Leaders of a medical ethics nonprofit with members planning to meet in Salt Lake City had a decision to make last June after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization effectively overturned Roe v. Wade, triggering abortion bans or restrictions in Utah and more than a dozen other states.
A month later, a Utah state law barring transgender athletes from competing in interscholastic girls’ sports took effect, placing Utah on a list with roughly two dozen other states subject to California’s ban on publicly funded travel to jurisdictions deemed to have anti-LGBTQ policies.
For Public Responsibility in Medicine and Research (PRIM&R) in Boston, which was planning to meet in Salt Lake City in November 2022, the laws amounted to what PRIM&R’s leaders described as an affront to the organization’s core principles and prompted a review of whether to proceed with the conference.
Leaders at other nonprofits have grappled with similar decisions when planning to meet in states where controversy has followed the enactment of public policies on matters from reproductive health to voting to transgender rights and other hot button issues. It’s complicated because organizations typically contract with host cities and venues years in advance when planning a national convention of thousands of people, but the political winds — and the passions they can engender — cast a blow to the timeline.
The head of PRIM&R was already throwing down the gauntlet to state lawmakers even before the Utah laws were placed on hold due to court challenges that remain pending. “These laws deny access to essential healthcare for people who can become pregnant and deny transgender women and girls the opportunity to participate in sports aligned with their gender identity; they are discriminatory and antithetical to PRIM&R’s values as an ethics organization,” wrote Elisa Hurley, the group’s executive director, in a letter last summer to the group’s 4,000 members.
The large number of the group’s members employed by California public universities and medical institutions and subject to that state’s travel ban using public funds added a further wrinkle. “The addition of Utah to California’s travel ban list further erodes our ability to bring together our staff, partners, and constituents for an inclusive, accessible, and welcoming meeting in Salt Lake City,” Hurley wrote.
PRIM&R pulled the plug on its planned conference — which had been years in the making and was expected to draw 3,000 attendees to Utah’s state capital — and opted for an online event.
“We had been doing our annual meeting virtually for the previous two years because of the pandemic and were looking forward to being back in-person for the first time after those couple of years, so certainly there was a sense of disappointment,” Hurley told The NonProfit Times. “But ultimately, we felt it was more important to live our values as an organization and feel good about bringing everyone together in a welcoming environment, and our entire board agreed.”
Still, not everyone agrees with boycotts. Critics of boycotts argue they can end up inflicting the most economic harm on the very minority communities and people – vendors, hotel and restaurant workers, and others – whom organizers say they’re trying to help and whose livelihoods hang in the balance.
It was with this in mind that ASAE (formerly the American Society of Association Executives,) developed a framework of suggested guidelines for its 42,000 members to consider before deciding to cancel an event where state or local policies might conflict with organizational priorities. The framework is broken down into sections that include gathering information on how a host city’s leaders might be working to address adverse or discriminatory state policies, as well as who owns the host facility and where that owner stands on the issue or legislation in question.
It includes is an equity analysis that involves considering the groups most impacted by a particular piece of legislation and assessing the economic harm that cancelling an event could cause to members of those groups who make their living in hospitality and tourism.
Before cancelling an event — or when contractual commitments and sunk costs preclude doing so or the penalties are prohibitive — organizers are encouraged to find out if the hotel or conference center is part of a national chain. If so, it might be possible to negotiate transferring the event to one of the chain’s other locations in a different city. If that’s not possible, there are other substantive actions that organization managers can take that can still achieve a desired impact on public policy.
Such a strategy might involve amending the conference schedule to include an educational session, charitable fundraiser, or service project related to a particular issue or policy concern. It can also include donating or partnering with local nonprofits or elected officials in the host city or state that are active on that issue and engaging the local media, chamber of commerce, and others to draw further attention to it from the organization’s perspective.
“The takeaway for me in helping to develop this framework is that there are actually many actions an organization can take to affirm and live by its core values without cancelling or moving an event,” said Lakisha Ann Woods, CEO of the American Institute of Architects and ASAE board chair, who helped craft the guidelines.
