Workers of Modest Means Face Tests in Charity World

Brian Gallagher knows a thing or two about being poor — he grew up facing many of the same economic struggles as the individuals his charity seeks to help.

“We were a product of human services and public support,” recalls Mr. Gallagher, one of six children and the first in his family to attend college. His working-class upbringing in Hobart, Ind. — Mr. Gallagher’s father had an eighth-grade education and held multiple jobs before landing a position as an industrial plumber — left an indelible mark upon him.

“Growing up in a challenging environment provided me with a real sense of empathy,” says Mr. Gallagher, who has been chief executive of United Way of America since 2002. “I understand what it’s like to have to buy food at a store with food stamps.”

But Mr. Gallagher’s background also makes him a relative rarity in the charity world. While there are no statistics that paint a thorough portrait of the class makeup of the nonprofit work force, the anecdotal evidence is strong: nonprofit leaders — and even rank-and-file charity workers — are far more likely to hail from the middle and upper classes than to ascend from below.

Monolithic Work Force

Many charity workers who grew up poor or working class insist that theirs is an essential perspective for charities, especially those that seek to aid the needy.

And yet, even as the nonprofit work force has grown steadily more diverse in recent years in race and ethnicity, the class makeup of its staff and leaders remains troublingly monolithic, says Chuck Collins, a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, a liberal think tank in Washington.

“You might have a culture that looks diverse from a race and gender standpoint, but in terms of class, everybody is coming from multigenerational college-going families,” says Mr. Collins.

It would be almost unthinkable that a nonprofit organization concerned with women’s issues would consist entirely of men, or that a minority-rights group would be led solely by white people.

Yet charities that serve the poor are routinely run by individuals who were never themselves poor, say nonprofit experts.

Betsy Leondar-Wright, author of Class Matters: Cross-Class Alliance Building for Middle Class Activists, argues that grant makers in particular need to look at the socioeconomic makeup of the nonprofit work force.

“Everybody asks for race and gender breakdowns of these nonprofits,” she says. “But what about the question, ‘Is there anyone on staff who has personally experienced the problem the group deals with?’”

Lack of diversity in workers from different socioeconomic classes affects not just how an organization provides services but also its philosophy on compensating staff members.

Far too many nonprofit organizations expect their employees to live on poverty wages, says Rebecca Wagner, executive director of Interfaith Works, a charity in Rockville, Md., that provides emergency services such as food and shelter to poor local residents.

“You end up limiting who can afford to do this kind of work and that’s a real shame,” she says.

In her 10 years at Interfaith Works, Ms. Wagner has made a commitment to offering the best wages and benefits the charity can afford to pay its 75 employees.

Her mission reflects both a cold-eyed view of the kind of salaries necessary to recruit and hold on to good workers and her own life experience. Ms. Wagner grew up on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in a working-class family; her father worked for the railroad, her mother was a community activist who stayed at home with her five children.

“I know what it’s like not to get what you want,” says Ms. Wagner. “When I was a kid, my girlfriends took singing and piano and ballet lessons. We never did any of that. I think that understanding stays with you — it helps you appreciate the struggles that others go through.”

Money Troubles

But it also puts employees who grew up in modest circumstances at odds with a nonprofit world that sometimes fails to compensate workers fairly. Alexander Heimann, a community organizer with the Essex County Community Organization, in Lynn, Mass., says the field’s tendency to draw its work force from the privileged classes shapes attitudes about how much charity workers should be paid, and whether being paid more is a worthy goal. “I think of myself as a worker,” says Mr. Heimann, who grew up in a trailer park outside Detroit. “And I’m fighting for a pay increase in a field where people think pay isn’t important.”

The shortage of workers from modest backgrounds gives too many charities a distorted view of poverty, says Karen Courtney, executive director of the Foundation for Fair Contracting of Massachusetts, a nonprofit group in Boston that monitors labor standards in public construction. “There’s a total disconnect around the fact that, at the end of the day, poor people need to make more money,” she says.

