People Centered HR for Nonprofits with MR Rolfe
2/24/2025
“If we think about the organization as the collective; it is the group agreements we’ve made about how we’re going to show up together, how we’re going to work together, how we’re going to hold each other accountable.
When you join that system, you’re consenting or opting into the group agreements of that system, that collective. HR is that literal liminal space between negotiating what does the organization owe staff, and what do staff owe the organization? That’s a really tough line to hold.”
People-centered HR isn’t a luxury—it’s essential. Learn how nonprofit leaders can build equitable, transparent, and humane people practices that strengthen their organizations, even amid uncertainty and limited resources. In episode 143 of Nonprofit Mission: Impact, Carol Hamilton speaks with Megan Rolfe about:
what it really means to practice people-centered HR in nonprofit and social-change organizations—especially small teams navigating limited resources, rising uncertainty, and growing demands for equity.
reframing HR not as a compliance or risk-management function, but as a shared set of agreements about how people work together.
equitable compensation, including the difference between living and thriving wages, transparency in pay practices, and
balancing risk, safety and boldness in today’s environment
Throughout, Megan emphasizes progress over perfection, collective responsibility, and the relief that comes from remembering: you don’t have to do this all by yourself, all at once, or exactly right.
Episode highlights:
[00:08:06] Finding HR by Accident—and Choosing It on Purpose
Megan shares how she came to HR through “incidental” people work in small nonprofits, where HR responsibilities often fall to operations or fundraising staff. Over time, she came to see people operations as mission-critical—and deeply underdeveloped in social-change organizations.
[00:10:05] Why Small Organizations Are Where HR Can Be Transformative
In small teams, even modest HR practices—job descriptions, performance evaluations, clear role expectations—can be genuinely life-changing. Why scalable, administratively realistic systems matter most where resources are tight and impact is immediate.
[00:12:50] What People-Centered HR Really Means
People-centered HR prioritizes transparency, staff voice, and clarity about shared agreements. Megan reframes HR as the “liminal space” between what staff owe the organization and what the organization owes its people—grounded in listening to those most impacted by people systems.
[00:14:30] Protecting the Organization Because of the People
Rather than using HR to protect institutions from staff, nonprofits must protect the collective—because people make the mission possible. This distinction is especially important in nonprofit organizations that have no owners, only shared purpose.
[00:18:52] Living Wage vs. Thriving Wage
The difference between paying people enough to survive and paying them enough to build stability. While thriving wages may not be immediately attainable for most nonprofits, they can function as a guiding light rather than an all-or-nothing benchmark.
[00:21:44] Start Where You Can: Entry-Level Pay Matters Most
Raising entry-level wages, even modestly, creates the greatest equity impact. Focusing on the base of the pay structure as a practical, values-aligned place to begin.
[00:24:52] Concrete Steps Toward More Equitable Pay—Without New Money
Practical actions nonprofits can take right now:
Posting salary ranges and benefits upfront
Ending salary history questions
Moving toward no salary negotiation at hire
Making pay bands and pay practices transparent to staff
These steps reduce inequity, build trust, and clarify expectations—without increasing payroll.
[00:29:23] Why Pay Transparency Builds Trust
When staff understand how pay decisions are made, it reduces suspicion and anxiety. Transparency doesn’t mean publishing individual salaries—but it does mean demystifying the system
[00:31:07] Navigating Risk, Fear, and “Safety” in Uncertain Times
As nonprofits face growing political, legal, and personal risk, how organizations can respond thoughtfully—distinguishing between organizational risk and individual staff vulnerability, and adapting policies accordingly.
[00:34:15] Scenario Planning for People, Not Just Programs
From travel policies to digital security to crisis protocols, nonprofits to plan for process, not perfection—knowing who to call, what questions to ask, and how decisions will be made when things go sideways.
[00:37:030] A Mantra for Leaders Carrying Too Much
Megan closes with a powerful reminder for nonprofit leaders:
You don’t have to do this all by yourself.
You don’t have to do this all at once.
You don’t have to do this exactly right.
The work is collective—and being strategic means accepting human limits while still moving forward.
