Georgia Hilmer

Ishmam Rahman

February 26, 2021

When I think of the American Civil Liberties Union, I think of tireless lawyers, not tireless fundraisers. Without fundraising, though, the ACLU wouldn’t exist. (One could argue the organization shouldn’t exist: it is the responsibility of the US government itself, not nonprofits, to strive to uphold the basic constitutional rights of all people in this country. One could also argue that the defense of our fundamental freedoms shouldn’t be a donation-based enterprise. And yet.) Because many of us who benefit from the ACLU’s work — the unsexy legal maintenance our imperfect democracy requires — take it for granted, fundraisers are crucial. Their job is to impress upon donors and potential donors the urgency of an organization’s mission and convince them to give in support of it. Ishmam Rahman manages fundraising for mid-level and major donors at the ACLU. The job is technical (coordinating campaigns, building strategy, and managing teams) but of course it’s emotional too. When your work is tied to causes you care about and issues that directly affect your wellbeing, can you separate the professional from the personal? Should you?

Practical and philosophical questions about how work, politics, and identity converge animated much of my conversation with Ishmam. How do you bring your whole self to a heteronormative and white workplace when, like Ishmam, you are a queer non-binary person of color? When certain kinds of people and labor are more revered and better rewarded than others under capitalism, how do you resist internalizing problematic hierarchies of value? Can you avoid conflating personal identity with productivity and prominence? As a culture, we pay scant attention to the activists and organizers fighting daily to build a better world on our behalf. Ishmam’s role at the ACLU represents an even less appreciated form of labor: the behind-the-scenes, unheralded but absolutely vital administrative work that makes progress possible.

As the boundaries between home and work continue to collapse, this much is obvious: the quality of your job affects the quality of your life more directly than ever. Ishmam’s experiences in spaces of varying inclusivity illustrate how central the workplace can be — for better and for worse — to your sense of self. We are constantly making maps for each other: using our behavior and speech to demonstrate our values and priorities and model possible ways of being. I appreciate Ishmam’s generosity and candor in charting their own journey so that others might imagine new futures for themselves.

This interview took place over the course of January and February 2021. It has been edited and condensed.

Georgia Hilmer: How did you get from school to this moment in your career right now? 

Ishmam Rahman: I went to a really small women's liberal arts college called Scripps in California. When I needed a job on campus a friend recommended that I work at phone-a-thon, which is a fundraising program where current students call alumni and parents to ask them to donate to the school. Honestly, I took the job because it paid the most (since you get a commission) but then I really loved it because of how goal-oriented it was. After I graduated, I really wanted to live in New York. I grew up in Bangladesh and watched a lot of American movies. In 10 Things I Hate About You Julia Stiles’ character really wanted to go to school in New York and I was like, “That's it. That's me.”

I knew that I wanted to work in social justice-related causes but I didn't want to be a social worker because I felt like I didn't have that emotional bandwidth. I applied to lots of nonprofits and got a job at a small organization at the New York City level that works with homeless women and formerly incarcerated women. The development department was just two people: me and my boss. I got to learn a lot. We were doing basic marketing, communications, fundraising, grant-writing, emails — everything. I realized that I really loved the work because I love talking to and connecting to people and I'm persuasive and also creative. I felt like I had found the place that I was supposed to be working within social justice. I can't imagine working in a field where I'm not in service to people.

After that I wanted to get more experience in larger nonprofits, so I started working at a queer civil rights organization. That was really awesome because I was also coming into my queerness at the time and learning more about that. And then I started working with the ACLU. It's been cool to gradually go from a small organization to a really big one. I would love to work at an international organization to get that experience and then come back to the super grassroots, very local level.

How would you describe your job at the ACLU?

I work with mid-level and major donors who give to the ACLU. We're trying to run campaigns that make donors feel invested in our long-term vision and our long-term plan but we're also trying to put out content messaging when things happen in the moment. So when the Muslim ban happened, we had to respond to that really quickly and tell the donors why it mattered and put an ask out for funds. “This is who the ban is affecting, this is how you can help.” How do we explain what we're doing? We're working in racial justice; we're working in prisons; we're working in freedom of speech; working in immigrants’ rights; queer rights. There are so many things that we need to emphasize. We're always trying to figure out: How does the emergency messaging of the moment thread into the long-term messaging that we're already doing? How do we convince people to give and stay with us?  

