White Accountability Group for Nonprofit Leaders
The White Accountability Group is a collective of individual nonprofit leaders supporting each other in addressing our own internalized white supremacy. Together we can do the work needed to support our staff and communities of color and to learn the skills necessary to navigate conflict across barriers of race, gender, ability, and class.
This group provides support to white nonprofit leaders in building equitable practices within nonprofit organizations. We discuss hiring strategies, program design practices, and ways to build non-white-dominant internal cultures. Participants have an opportunity to share and get support for their own organizational challenges.
Simultaneously, this group supports members in unpacking and letting go of our own internalized white supremacy. We are only able to truly address equity issues if we can deeply understand our complicity and intuit the felt experiences of people of color. You don’t need to do this work alone.
Why I Created This Group
I have the privilege of being perceived as white (and therefore safe and respectable) even before I am identified as being trans. I have let this privilege shape me and as a result have caused harm to the people of color close to me.
I have hired people I knew would struggle to thrive because I wanted diversity on my team. I have been complicit in perpetuating white-culture-dominant workplaces. I have failed to prioritize conversations around race because they didn’t feel “important enough.” I have microaggressed friends of color. I have failed to pause until I could get the right people in the room.
Today, through painful experience and the generosity of people of color who love me I have made some progress in dismantling my own internalized white supremacy. I created this group to continue this work and to support my fellow white people in doing the same.
It is hard to do this work and the folks of color in our lives are too traumatized and angered by their lived experience to have the energy to help us. But it is mandatory and we don’t need to do it alone.
Who Should Join
We invite anyone working in the broad nonprofit sector who is in or desires a position of leadership to consider joining. We recognize that structural leadership is not available to many. For us, leadership requires only that you have a vision for how things can be different and energy to be part of moving the sector forward.
This group is only for people who identify as white and are prepared to do the uncomfortable work of understanding our role as white people in harming communities of color. All members should come with a basic understanding of how systemic racism and individual bias impact communities of color.
While all members are white, this group may include people who have other marginalized experiences of gender, class, and ability. Participants will be expected to help create an inclusive space.