Guest Bio:
Megan Rolfe provides small social justice organizations with the HR support they need to move work forward and impact change. Having spent 15+ years supporting nonprofits and small businesses focused on making the world a better place, equipping the teams that most need capacity for their vital work holds a special place in her heart
Important Links and Resources:
Blue Swallow Consulting: Resources including working towards a thriving wage and first steps towards more equitable compensation
Vega Mala Consulting: includes more resources on equitable compensation
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Carol Hamilton: I can’t count the number of times I have said that nonprofits are a collective endeavor by design. Usually this is in regards to my work with organizations on their strategy and strategic planning processes. I want the collective represented in that process and to bring all voices to the table.
I have to admit that I had not made the connection to how organizations manage human resources. That is probably because my concept of HR was pretty narrow from my experiences within organizations – the employee handbook I was handed and had to sign an acknowledgement of receipt on my first day, signing up for benefits, knowing how many hours I had in leave, etc.
My guest today on Nonprofit Mission Impact MR Rolfe broadened my perspective on the topic greatly. And her assertion that “the group agreements we've made about how we're gonna show up together, how we're gonna work together, how we're gonna hold each other accountable.” Is essentially a definition of organizational culture. i.e “How do we do things around here?”
I talk all the time about organizational culture – and how those group agreements are often not explicit..
MR’s frame that when you start at a nonprofit as a staff person – you are entering into an organization and thus you are opting into its group agreements. AND that HR is the negotiation between what does the organization owe staff and what does staff owe the organization? I had never thought about it quite like that and it sheds new light on the push pull between leadership and staff. Especially when you consider that many HR practices (often called “best practices”) are borrowed from the private sector. The private or for profit sector is based on a very different set of assumptions. First being in the name – for profit – some economists argue that profit is the primary and only purpose of any business. With that in mind, extraction of as much as possible from employees has been incentivized from the start.
For social change organizations working towards a world where everyone thrives, borrowing a set of assumptions, practices and tacit and explicit agreements that start with I am going to get as much as possible out of you for as little as possible is really problematic.
So then the question is – if we really want to live our values and center people as we do our work – what does that look like? And as MR says – not just in the ideal – but what is possible in the here and now.
I learned so much from this conversation.
We talk about what it really means to practice people-centered HR in nonprofit and social-change organizations with a special focus for small teams that are navigating limited resources, rising uncertainty, and growing demands for equity.
We consider how to reframe HR not just as a compliance or risk-management function, but as a shared set of agreements about how people work together.
We delve into how to work towards more equitable compensation, including the difference between living and thriving wages, transparency in pay practices, and
We also explore how organizations are balancing risk, safety and boldness in today’s environment
As you listen, remember as MR shares - you don’t have to do this all by yourself, all at once, or exactly right.
All right. Welcome MR, Welcome to Nonprofit Mission Impact.
MR Rolfe: Thank you. It's a delight to finally get to be here.
Carol: Yeah, it took me a while to persuade you, but I'm glad you're here now. Yeah.
MR: Yeah I've been a huge fan from the beginning.
Carol: Oh thank you. Thank you. I like to start out each episode with a question around what drew you to the work that you do? What motivates you? What's your reason?
MR: Like anybody in this work, I didn't necessarily grow up thinking I'd be a social change HR consultant or even just HR itself was not something that was obvious to me as a career path. Accidentally found my way here primarily because I was in small nonprofits and there's no HR in small nonprofits historically. So I was doing a lot of accidental or incidental hr even though I had like fundraising and operations roles. But certainly as I moved more into operations, I was doing a lot more incidental HR I think social change work, we just had this really underdeveloped attention to. The reality of that being a real role that's necessary for our operational wellbeing. It's been much more commonly understood probably in the past five years, and has been a real reckoning around. We don't have a bench to fill that space around how to do HR in a thoughtful way, in a social change way. And so I had the fortune of working joining the team in 2018 and really realizing that this is a group that specializes in equitable HR practices and you had Mala Nagar garage on, on your podcast earlier.
And, that was me really reckoning with, oh wow, I was doing all this in a way that was actually not really thoughtful or not as skillful as it could have been, and not in the most people centered way. And so I felt like I got this real. Apprenticeship and how to have a worker justice approach to her. And began to see HR as more of an intentional path rather than a piece of the work that might be part of other, my role itself. And then in 2020, I became an independent consultant and really honed in on a particular lane, which is small social change orgs because. Small orgs. I have such a deep affinity for, I've spent my entire career in small teams and any HR intervention in those teams is transformative.
