Embedding Inclusive, Equitable Diversity Practices in Nonprofit Organizations: Developing Policy to Account for System Dynamics

Abstract

To offer guidance to nonprofit leaders desiring to leverage diversity for inclusion, performance, and equity, we develop a framework for a comprehensive, mission-enhancing policy. The policy fits nonprofit organizations’ distinctive characteristics of shared mission attainment and values focus among members. The framework proceeds from an extensive transdisciplinary review and synthesis of empirical literature. It focuses on lived actions in the form of organizing practices that leaders can institute and sustain. Through a combined lens of practice theory, intergroup contact theory, and systems dynamics, we identify everyday workplace practices that undermine inclusion, performance, and equity. We detail how these anti-inclusive practices produce systemic resistance to current diversity policies by operating in vicious cycles that continually reproduce organizational and social problems. We specify a combination of practices for accountability, inclusive interactions, and personalized socialization that address the anti-inclusive practices and produce virtuous cycles of inclusion among organizational members. Illustrative cases demonstrate how the combination of practices has been effective in producing inclusion and attitude change in nonprofit organizations. To overcome policy resistance, these cases and other evidence suggest nonprofit diversity policy should emphasize inclusive values and mission-attainment rather than legal compliance.