Smaller organizations, when they have such high dollar donors, they have a very special program where they will pair up individual fundraisers with donors to go and ask them for money on the phone or face to face. But we're such a large organization: we have 42,000 people who give us between $1,000 and $100,000. So what we do is run a direct marketing program where we send out direct marketing materials, things in the mail and over email, and we call donors on the phone through telemarketing programs we run. I manage those programs. I’m making sure I'm getting copy from the vendor, making sure that the copy is being trafficked to the right people, that it's being proofed and approved. I'm creating the art for the campaign packages, making sure that I'm working with a mail shop to order the right amount of stuff, making sure that I'm working with a data person to pull the right segments of our donor list. When I'm in a strategy meeting, I also strategize with other colleagues on who we should target for a campaign. Should we have a different strategy for different population segments? There's a lot of behavioral research that has gone into direct marketing methods.

What was your awakening to social justice issues as a young person? Do you remember a particular topic or event in the news that sparked your interest and sense of urgency?

I want to be really transparent about this because I think that it's important: I grew up with a lot of class privilege. I would not be here if I didn't have that class privilege. My parents worked in government in Bangladesh and had very highly visible jobs. They were doing public service jobs and were really into philanthropy, so I got to experience that type of work. My parents caring about how to make the community's lives better was just part of my life. I think that service was expected of me in some way.

My parents had a very “We want to serve” kind of mindset. I learned that from them. But there's issues with that, right? I learned about philanthropy through the model of charity, where the community receiving aid is not being as empowered. The older I've gotten, the more I've learned about progressive ideas, the more I’ve had to flip that idea on its head.

You went to boarding school abroad before going to Scripps. Was that your decision?

It wasn't my decision but I said okay to it. My parents wanted to send me because they were traveling a lot and I had gone through some sexual trauma as a child and experienced sexual abuse. Once I told my mom about it, she was like, “Let's just get you away from here.” And there's so much class privilege in that, that something like that happened to me and then my parents were able to pay for me to go somewhere else. That's not the perfect way to solve the problem at all. 

No, but I can understand the impulse. 

That's why I said, “Okay.” That situation is also part of why my relationship to Bangladesh is complicated — I always wanted to do social justice-related work in Bangladesh but now I feel safer here as a queer non-binary person who experienced sexual trauma.

I'm sorry that you experienced that.

That's okay. It's very common, it happens to so many people. I was just lucky that my mom was able to be say, “You don't have to be here.”

You mentioned that when you figured out that you were good at fundraising and administrative behind-the-scenes work you felt that you had found the lane in which you could be useful in social justice work. I have a question related to that that stems from my own impostor syndrome. You’ve found the space where you can contribute best in your field (by being a fundraiser) but you’re not doing the superstar job of ACLU lawyer, the public-facing role that gets the attention and accolades. Do you ever feel like self-conscious about the part of social justice you're working in?

Yeah, totally, 100%. I have thought about that. People are like, “Oh, wow, you work at the ACLU,” and I’m like, “Yeah, but I just fundraise.” You know what I mean? But I think I try to remind myself that without a person doing my job, the other work wouldn't be possible. Just because I've chosen this different route doesn't mean it's any less legitimate. Everybody has a part to play in the movement for progress. I think that there's a place, through movement fundraising, where you can apply the same values and ideals you have in your politics to fundraising. You can talk about the redistribution of wealth. You can critique capitalism and talk about pushing organizations to accept money from only people whose values they align with. The more I think about these issues, the less I feel imposter syndrome. I feel like there's a kind of beauty to knowing what your limitations are. You don't want to do a shit job at something. I want to be happy, you know. If I went to law school, I would not be happy. If I'm not a happy person, I'm not going to be doing the best that I can.