It impacts everybody in those teams, and there's often the least. Attention to HR in those spaces. Sometimes it lets everybody get a job description that changes lives. Let's create a performance evaluation process. We've never had one before. So things like that are just so that the bones of building the work of how are we gonna do this together in a small environment and scale it so that it's administratively achievable because so much of the HR practices. That is more commonly known, like assuming you have a hundred, 500 people or a team of 20 HR people to do it. And in this case we don't. So what can we do that's still thoughtful and as equitable and inclusive as we can make it? So I think my reason is really ultimately about a deep care for people, but a belief that tends to. The work home is really, and then the hygiene of the work home is the way we do our best work. And that is real, there's a real essential need for that kind of attention so that our missions are more achievable. Neglecting that is to the detriment of our missions and our people and the work.
So I feel really strongly about that. And I also feel, of course, very strongly about how we do people operations in a thoughtful way. And not just borrowing the practices that have been ascribed to us by corporations, that don't really match the vision that we have for the world we're building.
Carol: Yeah you used the word thoughtful many times, which is really, I would say the number one word I think of when I think of you. Very deliberate and very thoughtful. And yeah, when we borrow those systems set up for corporations in the for-profit sector, oftentimes I think people realize, they think, oh, HR is about people and now, corporations are calling it the head of people or the vice president of people and culture and all these things. And at the same time when people, when a push comes to shove, it's more that those folks are actually there to protect the organization, not protect the, or the people in the organization. But I think in small org nonprofits, it's different, there's a kind of a different challenge or maybe a related challenge in that people come together around a mission and they assume.
We'll be fine. Like we really just have to focus on the work and the rest of it will work itself out. And that is not true. We know that. And then a lot of messiness happens that might be able to be prevented with more people centered here. So you call it people centered around her. What, how does, how is that different from your kind of.
Standard and also, that difference from what we've inherited from the for-profit sector.
MR: Yeah, I think you're right that there has been an assumption that isn't it enough that we all care about this mission?
Carol: Exactly. Exactly. I think that's it. I think that's it.
MR: Yeah. We all believe in this, right? But even that. There's tension around that too because Molly and I have talked about this in her session, but people show up with some in our social change work.
We have some really strong values we're showing up with, and sometimes those overlap with the org values and sometimes they don't. Sometimes we think I would do it this way, and why is my org doing it this way? But I also support your point about protecting the organization. HR protecting the organization.
I think that is true. What you're talking about is when the HR is used as a punitive force against staff or as a we're here for protecting shareholder investment. Like we're here to the CYA approach of HR rather than, and seeing people as literal resources rather than as.
Actual humans, like the emphasis on the human part of that work. And I think that there is a reality of. resources are about protecting the organization. If we think about the organization as the collective, and it is the group agreements we've made about how we're gonna show up together, how we're gonna work together, how we're gonna hold each other accountable.
And when you join that system, you're consenting or opting into. The group agreements of that system, that collective, and HR is like that literal liminal space between negotiating what is the org owe staff, what do staff owe the org? And that's a really tough line to hold. I think that it becomes really obvious very quickly to staff. Whether you're there to protect the institution for the institution's sake versus protecting the institution because you care about the people who are making the organization possible. And people as real people who are the essential component of doing the work together. I think people centered, HR to me, is one that pushes for as much transparency as possible. As much staff engagement as possible. So it's really a, taking a more of an orientation of listening to the folks who are gonna be most impacted by people systems which seems like a radical notion. It shouldn't be. But something for example, performance eval system. If, it seems reasonable to think that the people who are going to have their performance evaluated. Should have some say and some input into the system that's used to evaluate them. They might not be the deciders of that system. They certainly won't be the deciders of the outcomes of that system. But why not have some input process around how we're gonna be evaluated, how we set our goals like I think that. Or even, how do we make sure we have some upwards feedback mechanisms? Like how do we make sure that managers get feedback too from staff and how is that assessed and then internalized and shared back of what we heard and how, what we're gonna do about it. So that's what I mean by people centered having as much I don't I think people use transparency without a lot of clarity of what the, I'm
Carol: That gets bandied around a lot for sure.
