Four years ago, Judi Taylor Cantor, in charge of planned giving at a New England university, rented a car for what she thought would be an ordinary visit with a longtime donor. The man wanted to add money to a previous gift.
“After lunch we returned to his home, where we discussed the gift contract and he gave me a check,” recalls Ms. Cantor, now a fund-raising consultant in Westwood, Mass. Up to that point, “there was nothing unusual about the visit.”
But just as she was leaving, she says, “he helped me with my coat and then grabbed my breast and tried to kiss me—very dramatically. I was horrified. He immediately apologized, but I couldn’t talk.”
Instead, Ms. Cantor says, she fled to her car. “I was shaking. I was really shocked and frightened. It came out of the blue.”
Unwanted sexual overtures are shocking in part because so few people openly discuss them in the nonprofit world. But many fund raisers at colleges and other nonprofit organizations say that it is not unusual for donors, board members, and others to subject fund raisers to inappropriate comments and unwanted advances.
“It is a fairly common problem, unfortunately, and I am not sure it is going to go away,” says Bruce Flessner, a Minneapolis fund-raising consultant. “Just because you are doing good work doesn’t mean that bad things aren’t going on.”
Making the problem all the more vexing is that it often involves people a charity has little control over.
“In a typical workplace sexual-harassment incident, you have a male supervisor harassing a female subordinate,” says Caren Goldberg, an assistant professor of management at American University who has conducted numerous studies on sexual harassment. “In the world of philanthropy, the donor has all the power.” That makes “it much more difficult,” she says, “since you can’t fire them.”
Not only does a charity have little control over individual donors and other benefactors, but it also often depends on those people for major donations. In at least three instances uncovered by The Chronicle, fund raisers who complained about unwanted advances say their institutions ended up losing big gifts, including one of $2-million.
Vulnerable Situations
Sexual harassment can occur in any job, but certain aspects of fund raising make it more likely. For one thing, women now dominate the profession. Three-fourths of the 30,000 members of the Association of Fundraising Professionals are female.
In many cases, those women are appealing to older, powerful men for large donations. To succeed, fund raisers must build long-term relationships with donors. And they often visit donors in their homes or meet them in social settings where alcohol and personal information are plentiful.
To be sure, unwelcome sexual advances are not a daily occurrence for most fund raisers. But the problem happens often enough that they and the organizations that employ them should have better guidance on what they can do to prevent and deal with harassment, says Polly Aris Stamatopoulos, a Washington consultant to nonprofit groups.
Ms. Stamatopoulos says she has rejected inappropriate sexual requests from donors and observed several incidents in which other donors or trustees made sexual overtures toward fund raisers she supervised. People who raise money for a living, she says, should be required to take “a class in the sexual politics of fund raising.”
The Association of Fundraising Professionals does not offer such training routinely, but it adopted a “fair-behavior policy” in 2005 to protect its own workers and people in its chapters from sexual harassment.
‘An X on Your Head’
Still, the subject of harassment is so difficult for most fund raisers to discuss that very few of the more than 20 people who told The Chronicle they had faced the problem were willing to allow their names to be used.
“It is a disempowering experience,” says one woman. “I do not want to publicly acknowledge weird experiences in my career. It puts an X on your head. And I do not want people to think I brought it on myself.”
Despite their reluctance, nearly every one of the fund raisers who were interviewed said they wanted to speak about their experience in hopes that doing so would prompt more discussion about how to handle unwelcome sexual overtures.
Most of the instances The Chronicle uncovered involved women harassed by male donors, trustees, or grant makers, but two men said they had been victims of unwanted advances.
One of them, a Tennessee fund raiser who spoke on the condition that neither he nor his employer at the time be named, recalls a female donor he had visited many times. One evening she invited him to dinner at her club to discuss a large gift; at the end of the evening, he escorted the donor home, and she invited him in.
“She had never been inappropriate in the past, so I thought it was an innocent invitation,” he says. But when the donor lit some candles and then sat down on the arm of his chair, leaning over him suggestively, he says he realized she was trying to seduce him. He abruptly excused himself.
