April Must-Reads

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This month, we saw several organizations share openly about their stories and struggles in shifting culture and pursuing racial equity, we read an example of what happens when collaboration becomes the norm, and we found practical advice for grantmakers in a new guide and a survey of the nonprofit sector.

What caught your attention this month?

1. Resonance: A Framework for Philanthropic Transformation

GRANTMAKING STRATEGY | Justice Funders | Executive summary: 3-minute read; Full report: hour-long thorough read

A new guide from grantmaking groups Justice Funders and the Resonance Collaborative, “Resonance: a Framework for Philanthropic Transformation,” gives grantmakers a framework for shifting the power imbalance between funders and nonprofits. The guide offers suggestions already gaining popularity, like multiyear grants, and also reframes philanthropy as a form of reparations for the harm that elites have caused over centuries in the U.S. While shifting philanthropy will take time, the creators say the guide can help foundations identify opportunities for growth. For more about this guide, see “Balance of Power” (requires a Chronicle of Philanthropy subscription).

2. Putting Racial Justice at the Heart: How Did CompassPoint Get Here? (Introduction) and A Vision for Belonging (Part 1)

EQUITY | CompassPoint | 6-minute read (Introduction) and 9-minute-read (Part 1)

In this blog series, CompassPoint reflects on their journey over the last three years to “step into a commitment to racial justice, equity, and a vision for leadership that centers liberation.” The series will look back—at how the changes started and were sustained—and forward—at what’s still needed—focusing on three pieces of that journey: the organization’s vision, relationships, and resources. This introduction to the series and first installment begin to tell the story of the complexity of organizational and community change, offering insight for other organizations on racial equity journeys.

3. The Power of Reflection: The Story of On the Move

CULTURE | The Whitman Institute | 7-minute read

This case study of the nonprofit On the Move shares how the organization’s culture of reflection and commitment to equity show up in their practices. The profile highlights the relationship between On the Move and the Whitman Institute, showing what a funder-nonprofit partnership can look like and how this partnership set up On the Move to make great progress.

4. What Nonprofit Leaders Wish More People Knew

GRANTMAKING STRATEGY | Stanford Social Innovation Review | 7-minute read

Survey responses from Nonprofit Finance Fund’s recent State of the Nonprofit Sector Survey reiterate a common theme: the need for flexible, multi-year grants. In this article, the authors lift up recommendations for funders alongside four observations from the survey:

  1. Funding practices continue to stymie innovation
  2. Nonprofits get and keep people on their feet
  3. Nonprofits are first responders to inequity
  4. It’s hard to attract and retain top talent with limited and restricted funding

5. Winning the War on Poverty

COLLABORATION | New York Times Opinion | 4-minute read

What does it look like when everyone—community members, foundations, nonprofits, city officials, social entrepreneurs, conference planners, etc.—works together to create communities where no one lives in poverty? In 72 regions across Canada, community members have come together to understand poverty in their community and then build a plan based on the community’s strengths and needs.

Now you can more easily find the content you need

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Our website looks a little different these days. We just redesigned it with our partners at Ghost Note with one key goal: making it easier for you to get what you need to create the impact you seek.

Here’s what you can find.

Content

We’re regularly creating new content, so we wanted to make our website easy for you to explore and find what’s relevant.

  • Our resources page is full of field guides, articles, tools, and other content that we’ve spent substantial time developing
  • Our blog is where we share in real time what we’re learning, thinking, and reading
  • Our transformation insights page goes deep on what it takes for social change initiatives to achieve lasting, transformational, systems-level change
  • Our capacity building insights page highlights five foundations’ approaches to capacity building and common themes in what works

Case studies

What does it look like to develop a capacity assessment tool? Or rethink your strategy to have greater impact? Our new case studies walk through some work we’ve been lucky to partner on with clients.

Clear descriptions of what we do

We’ve heard it before: “What exactly do you do?” and “I had no idea you did that!” We took it to heart. And now we hope we’re more clearly describing how we can partner with you. Take a look at the services we provide to nonprofits and grantmakers, and read about how we approach our work.

