample—well, it is hard to describe the many ways it is likely skewed with a disproportionate number that are already foundation-friendly or that may exaggerate their “minority” status as a fundraising strategy.
The report also suffers from reporting on various social categories inconsistently. I was reading it specifically interested in the Latino community, but found the level of generalization a bit confusing. Sometimes reference would be made to Hispanics, other times to people of color or just to nonprofits in general under various topics.
With 65 percent of the city’s population being people of color, and the poverty population being a much higher percentage (over 80 percent of the kids in public schools are people of color), it is not clear what this means in terms of diversity when a foundation targets the “economically disadvantaged” or “children and youth”. The report doesn’t seem to grapple with the fact that New York City is a racial-ethnic minority city and the implications of this for discussions of diversity. The report’s expansive notion of “minorities” adds a level of complexity to the analysis that requires much greater exposition.
The report’s attempt to discover some causality in its findings is also problematic and at times contradictory. For example, while at one point they suggest a positive relationship between foundations that have written diversity policies and the level of diversity in those foundations (page 8), they question this relationship later on (page 10).
This issue of causality goes to the report’s discussion of the capacity-building needs of nonprofits. Is this the result of lack of skills and connections to wealthy networks, or the historic undercapitalization of nonprofits of color by foundations, governments, and others? This is a topic that will require much more discussion.
The report reveals a confusing picture of how New York City foundations, as a sector, address the issue of race in their grantmaking, staffing, and governance. The low levels and hodgepodge of reporting of diversity data by these foundations seems to make the case for greater government regulation, but that’s a whole other discussion. The report makes it clear, however, that, as the Reverend Al Sharpton is fond of observing, it seems that the higher you climb the mountain, the whiter it gets. I guess it’s important to establish that fact from time to time, but I am sure it is not much of a surprise to many of us. The question is, what do we do about it?
Benchmarking Diversity is a good beginning to designing a more definitive study or, more likely, series of action-studies on the issue of diversity in the city’s foundation sector. It makes it clear that much work remains to be done.
Mr. Falcón, a political scientist, is President of the National Institute for Latino Policy (NiLP), based in New York City.