What is the role of fundraisers in creating social change?

Farra Trompeter: Welcome to the Smart Communications podcast. This is Farra Trompeter, co-director and worker-owner at Big Duck. Today we’re gonna ask the question: what is the role of fundraisers in creating social change? And I am delighted to be joined by Mari Eva Mendes. I’m gonna tell you a bit about Mari Eva in just a moment, but I wanna explain our connection, I always think that is helpful. I first got to meet Mari Eva when I was helping, two years ago, plan the content for the AFP (Association of Fundraising Professionals), New York City’s annual conference Fundraising Day in New York. And we were looking for some great speakers and some different topics. And I reached out to Mari Eva because I knew she was involved in the Community-Centric Fundraising movement, which we’ll talk about in a bit. And then discovered she also was involved in NTEN, a group I had previously been on the board of. So she did a session, which got great reviews, and then I asked her for this past year in 2024 if she would speak with me on a panel for the morning keynote. And we had the pleasure of doing that with Shawnda Chapman from the Ms. Foundation for Women. And today I’m gonna get into some of our conversation with Mari Eva about what we talked about on that very stage.

Farra Trompeter: So, Mari Eva Mendes uses she/her pronouns. Mari Eva is a fundraising and communication strategist with over two decades of multinational experience in philanthropic enterprise, training, and program development. She has held senior development roles in organizations such as Harlem United, NRDC, and Girls for Gender Equity. And is currently the first chief development officer of LEAP, an arts education organization providing arts instruction to over 20,000 children throughout the five boroughs of New York City. Through MEM Consulting, Mari Eva also offers career and leadership coaching for entry to mid-level professionals, conducts development workshops, and speaks to advancement teams nationwide. She’s also one of my favorite people to now go out and get together with after work every now and then. Mari Eva, welcome to the show.

Mari Eva Mendes: Thank you so much, Farra, for this warm welcome. And I’m so glad that we were able to meet in 2023 and I mean, yes, we have a lot of fun together talking shop and talking about everything, so I’m really pleased to be here. Thank you so much for asking.

Farra Trompeter: Of course, my pleasure. Well, I know that I’ve had my own journey, you’ve had your own journey. Lots of folks have had their own journey when it comes to getting involved in philanthropy and fundraising. So for me, I was organizing bake sales in elementary school and working as a telefundraiser in college. And I spent my early career in direct response and online fundraising. And over the past 17 years, I’ve been at Big Duck where we focus on communications, but many of our projects at Big Duck engage donors and other community members. Over the past few years, I’ve grown to challenge a lot of what I learned and taught others regarding “best practices” in donor communications, much of that inspired by the Community-Centric Fundraising movement. Mari Eva, I’d love to hear about your journey and especially how you have worked with Community-Centric Fundraising or CCF.

Mari Eva Mendes: Sure. You started with bake sales, I’m gonna start early as well. I’m from Oklahoma and honestly, I didn’t even know that you could be a professional fundraiser for a long time. I thought that it was just part of our community service to help to support our communities around us and raise money to help the things that we wanted to see more of, or we wanted to see less of, that we wanted to build awareness for. I think that most people would agree that traditionally when we need money for something that benefits our communities, we just go out and we get it together, right? We build our churches, our schools, our synagogues, our mosques this way. And that’s traditionally how we’ve done this for, you know, a millennia. So I started out with fundraising in the late Eighties around awareness of the Tulsa massacre and apartheid in South Africa as just a little bitty-itty teenager, deeply concerned about racial inequities in the world that I was on my way to inherit. And that was my first exposure to really what fundraising could do.

Mari Eva Mendes: Then later as I started my formal career, I worked my way through several marketing and communications roles and I rediscovered that I really needed mission-driven work. I couldn’t just do it for like a golf course or some boutique hotel. I needed something a little bit more behind it. And so I decided that I was going to use my marketing and communication skills for good. And I did that to issues that mattered most to me: advocacy of women, the LGBTQ community, communities of color on a variety of issues ranging from the most basic inclusion and representation to public health, environmental justice, and most recently access to arts educations in the public school system.

Farra Trompeter: And tell me how you first got involved with CCF because I know you’ve been involved. That movement, you know, Vu Le was writing about issues, I think back from 2015 or 2017 on his blog. And then the movement officially kind of… Folks in Seattle and the Pacific Northwest were having these conversations and then the movement kind of started crystallizing and inviting people to participate through Slack and different conversations in 2020. When did you get involved with CCF and what’s been your role with them?

