What Dolores Huerta Is Teaching Fundraisers About Accountability

Dolores Huerta’s recent public statement about César Chávez is not just a historic revelation. It is a moral intervention. After decades of silence, Huerta said she was sexually abused by Chávez and explained that she had stayed quiet because she believed speaking out might harm the farmworker movement they helped build. She has made clear that her silence was rooted in protection of the cause, not absence of harm. That distinction matters. It matters politically, institutionally, and personally.

What moves me most is not only the gravity of what she disclosed, but the clarity of her leadership in doing so. Huerta is not speaking from the margins of this history. She is one of its authors. She co-founded the United Farm Workers. She carried the labor, feminist, and racial justice commitments of that movement for decades. And now, in her nineties, she is telling the truth in a way that asks all of us a brutal but necessary question: what have our movements demanded of women in the name of preserving institutions, symbols, and men?

I keep thinking about this personally because I had the privilege of working with Dolores Huerta on a fundraising event while I was at the Ms. Foundation. What I remember is her clarity, her rigor, and her refusal to separate justice from honesty. So when she speaks now, I do not hear scandal. I hear discipline. I hear a woman who understands that accountability is not the opposite of movement-building. It is part of movement-building. And I hear a challenge to every progressive institution that has ever asked women to swallow harm for the sake of the mission.

That is why this moment hits so hard for those of us in the nonprofit and fundraising world. Because our sector knows this script. We know what it looks like when a powerful person’s reputation becomes more important than the safety of the people around them. We know what it looks like when an institution quietly decides that truth is too disruptive, too expensive, too politically inconvenient. We know what it looks like when workers are expected to manage discomfort, smooth over incidents, stay gracious, and keep the relationships intact.

Fundraising, in particular, has a power problem that too often gets dressed up as professionalism. The research is not vague on this. In the AFP-OSU Workplace Climate Survey preliminary report, a majority of respondents reported experiencing sexual harassment during their fundraising careers, including harassment by external constituents such as donors, board members, and other stakeholders. The report also found that people’s confidence in whether their employer would respond appropriately was weaker when the harasser was an external stakeholder rather than an internal colleague. That point should stop all of us cold.

Fundraisers are often told that relationship-building is the work. But too often, especially for women and queer folks, that means being placed in close proximity to wealth and influence without adequate protection. It means being expected to laugh off comments at dinners, tolerate boundary-crossing at conferences, endure invasive behavior at donor meetings, and keep smiling at the reception, on the golf course, at the gala, in the hotel bar, in the private follow-up conversation that never should have been private in the first place. The fundraising sector has normalized a dangerous fiction: that harassment from external stakeholders is somehow harder to address because the harasser is financially valuable. The result is that workers are often left to absorb the risk so institutions can preserve the revenue.

The broader toolkit that followed this survey says the quiet part out loud: fundraisers are not only harassed by donors and external actors, but can also be sexually exploited by employers who implicitly or explicitly require them to tolerate this conduct as part of the job. It identifies these behaviors as abuses of financial, supervisory, and social power, and notes that while many workplaces have formal anti-harassment policies, fundraisers may be less certain those protections will hold when the offender is an external stakeholder.

That is exactly why Dolores Huerta’s statement lands so far beyond one man’s legacy. Her statement is about what happens when a movement confuses protection of the mission with protection of power. It is about what happens when women are told, directly or indirectly, that enduring harm is part of the cost of doing important work. It is about what happens when loyalty is measured by silence.

Progressive spaces like to imagine themselves as more evolved than the institutions we critique. Sometimes we are. Often we are not. Patriarchy does not disappear because an organization uses the language of liberation. Sexual coercion does not become less devastating because it happened in proximity to a righteous cause. And institutional cowardice does not become more noble because it is wrapped in social justice branding.

Huerta’s courage also offers a corrective to the false choice that always seems to emerge in moments like this: either protect the icon or destroy the movement. That is the wrong frame. The farmworker movement was never one man. It was built by women, workers, families, organizers, and communities whose labor and sacrifice cannot be collapsed into César Chávez’s name. Even now, as organizations cancel Chávez Day events and rethink public honors, the most principled responses have emphasized that survivors deserve truth and that the movement’s values must be bigger than any single leader. That is the lesson the nonprofit and fundraising sectors need to take seriously.

"Patriarchy does not disappear because an organization uses the language of liberation. Sexual coercion does not become less devastating because it happened in proximity to a righteous cause. And institutional cowardice does not become more noble because it is wrapped in social justice branding."

Accountability is not a distraction from the work. It is the work. If we can name harassment by a boss but not by a donor, our ethics are compromised. If we can condemn abuse in politics or entertainment but minimize it at a gala, conference, site visit, or cultivation dinner, our feminism is performative. If we tell fundraisers to be strategic when what we really mean is be quiet, we are reproducing the very conditions that make abuse possible.

For me, centering Dolores Huerta means centering a model of leadership that refuses that bargain. Her statement asks us to build movements and institutions where women do not have to choose between truth and the cause. Where fundraisers are not offered up as buffers between organizational budgets and predatory behavior. Where external stakeholder misconduct is treated as an organizational crisis, not a personal inconvenience. Where boards, executives, and development leaders stop acting as though revenue excuses harm.

The question this moment leaves us with is not whether our institutions can survive the truth. It is whether they deserve to. Dolores Huerta is showing us that telling the truth, even painfully late, is still an act of leadership. The rest of us should be brave enough to follow her there.

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Juliana M. Weissbein, CFRE is a respected leader and decision influencer in regard to fundraising operations best practices. With over a decade of experience, Juliana thrives on professional growth, team success, measurable results, and inspiring fundraisers to utilize data-based strategies. Juliana currently serves as the Associate Director of Development Operations at Planned Parenthood Federation of America. She has served as an AFP Global Board Member, AFP Global's 2019 Outstanding Young Professional Fundraiser and is a member of the AFP Global Women's Impact Initiative. Juliana is immediate past chair of the AFP New York City chapter’s Emerging Leaders Committee and currently serves on the chapter’s board chairing their mentorship program. She resides in Houston, TX and never turns down a good kombucha.