We were lucky to have fantastic partners in this redesign. Several clients and friends generously shared their time to give feedback on our site and language. The digital creative agency Ghost Note worked relentlessly to understand what our clients most want from us and translated that into a beautiful, crisp, vibrant, accessible website. To everyone who touched this project, thank you.

Take a look around and let us know what you think! If you come across errors or tech issues, or even something you love, please send a quick note to lvalerio@communitywealth.com. It will make the website better for everyone.

February Must-Reads

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This month brought insight for nonprofits and grantmakers looking to better engage community members, think more concretely about power, and embed equity in their organizations and their evaluation practices. It also brought advice for grantmakers on tuning in to what nonprofits need most.

What caught your attention this month?

1. The Time is Now to Embed Equity in Evaluation Practices

LEARNING & EVALUATION | Center for Effective Philanthropy | 6-minute read

Evaluation can, and should, be used in service of equity, says Jara Dean-Coffey of the Equitable Evaluation Initiative. As the primary purchasers and users of evaluation in the social sector, funders play a critical role in this. Rather than tweak their approach to evaluation, funders should reconsider their approach altogether. Dean-Coffey shares three principles in which new evaluation practices should be rooted and invites funders to consider four questions when engaging in evaluative work.

COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT | Stanford Social Innovation Review | 6-minute read

The better that city government officials understand residents’ lives, the more effective policy they can create. Yet doing so often takes time, money, and a willingness to experiment. After a year of researching how nonprofits, philanthropy, and local government in Philadelphia engaged with community members, the authors identified three ways social sector leaders can bring together the expertise of residents and city government.

EQUITY | Human Impact Partners | 6-minute read

Public health is increasingly focused on “upstream” causes, looking beyond individual behavior to health disparities. While this shift is leading to important interventions, “slightly upstream” work is not equity work, writes Nashira Baril, project director at Human Impact Partners. Baril argues that the field needs to recognize racism as a root cause of health inequity, but beyond that, it must recognize when “upstream” approaches are accommodating people within an inequitable system rather than shifting the system itself.

4. Race to Lead: Women of Color in the Nonprofit Sector

EQUITY | Building Movement Project | Executive summary: 5-minute read; Full report: 60-minute read

Women of color in the nonprofit sector face big obstacles to their advancement, reveals the newest report in Building Movement Project’s Race to Lead series. The report highlights key findings from a survey of more than 4,000 nonprofit staff and includes several calls to action for how the sector can change inequitable systems, how organizations can change, and how individuals can support each other to ensure a fair and supportive workplace for women of color.

STRATEGY | National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy | 9-minute read

Many of us in the social sector use the word “power” a lot, but what exactly do we mean when we say it? In this blog post, the president of the Chorus Foundation, Farhad Ebrahimi, outlines three types of power, encouraging readers to distinguish among these types of power and consider each type within the broader ecosystem of power:

  • Political Power: The ability to influence or control collective decision-making
  • Economic Power: The ability to produce, distribute, trade, or consume goods and services
  • Cultural Power: The ability to influence or control how we perceive and what we believe about the world around us

For more on shifting organizational culture, explore our field guide for creating a change-making culture.

Bonus article: How Grant Makers Can Tune In to What Nonprofits Need Most

(Requires a subscription to the Chronicle of Philanthropy)

GRANTMAKING STRATEGY | Chronicle of Philanthropy | 6-minute read

To better meet grantees’ needs, the Ford Foundation requested an independent analysis of its grantmaking practices. The analysis showed that more than half of the foundation’s grantees suffered from frequent or chronic budget deficits, and 40 percent had fewer than three months of reserves. In this blog post, Hillary Pennington and Kathy Reich of the Ford Foundation write that, as they listened to grantees in one-on-one conversations, they heard “we were exacerbating these problems by our approach to grantmaking,” an approach that included elements like funding one year and one project at a time. They heard from grantees a deeply felt need for funding for indirect costs. This blog post demonstrates how funders can ask themselves hard questions, invest time and money in understanding the answers, deeply listen to grantees and communities, share transparently about what they learn, and make changes in response.

