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Class Action

Bridging the class divide

The Staffing the Mission Project

Staffing the Mission works for change on two fronts, giving both nonprofits and funders concrete ways to make life better for nonprofit employees.

Read more in the Staffing the Mission Report

The Staffing the Mission project helps nonprofits express their values through their compensation and personnel policies. We work with foundations to promote practices among grantees that are aligned with the vision of the world that funders aim to create.

Class Action hopes to inspire a wave of foundations and donors committed to supporting their grantees to meet a set of benchmarks on wages, benefits, hours, decision-making input and working conditions.

Better pay and benefits are major pieces in the larger puzzle of increasing class and racial diversity in the nonprofit sector and reducing wage gaps in the US.

We’d like to hear from you!

Foundation staff and board members: It will help Staffing the Mission if you take this survey on your practices that support or impede decent staff jobs at your grantee organizations.

“While in general I think a lot about disappointing and unethical low wages across the [not-for-profit] sector, I hadn’t thought about how we could take a stand as a funder… This is cool stuff and I’m learning.” – Izzy Waxman, Mazon Canada

Do you work for, manage or fund a nonprofit organization? What are your thoughts on improving job quality? Connect with us by taking this online survey.

NEW at Staffing the Mission

“Low Pay and Poor Working Conditions Forced a Vital Nonprofit To Shut Down. I Was Complicit In Its Demise” – article by Lisa Ranghelli in The Chronicle of Philanthropy gives a shout-out to Staffing the Mission

Funders, please take this quick SURVEY OF FOUNDATIONS about practices that make a difference to quality of life for grantee staff.

Staffing the Mission was featured at a national conference of nonprofit managers, Elevate. Here’s what Laurie Goldman and Betsy Leondar-Wright had to say.
Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE), a community organization founded in 1993 that focuses on economic development, has implemented some best practices in their pay structure and transparency practices.

Fair Pay Practices for Mission-Driven Work

What can be done about low-paid, low-quality jobs at non-profit organizations?

Class Action’s newest publication, Staffing the Mission, spotlights the downsides of many nonprofit jobs, and offers practical advice to funders and nonprofit managers to improve job quality.

A Staffing the Mission Webinar

Staffing the Mission in the Media

Radio and Podcasts:

Blog Posts:

Another presentation on Staffing the Mission, for nonprofit sector scholars at ARNOVA conference

Class Action inspires action to end classism and extreme inequality by providing tools, training and inspiration to raise awareness, understand the relationship of class and race, shift cultural beliefs about social class, build cross-class solidarity and transform institutions and systems.