A Dialogue on Preventing Sexual Harassment in Nonprofits

Sexual harassment has recently garnered renewed attention with a wave of allegations against high profile men, including nonprofit executives. Given the legal, organizational and ethical implications of sexual harassment in the workplace, it is imperative that nonprofit organizations and their leaders take steps to prevent its occurrence. However, academic research on the topic is not always effectively translated to practice, and professional sources of information lack research validation. The purpose of this paper is to bring these two sources of knowledge into dialogue by comparing practice-oriented recommendations and academic research. We find an abundance of unanswered research questions and some contradictions, but also many research-validated best practices that nonprofit practitioners can adopt in order to prevent and address sexual harassment in their organizations.