Want more content like this? Get our monthly must-reads and other blog posts delivered to your inbox.

How Community Foundations Define and Communicate Their Value

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Sometimes an old idea can bring new insights. Take, for example, the Arizona Community Foundation (ACF).

As with many community foundations, measuring impact beyond assets under management is particularly challenging because ACF distributes the bulk of its funds according to the wishes of its 1,700 fundholders. While some community foundations have significant discretionary funds that they can invest in issues they select, ACF’s discretionary funds are limited. As a result, ACF must act through its donors to increase its impact. ACF hypothesizes that when donors, grantees, and the foundation itself interact in dynamic ways, they promote a culture of philanthropy that increases giving, leads to more effective nonprofits, and contributes to a better Arizona. With this hypothesis in mind, we partnered with ACF to help measure and increase its impact.

As learnings from this impact measurement surfaced, we used a time-tested framework to help ACF think about how they work with donors and grantees to further advance a culture of philanthropy.

A New Use for an Existing Framework

A framework familiar to the business world, the value disciplines framework, proposes that companies become industry leaders by excelling in one of three areas while meeting industry standards in the other two. The idea is that by narrowing its focus to be truly exceptional in one area, a company can stand out from competitors. The three disciplines that companies focus on are:

  • Operational Excellence – A reliable product at a modest price (Frontier Airlines, Walmart)
  • Product Leadership – Cutting-edge products or services (Apple, Tesla)
  • Customer Intimacy – A deep understanding of different customers’ needs and the flexibility to meet them (Amazon, Salesforce)

While a business framework may not seem like an obvious choice for a community foundation, there are several reasons it helped ACF think about its value. First, unlike private foundations, whose assets often come from a dedicated source, community foundations have customers: the donors who choose to place their money in donor-advised funds (DAFs). For many community foundations, growing this donor base is essential to the organization’s community impact and financial health. Second, a growing number of banks are offering DAFs, creating competition for community foundations. Delivering exceptional value is essential if community foundations are to compete with low-fee DAFs from companies like Vanguard and Fidelity.

How Community Foundations Can Identify Their Value Proposition

Together, we adapted the value disciplines framework to apply specifically to the community foundation context:

  • Operational Excellence – A reliable, smooth donor experience; giving is easy and cost-effective
  • Product Leadership – High-quality donor services; a variety of giving options that meet donor needs
  • Customer Intimacy – Personalized services delivered in a thoughtful way, based on a deep understanding of the donor’s needs

When we interviewed donors to understand the value ACF offered in supporting and shaping their philanthropy, we found that they typically saw ACF as excelling in customer intimacy. They felt ACF staff deeply understood their interests and tailored services to exactly what they needed. For a donor interested in seeding new organizations, ACF recommended a steady pipeline of well-vetted startup nonprofits. For another donor interested in international solar energy, ACF offered advice on how to manage legal risk when giving overseas. These donors and others felt heard and understood by ACF staff. They were satisfied with the products ACF offered (product leadership) and found giving to be a smooth experience (operational excellence), but they saw ACF as leading with customer intimacy.

Why Understanding Value Proposition is Important for a Community Foundation

Other community foundations can apply a value disciplines lens to:

  • Increase impact. The impact of a community foundation is tied to the giving of its donors. Engaged donors are more likely to become long-term givers and go beyond financial contributions, for example, by volunteering, recruiting other donors, and advocating for nonprofits. By supporting donors in their areas of interest and in ways known to be effective, a community foundation can increase its impact on the community.
  • Differentiate from other players. As smaller organizations, community foundations will struggle to offer DAFs that are lower priced than those marketed by large investment banks. However, their size and place-based nature is an advantage when it comes to customer intimacy. By building relationships, bringing deep knowledge of the community, and responding to donor needs in a tailored way, community foundations can attract and retain donors looking for more than a transactional experience.
  • Make the right internal investments. Like any organization, community foundations are faced with numerous opportunities to invest in internal capacity. Knowing where the organization needs to deliver exceptional value and where “good enough” is sufficient is critical to making the best use of scarce resources. If donors see customer intimacy as the key value proposition, then investments in donor support staff and systems will add greater value than incrementally improving price or products (assuming these are already at industry standard levels). Investments in donor-facing systems are particularly important to a younger generation of donors, who are digital natives and expect a technology-enabled experience.

