Are you part of an agency or program that does good? Is it related or unrelated to the Vincentian Family? There’s a justice issue that has implications for our our future. We want to do good. We want to do what we do well and we want to do it justly.

Jeremy Kohomban & David Collins write,

Across the United States, nonprofits struggle to pay competitive wages, especially in the human services sector. New York nonprofits have the third-highest prevalence of low wages in the private sector, behind food service and retail. This is in spite of the fact that its human services workforce is highly skilled and highly educated—two-thirds of workers have some college education, and close to half hold bachelor’s degrees or higher. One factor in the widespread acceptance of these low wages may be that, across the state, 82 percent of these workers are women, and 50 percent are people of color. Both of these groups typically earn less than their counterparts who are white, male, or both. Both women and people of color also tend to come into our workforce with higher levels of student debt, making low pay all the more burdensome.

The negative effects of poor pay are wide-ranging and institutionalized, and they pose an existential threat to the nonprofit sector as it currently exists.

Read and reflect upon this article at the Stanford Social Innovation Review. To do good, to do it well, to do it justly. That’s what it means to say #IamVincent.