Mari Eva Mendes: We all know NonprofitAF and I think if you were a fundraiser around 2016, 2017, you knew it, you loved it, you read it, you were so excited to see it because it really started talking about fundraising in a totally different way and applying a JEDI lens, a justice, equity, diversity and inclusion lens to fundraising. Fundraising as professionals, as fundraisers of color, and to the way that we raise money for communities of color who, of course, are disproportionately affected by many of the societal issues that nonprofits want to fix in the world. So I think I got involved really in about 2021 when they put out a call for the Global Council, which was when they really wanted to expand it and figure out how they were going to operationalize the movement. And I helped to support the strategic plan. In 2023 I was able to really help them to crystallize the Global Council’s retreat. It was a three-city, multi-city retreat. We had it in Los Angeles, Mexico City, and Toronto to make sure that council members from all corners of the world were able to attend. We put together a strategic planning process to really look at how we were going to think about our programming going forward. And then I left them with a beautiful plan and I’m still a great supporter of CCF. And I’m excited to see where this is going to bring our conversation and our discourse because it certainly has changed the way we think about fundraising, especially in the US, where most of our fundraisers are.

Farra Trompeter: Definitely. And the blog, Mari Eva was talking about is NonprofitAF, as in “as Farra”.

Mari Eva Mendes: Exactly.

Farra Trompeter: Dot com. So nonprofitaf.com. That’s not exactly what it stands for, but you can use your imagination, fill in the blanks. Now, I’d love to start off talking about why we put this conversation together. You were just talking about the conversation changing in the entire nonprofit sector, particularly here in the US but also around the world. And I wanna talk about this particular conversation and that connection between fundraisers and social change. There are a lot of things broken in how current fundraising practices work, and I’m just wondering if you could talk about maybe one you find the most problematic. I know there are so many, so dealer’s choice, what comes up for you?

Mari Eva Mendes: Yes, so many, so many. I’m gonna talk about it from a really personal perspective. I identify as a Black woman or a woman of color. And there just aren’t that many of us in fundraising, right? And we’re fundraising primarily for people of color and communities of color. So that’s been one of the areas that I’ve looked at the most over the past decade, is how little representation there is for women of color and people of color in fundraising and the communication sector. And I really think this has to change. It directly correlates to how we raise money in a culturally affirmative and transformational way. And I think that part of the problem, the larger problem with fundraising, going back to thinking about how big organizations were fundraising in the Eighties, for instance, the larger fundraising for Africa. It was very deficit-based. It was very extractive. There was nothing about the way that they presented the populations that they were serving, purporting to serve, that was very respectful, to be honest. And so I think that if you had more fundraisers of color who came from the communities that we were serving, you would get a different perspective on how to fundraise for them. And I think you would get more donors of color involved in the conversation because it is a myth to say that there are not donors of color that are not high net worth. We know that there are.

Mari Eva Mendes: And so I wanna talk about some studies that I’m familiar with. Candid did a study, I know everyone on this call knows about Candid, Candid.org, with demographic data from 2019 to 2024, representing almost 60,000 national nonprofits, showing that CEOs and EDs that are Black or Latino are respectively 15% and 6% only. And also the most likely to lead nonprofits with budgets that are under $50,000. It’s 44% under $50,000 led by BIPOC people. And over $20 million is only led by 27% BIPOC people. If we look at women of color, then this number continues to decrease. So then we’re talking about 14% of the larger nonprofits, $25 million and above. Zippia did another study going back all the way to 2010, using a database of 30 million profiles. And they shared data that showed that professional fundraisers and that’s writ large, right? Whatever your development professional description is in this larger dataset are overwhelmingly white at 77%, followed by 8% Latino, 5.3% African American or Black, and 5.2% Asian. This dataset actually shows a decline in Black fundraisers of almost 3%, which in 2010 were 9%. And so we haven’t even looked at gender parity and orientation. And if we put those numbers into this, then we see a pretty dismal picture of fundraisers of color. And so when we look at our own development departments, and those of you who are listening in today, I want you to do this. Just think about your own development departments, think about the demographics that you see. And then, I think the question to ask ourselves is, how are we going to have diversity and innovation in our fundraising practices if our teams are so homogenous? Because we know that diversity of thought is created by having more diverse teams.

Farra Trompeter: Well, thank you for sharing that and for offering certainly a very personal but pointed critique. And that is one of many I’m sure we could talk about. Now with everything in mind, with those stats you quoted, with the experiences you’ve seen, what you’ve observed, what lessons do you think fundraisers need to learn and maybe unlearn?

Mari Eva Mendes: I think that we really need to think about more ways to regularly include the communities we serve when we’re coming up with solutions. So I think that means that they are being joined with us when we’re talking about program development. They’re being joined with us when we’re talking about fundraising for their communities. I’ve found that sometimes people think that this is a programs area, it’s not a fundraising area, but I do believe that fundraisers are often at the forefront of supporting programmatic growth and innovative solutions. And so this is why we need a community-centric approach to revenue expansion. A good example of this would be having an advisory board of community members who are coming together to really look at the solutions from the ground up. I believe that they who are closest to the problems are closest to the solutions. And I think that if we start to listen and start to partner with our communities, and that’s for all fundraisers, fundraisers of color, whoever you are, I think that if we listen to our communities, we’re gonna come up with better programmatic solutions, better concepts, and then we’ll be able to really bolster and mobilize the community around raising those funds because they’ll own it. And we want them to own it. We want them to own the solutions as much as we force them to own the problems, which sometimes are systemic.

