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Editors’ note: This article is from NPQ’s spring 2023 issue, “The Space Beyond: Building the Way.”

Click here to download this article as it appears in the magazine, with accompanying artwork.

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I.   The Black Leader’s Burden

In the past three years, many of us who have been advancing justice initiatives have either questioned or outright criticized traditional top-down leadership as one root cause of the perpetuation of structural racism. The Aspen Institute’s definition of the term is instructive here. Structural racism “identifies dimensions of our history and culture that have allowed privileges associated with ‘whiteness’ and disadvantages associated with ‘color’ to endure and adapt over time.”¹ The structure of labor is one such “dimension of our history.” Though it has looked different from one epoch to the next, throughout this country’s labor history—from chattel slavery to the industrial age to the information age—White men with institutional power and authority have effectively shaped systems both to protect and propel the interests of White people. Thus, those of us doing racial justice work have posed a question that is at the very least worth grappling with: Can we trust an organizational leadership paradigm forged over centuries of oppression to lead us toward liberation, or do we need to reconfigure that model in order to produce different outcomes? We have further asserted that because of the inequitable distribution of access and opportunity that stems from racial capitalism, our leadership teams may not reflect our most qualified or hardest working (the twin pillars of merit) but rather those who were set up and supported to succeed from the beginning (the sine qua non of privilege).

The critique has been valuable. It has challenged leaders to look within, ask themselves hard questions, and uncover hidden assumptions that may be implicitly guiding their choices and—perhaps—impeding the progress toward the more just organizations they claim they want to build.

The critique has also, admittedly, been weaponized—often, against leaders of color who are ascending into organizational leadership. Just as these folks are assuming the mantle, they are being met with direct assaults on the established structures and forms of power. In the past three years, I have worked with or spoken to several dozen of these leaders. Nearly all have faced power struggles from within that they didn’t anticipate and can’t seem to get beyond without considerable time and energy that would otherwise be spent on the job they believed they were hired to perform. In some instances, the challenge presents as a clarity gap— employees stating that they don’t understand how decisions are made or what their roles are. In other instances, it presents as an accountability and transparency gap—employees asking (in some cases, demanding) to have access to information that may or may not be relevant to their job. And in yet others, the gap employees believe the organization needs to close is one of proximity—those closest to the work or who share certain identities with those the mission seeks to serve should make, or at least be deeply involved in, key decisions.

The challenge to power has also presented as a de facto coup d’état: a discontented band of employees who have felt burned by leadership no longer have faith in its capacity to lead. And since they have no formal means of airing grievances, they push back—on everything. They seek to unionize. They go directly to the board. They engage in creative forms of sabotage. In whichever way the problem presents itself on the surface, however, once consultants like me start asking questions and analyzing data, the fundamental challenge to power—who has it, who should have it, how should it be structured and exercised—eventually reveals itself.

And while some leaders can and have categorically shut down these challenges to power, Black leaders, in my experience, haven’t had that luxury. For one thing, no self-respecting Black person wants to be considered an enabler of White supremacy within their organization. Being labeled as such is the modern equivalent of the Uncle Tom, house negro, and sellout trope. I don’t know about you, but those are fightin’ words where I come from. Not only that, but the patronizing tone in which these assaults are typically packaged also assumes thatthe leaders are either naive or craven, when, in fact, the Black leaders I have worked with are crystal clear about who they are and what their ancestors endured. And while they know that the “merit” game they had to master in order to get to a position of power can be a fraught, flimsy grift used by guilty hearts to defend a rigged system, from their vantage point it remains the only practical means to accessing the institutional power to effect real change. Yet, even as they are fully aware of all of this and more, they accept that no matter how qualified they are for the role they were hired to perform, the true litmus test of their leadership will be whether and to what extent they wielded power in a just manner—a moving target that is dependent upon who is judging at that moment. So, as much as they may want to unleash their scorched-earth inner voice— and they do—they listen, nod, and, most of all, keep their facial expressions in check.

I call all of this the Black leader’s burden—and those who are in my circle are asking their coaches, therapists, each other, and whoever else will listen one question: How do I engage with this challenge to power without burning up or out?