MR: I'm not saying everything should be shared with staff. Sometimes that's to the detriment of staff. There are certain things that it's not fair or reasonable to ask staff to weigh in on or, have to hold. There are certain roles that have high levels of liability and risk and have to contain that, but thinking about who's gonna be most impacted? How do we communicate as much as we can? How is it clear? Even if we don't like it, people aren't gonna make the decision. How do we be as clear as we can about the decision so that people can and feel comfortable asking about the impacts of that decision.
So that we're not hiding anything. People won't feel like something's being hidden from them or that the decisions being made in a way that's not accounting for how it will impact the team.
Carol: Yeah, one thing you said at the very beginning, and if I didn't write it down, was how you think about the organization itself. And I think that's one of, over the years I've realized is one of the big differences between the for-profit sector and the non-profit sector is the fact that.
A nonprofit has no owners like that, that we're protecting the organization mindset in a punitive way or in a confrontational way with staff assumes that you're really protecting the owner of the organization. And in this case, as you're saying.
The organization is the collective, so it's a really different kind of baseline or foundation, if you will.
MR: Yes. Yeah. It is. There's the, we have, we put ourselves in a tricky position by professionalizing movement work, by, by, think it is labor, and in our. Capitalist system. We moved towards compensating it because it's real work. But then it did put us in a tough position of how we do this labor well together and and when we do this labor well, like how we're still ultimately, and a nonprofit is a vehicle that is subject to state and federal compliance and has certain. Under conditions under which we're doing the work together, you can always choose another structure, like a co-op or a volunteer group or some other space where you could create decisions and operations that don't have to be subject to those state and federal expectations. But the mission makes it complicated because, we're saying. We're saying like, here we are, we all believe in this thing. And we'll pay you for it. But we're not here to make money,
Carol: That is a rub that gets in our way a lot. Yeah, for sure.
MR: Yeah.
Carol: Which actually leads me to the next thing I wanted to talk about. Yeah, many organizations they're, they have been over the last several years trying to be more equitable in their practices and be more equitable in that re lane of compensation.
And even you've talked about, and with Mala talked about moving towards not just a living wage, but paying staff a thriving wage. Can you talk a little bit about what that means? What is a thriving wage and why is it different, and why is it important?
MR: Absolutely. Yeah. Living wage, I'll start with that is, is more commonly understood. It's there's some more shared or standard ways to define it and calculate it. MIT has a very well known living wage calculator. The EPI, Economic Policy Institute has a very well known living wage calculator, but even those two calculators will give you slightly different answers. They're similar, but they're pulling from similar data sources but they're close. So we have some general ideas like how we calculate living wage, and that's meant to cover your basic necessities, the minimum you need to survive in a particular geographic area. And there's been a long standing attention to trying to make sure that organizations, because nonprofits are just notorious for underpaying staff and looking at living wage data helps us put it more in context of this is the wage you have, but this is what it takes to survive in this. Space, is that the same? But it's not enough to just say that, we'll accept that we'll give our staff a surviving wage. I think benefits are always part of it because orgs are often paying another 15 to 30% on top of wages to cover insurance and other things. Helping staff understand that the org's total cost for them is not just their pay, but additional. Support is important. But, and so I think a thriving wage moves us more towards thinking about benefits too and all the other things that orgs provide for staff. Thriving wage is, I think, has historically been a way to try and aspire beyond living wage. It's more thorny because it's not, there's not a shared definition, there's not a shared way to calculate it. Everybody could have their own individual thriving wage. That varies quite considerably over time. I think even the idea of thriving is maybe troublesome . I talk about is it really thriving? Is it maybe a sustainable wage? Is it maybe a good enough wage? Because I think in the version of, the sort of ideal that we're striving for where everyone has enough, it doesn't mean that everyone's. All their wants and desires are met. We'll all still have to have some sacrifice and some sharing, that's the part of the collective element of the organization. And but your core needs should definitely be met and I think we should attend to as much as we can, advancing as much support as we can for staff.
And to be as aggressive about that as feasible. So I think with a thriving wage, I grapple with a lot. The way we use it, our proxy definition is it covers your bare necessities. Like you can pay your bills on time and you can afford the things you need, and you also have some discretionary spending and you also have some savings.
You're able to build savings. It's not the, it's an imperfect definition, but it's meant to speak to something beyond, I'm just able to pay my bills on time and afford the things I need. And I think for me, a thriving wage is really more of a guiding light for nonprofits. I don't think a thriving wage is within the realm of possibility for the majority of nonprofits.
