The Myth of "Doing the Work"
Why equity language outpaced equity practice and what Michigan nonprofits can do about it.
By Dr. Crystallee Crain, Director of Nonprofit Impact Consulting, Nonprofit Network
Every nonprofit I work with can tell me what they did. The all-staff training. The land acknowledgment. The statement was posted in June 2020 and never revisited. "We’re doing the work" has become a credential in this sector, a phrase that signals seriousness while asking almost nothing of the organization that says it.
I want to be careful here, because I am not arguing that the work is fake. I am arguing that we have confused two different things: the vocabulary of equity and the structure of equity. One is cheap. The other is not.
What the evidence “actually” shows
The most-cited research on this does not come from our sector at all. In "Why Diversity Programs Fail", Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev analyzed three decades of data from 829 firms and found that the standard toolkit of mandatory training, hiring tests, and grievance systems often left organizations less diverse, not more, in part because compulsory programs generate resistance rather than commitment.
The nonprofit-specific picture is no better. The Building Movement Project’s Race to Lead Revisited surveyed more than 5,000 nonprofit staff and found that extensive DEI activity across the sector raised awareness of race and racism without translating into meaningful change in how people of color experience their organizations. Their tracking across 2016, 2019, and 2022 shows the same pattern holding.
Then there is money, where stated values meet actual behavior. Research from Echoing Green and The Bridgespan Group found that among comparably qualified early-stage organizations, revenues of Black-led organizations were 24 percent smaller than their white-led peers — and unrestricted net assets, the closest proxy we have for a funder’s trust, were 76 percent smaller.
Awareness went up. Trust did not.
Why this happens
Statements are easy. Training takes time. Real change means sharing power, through salaries, hiring decisions, board seats, funding, and contracts.
Sociologists call this decoupling: an organization that adopts the formal structures that earn it legitimacy while leaving its operating practices untouched.
It is rarely cynical. It is usually just the path of least resistance.
The honest counterargument
Training is not worthless, and the other side of this deserves a fair hearing. A large preregistered field experiment published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that a brief online diversity training did shift attitudes and produced some limited behavior change; the authors’ conclusion was that one-off trainings are not panaceas, not that they are useless. More recently, researchers at Harvard Kennedy School tested a behaviorally designed training and found it led to measurably more diverse hiring, because it was built to change one specific decision rather than a general worldview.
That is the distinction worth holding onto. Training attached to a decision can move something. Training attached to nothing moves nothing.
Four Questions instead of a "Training"
1. Who decides? List every hiring, budget, and program decision made last year and name who held final authority. Diversity in the room is not the same as authority in the room.
2. What do we pay? Publish internal salary ranges. Compare tenure, raises, and promotions by role. You will learn more in an afternoon than in a year of workshops.
3. Where does our money go? Vendors, contractors, consultants, banking, insurance. Procurement is an equity practice almost nobody tracks.
4. How do we recruit our board? If board seats come exclusively from current members’ networks, the composition of your board is a mathematical result, not a mystery.
The small-organization advantage
I hear from executive directors across Jackson, Hillsdale, and Lenawee counties that this is work for large institutions with a chief diversity officer and a budget to match. I would argue the opposite. A ten-person organization can rewrite its hiring rubric in a single staff meeting. A large system cannot. Scale is a barrier to structural change, not a prerequisite for it.
And in a moment when many funders and institutions are retrenching, organizations that made structural changes are better positioned than those that made statements. Researchers at Stanford studying how organizations are navigating the current backlash describe a period of "closed doors" and when the obvious route is blocked, what survives is the work embedded in policy and process, not the work embedded in messaging.
A better standard
Here is the test I would offer any board that wants to know whether it is doing the work: point to something you can no longer do because of a decision you made. A hiring practice you retired. A budget line you moved. A power you gave up.
If nothing comes to mind, you have a vocabulary. The work is a ledger. Your actions are the record.
Sources
Why Diversity Programs Fail (Dobbin & Kalev, 2016) — Harvard Business Review
Race to Lead Revisited: Obstacles and Opportunities in Addressing the Nonprofit Racial Leadership Gap — Building Movement Project
Race to Lead Survey Key Findings: 2016–2019–2022 — Building Movement Project
Racial Equity and Philanthropy: Disparities in Funding for Leaders of Color — Echoing Green & The Bridgespan Group
The Mixed Effects of Online Diversity Training (Chang et al., 2019) — PNAS
Behaviorally Designed Training Leads to More Diverse Hiring (Science, 2025) — Harvard Kennedy School
How DEI Can Survive an Era of Backlash — Stanford Graduate School of Business
If you need more information or would like to speak to Dr. Crystallee Crain or one of our consultants about coaching or consulting work, or you need assistance for your organization, please contact us here.