A fund raiser in the San Francisco area, who requested that her identity be withheld, says she is considering quitting her new job over a “power imbalance” with an official who makes grants for a local corporation.
She met him in a previous job, but now that she is approaching him for a large gift, he wants more than a professional relationship, she says.
“A relationship I’d considered mutually respectful was instantly reduced to a ‘sexual strings attached’ power struggle,” the fund raiser says. “What leverage to demand appropriate treatment do I have when he’s the one with the money and I’m the one with my hand out? As the only fund raiser on staff, you do not want to go to the board and say you are in danger of not landing the biggest gift.”
She says that she gently rebuffed the grant maker’s advances, pointing out that they both are married, but that he has continued to ask her out. “I have felt unbelievably alone and unsure how to deal with this situation,” she says.
Not Much Guidance
Other fund raisers who have endured unwanted sexual advances say they were surprised at how little guidance is available about dealing with the problem.
“I remember looking online to try and find some wisdom from veteran fund raisers, and I couldn’t find anything,” says a 30-year-old fund raiser.
She was asked to seek a donation from an older man who has provided millions of dollars to her institution. After she had met with him several times, he asked her to go on a trip with him, made other inappropriate gestures, and bombarded her with daily e-mails and phone calls. “He began to take up so much of my time that the rest of my portfolio of donors was suffering,” she recalls
The donor ignored her repeated efforts to curb his amorous attentions, even becoming “angry and defensive.”
She put up with his behavior for more than two years, she says, because “my newness to the field and youth impacted how I handled the relationship. I was proving myself professionally. I wanted to keep raising as much money as possible.”
In hindsight, she adds, “this was not the right thing to do, but it is hard when this kind of thing gets in the way of your performance.”
When the fund raiser decided that she could no longer interact with the donor, she told her supervisors. They readily agreed to assign another fund raiser to work with the man, who has made no further gifts to the institution since then.
Charity’s Responsibility
While some colleges and other nonprofit groups have formal policies in place to help fund raisers and other employees deal with sexual harassment, many charity workers find that the policies do not solve the problem.
A fund raiser in her 20s named Dana, who requested that her last name be withheld, says the California organization where she works has such a policy and has provided training to help its employees recognize and protect themselves from sexual harassment.
Still, Dana says, she has been the target of suggestive comments and was once offered unsolicited sexual advice from a donor old enough to be her grandfather. Another time she managed a charity event at the home of a donor who handed her a name tag and told her to wear it “to give everyone an excuse to look at my chest.”
Because she and another colleague brought up those and other incidents at a recent staff meeting, she says, the organization’s top executives are considering asking board members to sign an agreement to abide by a conduct policy that explicitly bans sexual harassment and other inappropriate behavior.
While such measures will not prevent every sexual overture a fund raiser may encounter on the job, colleges and other nonprofit organizations need to be prepared to take action when their employees face harassment, says Noreen Farrell, managing attorney at Equal Rights Advocates, a San Francisco group that helps women fight bias.
Under federal law, she says, employers can be held liable if they are aware that clients or customers are harassing employees and take no steps to stop it. The same standards would apply if donors, trustees, or others are harassing fund raisers, Ms. Farrell says.
“The employer should step in rather than put the employee in this uncomfortable position,” she says. “Once the group has been made aware of it, they need to intervene.”
To help nonprofit organizations and their employees handle inappropriate sexual behavior, professional organizations for fund raisers should offer training to their members, says Ms. Cantor.
“We come in contact with hundreds of donors, and the odds are that this will come up somehow in your career,” she says. “This calls for us to stand up to this and say that we need more instruction about what to do about it.”
Holly Hall is features editor of The Chronicle of Philanthropy.
Coping With Unwelcome Sexual Advances: a Discussion for Fund Raisers
Join us on Wednesday, July 14, at noon U.S. Eastern time for a live online discussion about how fund raisers can prevent and handle sexual harassment and other unwanted overtures from donors, board members, and other charity supporters.
