(invisible) Labor
The scene: a small conference room in the Pacific Northwest. A few people sitting around a too-large table. A collection of snacks at the center and papers scattered about. Everyone is leaning in and craning their necks left and right in an attempt to follow the rapid-fire conversation. Some are nodding. Some are gesticulating passionately. Some are taking feverish notes. The previously quiet, measured space is in a sort of uproar.
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The question that sparked it all? Should a group of historically marginalized fundraisers be expected to educate others on ideas and topics inexorably linked to their lived experiences?
It’s not a new question.
In fact, if you’re a queer fundraiser, a fundraiser of color, a disabled fundraiser, or someone navigating any number of experiences, it’s a dynamic you’re likely more than familiar with.
It usually plays out like this: someone in your organization - often a supervisor - approaches you with a task related to your lived experience. Maybe it's an appeal email for National Coming Out Day, or a social media push for Black History Month. Instantly, you become the impromptu cultural ambassador. You're asked to review copy to ensure it "adheres to JEDI principles," or to step in front of a camera to provide "real representation." You are positioned as the in-house authority on all things Deaf, all things woman, or all things immigrant. You pour yourself into the work, hoping the final product will at least scratch the surface of what it actually means to navigate the world as you do.
The project launches, you get an optimistic pat on the back, and then - silence.
You fade back into the daily fundraising grind, waiting to be summoned the next time a heritage month or a tragic news cycle intersects with your identity. To make matters worse, the additional labor is completely uncompensated, and the lessons learned are rarely internalized by the organization itself.
Most of the time, it is as if it never happened at all.
In recent studies conducted by the Association of Fundraising Professionals and Race to Lead, data shows that - despite making up a tiny fraction of the philanthropic industry - one in three historically marginalized fundraisers reported experiencing high levels of stress due to identity-based labor expectations in the workplace. This, coupled with retention data showing historically marginalized fundraisers as over 40% more likely to leave a role due to workplace stress, paints a stark picture - the fundraising industry is hemorrhaging diverse fundraisers while also continuing to benefit from their labor.
And this labor makes an impact. Data from the Direct Marketing Association backs up what most fundraisers already know: segmented, personalized, culturally-competent messaging can drive up to a 760% increase in revenue compared to generic outreach. Nonprofits know that the era of the 'one-size-fits-all' appeal is dead. They invest thousands in CRM software to meticulously segment their audiences by identity, background, and culture - but software isn’t lived experience. It takes genuine understanding to accurately communicate the nuances of a community's relationship with wealth, charity, and legacy. To bridge that gap, organizations often turn first to their historically marginalized staff. These skilled fundraisers are reduced to human algorithms, expected to process and refine the organization's messaging until it is perfectly calibrated to extract capital from their own communities.
We know the toll this approach takes on the fundraisers, but what about the communities being solicited? Industry-wide data is scarce - largely because existing CRMs were designed around historically white donors and fail to capture diverse demographic data - but we know this for certain: for historically marginalized philanthropists, giving is inextricably linked to community trust.
While traditional donor bases might forgive a generic or slightly tone-deaf appeal, marginalized donors - likely hyper-aware of institutional tokenism - frequently operate on a "one-strike" policy. If an organization fails to communicate with genuine cultural fluency, it doesn't just miss out on a single gift; it risks permanently severing ties with the fastest-growing demographics of wealth in the country. This reality makes the invisible labor extracted from marginalized staff more than just a staff retention crisis - it is a massive donor retention liability.
How do you reconnect with a community that has been burned by a transactional, one-off appeal built on uncompensated labor? Realistically, you don’t.
So how do we address the issue of invisible labor among historically marginalized fundraisers and the risk it poses to our teams, our communities, and our industry as a whole? The answer requires moving past dry promotions and pizza parties and investing in tangible, structural change.
Compensating Expertise: If an organization relies on a staff member’s lived experience to secure revenue, that expertise must be financially compensated. Cultural competency is a highly specialized skill set. If a fundraiser is essentially acting as an in-house consultant for identity-based campaigns, their salary, title, and official job description must be updated to reflect that reality. True equity cannot be built on a foundation of unpaid labor.
Utilizing Existing Resources: Organizations must stop defaulting to their most accessible marginalized employee and start doing their own homework. This means allocating actual budget to hire external cultural consultants, paying community advisory boards, or simply doing the requisite research using existing literature. The burden of educating an organization should never fall by default on the shoulders of an employee who is just trying to do their actual job.
Building Pathways to Leadership: Most importantly, organizations must transition from extracting labor for one-off projects to integrating diverse perspectives into their core operations. If a fundraiser's lived experience is deemed vital enough to fix a campaign, it is vital enough to drive the overarching strategy. Creating clear, actionable leadership pathways ensures that historically marginalized fundraisers aren't just brought in at the eleventh hour to rubber-stamp a project. Instead, they are given the structural power to build the strategy, control the budget, and lead the team from day one.
For nonprofit leaders and organizations, the warning signs are flashing red. This extractive approach is not only unconscionable, but unsustainable. The sector is rapidly approaching a demographic and operational cliff. If the industry continues to treat the lived experiences of marginalized staff as an infinitely renewable, uncompensated resource, it will soon reach a breaking point where there is simply no diverse talent left to extract from. The hemorrhaging of these professionals isn't a hypothetical future - it is happening right now.
Systemic action must be taken immediately to change how this industry operates, or organizations will find themselves entirely locked out of the future of philanthropy.
But for the fundraisers navigating these realities right now, hear this clearly: you do not owe your institution your trauma, your culture, or your community ties. You are not a human algorithm, and you are not an in-house diversity consultant. Your value as a professional fundraiser is rooted in your strategic acumen, your relationship-building skills, and your ability to forge meaningful change out of centuries of messy data and outdated structures that were never built for our lived experiences.
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This conversation might start around a conference table, but it doesn’t end there. There is a path forward - both for historically marginalized fundraisers and the institutions that rely on their expertise. Reaching it, however, requires a difficult reckoning. We must finally face the realities of our work and answer the defining question of this industry: can our work continue if not for the invisible labor of the most marginalized among us?
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[ This article was written by Kato Lujan Camacho without the use of AI and with the support of an incredible QTBIPOC fundraiser community. All data cited in this article is derived from publicly-available sources and is understood to be accurate at the time of posting. Please contact us for more information about this article, the author, or the experience of historically marginalized individuals within the nonprofit philanthropic sector. ]