II.    Rethinking Power Arrangements

All of this is to say, the sudden influx of new Black leaders has not been met with the open arms of staff that many of us expected. In many instances, the arrival of a new ED/CEO just made the staff more anxious, the problems more pronounced, and the leaders themselves more uncertain.

Younger employees—the “entitled malcontents” who everyone my age and above insists are hung up on identity politics—at least understand something that those in leadership roles seem to be conveniently misremembering from their own youth: identity affinity alone is not a salve. However inexperienced and/or entitled staff may be, my interactions with younger staff members have consistently shown me that they are sophisticated enough to know that just because one shares a historically oppressed identity does not mean one shares the same values or vision for justice. What seems to be getting lost in the quest to quiet organizational discontent is that many of these young people feel duped. They were sold a vision of “the work” and the organization’s principles that, in the worst cases, turned out to be a complete fabrication. Once inside, they uncovered incoherent—sometimes nonexistent—systems and structures. They found themselves unclear about their roles, having been hired for one job yet doing another. They discovered that they were expected to go above and beyond without additional compensation or paid time off. And the values the organization trumpeted on their website—transparency and accountability? Well, turns out they were still working on that.

As a result, they lost trust and started demanding that leaders establish explicit systems and processes. And they have expectations—and having an actual say in decisions about the work that impacts them sits right at the top of their list.

How this could come as a shock to anyone is strange to me. Long before COVID-19 and George Floyd, things were not okay in a lot of organizations. In some cases, call-outs were long overdue. So, to the leaders who felt/ feel ambushed and pounced on, I ask, “What were you expecting?” Hiring a leader who shares a salient identity with the people who have been feeling left out or discriminated against is the oldest hustle in the book (and one that people have good reason to be skeptical of)—and intragroup conflict is nothing new, either.

As tempting as it may be, the role of leaders facing calls from their people for participation/inclusion, transparency, and accountability is not to stamp out, bad-mouth, or label such calls “impractical.” The onus is squarely on leaders—those who are committed to carrying the justice mantle forward—to engage with the challenge to power. As the eminently quotable Jay-Z once rapped: “it’s just the penalty of leadership.”² Thus, the justice-centered leader’s role, as I see it, is to learn how their historical predecessors met or failed to meet the challenge to power in moments of upheaval and change, and figure out how to adapt themselves and their organizations to more fully express the aspirations of racial justice and collective liberation.

When the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s executive secretary, Walter White, appointed Ella Baker to direct all of the organization’s branches in 1943, Baker “became the NAACP’s highest-ranking woman.”³ She also inherited a portfolio of sporadically engaged but largely immobilized chapters scattered across the country. From what Baker could gather, the primary function of the chapters was funneling membership dues to a national office increasingly staffed by professional civil rights leaders with their own agendas and ambitions. For their part, the occupants of the national office were content with this relationship: the dues allowed the national headquarters to engage in an advocacy strategy reliant upon public relations and court battles to eventually change the legal status of Black Americans. Baker believed that the chapters needed to be activated, and she set about transforming them into semiautonomous direct-action units that spontaneously mobilized around local and state issues of concern.

Baker began training local leaders—Rosa Parks, among them—to be activists. She started recruiting in pool halls and bars. Even though her efforts increased membership, her underlying belief in distributed power brought her into conflict with the NAACP leadership. Baker eventually fell out of favor and left the organization, but the resistance she encountered at the organization persisted into the next decade.⁴

As difficult as it is to grasp today, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the direction and goals of the racial justice movement were a matter of serious debate. Following World War II, African Americans began joining trade unions en masse.⁵ As they did, many became politicized; so, they began pushing for economic and social policies that would end discrimination and redistribute resources to the masses at home and abroad. Holding socialist or communist views was not yet considered anti-American; in fact, Ben Davis, an official member of the American Communist Party, won a city council seat in Harlem. But Black radicalism’s critique of colonialism, capitalism, and Jim Crow–style White supremacy ran afoul of the Cold War fever infecting the country. To protect itself from being labeled a communist front and jeopardizing its 501(c)(3) status, NAACP leadership purged leftists from its ranks and actively aided the State Department and FBI in a smear campaign against prominent Black leftists—Paul Robeson being its most prominent victim. It stood aside as the government harassed suspected Black radicals, stripping them of jobs on spurious charges of treason, confiscating their passports under dubious claims that they threatened democracy, and sentencing them to prison under bogus laws like the Smith Act—convictions which the Warren Court later overturned or ruled as unconstitutional. By the middle of the 1950s, Black radicals had been driven out of public view.⁶