Amen. That is something that I think can be hard to grasp, especially in this moment when the internet and social media makes highly visible all of the people who do this amazing on the ground activism and protest work and mutual aid work. I think it's easy to imagine that you have to be doing the same work the same way or you're not a legitimate participant in the fight for progress. Understanding that everyone has different strengths and that the system requires a lot of different skills and temperaments is important but maybe not something we hear about as much.

Exactly. I am thinking of when the protests for Black lives were happening last summer, somebody posted online that there's space for innovators, there's space for thinkers, there's space for leaders, there's space for healers, there's space for people who are taking care of all those other people in the movement. There's space for a lot of different types of people in the revolution, the movement, whatever it is. If you have a disability that doesn't allow you to protest in a comfortable manner — or just doesn't allow you to do that at all — does that mean that they're not participating in the most valid form of speaking up in this moment? No.

Earlier you were talking about how working at a queer civil rights organization was great in part because you were coming into your queerness at that moment. How did having a workplace that centered gay and queer issues affected your own consciousness about sexuality and identity?

At past jobs I did not feel comfortable talking about being queer or my queerness. I felt like there was an expectation to fit into heteronormative ways of being. So when I went to fundraising events, I felt this pressure to act and talk and speak of my experiences in a very specific way. That was hard for me and weird for me. I also thought that it was the norm. I accepted that this was going to be my experience. Going to the queer civil rights organization was really liberating in a way because everybody there dressed however they wanted to: crazy hairstyles, tattoos, whatever. Respectability politics in that space was not related to the way you dressed — everyone openly expressed their queer identities. That was nice to see and experience because, coming from Bangladeshi culture and just “mainstream” culture, respectability politics don't really align with queer politics. Respectability politics is all about upholding white supremacy and white ideals, not being different, conforming.

The issue is not just about how you bring yourself most authentically to your workplace as a queer person. How do you bring yourself as a person of color or as a disabled person and not whitewash yourself? Every workplace has some issue with respectability politics but I definitely feel much more comfortable being myself at the ACLU. Other organizations I worked at had issues with racial equity: I felt like I could bring my queer self but I didn't know if I could bring who I was as a Bangladeshi person, you know? At the ACLU I am trying to bring both of those things. It's been a work in progress.

When I started identifying as non-binary I began using they/them/their pronouns. At first I didn't want to do that because I wanted to make other people comfortable and make the donors feel comfortable. Then I got to a space where I was like, “No, fuck it. If this space can’t accept me as who I am when I think so much about their comfort then I shouldn't be here." Things still happen and sometimes you can't be your full self because that's just how the world is. But I keep pushing it and trying again. It hasn’t been perfect in any workplace but I have learned to ask myself: What do I want? And what feels good for me? How I want to move around a space?

In rejecting some of the attitudes or traditions or expectations you saw around you as a younger person, where were you pulling from instead as you built your own system or set of values? What were the influences that helped you develop a sense of purpose or direction?

Even though my parents abide by a lot of cultural norms in Bangladesh, they were more progressive than their parents. They gave me freedom when I was growing up to read whatever I wanted and be on the internet whenever I wanted, whereas their parents were very, very, very strict, and didn’t let them do a lot of things that I got to do. My mom got married at 17 to my dad when they'd met for, like, ten minutes. I think having the ability to read and consume any sort of media was really helpful. Boarding school really changed everything. My English teacher was a huge feminist in the 70s, the burning bras kind of feminist. During that time I didn't understand first- or second- or third-wave feminism or anything like that but she really influenced how my thinking developed.

I had this idea during that time that Western traditions were better than Eastern traditions because I felt anger at the gender-based violence that I had experienced. I was wrapping up everything in that — but that was me flattening my understanding of what my culture is for me to cope with my trauma. As a young person I was holding onto these Western values, these ideas that I did not grow up with, and being like, "Oh, these things give me more power. These things let me make more choices. These things let me be more independent financially and emotionally." Honestly, I got interested in social justice because of my parents and because of gender-based violence. I think it was a way for me to heal, for me to say, “I'm interested in this and I want to help other people — but through this I'm also going to feel better about what happened to me.”