As you apply the value disciplines lens, you might ask yourself the following questions:

Operational Excellence

  • How smooth is our giving experience? Do we spend a lot of time troubleshooting donor issues?
  • How does our pricing compare to other alternatives for donors? Are we a high-, medium-, or low-cost provider?

Product Leadership

  • Do we offer a wide range of giving options? How do these compare to what other competitors offer?
  • Besides DAFs, what other services do we offer donors (e.g., advice, learning opportunities, connections to community nonprofits, networking opportunities)?

Customer Intimacy

  • How well do we understand our donors? How detailed is our data on their interests and giving history?
  • Do we segment donors to better tailor our products and services to their needs?
  • How often do our staff connect with donors?

Applying this framework has led ACF to better understand the needs of its donors, ensure the best service provision, and seek new ways to support them in transforming their philanthropy Through this support, ACF believes it will advance a vibrant and enduring culture of philanthropy in which donors increase their support for nonprofits, grantees become ever more effective in delivering on their missions, and greater collaboration among all parties leads to a better future for Arizona.

Putting Your Organization’s Values Into Practice

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We launched a field guide a couple of weeks ago on forming an organizational culture that will set you up to reach the outcomes you seek. The guide is filled with practical recommendations, and to further build on this, we wanted to offer two additional tips on how to live out your culture’s values day-in, day-out. As we’ve seen in our work with Helios Education Foundation and the Wells Fargo Regional Foundation, these tips and activities can help bring your organization’s values and culture to life.

Making Your Collaboration Value Stick

For many organizations, inclusion and collaboration are core values that drive the work. In our field, we know that we can not do the work on our own – we are better when we have more perspectives and lived experiences at the table and when partners are empowered to drive decisions. But what does this look like in everyday practice? How can the behaviors that lead to inclusion and collaboration be a part of our daily routines, structures, meetings, and teams?

Form a cross-functional culture working group.

Helios Education Foundation launched a culture working group with staff from across their organization representing every team and every position level, from operations assistants to the chief operating officer. The task for the group was three-fold:

  • Model an effective cross-functional working team
  • Identify and bring attention to culture issues and needs
  • Take a leadership role in defining fun and relationship-building activities

Through monthly meetings and actions in between, the group worked together on a number of new initiatives: managing a new staff engagement survey, rolling out Yammer as an interactive communications app and starting monthly birthday celebrations, occasional group outings to Topgolf, National Donut Day festivities, and many other activities. The working group distributed leadership to live out the culture — everyone owned the change they wanted to see. Representatives from across the organization were included and empowered to decide on and move forward key improvements in the organization, showing that living out these core values can lead to positive results.

Everyday Fun on Your Team

Do you take time for an icebreaker in all-staff meetings? Is team building a priority when you gather? Would your staff describe the organization as a “fun place to work”?

For many organizations, funteamwork, or community are core values. But what does that look like in practice? How can you get into a regular rhythm where fun is not just an annual picnic but an essential part of how you do work?

Take five minutes in the beginning of every staff meeting for a game.

Split into teams and do one round of trivia. Play a round of Pictionary or Charades. Or, as we did recently with our friends at the Wells Fargo Regional Foundation and their board, see who can build the tallest free-standing tower out of only 20 balloons and a roll of tape. Make this a regular practice — on a weekly, monthly, or even daily basis — if you want to really live out a value of teamwork and fun in your teams.

We hope these tips help you put your culture into action. For more information, send me a message (whowell@communitywealth.com).

Creating a Partnership Strategy: A Field Guide

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To make real traction on complex social problems, we can’t go it alone. Organizations with ambitious goals, such as ending childhood hunger in a state or solving a city’s housing crisis, need partners in the work. Yet too often, organizations form partnerships without a clear purpose or focus, and the partnership eventually becomes more of a drain on resources than a lever for greater impact.

