Equality At A Price? New Survey Shows How Much LGBT Organization Leaders Make

Ever wonder how much the head of your favorite LGBT organization makes?

There’s no doubt the LGBT community has made historic advances in an historically short amount of time. Markers in time – like Stonewall, and Prop 8 – help us tell a story, but every LGBT person’s own story has helped move us forward. A huge grassroots movement has contributed vastly to LGBT equality, but so have the LGBT organizations (not to mention our allies) that act on our behalf. 

But at what price comes equality? It’s no secret some LGBT orgs seem to draw the ire of many in the community, and others are unquestionably respected and revered. Does it have to do with the leaders at the top? Or the missions they choose? Or how they choose to achieve their missions? 

Bottom line, is what the heads of our LGBT organizations make fair?

The Washington Blade today published a survey, culled primarily from publicly available tax documents, of annual compensation given to the heads of 42 of the nation’s largest or most-prominent LGBT orgs.

They also included each organization’s revenue, and the percent of revenue that CEO receives in total compensation.

Is HRC’s Chad Griffin the highest paid? No. Although at $429,411, he’s close. But he runs the nation’s largest LGBT group. Washington, D.C.’s Food & Friends works to “foster a community caring for men, women, and children living with HIV/AIDS, cancer, and other life-challenging illnesses by preparing and delivering specialized meals and groceries in conjunction with nutrition counseling.” Should their executive director make $433,896? 

Questions like these are answered by boards of directors, but they’re important to ask.

Those compensation packages are at the high end of the scale. At the lower end, heads of groups like New York’s Empire State Pride Agenda, It Gets Better, and NoH8, And there are groups like GetEQUAL where numbers are not available, and LA Pride’s Rodney Scott, who receives no compensation. 

The report looks at compensation and revenue from 2013, and it’s important to note that several of these LGBT leaders have moved on.

The Blade shares an important gauge to put these salaries in perspective.

“Two national watchdog organizations that monitor salaries and other financial information of nonprofit groups – Guidestar and Charity Navigator – have released studies showing that the salaries of the heads of the LGBT and AIDS groups surveyed by the Blade are generally similar to the compensation of the heads of other nonprofit organizations with comparable annual revenue and staff size.”

And they add:

“We know that many donors continue to be concerned by what they believe to be excessive charity CEO pay,” Charity Navigator states in the introduction to its 2014 Charity CEO Compensation Study. “But well-meaning donors sometimes fail to consider that these CEOs are typically running multi-million dollar operations that endeavor to help change the world.”

 

Image by Amarand Agasi via Flickr and a CC License