How I Did It: Providing Equitable Salaries at an Abortion Clinic
Kwajelyn Jackson
Executive Director, Feminist Women’s Health Center
Pronouns: she/her
Digital: website, twitter, facebook, instagram
Nonprofits that everyone should give to: All-Options, Abortion Care Network, Black Mamas Matter Alliance
ReproJobs: You’re the executive director at the Feminist Women’s Health Center in Atlanta, Georgia. Can you tell us a little bit about your work and how you came to the clinic?
Kwajelyn Jackson: Right out of college and through grad school, I worked in banking as an underwriter in community development finance, where part of my work was to evaluate the financial reports of developers and evaluate risk. From 2010 to 2013, before working at FWHC, I worked at an arts and social change non-profit called WonderRoot (that has since closed), as a program manager, volunteer coordinator, and art center manager. While at WonderRoot, I was connected to many progressive non-profit organizations and artists working on social justice, and the Feminist Women’s Health Center was one of them. When I left WonderRoot, a friend sent me a job posting for a volunteer/engagement coordinator position at Feminist Women’s Health Center. I have always been connected to social justice more broadly because my mother was an activist and trained young people and organizations about systems of oppression, and she worked as vice president of diversity and education at Planned Parenthood in St. Louis, MO. I also had a bit of grounding in Black feminist thought from my time a Spelman College, a historically Black college women, femmes, and GNC (gender non-conforming) folks.
ReproJobs: One of your big first projects in your first year as Executive Director was to do a salary scan of your staff salaries. Why did you do that?
Kwajelyn Jackson: When I was named interim executive director in 2018, I submitted an updated budget to our board of directors with some salary increases that would bring our base rate of $15 per hour. After becoming the permanent ED, I have included cost of living adjustments in every annual budget, and in 2019 we did a market scan to increase salaries for 2020 to meet local market trends. I knew that there were a myriad of reasons why we were paying rates below $15 an hour, but I also knew that we were losing talented people in part because they couldn’t afford to stay. And our advocates were dissuaded from participating in economic justice advocacy at times because we could not in good faith call for others to pay $15 when we couldn’t. When I stepped into leadership, I wanted to look more closely at what we could adjust to prioritize paying people as close to a livable wage as possible. So that our staff could take care of themselves and their families, and so that we could retain and grow the best and brightest.
ReproJobs: What was the process like and what steps did you take? Had you ever done anything like that before?
Kwajelyn Jackson: First I used the federal COLA (cost of living adjustment) to adjust everyone equally. Then I used a local non-profit salary report from the Georgia Center for Non-Profits that provided ranges for different roles at different levels (coordinator, manager, director) and cross-referenced that with sources like Glassdoor, LinkedIn, and Indeed to get to what felt like a fair rate or salary by position. I started with the frontline clinic hourly employees and worked towards director-level positions, and calculated a market adjustment for everyone—except me—that ranged from 4% to 11% increases. I wanted to make sure that there were no inequities between the clinical and non-clinical positions that were at the same management level.
Because I used to work in banking, and I majored in economics, finance and budgets are not scary to me. I am not an accountant, but I tried really hard to start with taking care of people and then work the rest of our budget around it. I wanted us to move from a scarcity mindset to abundance. I keep asking my colleagues, “What do we need to do our work well?” That has to be where we start.
ReproJobs: What did you learn from this process? What changes were you able to make?
Kwajelyn Jackson: I learned that it is very hard to shift from a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset, especially when experience has taught us that we deserve less. It is hard to balance a self-preservation instinct with a collective care model, without indirectly calling for martyrdom. That capitalism, white supremacy, classism, and fear can creep in and overtake us if we let them. That it is important to have open honest conversations and make space for people to feel and express the things that make them insecure or uncomfortable, and to be open to having your mind changed when you get new information. When you hold power the only way to gain and maintain trust is to be as transparent as possible about the process, the decision-making, the constraints, the whys, and the why nots, and to act with integrity. And I learned that not everyone will be ready to change at the same pace and that is okay too.