Certainly the ones I work with, because nonprofits don't have access to wealth like they are in the, between, negotiating with the 18 rich people who have all the money, the, like whatever the 30 or so foundations that everyone's trying to get money from. and trying to redistribute the people's money to staff for leveraging a social change vision. And it's a really tough place to be. Like, how do you convince folks to make sure that everybody has enough to thrive as, like even if you look at cost of housing and cost of food it's eye popping. Like how much of a nonprofit would have to pay to make sure everybody has. Enough to afford a two bedroom rental with some high cost of living areas.
So I always encourage folks, first and foremost, just start with your base. What can you do to bring up your entry level wage? Because it's the rising tide that will lift all boats. The more you tend to that first level, other levels will benefit. And it's the, where the most economic impact is gonna be felt when even small increases make quite a bit of difference for folks at the entry level wage. And to know that a thriving wage is not kinda like racial. I think it's like racial justice. Like we're not gonna solve racism in our organization right now. We're not gonna solve economic injustice in our organization, but we're not gonna give up on it. We're not gonna not try to do something about it.
What can we work on, how can we work towards that as a long term goal and not as something that is the expectation of perfection right away.
Carol: Yeah, so it's not an all or nothing, but I appreciate the difference between, you can pay your bills. There's always, and I'm thinking back to when I was not very well paid and a single mom. And yeah, I was the classic case of, one bat, one big car repair was gonna throw me for a loop, like that, that the statistics about how many Americans are, one emergency thing away from, real disasters.
So having a little bit of cushion, again, like you said, it's not everything, your hopes and dreams. You're not winning the lottery but to not be, when it's just that bare minimum and you're so on the edge, you're still in the. A constant state of economic insecurity and worry and thinking about everything, having to think about stuff.
And yeah. Organizations like you said, aren't gonna be able to do all of it, or do any of the problems themselves. We're stuck in the system. We're stuck in. But you laid out some things that people could, that organizations could do that would move them in a direction towards more equitable compensation, even without actually spending a lot of money.
So what are some of those kinds of simple steps that an organization can take?
MR: Yeah, this is part of me. Affinity for small orgs who are just like, but we don't have any resources to do this. So that's okay. I really believe in not doing what we can right now. That's the thing we need to focus on. And so there's so many things that you can do. That will have more equitable pay practices internally immediately. One is that some of these are very obvious, but post your salary range on your job post. Most people are doing this now in part because it is required by many states. Including DC and Maryland and DC also, interestingly, they require if you're gonna interview someone, so if you advance someone past the application stage, you are required to share your medical benefits information with them as well. So I'm not sure everyone knows about that, but I think the more you can be explicit with folks before they enter your system, what your pay is, you set expectations clear upfront and there's also a little bit of internal. Pressure to do, to pay people well, to sufficiently recruit folks.
Carol: One I feel like has, that's, there's been a radical shift in, I don't know, the last five years, last seven years, where that definitely wasn't done and now is becoming much more standard.
MR: Yeah. Yeah. It really was a cascade.
Carol: I wish you would then go into RFPs too. It's just putting your budget in there.
MR: yes,
Carol: Just tell us what you have.
MR: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. It was just like a cascade of state laws that sort of made it so people couldn't get away with it anymore. The second piece there's also laws about this, but it's a little harder to observe, is not asking for salary history at the time of hire. You're not placing, you're not making someone's wage based on what they've previously earned. You're making someone's wage based on what you feel is best for their role in your current pay system. So it doesn't matter what someone was paid before. This is also illegal in many places, including DC and Maryland, but it's not illegal everywhere and it still happens sometimes. And then I think that, a little bit more, sometimes more tricky is like working towards having no salary negotiation at a time of hire. I think this is hard because, if in many organizations, sometimes it's seen as a test, whether you ask for money or not, especially if you're maybe an advocacy org or something, you wanna see whether people advocate or you wanna allow for discretion around people's particular circumstances.
