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Hiring Job Candidates with Criminal Convictions: Unlock the Possibilities
Like many employers, you may follow a default position of not hiring job seekers who have a past criminal conviction, but such a one-size-fits-all policy can not only get you in trouble with the law, it could also eliminate some excellent candida …
Ditch Your Board Composition Matrix
You know the board matrix: it has a list of skills and competencies that are “supposed” to be on the board, such as legal, marketing, HR, fundraising, finance. And typically there are also demographic qualities, such as gender, race, age. The boa …
Is Coming to Work Required to Keep My Job?
Dear Rita in HR: I have an employee with a disability who is requesting intermittent leave as an accommodation. She says she can’t tell ahead of time when she’s going to be able to come to work. It seems to me that just coming to work is an “essential …
Can We Discriminate in Favor of People with Disabilities?
Dear Rita: Our agency serves clients with mental health needs, and we like to provide employment opportunities to individuals with mental illness. Can we say in the job advertisement for peer counselor that the applicant should have a mental illness? W …
Six Easy, Nearly-Free Ways to Be More Disabled-Accessible
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) regulations are undeniably intimidating and seem so expensive to implement, but disabilities activist Mary Lester says there are simple ways to make your office and program sites more accessible without busting …
Emma’s Disability is Hurting Performance: Can We Fire Her?
Dear Rita: Emma has worked as a case manager for our nonprofit for over 15 years. Lately, she has outbursts with clients and coworkers and she’s way behind on her paperwork. We designed a Performance Improvement Plan. A couple of weeks later …
A Few Good Men: Being Male in a Female-Majority Sector
We asked Blue Avocado’s male readers to let us know their thoughts on being men in the majority-female nonprofit world. What we learned surprised us — and raised new questions: The facts are that women comprise 70-75% of nonprof …
Ten Things I Learned About Leadership from Women Executives of Color
While executive director of CompassPoint Nonprofit Services, Jan participated in the Women Executive Directors of Color network, conducted a study on nonprofit women executives of color, and experienced life through her lens as a Japanese American woma …
Recruiting for Board Diversity: Part 3 in Diversity Series
In Part 1 of this series on diversity, we discussed mission reasons, business reasons and other ways to think about diversity on nonprofit boards. In Part 2 we looked at diversity at the nonprofit sector level and the importance of organizations of col …
Diversity & the Nonprofit Ecosystem: Part 2 in the 3-Part Diversity Series
In the last issue of Blue Avocado, we discussed four key arguments for diversity on nonprofit boards — reasons of mission, business, corporate responsibility and definition. This article — Part 2 of 3 on nonprofit diversity — looks more broadl …