A partnership strategy can help. We created a field guide to guide you as you create a partnership strategy and grapple with questions about with whom to partner and how to make those partnerships meaningful and effective. In the field guide, we walk through common stages of a partnership and offer actionable tools, questions to explore, and examples of what this work looked like for the education nonprofit City Year.

Partnerships can be challenging, messy, and time-consuming, but they also can help us accomplish more than we could ever hope to achieve on our own. We hope this field guide can provide some structure as you think about how you can approach your partnerships more intentionally.

Download the field guide here.

Creating a Change-Making Culture: A Field Guide

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Leadership expert Peter Drucker famously said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” While many in philanthropy have heard this quote and quite a few may agree that a strong culture is critical for foundations to achieve their goals, data suggest that culture may indeed be a barrier to success for many foundations.

A 2017 survey of grantmaking organizations by Grantmakers for Effective Organizations found that 48 percent of grantmakers did not think their culture was where it needed to be to maximize effectiveness. That means almost half of these organizations don’t have the culture they need to be successful. What can you do about it? Invest your time and money in getting the culture you want.

Many foundations invest significant time and resources in developing strategies that chart a course for greater impact without including attention to culture in the process. As the data above indicate, attention to culture is critical for ensuring an organization is well positioned to meet its goals and has the right team in place.

We created a field guide to help you form the culture you want for your organization. In this field guide, we offer a method and process for creating this change-making culture, with questions to discuss with your staff and board and practical recommendations throughout.

Grounded in our partnership with Helios Education Foundation, this field guide shows how we have seen organizations achieve significant results—including the ones listed below—through an intentional culture change process.

Culture Results

  1. Clearly defined and agreed-upon values that resonate for all staff
  2. Behaviors that reinforce your values and guide how everyone will act with each other and with external partners
  3. Structure, policy, and process changes that support values and behaviors
  4. Action plans clarifying who will lead changes and by when they will occur
  5. Aligned senior leadership teams with clear and consistent management practices, agreed-upon decision-making protocols, and increased trust
  6. Distributed leadership across the organization to lead culture changes “from their seats,”including the potential to establish cross-functional, staff-led culture working groups that ensure changes move forward (see our forthcoming blog post for more on culture working groups)

Staying Accountable to Our Community

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I’ll never forget the day when, early in my career, a colleague asked me to do something that felt wrong. I was less than a year out of college and working as a television producer for a major network in Topeka, Kansas, when news came across police scanners that a body had been found in a local hotel room. I remember feeling sick to my stomach. We sent a reporter to the scene.

Several hours later I found myself talking with a colleague from the promotions department. He asked me for video from the scene so that he could produce a promotional piece highlighting that we were the first network there. “What on earth?” I thought. I thought of the deceased person’s parent watching this replayed on TV and their child’s death being used as an opportunity for self-promotion. Where was the empathy for this family? Who was I accountable to? As a journalist, I believed I should be accountable to the community in which I worked, including this person’s family. But I encountered other pressures inside the newsroom, for example, the pressure to promote our station to drive ratings, which generated advertising revenue critical to the station’s viability.

In my current work with Community Wealth Partners, I see similar tensions play out in social change organizations. While nonprofits are ultimately accountable to the communities they serve, pressures to please other stakeholders often distract from this accountability. Many organizations feel pressure to please funders and donors to ensure an organization’s financial sustainability and ability to continue to deliver on its mission. Similarly, executive directors or CEOs of nonprofits often feel pressure—whether one admits it or not—to please the board, as one’s own job or personal sustainability can depend on it.

These pressures can lead to decisions that are not centered on accountability to community. For example, funding restrictions can prevent nonprofits from being able to adapt programs to better meet constituents’ needs. Staff may make decisions that privilege the opinions and expertise of their board members over the knowledge and experiences of community members.

So how do organizations keep focused on holding themselves accountable to the communities they serve, even amid these pressures? For Miriam’s Kitchen, a nonprofit focused on ending chronic homelessness in Washington, D.C., it’s a matter of explicitly committing to who comes first and building intentional practices to make it a reality.