Like they have a high pay and they wanna match it, whatever it is. But I think it's. While that, like the first thing, we are going back to the collective again, the first thing we do as a new staff person is challenge the pay system. We're like I should be, I'm gonna enter as an individual and I might wanna make beyond what that band is or beyond what someone who's been at the organization in this band for three years and has institutional knowledge has, we have so much, pressure to reward external innovation
Perspectives rather than reward institutional knowledge and and the growth that people have made in their role that I always feel like the first thing you should do is encourage people to enter the system that, in a way that honors the system because once they're in the system, you will honor them, and you're not gonna have someone else come in and break the system instead.
I think this is I, this is, known that the folks who tend to negotiate are folks who feel more equipped to, who often have more privileged identities, and it creates permanent wage imbalances. So working towards no salary negotiation, the time of hire. And the last thing I would say is making your pay scale public to your staff, which. Kind of scary for someone who works. And that's good. I'm, it's okay to be scared. It will result in questions and it probably will result in some reckoning or shifting that is necessary in your system because you want a pay scale that people feel like they understand and know where they fit in, regardless of which role they have or which band they're in. But if you are able to just at first just document your pay practices, how do we, how do you get promotions here? What kind of. What are opportunities for wage increases? How does that, how does, how do bonus structures work? Whatever it is, and making it clear to everybody. That is so important for folks to feel like they understand how their wage is set and how their people's wage is set, and they have confidence in the system. I would say, everybody has a federally protected right to discuss their own wages with anybody they want to. Organizations I don't think should be transparent about everybody's. Individual wages, that's a consent based process. So I feel like anybody can share their own, but organizations should make that transparent.
But they absolutely should make the bands transparent. And as much as possible, like the practices that are used to set, pay transparently and remind folks of them regularly.
Carol: Yeah, I feel like that. Those kinds of things can be such a black box I don't know. They all go into a conference room and have a conversation and then, people get letters that tell them what their bonus is and whether they got a promotion or not. And it's just a mystery how it all works in a lot of organizations.
MR: Yeah. Yeah.
Carol: Yeah.
MR: It feels, if you don't know how you got to the number you're making, then it creates a lot of doubt and the ability for the organization to be making fair and effort pay decisions.
Carol: Yeah. And I also appreciated what you said about the negotiation. Come on, that's really coming in with a vigil. Individualistic mindset. Now, again, it's individual, collective, how much sacrifice are you making? And that, people have been told over and over again, you have to advocate for yourself.
But it is interesting that it's just an assumption. It is, I guess another assumption that we borrow from a very, capitalistic perspective and
MR: Absolutely.
Carol: approach.
So thinking about the wider context that organizations are working in right now with unfortunately so many threats to the sector, especially the types of organizations that you're working with. Many organizations want to, or many are urging organizations to be bold and not acquiesce in advance.
When we're threatened, our natural reaction is to figure out how we can be safe. What are you seeing in terms of organizations and how they're managing this kind of pull towards bold action or managing risk and remaining quote unquote safe? I have to put that in quotes 'cause I'm like, I don't know about that.
I don't know what you do to make yourself safe these days.
MR: That is a hundred percent true. I think people are looking to staff, are looking to orgs to keep them site safe and a time in which orgs themselves are not safe. And no, not, yeah, we don't have ground right now. And it really is the theme of the year there. So much about their risk is changing rapidly over time, and that's by design.
I think that, let's just bombard the system with all the possible things that we could do so that you don't wanna do anything, or you think anything could be risky or a threat perceived as threatening. And then I think we also have lost a lot of the clarity around things we can rely on, like the NLRB or Equal Opportunity Commission. The courts. What is the law now? There's just, it's a lot more flexible and it's taking some time. It's not meant to withstand this level of challenge or interpretation. And so don't have a lot that we feel like we can turn to. I do think so. a lot of reactivity to anxiety about risk.
It's like generalized anxiety about the increased experience of risk, although it's probably more perceived than actual. There are very real actual risks. There are bodies in the line, right? There are people who are experiencing violence directly. And I think for a lot of, many organizations I'm seeing are also in the place of something we never really thought of. This didn't really impact us before, and now it does, and we don't really know what to do. I've been seeing a lot of this past year, a lot of pulse surveys, a lot of things like staff engagement and morale surveys because folks know that there's an increased anxiety on the team, but are grappling with what to do about it?
Because some of it we can't solve. It's not that, it's something that the org is subject to as well. And really getting clear on what exactly are the concerns and what's within the organization's sphere of control to address. I think this is where talking with staff again, staff inclusive processes is really important because some threats are organizational and some threats are personal.