The struggle for power is not an aberration; ours is as much a history of conflict as it is communion. To put it bluntly: We fight. We disagree. Yet that disagreement pushes our shared quest for liberation forward.

The NAACP’s strategy paved the way for Eisenhower’s Department of Justice to formally back the NAACP’s Brown v. Board of Education petition before the Supreme Court;⁷ it also established a blueprint for racial justice movements: going forward, in order to win the support of elites who broadly supported diversity and who tended to populate nonprofit boards, the goal of racial justice had to be framed as full access and opportunity within the existing order of things, not structural change to the underlying systems that enabled discrimination.

So, what is the lesson here?

I do not question that the NAACP of the Cold War era paved the way for the modern-day racial justice movement. Faced with unprecedented pressure to prove its loyalty to the government or perish, it chose collective preservation. Sadly, one of its unflattering legacies is the notion that internal differences regarding the direction of the movement must be silenced; only certain visions for change are to be given quarter. As the inheritors of the racial justice legacy, contemporary justice-centered leaders who are being challenged by their people to shift power would do well to situate that challenge within this continuum. The struggle for power is not an aberration; ours is as much a history of conflict as it is communion. To put it bluntly: We fight. We disagree. Yet that disagreement pushes our shared quest for liberation forward. Martin Luther King Jr. studied, cited, and built parts of his own philosophy on the historical materialism commonly attributed to the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.⁸ Hegelian dialectics asserts that growth is the process and product of struggle between competing visions. Through conflict comes improvement.

I offer this perhaps unpopular perspective because the challenge to power that Black leaders are facing is being increasingly characterized as a—even the—problem rather than a symptom. But hear this: The “woke” rhetoric that conservatives have collectively dog-whistled to signal their disgust? It’s now being adopted by the left. Progressives are being derided as utopian dilettantes at every turn. It has become fashionable to come across as a “reasonable,” “sensible” pragmatist and pontificate about how “these things take time” and “maybe, in our haste to make amends to Black people for past wrongs amid the 2020 racial reckoning, we overcorrected by adopting impractical antiracist policies.” Thus, those outspoken employees who express disagreement or push organizations and their leaders to be in alignment with the values they tell the world they believe in (by practicing, for example, a form of democratic decision-making) are being labeled “radical extremists,” “emotionally immature troublemakers,” all sorts of names that may have some legitimacy but are also being used to obscure some truths, avoid a deeper dissection of the social sector, and fend off important introspection overall. I see it, I hear it: the relieved sense among leaders that the rabble are being cleared out so that they can finally lead without distraction.

In the thaw, it’s important that leaders not be seduced by an absence of open dissent. The NAACP of the 1940s and 1950s leveraged democratic forms—the language, ideals, and symbolism of egalitarian democratic institutions—yet ordinary, dues-paying members could not vote for national leadership.⁹ Nor did they have a seat at the table when strategic decisions that would impact millions of lives, including their own, were being decided. Inasmuch as the organization proudly presented itself to the world as the face of change, its priorities and values were largely shaped by the agendas of government agencies, private foundations, and wealthy individuals who had their own beliefs about how the world works and the role Black folks should play in it. And while we have a landmark case to look back on with pride, we should also ask what we sacrificed—and, in light of the resegregation of American schools, whether that sacrifice was necessary to get what we deserve.

What I believe to be true is that the reckoning opened long-overdue lines of communication between leadership and the people they lead within the social sector. It put the question of who should decide and on what basis out into the open and on the table. It gave space for the question of power to be explored. Now, anyone aspiring to formal, mainstream social sector leadership in the post-BLM era has to expect and be prepared for the rank and file to challenge them by raising concerns over workplace inequities that they perceive, pushing for transparency around decisions that impact their work, and seeking clarity when boundaries are blurry.