At Miriam’s Kitchen, a core value is that its chronically homeless guests are at the center of everything the organization does. To live this value, the staff have built intentional opportunities to gather input from guests and incorporate that input into decisions about strategy and day-to-day operations. For example, Miriam’s Kitchen has a Guest Engagement Working Group, which is made up of guests that meet regularly to offer input on services. As the organization was refining its theory of change, staff invited a few guests to provide feedback.

“Every organization that serves vulnerable people has a responsibility to set aside times where you really listen to them,” said Scott Schenkelberg, president and CEO of Miriam’s Kitchen. “Otherwise you can easily get to a place where you aren’t listening to them.”

Funders and boards can either help or hurt an organization’s ability to listen and be responsive to guests. Funders can help nonprofits stay accountable to those they serve by providing flexible funding, which allows organizations to create space for listening and adapting based on what they hear. For Miriam’s Kitchen, this has meant working to ensure that most of its funding is unrestricted. “If the majority of our money were restricted, it wouldn’t allow us the flexibility to be able to adapt our programs and services to best meet the needs of the community,” Scott said.

Boards can support staff’s efforts to be responsive to those they serve by refraining from weighing in on management decisions and prioritizing input from the constituents as the most important voice. “We’ve all been on boards where someone is on fire about an idea even when staff says it doesn’t really fit our needs or program model,” Scott said.

The start of a new year brings opportunity for new intentions, such as prioritizing constituents. As you set new intentions, you might consider a powerful question that I learned from Suprotik Stotz-Ghosh at Grantmakers for Effective Organizations: How am I holding myself accountable to those with the least power in the group? Depending on the situation, power may be determined, implicitly or explicitly, by a range of factors including race, gender, age, or positional authority. It can be so easy to respond to the loudest voices or charge ahead with your default ways of working. Reflecting on this question can cause you to realize who you might be holding yourself accountable to, and it could result in different decisions, more inclusive and transparent processes, and better outcomes.

Staying accountable to those experiencing chronic homelessness in D.C. has resulted in progress for Miriam’s Kitchen. Just five years ago, the organization transformed its strategy from a sole focus on direct services to orchestrating systemic change to end chronic homelessness in D.C. As a result of that decision, Miriam’s Kitchen played a leading role in creating a coordinated entry system for individuals experiencing homelessness that streamlines the process for getting on the list to receive permanent supportive housing and gives priority attention to those who are most likely to die on the streets. Today more than 100 organizations in the city participate in this coordinated entry system, which is now housed at the Community Partnership for the Prevention of Homelessness. Additionally, Miriam’s Kitchen and the coalition it helped build have secured $112 million more from the city in vouchers for permanent supportive housing. These big wins speak directly to the reason Miriam’s Kitchen exists—ensuring that no one in D.C. ever experiences homelessness again.

Photo from Miriam’s Kitchen #MoreThanAMeal video

2018 Must-Reads

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What is something you read, listened to, or watched this year (regardless of when it came out) that impacted the way you think about your work? And why? We asked folks across the social sector for recommendations and were thrilled to see the incredible list they put together. Here’s what they said. What would you add? Comment below or tweet us.

Recommended by Kerrien Suarez (Equity in the Center)Lupe Poblano (CompassPoint)Dr. John Jackson (Schott Foundation), and Elissa Sloan Perry (Management Assistance Group)

“’Decolonizing Wealth’ is brilliant and groundbreaking!” — Kerrien Suarez, Equity in the Center

Power Moves

Recommended by Jalisa Whitley (Unbound Impact) and Connor Daley (Talent Citizen)

“’Power Moves’ from NCRP reframed my thinking around leveraging and sharing power, and their webinar series was amazing.” — Jalisa Whitley, Unbound Impact

“’Power Moves’ from NCRP has been the most important resource for me this year! It has helped us understand our own power as a firm (a badly under-examined field) and provided our clients and partners with inclusive, equitable tools to gather feedback.” — Connor Daley, Talent Citizen

We Too Sing America: South Asian, Arab, Muslim, and Sikh Immigrants Shape Our Multiracial Future

Recommended by Neesha Modi (Kresge Foundation)

“As an Indian American in this work, ‘We Too Sing America’ by Deepa Iyer has been personally profound.” — Neesha Modi, Kresge Foundation

The Mighty Miss Malone

Recommended by James Siegal (KaBOOM!)

