What Should I Do About Privilege?

This is a lightly adapted excerpt from Gemma Bull and Tom Steinberg’s, Modern Grantmaking: A Guide for Funders Who Believe Better is Possible.

A Philanthropic Horror Story

‘The sheer power of grantmaking! People laugh at your jokes when they’re not funny. If you convene 100 people, 150 will show up. But this kind of power can be dangerous.’

— NGOZI LYN COLE, experienced senior UK grantmaking executive and board member

Gather round the campfire, everyone — it’s time for a horror story. As with any good scary tale, we leave it up to you to speculate on which bits are real …

Picture a boardroom in a large funding organization. The deep lustre of the mahogany table and the discreet, expensive lighting hint at the volume of wealth lurking in institutional bank accounts.

A board meeting is just getting started. Eight of the great and the good are sitting around the table studying the agenda, which includes a never-before-seen session called ‘Diversity, equity and inclusion awareness training’, scheduled just before lunch.

The morning passes as it usually does in board meetings, with presentations, finances and decisions. Late morning, around the time appetising lunch smells start to waft into the room, there is a knock at the door. An assistant informs the chair of the board that their guests are here. With great fanfare, members of a training organisation run by disabled people are ushered in to run the scheduled awareness training session.

Over the course of the allotted 25 minutes, the training organisation takes the board members — none of whom are disabled — through an exercise focused on helping them understand how modern professional organisations should think about equity, power and privilege.

But, although they take part and nod along politely, the board members are not really engaged in the exercise. Their minds are elsewhere. There’s a lot of other stuff on the agenda, and some tricky funding choices to be made — plus the allure of a three-course meal is strong when you had to get up early to travel to the meeting. This appears to be especially so of the chair, who smiles a lot but does not steer the board to discuss any actual decisions or commitments they could make. Then it’s lunch-time.

The board meeting ends a few hours later. The official minutes of the meeting show that diversity training was delivered and appreciated by the board who were grateful to the trainers for coming in to run the session. There’s consensus around the table that it was a good thing to do the training and that everyone is better off for it. The board meeting concludes and everyone goes home.

Then … nothing changes. Or, to be more specific:

• No changes are made to the organisation’s priorities or strategy.
• Nothing changes to make this funder’s application process more open and welcoming to different sorts of people.
• Nobody reviews the funding strands and programmes themselves to make sure that they don’t exclude certain groups.
• No changes are made to the composition of staff, board members or, ultimately, the mix of grantseekers who are awarded funding.

To the board members the diversity awareness training has been like water off a duck’s back. But, despite the total lack of impact, it has been minuted as a great success and the organisation officially plans to return to it in three years’ time.

And so, with a great, silent scream of missed opportunity, our horror story draws to its close.

How does this story help me be a Modern Grantmaker?

‘If you’re a funder who brings in Black and brown expertise to ‘help trustees’ and yet doesn’t take that next step and look at who needs to give up some power, step down and allow new and different faces in, you’re the problem.’

— Ruth Ibeguna, founder of RECLAIM Project and The Roots Programme

This is fundamentally the story of an organisation making a costly mistake. It is a mistake that all Modern Grantmakers should work hard to avoid.

We call it a mistake because the board members in the story had an opportunity to make their own funding organisation better, but they passed it up. They had the opportunity to make changes that would have led to new applications from potentially impactful grantseekers, but they ignored it. They had the chance to make the funder’s own team stronger and more capable, but they passed that up too. They also had the chance to make sure that their funding wasn’t perpetuating problematic inequalities in the society they served, but they didn’t. They thought the exercise was about ticking a box and feeling good about themselves.

Why didn’t the board members in the story think any change was needed?

‘In ten years working for disability charities, I have yet to meet a person with lived experience of disability, representing a strategic funder.’

— Anonymous Senior Executive of a UK disability nonprofit

In the story the board chose not to make any changes to the way the organisation worked because they didn’t understand or couldn’t empathise with the very different life experiences of people who weren’t like them.

They just couldn’t comprehend how the way in which their funding organisation worked could present barriers to people whose lived experience of things like money, education, discrimination and employment was profoundly different from their own.

This kind of mistake has already been given a name: unchecked privilege. It’s called ‘privilege’ because it relates to the advantages some people have, and others don’t, that are a result of accidents of birth. This privilege is ‘unchecked’ because in our story the people around the board table didn’t take any steps to better understand and act on what the trainers from the disabled-led organisation had shared with them.

Grantmakers need to be aware of the role of privilege in their organisation and in society at large. They need to know how to acknowledge and manage privilege — this is often known as ‘checking your privilege’.

To get you started, we will look more into what privilege is and why it matters so much to good grantmaking. Then in the second half of the chapter we’ll look at what other funders are doing to stop unchecked privilege from undermining their mission and strategy, and what this could mean for you.

Gemma Bull and Tom Steinberg are the authors of Modern Grantmaking, a practical guide that grantmakers can turn to whenever they need support. But it’s about more than handy tips. Every grantmaker can be a reformer too — their book explains why this is so important and how you can get involved.