NAAFA has an Executive Director Again. Here’s why that’s good news for the entire movement.
Image description: A picture of Tigress Osborn, a fat Black woman with light-brown skin, gold eyeglasses, and dark curly hair.
Back in June, NAAFA announced that the Board of Directors would name me Executive Director of NAAFA on July 1. The announcement was met with overwhelming support from our NAAFA community and others in fat liberation and social justice work. I felt– and still feel– humbled, excited, confident, anxious, grateful, proud, and supported.
NAAFA's leadership structure has varied some over the course of the organization's 54 year history, with board chairs, presidents, chapter leaders, a few paid administrative staff members, and a previous long-term executive director (Sally Smith, who served as Executive Director for 9 years). Very few roles have been paid positions. Since 1969, NAAFA has been almost totally volunteer-run. Until a few months ago, that included me. My appointment as ED is the first paid staff position in two decades.
This is not unique to NAAFA. Many nonprofits are run by volunteers, and most fat advocacy organizations don’t have paid staff. Some fat groups have been able to pay contractors, or to give stipends or grants for particular projects or for work on specific programming. At NAAFA, I am the only paid employee, but unless they have offered to donate their time, speakers and other guests for NAAFA’s virtual events are compensated for their time and talents. Some contractors also do work for us. Over the past few years, we’ve prioritized paying more and more fat people for their labor, with special focus on BIPOC fat people, LGBTQIA+ fat people, disabled fat people, and superfat people.
There are fat people who make a living being “professionally fat” by working as public speakers, models, authors, and influencers (although you might not fully understand just how many of your favorites have some other day job that pays the bills, or work multiple gigs to cobble together enough to live on). There are HAES®-aligned health and wellness practitioners who commit to size inclusive or fat liberationist approaches in their professions, and there are academics and researchers who are paid by higher ed institutions or community organizations (but you might be surprised about the cobbling of compensation here, too). Our colleagues at ASDAH committed to paid positions for leaders a few years ago, and they have continued to expand that commitment. We appreciate their example. All told, no matter how you add up the ways fat people get paid to work on behalf of fat people, most of us who dedicate our lives to this cause do so with the progress of the cause and the support of fat community as our only compensation.
We cherish every volunteer contribution, past, present, and future. We appreciate you, and we need you. But depending only on volunteers is not sustainable, not unless we are willing to be exclusive or exploitative. Not everyone’s circumstances allow for volunteering. My own barely did, and a tremendous amount of family and community support – as well as a pandemic lay-off – went into making that possible. Fat liberation is missing voices, talents, experiences, and more when our movement work is limited only to those who can donate their time.
As the full-time Executive Director of NAAFA, I am, to our knowledge, currently the only full-time employee of a fat civil rights organization anywhere in the world.
This means something so much bigger than the impact it has on me personally. It was great to be able to tell some friends, “Hey, Bestie, I’m finally getting a paycheck!” And it’s great to have the Board’s and our donor’s faith in my leadership. This is my role now; part of my job is to make sure it’s someone else’s role later. Returning to a structure that includes paid staff helps ensure the longevity of this organization. That matters beyond NAAFA.
I am often in meetings with other non-profit leaders in other movements, and they tell me their capacity is limited because of their small staffs of 5 or 6 people, and their small-to-them budgets of a few hundred thousand dollars per year. I dream of having those resources for our organization and for our movement, and I dream of even more for all of us. Building infrastructure at NAAFA will allow us not just to keep chugging along, but to expand our reach and deepen our impact.
To paraphrase activist and scholar Charlotte Cooper, NAAFA is not all fat activism can be; it is not and should not be a proxy for all of fat activism. But as the longest-running fat advocacy organization in the world, we have a place in the movement that is unique from other groups, and we have recognition and sometimes resources that other fat lib entities don’t have, even when that recognition or those resources are scarce. When NAAFA thrives, it signals something to society about the strength and significance of our cause. Let’s keep boosting that signal together in all the ways we can!