When “Neutral” Isn’t Neutral: What the Retreat from DEI Means for Nonprofits

Both sparked big questions about the future of journalism — how reporting will be produced, how audiences will find information, and how news organizations will adapt to a constantly shifting media ecosystem.

But one session focused on something more immediate for many nonprofit organizations — the retreat from diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

Across sectors, institutions that once made visible commitments to DEI or justice are quietly stepping back. Language is being softened and public commitments are disappearing from websites and annual reports.

In many cases, organizations are making these changes out of fear of legal challenges and political pressure. And while the conversation often focuses on the politics surrounding DEI, the reality for nonprofits serving Black, brown, LGBTQ+, and immigrant communities; women; and other specific populations is far more concrete. For them, the language of equity isn’t branding — it’s a reflection of why they exist. And when that language disappears, something deeper is at risk.

Naming the Communities You Serve

A new report from ABFE and Candid, Holding the Line: Black-Led Nonprofits and Race-Explicit Work Amid Backlash, offers an important window into this moment.

The report examined the experiences of more than 1,100 nonprofits and found that organizations led by and serving Black communities are significantly more likely to be advised not to mention race when describing their work. In interviews with nonprofit leaders, more than half said they had received either direct or subtle signals from funders encouraging them to soften race-explicit language in grant proposals or program descriptions.

For many organizations, this creates an impossible tension. Race is not a peripheral aspect of their work. In fact, interviews in the report found that 71% of Black-led nonprofits described serving Black communities as foundational to their mission, while the rest said it was critical because of the disproportionate impact of the issues they address. So when organizations are asked to remove or dilute language, they are being asked to reshape how they explain the very reason they exist.

The broader concern is not just semantic. When language that names inequality disappears, the underlying problems do not disappear with it. Communities facing disproportionate barriers to healthcare, education, safety, or economic opportunity continue to experience those disparities whether or not they are explicitly named in grant proposals. And as the authors of the Holding the Line report note, naming race and structural inequity is often central to the accountability necessary to change systems. In other words, if organizations working closest to inequities feel pressure to soften how they describe those inequities, what does that mean for our collective ability to address them?

What Funders Owe This Moment

The Holding the Line report makes one thing unmistakably clear — the organizations bearing the greatest cost of this retreat are the ones who never had the luxury of treating equity as a trend. Black-led nonprofits didn’t add racial justice language to their websites after 2020 because it was fashionable. Many have carried it in their names, their founding stories, and their mission statements for decades. They are not adjusting to a new climate; they are being asked to obscure who they are and why they exist.

And they are being asked to make these changes while already operating with less. Research cited in the report shows what many of us already know — that majority Black-led nonprofits have budgets substantially smaller than their white-led counterparts, and receive far less revenue. This is true for organizations serving the many populations mentioned above as well. Yet, they continue to deliver essential services.

The issue is not abstract. I’ve been on calls where program officers advised clients serving Black, Muslim, and Latino/a communities to change their proposal language in order for grants to make it past compliance. The message, delivered politely and with good intentions, was clear — the work is fine, but the words are a problem.

The burden this creates falls hardest on organizations that can least afford it. Rewriting proposals to strip race-explicit language takes time and capacity that small nonprofits simply don’t have. It requires staff to craft multiple versions of their story for different audiences — a kind of institutional code-switching that the report links to burnout, diminished authenticity, and mission drift. One organization interviewed in the report saw its funding drop from $300,000 to an estimated $150,000 in a single year after leaning into more race-explicit messaging.

Large foundations are not equally vulnerable to these pressures, and that distinction matters. The largest philanthropic institutions — those with significant endowments, legal resources, and national platforms — have considerably more room to absorb risk than the nonprofits they fund. When those institutions go quiet, or begin softening their own language to avoid scrutiny, they do not just protect themselves. They signal to the entire sector that retreat is the reasonable response.

But the harder question facing the sector is this: when the political climate shifts again — and historically, it does — what will we have preserved? The organizations doing the most proximate work in Black, brown, immigrant, LGBTQ+, and other communities are making impossible choices right now, negotiating their identity against their survival. What infrastructure, what trust, what capacity will still be standing on the other side of this moment? And what role do funders, intermediaries, and others with influence in this ecosystem want to have played in the answer to that question?