“I read (with my 12-year-old daughter) ‘The Mighty Miss Malone’ by Christopher Paul Curtis. It’s a vivid, Depression-era portrait of 12-year-old Deza Malone, a girl with endless potential who is faced with challenges no kid should face – at the intersection of race, gender, class, and place.” — James Siegal, KaBOOM!

Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

Recommended by Lupe Poblano (CompassPoint)Elissa Sloan Perry (Management Assistance Group), and Shawn Dove (Campaign for Black Male Achievement)

“Although I read adrienne maree brown’s ‘Emergent Strategy’ a couple years ago, it’s still active in my life and often in my suitcase!” — Elissa Sloan Perry, Management Assistance Group

“Introduced just this year to adrienne maree brown’s ‘Emergent Strategy.’ Been moving and marinating at a reflective pace! She says we should ‘see our own lives and work and relationships as a front line, a first place we can practice justice, liberation, and alignment with each other and the planet.’” — Shawn Dove, Campaign for Black Male Achievement

Early Learnings from the Reframing Washington Empowerment Fund: Part 1 and Part 2

Recommended by Jalisa Whitley (Unbound Impact)

“I love the Weissberg Foundation’s blog, in particular their learnings from their Reframing Washington Empowerment Fund. It’s a great model of funder transparency.” — Jalisa Whitley, Unbound Impact

Entangled Roots: The Role of Race in Policies that Separate Families

Recommended by Alicia S. Guevara Warren (Michigan League for Public Policy)

“For me over the last year, I’ve done a lot of reading on the trauma caused by parental separation. I have been particularly moved by those who have been so courageous to share their stories—written and through video—to spur action and help people understand the impact the policy to separate families at the border was having. One report that I think is particularly helpful was from the Center for the Study of Social Policy called ‘Entangled Roots: The Role of Race in Policies that Separate Families.’ It helps to show all of the systems where we have policies that separate children and the roots of racism in those policies. It includes actions and recommendations, which is always important in policy work!” — Alicia S. Guevara Warren, Michigan League for Public Policy

Scene on Radio: Seeing White Series

Recommended by Nicky Goren (Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation)

“The podcast series from ‘Scene on Radio’ called ‘Seeing White’ should be required listening for white people, particularly those embarking on racial equity work in philanthropy.” — Nicky Goren, Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation

“We need to correct and reframe our history.” — Nicky Goren, Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation; Relevant recommendations from Nicky: Doctrine of Discovery (video) and Uncivil (podcast)

Does Collective Impact Really Make an Impact?

Recommended by Sara Gibson (20 Degrees)

“This piece really got at the [heart] of collective impact—how hard it is and how it really works, if you give it enough time and really involve the right people.” — Sara Gibson, 20 Degrees

Toward One Oregon: Rural-Urban Interdependence and the Evolution of a State

Recommended by Colin Clemente Jones (Collins Foundation)

“My reading this year has really honed my thinking on power and place. For me, ‘Toward One Oregon’ from Oregon State University Press is at the top of the list. Definitely paradigm-shifting.” — Colin Clemente Jones, Collins Foundation

Additional recommendations by Colin: A Lot to Ask of a NameCity of Segregation: One Hundred Years of Struggle for Housing in Los Angeles, and There Goes the Gayborhood?

“People follow you because of what you believe is possible, yes, for them as a team, and more importantly for each of them individually.” — MarkSteven Reardon, consultant; quote shared by Janice Johnson Dias, PhD (GrassROOTS Community Foundation) 

M Archive: After the End of the World

Recommended by Elissa Sloan Perry (Management Assistance Group)

Raising Kings: A year of love and struggle at Ron Brown College Prep

Recommended by Dale Erquiaga (Communities In Schools) — See also this follow-up episode

The Need to Double Down

Recommended by Darell Hammond (formerly of KaBOOM!)