That is so much pressure to have on your work. I can imagine that that can both be super empowering and also completely exhausting. I think our generation has been raised to entangle their identity and their self-worth so thoroughly with their professional lives. As young people we often look to our jobs as the places where we can enact these enormous personal transformations or express our values best and it just gets so complicated so quickly. 

That's a good way to put it: work can feel like a way to enact transformation or liberation. At the organization I worked at where I worked with women who were homeless and formerly incarcerated, a lot of the time the job training they wanted to get was to become a counselor for other homeless women, to offer the exact same help that they were getting. The sentiment I would hear from some of them was that they were trying to sort of heal through that. It is interesting. 

In our society, when you do jobs related to trauma or building community or helping others, the work is very devalued. You can see it in the salaries: certain roles have very high reward, and certain roles don't. You're trying to transform yourself and trying to heal by continuing to do the work that helps people like you but you're caught in the cycle of not being valued in terms of how much people pay you or how people treat you.

It makes me think immediately of Stacey Abrams and the adulation she has experienced in the last year as the wider (whiter?) world finally pays attention to the issue that she's been committed to for a long time. In our cultural wasteland, the value system that we have does not reward the kind of work that she has done, the work so many people do in fundraising and philanthropy and activism and social justice. And you would think the economics would support giving more money to the people who can help, not holding it hostage in all these convoluted ways.

People who are progressive want to form an egalitarian society and in order to do that people who have a lot have to lose. Philanthropy is really complicated. It started off as a very white institution of giving to charities and giving to people who are “less fortunate” than others. Is it problematic that a lot of people have engaged in philanthropy because they get tax breaks? Yes. I think organizers are doing amazing work. I think activists are doing amazing work. And I think there are fundraisers that are doing great work. But fundraising becomes more complicated when there are fundraisers that uphold this structure where they let people who hoard wealth give it away only fractionally because of tax benefits. There are fundraisers who are progressive, who want to change the structure, so there is a push and pull. But I don't know what to do about those problems, really, because at the end of the day, we have to do the work that we're doing. Somebody has to do it and the government's not doing it, because that's not the type of government that we have. So philanthropic nonprofits have to exist.

Could you describe some of the other issues in philanthropy, as you see them?

One example is that when large foundations give money to small organizations, they give a grant with a lot of parameters. I think accountability is a good thing. But who decides what those parameters are? Are only white funders or people who have a lot power setting them? Or are they being set by people that truly understand what a community needs? I feel like there's always a gap between what big funders think the communities need versus what the actual nonprofit on the ground knows the communities need. But the small organizations won't get funding if they don't agree with the big funder. I think that's a problem and I've seen it really limit the work. It stops the work from being about the community and becomes more about, “How do we get this next grant?” 

And do you see that as related to the white savior complex that seems to drive so much philanthropy? The myopic vision that says, “I'm going to be in control of how this money gets distributed whether I know what I'm doing or not”?

100% I definitely think that it’s related. I think most wealthy people, if not all, want to keep these sort of inequitable structures going so that they can stay on top. If they truly cared about transforming society completely then they'd give a huge majority of their wealth away, which some people do. But not everyone is interested in that. The whole point is we're not thinking, “How do we end this nonprofit? How do we end this problem so this nonprofit doesn’t have to exist?”

Yeah, I've heard a few people at nonprofits describe their goal as making themselves obsolete because they hope one day that their work will not be needed anymore. Your point about grants and parameters makes me think of about the conversation about MacKenzie Scott [Jeff Bezos’ ex-wife] and the no-strings-attached way she gave away a lot of the money she donated recently.

That's why whenever I get on the phone with my dad he's like, “Have you called McKenzie Scott?”

Oh my gosh, so many people must be searching for her number right now. I'm so transfixed by the idea of this subtle not-so-subtle public shaming through leading by example. I don't know how effective any effort to shame Jeff Bezos would be … but that definitely seems part of what she was doing: demonstrating that you can just give a lot of your money away, it’s that easy. Do you see a concerted effort at work by people in your world to lead by example?

Yeah, I do. I think that all the equity, diversity, and inclusion conversations that we've been having as an organization internally have led us to talk about white supremacy and capitalism more openly. We’ve been talking about how change doesn't end at representation: you need to be actively anti-oppression. And how can you be anti-oppression? You need to move all the people that are giving us money and supporting us along to a more radical place. That's our duty as fundraisers: they're giving to us, we need to push them further.