Farra Trompeter: Well, with that in mind, let’s go on that journey. Let’s say we can really shift into getting communities resources they need and investing in the solutions they have to solve the problems they face. How can we partner with donors in ways that honor their investments and make sure their resources are really going to systemic change? You know, again, sometimes this involves educating a donor, sometimes it involves pushing back or saying no, sometimes it involves really listening or educating them in new and different ways. I’m curious if you have any thoughts about how we can do that.

Mari Eva Mendes: I think first of all when we think about donors as more than just the extractive dollars that they represent to us as fundraisers, I think if we just look at them as partners in our work, we’ll have a much better result altogether. So that’s the first step, I think, is to be like: donors are our partners and we need to bring them along with our solutions. There’s the African proverb, “If you wanna go fast, go alone. If you wanna go big, you have to go and take the people with you.” And it’s a slower journey if you take the people with you. But I do believe, to your point, Farra, yes, there’s a lot of education that has to happen in that. I’ll tell you right now, I’m working on the annual plan for LEAP. And part of what I’m doing is trying to put together for our board, a wonderful board, trying to put together a picture for them of the different channels of fundraising and why they’re important because I do believe that if they understand fundraising better, they will be able to help me mobilize my program better.

Mari Eva Mendes: And so I think this is a small example of how we bring donors into that conversation, but it can be used a million times over. And so when we talk to our foundation program officers, also people, we need to bring them into that solution like that. I do think also that we have to look at infrastructure and capacity-building solutions, not restrictive program-based funding like we’ve seen in traditional models. I think this also applies to government funding and contracts for social services where programs are just barely making it with shoestring budgets and Scotch tape solutions. And I think if we really want change, we’re gonna have to advocate for it vociferously at every level of society. So that means when funding is getting cut in New York City for education, we have to talk about it and we have to be present to say, this is what it means when these dollars get cut, this is what the effect is going to have on our children and our youth.

Mari Eva Mendes: Finally, another example is Mackenzie Scott. She’s going out there and she’s putting trust-based philanthropy dollars and general ops dollars in the hands of experts that she has vetted, and organizations that she has vetted. Tried and true nonprofits that are just doing their thing. A wonderful example that I’m gonna share is Harlem United, who just got Mackenzie Scott funding this last year, and I really hope we see more of this, because if we let our experts be our experts and then we come into the solution offering what we can: resources as funders and donors, it’s a win-win for all of us.

Farra Trompeter: I’m gonna bring us to really the theme of today, which is, given everything that’s happening in the world, what would you say is the role of fundraisers now and how might that change in the future?

Mari Eva Mendes: We are the change makers, baby. We’re the ones who make it happen. Now I am hoping that there’s someday, someday that there’s no need for fundraisers like me. I would really like to be out of a job, but I don’t see that day coming anytime soon. I think we all need to remember the energy and purpose that got us excited and got us up in the morning in the first place. What led you to become a fundraiser? I know what led me to become a fundraiser. I was like, “Oh my goodness, what is this world I’m looking at? How am I gonna live in it?” No, no apartheid. No Tulsa massacre without awareness, right? So what is that thing that got you up in the morning and got you fired up and filled with determination? Explore that energy. Explore it every day. Meditate on it. Five minutes before you start your day and open your work. It’s really what’s gonna get us through the lean times and the hard times of grant rejections, “not right nows”, the setbacks that are always normal for fundraisers to encounter. We have to focus on the small wins and the incremental shifts and the big picture. And finally, I would say that you know, that revolution, it might not be televised, but I am pretty sure it’s going to be fundraised for. So here we are: if we want to see change in the world, we’ve gotta make it happen and we have to mobilize around it.

Farra Trompeter: Love it. Well, I don’t know what more we can say. So if you’re out there, second Mari Eva’s invitation, figure out your why in whatever you’re doing, whether you’re a “full-time fundraiser”, or it is part of 30 things in your job description, we all have some kind of connection to fundraising if we’re working in the nonprofit sector. So think about your why and think about how you could take on more of a spirit of partnering with others, of looking for ways to really look for that bright side and keep pushing for change. If you are out there and you want to connect with Mari Eva Mendez, please reach out to her on LinkedIn. We will link to her profile and many of the resources and studies mentioned here today at bigduck.com/insights. Mari Eva, thank you so much for joining us today.

Mari Eva Mendes: Thank you. It’s my pleasure. Farra.