This is the first interview in this month’s series celebrating the leadership of Hispanics in the nonprofit sector. I’m profiling several nonprofit leaders who I admire for the impact they make on their communities every day. You can check out all of the interviews in the series here.

Meet Alfonso Wenker, Director of Programs at the PFund Foundation

Alfonso Wenker is the Director of Programs at the PFund Foundation and a nonprofit blogger at From Our Perspective. In this candid interview, he shares his path into the nonprofit sector and his ideas for how we can move forward in doing the work of social change.

Age (or what generation you belong to)

I am a proud Gen Y –er, age 23, born in 1986.

City, State where you live

I currently reside in downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota.

How did you make your way into the nonprofit sector?

I started by doing student organizing during college at the University of St. Thomas – Minnesota. I was a leader with our LGBT student group and also worked with our student government around diversity and inclusion. Through the LGBT student group I met community and nonprofit leaders. In 2006 I was invited to a roundtable meeting of LGBT campus leaders. At this meeting we talked about the need for statewide work on college campuses around LGBT issues. We launched the Minnesota GLBTA Campus Alliance that month and I was one of its founding board members. As student co-chair of the organization’s first board I was in charge of finding funding, building partnerships, helping to plan a conference and securing a 501(c)3 for the group. It was a crash-course in “nonprofit 101” and I fell in love. I met so many people and was learning something new every day.

It was through my work with the Minnesota Campus Alliance that I met staff from OutFront Minnesota, Minnesota’s largest and most powerful LGBT advocacy group. During the 2006 – 2007 school year, as a sophomore, I interned for OutFront in the development department. I assisted with membership mailings and events as well as foundation and donor prospect research. I was especially intrigued by what I was learning about the foundations I researched. Philanthropy’s role in supporting social justice worked sparked my interest. I wanted to know more. That summer (2007) I volunteered at an event for PFund Foundation and met the executive director. I was so excited to meet the ED. PFund was doing LGBT grantmaking across the Upper Midwest and I had helped the Minnesota Campus Alliance and OutFront Minnesota prepare grant proposals to PFund in 2006.

Later that summer, I attended a conference for LGBT people of color during Twin Cities Pride weekend. The ED from PFund was there at the conference. He approached me with a flyer and said, “We’re hiring, you should think about it.” Two months later in August of 2007 (one month before my Junior year of college started) I was hired as the half-time programs manager for PFund Foundation. In this role I would facilitate grant and scholarship review processes, manage all the process files and paper work, and build the Foundation’s newly launched Racial Equity Initiative, part of a larger campaign by the national affinity group Funders for LGBTQ Issues, aimed at increasing the capacity of autonomous LGBT communities of color organizations through increased grantmaking and technical assistance.

What is your current position and day-to-day work?

In July 2010 I was promoted to director of programs at the PFund Foundation. In this role I provide oversight, strategic direction, planning and implementation of all foundation programs, including grantmaking, scholarships, leadership development, technical assistance and capacity building programs. Additionally, I manage the convening and reporting work PFund does. I most recently oversaw I project we were doing around LGBT aging that resulted in the report, “Equality as We Age.”

A large part of my time is spent working with LGBT nonprofits and programs working with them to strengthen the social justice work they do in the community.

What is your educational background and area of expertise?

I have a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of St. Thomas – Minnesota in journalism and mass communication with a concentration in public relations.

I’m currently honing my facilitation skills and enjoy guiding groups and coalitions through strategic processes to define values, outcomes, goals and objectives for their work. I’ve also immersed myself in practices and frameworks that explore how a successful social justice movement works at the intersection of multiple identities.  So often we label things as a gay issues, a race issue, a gender issue, a class issue. But, what about folks living at the intersection of a multitude of identities? What about the working-class Latina lesbian? Which issues are hers?

I get excited about building the capacity of social movements to address the pervasive inequities faced by so many folks.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy has reported that 82% of nonprofit CEOs are white. What does that mean for Latino leaders and other people of color who aspire to leadership roles in the future?

It may sound trite, but we need to keep showing up. We need to show up in the places where maybe folks think we’re too brown, or too young or too gay. We need to assert our leadership, claim our accomplishments and not be afraid of “raising our hand” when we might be the experts on something. Older and white doesn’t mean smarter or better. We need to continue to write and offer critiques of the sector. We need to apply for jobs that have traditionally been held by white folks. We need to tell one another that we are worth it. We need to have serious conversations with the nonprofits we are involved with about what they value around diversity and inclusion.

I recently had a moving experience while at a conference. I was sitting next to another young man of color and he was encouraging me to take a career risk. He is only 10 years older than me but he said, “when I was your age, I didn’t have any other gay men of color telling me I could take risks.” This was inspiring, and we all need to do more of this.
We need to support one another in taking risks and challenge the nonprofit infrastructure that for too long has paid lip-service to increasing leadership of color. It’s about accountability. It’s about exploring the intersections of inequity and inequality and recognizing that if the role of social justice nonprofits is to create a more just and equitable society for those most marginalized, then those folks need to be at the helm of organizations making the decisions for the betterment of our communities.

Together we must challenge being tokenized. We should resist taking a job or volunteer role to fill a diversity quota (I recently blogged about this at From Our Perspective) but pursue and take on roles that give us a chance to excel in our areas of expertise.

What would you like to see changed in the nonprofit sector?  How can we take action to implement that change?

We are in a unique political moment; a time where I think folks are expecting nonprofits to be strategic, focused and results-oriented.

It is no longer enough for a nonprofit to have a diversity policy, say it’s “welcoming to everyone” or receive training around a certain community. It’s time to move from theory to practice. Many nonprofits tout having participated in extensive diversity and inclusion efforts, yet we rarely see leadership at the top change. If our organizations are going to continue putting time and resources into “diversity and inclusion” then we need to hold them accountable. When an organization creates its development plan, we don’t say, “hey it’s ok you didn’t make your revenue goal” or when we’re evaluating our programs we don’t say, “well we didn’t exactly get more teens off the streets and into jobs, but we’ll do it next year.” No, we set fundraising and evaluation plans and goals and stick to them. If we don’t meet them we ask ourselves hard questions about why, we hold our leadership accountable to the plans and we make organizational changes.

Why then, don’t our nonprofits hold themselves to the same standards when it comes to matters around diversity, inclusion and equity? Why is it ok not to act on new plans or training on these matters but not when it comes to things like fundraising or evaluation we hold ourselves accountable to the plan?

Our nonprofits should have clear and actionable plans about moving people of color, LGBT people and women into key, visible leadership and policy-setting positions. And in the same way we track our success each year along the lines of fundraising, program evaluation etc., we should also track our success in transforming our organizations and the sector as a whole.

This is a shared responsibility. As folks of color and LGBT folks we need to mentor one another, encourage new leaders, provide opportunities to succeed and usher in new leaders and ideas. And at the same time, white folks, straight folks and men need to hold ownership over the sector’s success. Together we’ll need to be accountable one another, to our constituents and to the sector. We all need to own the transformation or it won’t happen.

I’m working toward a day when the sector’s power dynamics have shifted. I’m striving toward seeing more CEOs of color, more LGBT CEO’s, younger CEO’s, poor and working-class CEOs. In order for this to happen there will have to be a shift in how we value leadership, who we see as leaders, how we define what a leader is and what it is we demand of our leadership.

You can follow Alfonso on Twitter @alfonsowenker