Notes | 7 Questions to help figure out if you’re dealing with a performative nonprofit by Sanaa Ali-Mohammed

1. How do they treat Black, Indigenous, and racialized workers who speak out about white supremacy and racism?
   [Performative] “leaders tend to favour the ones who make them feel comfortable, who aren’t asking the organization and leadership to do better”
2. How do they approach internal interventions?
   [Performative leaders] “shy away from training and conversations about anti-racism, instead preferring to speak about equity, diversity and inclusion. However, you can’t have equity if you’re not dismantling oppression and talking about anti-racism.”; Performative nonprofits often adopt a “checkmark” approach of “let’s do training, so we can say we’ve done training.” 
3. How do they quantify their commitments and measure progress?
   “For a sector [like fundraising and philanthropy] that has become so good at quantifying things, that organizations don’t have measurable outcomes [especially for addressing anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism] is concerning.”
4. How are mistakes, oppression, and harm acknowledged?
   Performative leaders and institutions will often fail to acknowledge or challenge the broader systems — like imperialism, capitalism or settler colonialism — that lead to specific instances of oppression, and will instead focus on the resulting symptoms.
   ..without acknowledgement of harm caused and apology and reparations to those who have been harmed, institutions and leaders cannot form authentic relationships. ;
5. Do they demand trauma porn?
   Performative institutions demand Black, Indigenous, and racialized people’s stories of overcoming pain and adversity, in many cases in exchange for access to resources like funding.
6. Do they recognize the complexity of Black, Indigenous and racialized people’s experiences?
   Performative institutions often mask internal issues of racial discrimination through tokenism, which relies on the idea that all Black, Indigenous, and racialized people are interchangeable for one another.
7. Are they taking risks?
   Authentic allies are willing to take risks to interrupt oppression.

Anti-racism work is not just about training[…] It’s also about shifting culture and policies embedded across all levels of an institution, which requires allocating the time and resources needed to do so effectively.