By Sterrin Bird, Wingspan Philanthropy

Something happened to me recently that I’ve been turning over in my mind — not because it wounded me, though it did sting, but because of what it revealed. About one person. About one organization. And about an industry I have given 35 years of my life to.

I was removed from an advisory council I helped build — quietly, without notice, without a conversation, without the basic courtesy of a phone call or an email. I found out the way you find out about things people hope you won’t notice: by stumbling across the absence where my name used to be.

When I reached out, I learned that one person had made this decision. Alone. No vote. No process. No governance of any kind. The reason? My views don’t align with the organization.

And then came the line I haven’t been able to stop thinking about:

“Nobody looks at that.”

As if invisibility were the same thing as integrity.

The Personal Part

I want to be honest about the personal dimension of this, because I think pretending it wasn’t personal would itself be a kind of dishonesty.

I have invested significantly in this work — financially, professionally, and reputationally. I showed up. I contributed. I believed in what the organization claimed to be building. And I was erased without a conversation because someone found my voice inconvenient.

That is not nothing. It is a breach of trust. And I think we do ourselves a disservice when we pretend that professional betrayals don’t land somewhere real.

But here is what I also know: the sting fades. What doesn’t fade is the clarity it produces.

Being treated this way tells me something important about who I was in a room with — and more importantly, confirms that I was right to keep saying what I’ve been saying.

The Professional Part

I have spent the better part of the last several years making one argument, in different forms, across different rooms: that how we treat people is the only true measure of our values.

Not our mission statements. Not our websites. Not the advisory councils we assemble to signal our commitment to diverse perspectives.

How we treat people when it costs us something — that is the whole ballgame.

What happened to me is a small story. One person, one decision, one advisory council. But it is a precise and perfect illustration of the larger problem I see everywhere in this sector:

We have confused the performance of values with the practice of them.

Organizations build advisory councils to demonstrate that they welcome diverse voices. They publish values statements about authenticity and relationships and belonging. They give keynotes about the importance of trust.

And then, when a voice in the room says something inconvenient, one person quietly removes her and hopes nobody looks.

What “Nobody Looks at That” Actually Means

I keep coming back to that phrase because it is so revealing.

It is the logic of someone who has never genuinely internalized the values they espouse. It is the reasoning of a person who understands accountability only as the risk of being caught — not as an orientation toward doing right by people regardless of who is watching.

In fundraising, we talk constantly about donor trust. We talk about stewardship. We talk about the sacred nature of the relationship between an organization and the people who invest in its mission.

But stewardship is not conditional on whether the donor is paying attention. You don’t honor a relationship only when someone is looking. That is not stewardship. That is performance.

The same logic applies here. You don’t treat a colleague, a contributor, or an advisor with dignity only when there are witnesses. If the first question you ask before making a decision is “will anyone notice?” — you have already answered the more important question.

What This Asks of All of Us

I am not writing this to relitigate what happened to me. I have said what needed to be said, and I have moved on.

I am writing this because I think our sector has a truth-telling problem. We are very good at the language of integrity and very inconsistent at its practice. And the gap between those two things is exactly where donor trust erodes, where staff burn out, and where the credibility of our work quietly collapses.

If you lead an organization — any organization — I want to ask you one question:

How do you treat people when you think nobody is looking?

Because somebody always is. And even when they’re not, it matters.

The quality of your character is not determined by your audience. It is determined by the thousand small decisions you make in the absence of one.

This sector is asking donors, volunteers, and communities to trust us with their resources, their time, and their hope. We do not get to ask for that trust and then operate on “nobody looks at that” logic when it’s convenient.

We just don’t.

I’m still here. Still saying the same things. If anything, more certain than ever that they need to be said.

Sterrin Bird, CFRE
Founder, Wingspan Philanthropy
sterrin@sterrinbird.com