I guess you could call me a liar. Back when I had fundraising responsibilities at several small nonprofit organizations, I lied to foundations all the time. I assumed, often correctly, that funders wanted to believe that their money would directly bring about specific program impacts, so I told them it would. That meant hiding some […]
Classism in Diversity Work
The Nonprofit Inferiority Complex and Why We Need to Lose It Now
Here’s a thought exercise you can use to test yourself for the dreaded Nonprofit Inferiority Complex, the internalized idea that nonprofit work is inherently less valuable than other forms of wage labor. How do you feel about the following statements with respect to community-based nonprofits? 1 = strongly disagree; 2 = disagree; 3 = maybe; […]
Building Bridges, Not Walls
Class Action was founded by visionaries who realized that they had grown up at different ends of the class spectrum, but who had arrived in the same place when it came to their passion for advancing social equity and justice. Their commitment to building bridges across differences – instead of building walls – continues to inform […]
Beyond Trump: Creating Class-Race Alliances
Part of the White, Working Class, and Worried about Trump (#WhiteWorkingClassVsTrump) Campaign*: I grew up in economically depressed, though beautiful, northeastern Vermont. My family was on and off welfare throughout my childhood, and we were always poor. As a child, I was acutely aware of the ways poverty set me apart from other people. As I […]
Beyond Trump: Building a Coalition for Change
Part of the White, Working Class, and Worried about Trump (#WhiteWorkingClassVsTrump) Campaign*: I grew up in South St. Louis City in a multi-racial, working-class neighborhood. My dad was a union carpenter, and my mom worked part-time at various jobs while maintaining the home. I’m the oldest of seven children. I remember the constant anxiety in our […]
A classist comment from a feminist publisher
I wrote a paper on the classism I experienced as a poverty-class single mother in the feminist movement, and it was selected for inclusion in a prestigious anthology. When I asked the editor about payment for my chapter, she said that all proceeds from book sales would be contributed to a charity. “None of our […]
Building Solidarity and Dealing with Racism
In 1971, when I was “lead organizer” for what became the All Peoples’ Coalition (APC), I learned a different approach to dealing with some racism I encountered among working-class whites. APC was a federation of some thirty organizations (churches, block clubs, the neighborhood shopping strip’s merchant association, tenant associations, and other groups in Visitacion Valley, […]
Felice’s mission of making classism a diversity issue
When Felice Yeskel started graduate school in the 1980s, she was outraged that the Social Issues Training Project at the UMass Education School omitted classism from its curriculum. Every aspiring diversity trainer had to practice facilitating two-day workshops on sexism, racism, heterosexism, ageism, ableism and anti-Semitism – but not classism. Felice had been severely oppressed […]
Don’t be a classist anti-racist!
While naming “white privilege” is an important part of exposing and dismantling structural racism, I can see how the term “privilege” is hard to swallow for white folks on the downside of our economic system. Being marginalized in one power system doesn’t mean you can’t be privileged in another. But this particular form of pushback […]