And so I would always wanna know what are the risks that staff specifically are facing and what outcomes are they fearing? And not every staff person is gonna be experiencing the same risk at this time, and so working through what the role requires and how you can have creative adjustments to that during this period. An example would be. Like if your organization has a, and I talked about DC a lot 'cause we're DC based, but DC is occupied territory right now. It's not really the safest place for a lot of folks , including DC residents. But if your organization's not based in DC and your staff have to go to a conference in DC some staff don't wanna do that, for very understandable reasons.
And so there's a question of what can be adjusted? Can you have virtual attendance instead of in-person attendance? Can another staff member go who has less security risks, and then in the roles itself can we distribute workflows so that the folks who are less vulnerable or are able to take on more visibility or more in-person work, whatever it is. And I think organizationally you can develop protocols that sort of account for some of these needs that are in line with your org's mission. And some of them have already done so. The attention to digital security, I think, started in 2016, but there's been renewed attention now, for sure. But like things about, are we auto deleting emails or how do we save our files on a particular server particular drive that's not accessible to everybody? Also revisiting our travel policies and our security policies. Our workplace safety and security policies, and so many of these many orgs have been with us for a long time.
Think about like Muslim advocacy orgs, transgender advocacy orgs, immigrant justice orgs, like some folks have protocols in place or have had staff have to navigate, border crossings in un actively unsafe spaces all the time. The impact I think, is just more widespread. People will realize oh, it's everybody.
Who's vulnerable now, or certainly much more. Many more people, many more orgs are vulnerable now. And so I think about revisiting those kinds of plans, like what do we do? We need a doxing plan, do we need an arrest and detainment plan, and finding legal counsel. The legal field, like HR, is very underdeveloped in terms of movement work.
There's not a lot of movement lawyers out there, but I think having someone to call when shit goes down is just important to have on hand. And, there is so much scenario planning in that November to January timeline, but, and even though there was a playbook that we knew what the plan was, could any of us have really planned our way through this year?
Like it's been absolutely bananas. So I think the most important thing is you need to know what your resources are. Like who do we turn to? Who do we ask for help? And what your process is for when shit goes down. You don't have to have an answer to every single scenario.
Carol: Yeah. Yeah. I think having the steps and the questions and the, yeah. Who to go to. Steps. Think what are we asking ourselves? If you have that planned out in advance of those kinds of things, that helps a lot. So to close out the, speaking of a question, what's one question that you would wish more nonprofit leaders would ask themselves to think more strategically about how they manage staff and their HR policies?
MR: Yeah, I, I. I, I've got a hard time with this one because I think, I don't really wanna to the folks who aren't trying that hard or don't get it. 'cause it's if you don't really care about your team at this point, I don't think I can convince you to care about your team, but
Carol: Let's assume they do care,
MR: exactly.
Carol: They do wanna do it more effectively.
MR: I think right now I really wanna talk to people who are trying their darnedest and are really impossible. Situation and for the Ethical Compensation series that Mala Nagar One of the mantras we started the series with was three parts. It was, you do not have to do this all by yourself. You do not have to do this all at once, you do not have to do this exactly right. And I can feel the release when those words are spoken or written down because leaders are just holding so much and you can't actually solve all these problems by yourself perfectly. And I think on the corresponding side, for any staff who are listening to your podcast, I really want staff to consider this too, which is can I live with it?
And it might not be like if maybe it's the corresponding question for each of those. Which is what's my role to help? Can I accept that we can't do it all right away? And can I live with it not being exactly right, right now? Because the biggest thing I feel in the orgs that I'm working with and the movement spaces is so much inner turmoil between staff who really are wanting, spending a lot of energy internally on trying to fix things that the org might not be able to do. Or might not be within the realm of control or staff or, leadership's not equipped to resolve right now. And I think we don't need to do our opposition's work for them. We are in coalition, so we're not gonna be comfortable all the time. We're not gonna be in total agreement all the time, and we're not gonna be safe all the time, in a world that's so scary and actively dangerous for many of us. Seems like we're turning to orgs to be a safe haven that they're not
So I think I'm just my, I would for us to be more strategic together. I would like us to say what can we do right now? And can we accept that we're humans doing this work?
The best
Carol: Best we can.
MR: We have.
Carol: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much.
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