ReproJobs: Abortion clinics are under a ton of scrutiny, restrictions, and attacks from all angles. Why, during such a challenging time politically, did you take this on?
Kwajelyn Jackson: The current political environment does not dictate most of the decisions I have to make on a daily basis, honestly. If I waited for the skies to be clear and for people to be free before I made tough choices, I would still be waiting. The truth of the matter is that because our work is important for our liberation, it will always be under attack by those who want us oppressed. And my staff deserve to be treated with dignity right now, regardless of the circumstance we find ourselves in. Our movement does so much to ensure that the communities we serve are treated with care, but our staff are just as deserving of care as our patients. At this exact moment, as we are so uncertain of the future, I worry about whether this was the right decision at the right time, but then I think, what better time to pay people more money than when their work is the hardest it has been. No matter what happens to us politically, I want our people, all of our people, to be protected at all costs.
ReproJobs: We often hear in all sectors that it’s economically not feasible to raise salaries or pay workers a living wage. Abortion clinics are often trying to make ends meet. How did you make it work financially?
Kwajelyn Jackson: All in this amounted to about a $500K budget increase, plus additional benefits and other personnel costs. So this was a big undertaking. We did have a successful fundraising year in 2019, due in part to the 6-week ban in Georgia, but an increase like this calls for ambitious fundraising goals and accurate revenue projections. Of course, so much of that is derailed now with the Coronavirus pandemic, but I remain committed to paying people as fairly as I can.
ReproJobs: What was the hardest part of this process? What was the easiest?
Kwajelyn Jackson: One of the other things we incorporated this year was salary transparency so that everyone had full access to the budget and could understand how their rate aligned with their colleagues. This was probably the hardest part because people have such complicated relationships with money and have been taught to keep it private. So I started with the leadership team and our check-in prompt was “What were you taught growing up about money?” The other challenge was that people were taught to withhold information in order to maintain power. But as a reproductive justice organization, we must interrogate and distribute power, even within our own organizations. So getting managers to be comfortable sharing salaries openly and on job postings took some effort.
It was also hard because even though I knew this was the right thing to do, I still feel like it is not enough. The work that our staff does in the clinic, in the Capitol, in the community, is difficult and valuable. And a true RJ minimum wage would be closer to $28 per hour. It is hard because we have not raised prices on services to compensate for the increases in costs, but we will have to at some point to remain sustainable.
ReproJobs: If someone else were to do this for their organization or clinic, where would you suggest they start? And, what’s your best advice for them?
Kwajelyn Jackson:
Start from your floor, not your ceiling
Pay yourself last
Do not create a white collar/blue collar divide
Look carefully at the cost of living where you are
Be bold and radical in how you appreciate your staff
ReproJobs: If you weren’t doing movement work, what would you be doing?
Kwajelyn Jackson: Probably selling vintage clothes is a shop or online.
ReproJobs: Is there a particular person you love to create with?
Kwajelyn Jackson: Probably Angela Doyinsola Aina of Black Mamas Matter and Oriaku Njoku of ARC-Southeast.
ReproJobs: What’s a professional development training you took that you’d recommend to others?
Kwajelyn Jackson: Rockwood’s RJ Fellowship, Forward Together’s Stepping into Power, The OpEd Project, The Management Center’s Managing to Change the World.
ReproJobs: What’s a work-related behavior you’re working on changing?
Kwajelyn Jackson: Skipping lunch.
ReproJobs: Where’s your next vacation going to be?
Kwajelyn Jackson: I was supposed to go to Belize this month, so hopefully there one day soon. But I also have a tentative girls trip planned to Mexico in the fall if we can travel by then.
ReproJobs: What’s Spotify channel are you listening to these days?
Kwajelyn Jackson: I have a playlist called Nostalgia that has 70s, 80s, and 90s songs on there that I like to listen to when I drive. But mostly I listen to podcasts like The Read and Why Won’t you Date Me?