Chris Vest, ASAE’s vice president for communications, said ASAE has never pulled a meeting due to a controversial public policy or legislation. “The goal is always to see what actions can be taken in partnership with a host city and state leaders that enable us to live by our organizational values and impact positive change without moving a meeting,” he said.
Hurley, of PRIM&R, said her organization faced a similar conundrum in 2017 when its annual conference was planned in San Antonio, Texas. State legislators there were considering a bill on transgender use of public bathrooms similar to one that had been signed into law the previous year in North Carolina. The bill, which would have restricted transgender persons to using restrooms matching the sex on their birth certificate, was eventually scrapped.
That same year, however, Texas approved a law allowing religious organizations contracted to the state’s child welfare system to refuse assistance to same-sex couples seeking to foster or adopt. “From our perspective and many others, this anti-LGBTQ adoption legislation was just as discriminatory” as the bathroom bill, Hurley said.
In the end, PRIM&R went ahead with its San Antonio convention anyway, but not before considering the alternatives and making some changes.
“After conferring with the city of San Antonio – a very diverse, welcoming city – we decided we would go and participate in some sessions to show our support for the LGBTQ community and try to put pressure on the state legislature to vote a certain way, not as a lobbying organization but through various educational and listening sessions,” Hurley said. “And for our California constituents who couldn’t come, we had a very robust virtual conference to accompany the in-person event.”
The reaction to the group’s decision was mixed, with some members saying they appreciated these gestures but still would not be attending. But, said Hurley, “we felt like this was a diverse city that was trying to do all the right things and that they could use our support.”
The same considerations led the group to consider Salt Lake City – which Hurley describes as a “progressive, welcoming city” in an otherwise conservative state – as a future conference venue.
PRIM&R has since adopted a practice of insisting on contractual language to make it easier to pull out of a planned convention if circumstances warrant it. It’s always a negotiation and even with these clauses included, invoking them to cancel events with hundreds of thousands of dollars or more at stake is never a simple matter, Hurley said.
“But where we can, we try to get language included to say that if certain types of discriminatory legislation end up being passed, then we as an ethics organization reserve the right to pull out if we find that a venue is no longer aligned with our core values,” Hurley said. “Having that language allowed us to get out of the Salt Lake City contract with fewer penalties than we otherwise might have faced.”
Hurley stopped short of calling the Salt Lake City pullout a “boycott,” but acknowledged the economic impact of pulling up stakes.
“We would have spent at least $1 million just on the food, audiovisual and other concessions, and with 3,000 people who were planning to come to Salt Lake City, there certainly was a little bit of that in the mix – of saying we are not going to bring our people or our financial support to this state. And I’d like to think if enough other organizations did that, it would have an economic impact that would not go unnoticed,” she said.
Such was the case in North Carolina, where lawmakers seeking to win back lost business repealed the state’s law on transgender use of public bathrooms after the NCAA canceled its 2016 championship basketball games in the state. Similar boycotts by other sports organizations, companies and entertainers were estimated to have cost North Carolina millions of dollars in lost business and were a further blow to residents’ pride in the basketball-crazed state.
“We said after our San Antonio convention in 2017 that we were going to take a good, hard look at where we hold our future conferences,” Hurley said. “We specifically took all this into account when we first thought about Salt Lake City as a venue but decided that Salt Lake City as a municipality had a reputation for being very progressive and welcoming, which was one of the reasons we felt comfortable choosing it as a venue.”
However, the double whammy of Utah’s abortion ban and transgender bathroom bills coming within a two-month period of each other overwhelmed any thoughts of proceeding with the group’s planned gathering.
“At that point, it became a matter of whether in good conscience we could go to a state where we no longer felt we could ensure the safety, respect for autonomy, and basic human rights of our constituents, let alone if a woman who was pregnant was at our conference and something happened,” Hurley said. “It would be nice if there were some public policy impact from all this, and I think to the extent we can put some financial pressure on legislatures to act the right way, that’s not a bad thing. But ultimately, it’s about wanting to live our values and feel good about where we bring our people together.”