Ms. Courtney, who grew up in Lawrence, Mass., in a working-class family, argues that advocates for the poor often approach their work with an inherent bias against upward mobility. “It’s OK for certain groups to want to make a lot of money — doctors, lawyers — but there’s an inherent discomfort with the idea that a plumber can make $60 an hour,” says Ms. Courtney. “Why can’t we say that everybody should be able to make that?”

But charities that reflect the communities they serve must still navigate the treacherous class currents of the grant-making world. Reggie Moore and his wife, Sharlen, started Urban Underground in 1999 as a response to the violence and poverty that were ravaging Milwaukee’s neighborhoods.

They had immediate success — demand to participate in the charity’s leadershipdevelopment programs far outstripped the supply of slots from the very first year. And yet finding adequate resources for the organization was nearly impossible, says Mr. Moore, who now manages a youthactivism program from Milwaukee for the American Legacy Foundation, in Washington.

“I don’t think foundations look at leaders who come from the community as being credible. It’s a huge disservice,” says Mr. Moore, who grew up in a Milwaukee housing project and is currently seeking a bachelor’s degree at the city’s University of Wisconsin campus. (He is on track to become a first-generation college graduate next spring.)

Only when Mr. Moore received a Ford Foundation Leadership for a Changing World award in 2005 did Urban Underground’s financial fortunes begin to turn around.

“That saved the organization,” he says. “Getting that national validation gave us some credibility in the eyes of donors who hadn’t taken us seriously before.”

‘The Next Frontier’

Some charity experts argue that it’s only a matter of time until socioeconomic class gets as much attention as race, gender, and ethnicity in organizations’ efforts to be more diverse and inclusive. Kristen Golden, executive director of Class Action, a five-year-old nonprofit group in Hadley, Mass., that helps charities and foundations confront what the group calls “classism,” says that she sees a growing interest in such issues.

“Class is the next frontier,” says Ms. Golden, who oversees Class Action’s work with foundations, which now make up 20 percent of the organization’s clients. “When you think about it, foundations exist because class privilege exists. Somebody had enough resources that they created a whole organization to give some of them away.”

Much of the information in Class Action’s training sessions, says Ms. Golden, involves practical questions of fairness. Who makes decisions at a charity? What are the pay levels? What assumptions are made about the staff’s ability to pay for, say, travel?

Amid the recession and its profound impact on so many charities, class divides that may have simmered beneath the surface are quickly coming into view, says Ms. Golden.

“The economic crisis has made it impossible not to deal with class,” she says. Organizations that maintain the illusion that their entire work force is on equal economic footing cannot maintain that illusion in a time of budget cuts and layoffs. “Charities that are class-aware are much more fair and transparent about how to address shortfalls in an equitable way,” says Ms. Golden.

Yolanda Alindor invited Class Action to help the San Francisco Foundation think about economic-class issues a year ago. As coordinator of the foundation’s Multicultural Fellowship Program, Ms. Alindor noticed that the curriculum for the fellows included nothing about class, which she considered an oversight.

“We’ve never talked about class here at the foundation, yet it’s all around us,” says Ms. Alindor. “We could have in our reception room somebody who advocates for the homeless or was recently homeless, and they’re sitting right next to one of our wealthiest donors.”

The process proved awkward, even embarrassing at first. “There was definitely some level of discomfort for the people who are at the top end of the income scale,” she says.

But the exercise in class awareness played a role when, like many organizations, the San Francisco Foundation had to make budget cuts this year. As members of the leadership team debated how and where to cut, notes Ms. Alindor, they took class into account.

“The cuts were implemented according to a sliding scale,” she says. “The people with the highest compensation took the biggest cut, the lowest got no cut. I would like to think that, because we have a thoughtful leadership team, we would have gotten there anyway. But it helped us see the cuts as a class-related issue.”