Nonprofit Leaders Assess their Diversity Efforts: Only 36% believe their staff are "very" diverse
A new report from the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP), titled Nonprofit Diversity Efforts: Current Practices and the Role of Foundations, shares nonprofit leaders’ views on their diversity pursuits, how their foundation funders are interacting with or supporting them in this area, and how foundations are involved in the diversity efforts of grantees.
Based on survey responses from 205 nonprofit leaders, here are some of the takeaways of the report:
• Seventy percent of nonprofit CEOs believe it is very or extremely important for their organization’s staff to be diverse, but only 36 percent believe their staff are actually "very or extremely diverse."
• Forty-two percent of nonprofit CEOs report that their organization’s foundation funders have not discussed diversity issues with them.
• Of the nonprofit CEOs whose foundation funders request demographic information, only 21 percent report that those funders explain how they use the demographic information they collect.
According to Ellie Buteau, vice president of Research at CEP, the report shows nonprofit leaders recognize that they have room for improvement in terms of how diverse they believe their staffs and boards should be in order to achieve their organization’s goals versus how diverse they currently are — and they also recognize they have steps to take to better reflect the populations they are serving.
In terms of boards, Buteau adds of the findings:
For example, while 64 percent of nonprofit CEOs believe that in order to achieve their organization’s goals, it’s very or extremely important for their board to be diverse, only 22 percent believe their board is very or extremely diverse. And, while 61 percent of nonprofit CEOs believe that in order to achieve their organization’s goals, it’s very or extremely important for their board to reflect those they seeks to serve, only 26 percent of CEO’s believe their boards are reflecting those populations very or extremely well.
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