What shape does that take?

Pushing their own personal politics further. When the Black Lives Matter protests were happening we started talking about divestment from the police. Our donors had a really hard time with that. Our messaging was that we're going to follow the lead of Black and brown organizations that have been working on this issue for so long. And we agree with them that we need to divest from police and we need to invest that money in communities. We got a lot of questions from our donors. There was some backlash but we kept sending out communications and doubling down on that message, saying, “This is something that we're not going to compromise on. You’ve been with us this whole time. This issue is part of the civil rights fight we are engaged in.” I felt like we were able to do a lot of education there. Because I work with high dollar donors, my donors are white and sixty or older for the most part. Watching a shift in their thinking happen has been really great. 

With the Biden Harris administration, our messaging has been: “This is a good thing but their policy positions are not as progressive as we want them to be so we have to continue pushing.” Because the ACLU has been in the civil rights fight for one hundred and one years and we have progressed so many issues forward, and because our group of donors is a multi-generational group of donors, when a message comes from an institution like the ACLU, our donors can trust it. I think that's really valuable, that we get to say, “This is valid, this is real,” about important issues. And say, “You should get involved.”

Being a fundraiser, I feel like it should be your personal calling to use your position to decenter whiteness in philanthropy and to try and change the structure as much as you can. I can do that because I have access to so much power through my donors, because they've been with us for so long, because we are such a large, established institution.

I'm curious if you feel like your insight into the colonialism and imperialism of Bangladesh's history have informed your understanding of the colonial and imperial aspects of philanthropy?

Yeah. It really has. I think it's really informed my understanding of the white savior complex and my understanding of the institution of philanthropy in America or any white western country. I'm not a theorist but I feel that philanthropy does come from ideas of colonization and trying to mold a community that you think is not good enough in your own image. That idea is very much present in Bangladesh. I think that people who have more privilege or are richer or are lighter-skinned are always trying to reach for white ideals, which is very problematic. Those people continue perpetuating very toxic structures. The white standard is the right standard for people to be seen as self-sufficient and happy and good. I feel that in countries that have been colonized, nonprofits came in and tried to fill the gap and take care of disenfranchised communities because the government just wasn't set up for success by the imperialist powers that decimated the country and then left.

And so the cycle continues. 

That same thing is happening here: nonprofits try to fill in the gap of what the government has failed to do, or what the government can't do, because it was never set up in a way for everyone to succeed or to uplift all communities.

So, weirdly, if the government sees the nonprofit world stepping in to solve problems, it can excuse not doing that work themselves and continue to let other people solve the problems that they've created and neglect.

Exactly. They're like, “Oh, capitalism works for us, because all the things that capitalism doesn't take care of the nonprofits are just there to pick up after.”

Oof. Maybe to end on a positive note … what makes you feel hopeful lately? Are there areas where you're seeing change that feels like it could be sustainable?

Generally speaking, honestly, what I've been hopeful about is people talking about more progressive ideas and the possibility of radical shifts becoming part of the mainstream conversation in the last few years. I think we are more polarized than ever but younger people give me a lot of hope because we are more and more progressive, and there's a lot more digital organizing, and people are a lot more aware and more connected. So I think that's the long-term hope for me. For short-term hope: I think squeaking out these wins in the last few months is going to provide momentum, especially this last year with the racial re-awakening that happened for non-Black people. I think, as a non-Black person of color, I've seen non-Black people of color do more in their communities. Speaking as somebody who's a Bangladeshi person, I think Asian identity is seen from the outside as a monolith but we come from different places, backgrounds, religions, ethnicities, and nationalities. There is a lot of inequity in the way different Asian communities are treated. This last year was really important for having conversations with people from different generations and trying to reconcile some very fucked up legacies of prejudice. I think that white supremacy divides and conquers and has always divided and conquered people of different races and different ethnicities. For us to root out racism against us we have to root out white supremacy. I think I see some reconciliation across generations and different Asian identities and that gives me hope.