September 18, 2008 | Read Time: 4 minutes
The key for gay men and lesbians in finding their place in the nonprofit world, says Jeremy Kraut-Ordover, is to seek compatibility between an employer’s overall values and their own.
“The people who have an easy run with it are those who pay attention to a group’s mission,” says the 29-year-old gay man, who raises major gifts for the Phoenix Children’s Hospital Foundation.
To illustrate, he tells of a friend of his, also gay, who had a tough time working for a nonprofit employer and ultimately left his job.
His friend’s workplace difficulties, says Mr. Kraut-Ordover, did not arise from his sexuality. “It had more to do with him being liberal in a very conservative organization,” he says. The mismatch of sensibilities, he says, “just poured gasoline on an open flame.”
Even when the individual and organizational values fit, gay men and lesbians in the nonprofit world must navigate challenges as they do their jobs day to day.
When she was hired nearly three years ago for a communications job at the Women’s Fund of Miami-Dade County, Kim Diehl says, she found herself to be the organization’s only lesbian employee, and, as a black woman, its first person of color in more than a decade. “I just kind of modeled for them, ‘We’re all going to be comfortable with this,’” says Ms. Diehl, 33, who is now the communications director at Service Employees International Union Healthcare Florida, a union of health-care workers in Miami.
She felt welcome — at times, a little too welcome. “If anything, I felt over-exoticized,” she says. She terms the reaction as “overeager liberal enthusiasm. I was more amused than anything.”
But, she adds, “I was asked to give the woman of color or the lesbian perspective a lot.” Such experiences, she says, sometimes left her feeling a little “typecast.”
‘I Am Really Careful’
At Massachusetts Jobs With Justice, in Jamaica Plain, Mass., an advocacy project of the Center for Labor Education and Research, Jennifer Doe, 33, finds herself at ease with her colleagues. But outside the office, in her work as an organizer, Ms. Doe — who is married to Jennifer Rosenlund, 32, a case manager at Walnut Street Center, a charity in Somerville, Mass., that serves developmentally disabled people — she calibrates how much she can reveal about herself when dealing with the labor unions, grass-roots organizations, and religious groups her charity relies on to do its work.
“I am really careful about how I talk about my personal life,” she says. “I don’t want people’s personal hang-ups to interfere with our agenda.”
The degree of candor, she says, can change depending upon the audience. “When I deal with the Catholic groups, I’m especially careful,” she says. “When I work with the Unitarians, I don’t care.”
During his five years as a fund raiser and manager of volunteers at the nonprofit Arizona Theatre Company, Joseph Tapp, 31, never worried about being openly gay. But in his job as development director at Chrysalis, a group in Phoenix that serves domestic-violence victims, he says, he is circumspect around board members and some donors. Still, he thinks most people he deals with know he is gay. “I’ve never come out, but I’m not really in,” he says.
Though he has never had any negative experiences on or off the job related to his sexual identity, he says, his group’s mission prompts him to be cautious when dealing with the public.
His charity’s donors come from a broad range of backgrounds. “Domestic abuse really doesn’t know any boundaries,” Mr. Tapp says. “It affects all members of society. That includes the [gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender] community. That includes the right-wing conservative community, the left-wing liberal community.”
Charles Jensen, 31, says he never mentioned he was gay when interviewing for the job he took this summer as director of the Writer’s Center, in Bethesda, Md., fearing it might have an impact on the hiring decision — although, he says, it is common knowledge in his office now.
Still, like Mr. Tapp, he remains careful when dealing with donors.
“I would really hate the organization to suffer because someone that I need to have a good relationship with has an issue with that,” Mr. Jensen says.
“If I were in a different kind of nonprofit, that might not be an issue for me,” he says. “But because I’m in a nonprofit that really is dedicated to serving everyone, of all backgrounds, I really need to be as welcoming to the community that I would hope they would be of me.”
