View nonprofit success through a lens of equity

I have worked in the nonprofit landscape in Detroit for over 17 years, doing what I can to help remove barriers to financial security for communities of color.

I was also once a single mother on welfare raising my young son in Detroit, and very dependent on the resources and support of local nonprofits.

It turns out that they key to helping me move out of poverty was not how many nonprofits I was served by, but how well they served me in helping to resolve the underlying issues that were keeping me in poverty: Lack of education, developmental delays with my child, stress from relationship issues, the struggle to keep food on the table for myself and my young son, just to name a few.

Twenty-one years later, I have come a long way, and I now advocate for nonprofits to do more in showing their impact in the communities they serve, rather than showing simply how many people were served.

When it comes to nonprofit impact in communities of color, most data will show the number of people served, as opposed to how people are becoming better off as a result of individual nonprofit efforts.

According to a study conducted by Oracle Netsuite, a majority of nonprofit organizations struggle to effectively measure and demonstrate the impact of their work. Based on a survey of more than three hundred and fifty senior nonprofit executives: 71% considered outcomes measurement to be important and 76% said it was a top priority for their organization in 2019, however only 20% believed they were “very effective at demonstrating outcomes.”

This is very alarming, since federal and state governments grant nonprofits tax-exempt status precisely so they can use more of their profits to serve the greater good.

So, how do state and federal governments know that nonprofits are indeed serving the greater good? The answer is, they don’t. Federal regulations, for the most part, are in place to prevent fraud and the breakdown of trust between nonprofits, their donors and the communities they serve.

States have different requirements for reporting by charities. Some rely upon required reporting on Internal Revenue Service Forms 990, some require registration information, and some require independent audits and notification of certain transactions, none of which inquire about how the people served directly by the nonprofits are becoming better off because of their nonprofit efforts.

Some may believe that requiring nonprofits to provide proof of their program effectiveness should be the grantmaker’s responsibility and be used as a condition for funding a nonprofit. However, both private foundations and public charities are regulated by federal and state entities. So if the federal and state governments are not making it a priority for nonprofits to provide this type of outcomes data, why would grantmakers be concerned? Showing how people are becoming better off continues to become less and less important — and this is where the problem is.

Although many grantmakers do require periodic progress reporting throughout and at the conclusion of grant cycles, most often, nonprofit reporting focuses more on how many people were served.

There must be a true accountability plan for the organizations who are on the front line and have been charged with the responsibility to improve outcomes for communities of color.

The current White House administration should include in their racial equity plan the need to assemble a team of knowledgeable professionals who can develop a racial equity lens accountability plan specifically designed for nonprofits serving communities of color.

It’s going to take a village to help close the racial wealth gap, and developing a common racial equity lens monitoring process to help nonprofits who are struggling to collect meaningful data could be a key component to closing the racial wealth gap.

Quisha Brown is a nonprofit consultant who has been involved in nonprofit leadership for over 17 years in various capacities and has written extensively on the topic of racial equity lens logic models, progress monitoring using data and theory of change. She is the Author of Racial Equity Lens Logic Model & Theory Change and the developer of the Progressive Outcomes Scale (POS) Logic Model framework.