Are our purpose-oriented foundations/PSOs worsening income and wealth gaps through its traditional compensation systems? 

What does it mean when philanthropy, as a sector, hires more staff representative of the communities it serves but doesn’t change how they pay their staff? 

How can we advocate for better compensation for ourselves in a way that doesn’t reinforce competitive markets and disadvantage our colleagues? 

In this highly interactive workshop, learn how to improve your workplace compensation using new organizational development understandings about pay equity.

Starting with an exploration into how traditional compensation systems prevalent in the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors affect staff’s sense of deservingness and power, we’ll learn how philanthropic staff have challenged their workplaces to be more values-aligned in their pay practices. 

Building on insights from social science research on pay equity, we’ll support participants to identify their material needs, strategies to be in solidarity with one another, and specific compensation changes that bring economic justice into the sector, not just outside of it. 

Lunch & Learn participants will leave the workshop with more knowledge about how even the most progressive parts of the sector are leaving people behind, deeper insights into sector staff dynamics and norms that feed into inequity, and concrete tools to make changes for themselves and their peers. 

About our Facilitator

Richael Faithful (they/them) is a culture worker, movement lawyer, and traditional healer from Washington DC. They are Borealis Philanthropy Racial Equity to Accelerate Change (REACH) Fellow with Vega Mala Consulting for their work on equitable compensation and culture change. Faithful is a leading facilitator in Washington DC’s philanthropic community, and has served on national projects including with Open Society Foundation, Omidyar Network, and PEAK Grantmaking. In previous years, Faithful was an invited facilitator at National EPIP conferences. They currently serve as a Board of Instigator with Diverse City Fund, a local fund supporting visions of people of the global majority in DC to create system change.