Charities Set Differing Rules for Employees’ Relationships

In the wake of the American Red Cross’s dismissal last month of its leader, Mark W. Everson, over his affair with the

leader of a Red Cross affiliate, charity employees may be taking a closer look at their organization’s policies about romantic and other personal relationships between workers.

The policies include forbidding supervisors to date those they supervise, requiring partners to disclose their relationships to avoid conflicts of interest, warning about harassment, and cautioning about playing favorites, as well as placing no restrictions on employees’ consensual intraoffice love lives.

For example, the policy of Habitat for Humanity International, in Americus, Ga., forbids a supervisor from “having a romantic/dating relationship with any subordinate or anyone in his or her management chain, even if the relationship is consensual,” writes Duane Bates, the charity’s director of public and media relations, in an e-mail message to The Chronicle. The policy is spelled out in Habitat’s employee handbook and distributed to newly hired workers. Employees must sign an acknowledgment that they have received the handbook. “We believe this policy is in line with practices at other organizations,” writes Mr. Bates.

Habitat has experienced public turmoil in the past related to sexual allegations. In January 2005, Habitat’s board fired the group’s president and founder, Millard Fuller, following an investigation of charges that he had engaged in improper conduct with a former female Habitat employee. The board dismissed the allegations, but cited Mr. Fuller’s continuing public comments about the case as being detrimental to the organization.

The United Way of America, in Alexandria, Va., focuses on the dangers of nepotism in its human-resources policy, stating that “favoritism based on family or close relationships is unfair to other employees.” The policy requests that employees “do not supervise or exercise management authority over staff with whom they have a relationship that could adversely affect impartiality.” It also forbids the employment of workers who are related by “blood or marriage” to current United Way employees “except under special circumstances that are clearly in the best interest of UWA and are disclosed immediately to the Ethics Committee of the UWA Board of Governors.” The code also states that “the appearance of favoritism is easily perceived, even in some cases of friendship that otherwise are harmless.”

The United Way went through its own scandal in the early 1990s when its national leader, William Aramony, was forced to step down amid widespread criticism of his spending practices and efforts to place close associates in jobs at the charity. Mr. Aramony ended up serving time in prison for defrauding the organization.

Avoiding Conflicts

The approach used by Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, in Philadelphia, is to emphasize harassment as a danger, including an antifraternization stipulation in its overall antiharassment policy. Employees are required to sign the policy to indicate that they accept the conditions, and the code is also part of online training that all of the charity’s workers are required to take every two years, according to Jill Godsey, the national organization’s marketing coordinator.

In addition, writes Ms. Godsey in an e-mail response to The Chronicle’s inquiries, the charity “also employs an outside company to handle 24-hour anonymous and confidential submissions of potential violations of our harassment and code-of-ethics policy.”

Communities in Schools, in Alexandria, Va., has a zero-tolerance policy for sexual harassment, “and that’s pretty much all we have to say on the subject of dating,” says Deborah Veney Robinson, the group’s vice president of communications. She notes that romantic relationships have never created problems for the organization.

However, she says the group does operate on an unwritten understanding that relationships between bosses and those they supervise could lead to conflicts of interest.

At plenty of charities, officials say that workers often develop long-term romantic relationships.

At Catholic Relief Services, in Baltimore, “we have a number of people who have found their mates and spouses in the organization, but I don’t think we’ve ever had a case where we had a supervisor and a subordinate become involved,” says Dave Piraino, executive vice president for human resources.

The group doesn’t have a formal policy on intraoffice dating. “We try to follow Catholic social teaching, which requires respecting the dignity of the individual,” Mr. Piraino says. “Generally, our policy is we do respect the individuals, we do respect their privacy.”

Making Rules

Rules guiding employee interaction are essential for charities, says Scott Leff, director of consulting at the Bayer Center for Nonprofit Management at Robert Morris University, in Moon Township, Pa. “A prudent organization and a responsible board need to pay attention to this issue if it comes up,” says Mr. Leff. However, he adds, groups need some flexibility: “Would I say that absolutely no agency should allow married people or people in a romantic relationship to work there? No.”

Instead, charities should consider instituting policies that require employees to report relationships, Mr. Leff says. In his view, the biggest risks that office romances pose are financial. “Any financial-control system tends to be much more vulnerable when there is collaboration,” he says. “If you have a romantic relationship between people, it potentially opens the door to collaboration.” One important safeguard, he says, is to ensure that employees in a relationship do not have access to the same funds.

But Mr. Leff also warns against knee-jerk reactions to the Red Cross situation, and worries that small nonprofit organizations could be burdened with yet another regulation. “So many nonprofits have fewer than 10 people,” he says. “They are getting all of these layers of policy and planning and business-school sophistication that they’re being asked to comply with.”