What Every BODY is Saying

Recommended by Andres Gonzalez (Holistic Life Foundation)

“It greatly enhanced my ability to read people and to better communicate with them based on some of their non-verbal cues.” — Andres Gonzalez, Holistic Life Foundation

Insights From Equity in the Center Summit

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As we draw close to the end of this year, we have an opportunity to reflect on how we’ve grown in our work toward racial equity and recommit to it in the year to come. I reflected on our racial equity journey quite a bit this fall, particularly at the Equity in the Center Summit, a gathering of nonprofit and philanthropic leaders exploring ways to advance racial equity inside organizations and across the social sector. I left the summit feeling humbled by how much more work I need to do and energized about what’s possible. I credit Kerrien Suarez, Monisha Kapila, and Andrew Plumley at ProInspire for designing powerful sessions at the summit where I gained insights and takeaways that will become part of our firm’s continuing racial equity learning journey and that may help you reflect on your own journey.

One of my most valuable takeaways from the summit was a reminder that working toward racial equity requires persistent commitment to systems change through educating myself and others, self-reflection, and a willingness to engage in conversations that are often difficult. As we continue our own learning, as individuals and as a team, here is some helpful advice I picked up from the summit.

  • When talking about equity, it’s critical to acknowledge the systems and structures that have enabled racism and oppression in our country for generations. It helps to have the language to talk about racism and the history to understand it. One consultant, Heather Hackman, who works with white people on understanding whiteness, carries books with her to show her clients the laws, practices, language, and decisions that created the conditions that benefit a few and maintain systems of oppression.
  • Liberalism should not be confused with racial justice. Cities that have progressive policies are not more equitable. Racism’s purpose is to deny, extract, and exploit resources from people of color for the benefit of white people and for this to seem normal. Racial justice requires intentional focus on realigning systems with our values and who we want to be as a society.
  • Racial equity work must include an organization’s leaders, executives, and board. Having leaders fully committed to doing the work is critical to advancing racial equity. Also, it isn’t enough to have people of color on the board; the board must be willing to push for change.

A couple of questions were in the back of my mind throughout the conference as I thought about how I do my own work and play a role in leading our firm toward fully living our equity values: How do I continue to push myself? And where do I get the energy to do it? Racial equity work is personal and difficult. I was relieved to see that others were also asking these questions. Here are ways we can continue to push ourselves and our organizations in our racial equity journeys.

Recommendations for Individuals

  • Take an unflinching look at yourself. Ask yourself, “How is colonization and white fragility showing up in how I engage?” (If you’re not sure, see the recommended resources below to spur deeper reflection)
  • Continue to work on your own implicit biases and internalized oppression
  • Hold yourself accountable to a specific community—this can be friends, mentors, colleagues, or the community you are trying to impact through your work
  • Increase your awareness of your own privilege and how you are using it
  • Get comfortable with being uncomfortable
  • Take time to take care of yourself (i.e., practice silent Sundays, or don’t engage when you know you have reached your energy limit)
  • Show compassion and grace to others when they are learning or processing something hard

Recommendations for Organizations

 

  • Embed racial equity and inclusion in organizational policies and practices
  • Create space for regular conversations and learning about racial equity
  • Create spaces for people of color to make organizational change, and support their work
  • Get staff buy-in on the organizational culture to which you aspire, and regularly check in on how you are doing in achieving that desired culture
  • Don’t be afraid to fail. Talk about the “ouch” moments, lean in to curiosity, and avoid judgement and shame
  • Recognize colleagues’ humanity (e.g., do head and heart check-ins during meetings; come together to process tragic events; prioritize colleagues’ ability to take care of themselves)

For more suggestions of steps you can take to advance racial equity in your relationships, organizations, and community, check out Equity in the Center’s Call to Action.

I would love to hear about your journey and learn about what’s working for you. What else are you doing to center equity in your work? What tools or resources have you found helpful? What successes and challenges have you experienced? Reply below or reach out to me.

Recommended Reading

 

Here are some additional resources that may help further your understanding of how to advance racial equity in the nonprofit sector.

The visual map was created for Equity in the Center by Julie Stuart of Making Ideas Visible