III.    Justice-Centered Leadership

The justice-centered leader understands that chronic distrust is the context and condition in which people are living their day-to-day lives. People witnessed the raw hypocrisy of January 6. They are now watching corporations renege on racial justice pledges and governments pass laws to restrict everything from Black voter participation to Black history. The murder of unarmed Black men by law enforcement continues unabated. White supremacy has placed many people on edge, bracing for the next assault. Therefore, the leader who is facing a challenge to power and who hopes to productively engage with conflict first seeks to establish a sense of safety. They do this by being vulnerable and clear.

This is difficult work. It demands experimentation, patience, and a tolerance for prolonged ambiguity—even for repeated failure.

By openly acknowledging their own uncertainties—that they don’t have all of the answers; that they, too, are bewildered by the world’s events; that they don’t know exactly what a different set of relational arrangements can look like or if they are ready to embrace such a thing if it were presented—and asking for help, the leader effectively removes themself from the traditional role of the all-knowing authority figure. They join their people in the work; and in so doing, the leader restores a basic belief within people who have been systematically excluded, lied to, let down, and betrayed that they are seen, they are wanted, and they matter.

The justice-centered leader also prioritizes being clear with their people. They know that in the absence of clarity, people create their own realities, filling in the gaps with their own story lines. The justice-centered leader also knows that White supremacy thrives on ignorance and confusion, so they make it their business to be clear. They are explicit about where they are seeking consensus, compliance, or commitment; they name who has decision rights and how decision-making functions; they make sure that people understand their role, what is expected of them, and what will happen if expectations are not met; and they draw clear boundaries. These leaders do whatever is necessary to ensure that their people—too often and too easily disqualified from opportunities because no one took the time to just be honest with them—have the information they need not only to succeed but also to decide if this is the right place for them.

This is difficult work. It demands experimentation, patience, and a tolerance for prolonged ambiguity—even for repeated failure. In my practice, I am observing some leaders making more progress than others. These leaders share a set of common traits. First, they are legitimately grappling with the challenge of staff asking to decentralize power; second, they are searching for ways to close the gap between decisions and those affected; third, they are recognizing the critical need to realign their people with the mission. It is still too early to tell whether their efforts will result in lasting organizational change, not to mention greater impact—but these leaders are at least leaning in. And, as they do, what they are modeling and enabling has the potential to shift our shared understanding of how a leader is supposed to act and what a leader is supposed to do when faced with a challenge to their power.

I confess that these are just starting points—building blocks and first drafts drawn from the small sample size that is my consulting work—yet, from what I have observed, they are making a difference. Collectively, I call these three starting points “justice-centered leadership practices.”

1.   Getting more proximate to the work

Eliminating roles and people who may be cherished within an organization creates wounds and triggers grief that must be attended to. But where the leader focused on equity may get stuck trying to be fair to everyone, the leader centered on justice is called—simply and purely—to right past wrongs.

In 2018, I heard New Profit’s Tulaine Montgomery give a talk on proximate leadership that shifted my consciousness. What she said was at once profound and intuitive: people who hold power need to be more proximate to the problems they are trying to solve. It is as simple as that. And yet, the number- one problem many organizations face when attempting to reimagine their structure is their own internal, self-created bureaucracy. In a quest to grow the mission, organizations hired managers. Now they have managers of managers of managers. Each time, the people doing the work—often, young Black folks and other people of color—were pushed further down the organizational chart. The result is that the managers of the most significance—those who lead the teams who do the most essential work—are often far removed from decision-making spaces that affect the work. They only speak to the power center through intermediaries, whose incentives may not be aligned with mission or impact.

Once the justice-centered leader becomes aware of the gulf between themself and the work, they seek to close it. This can happen a number of ways, but what I have witnessed and been most impressed by are leaders making the difficult decision to eliminate layers of organizational bureaucracy so they can get closer to the work. This shift is not for the faint of heart. Eliminating roles and people who may be cherished within an organization creates wounds and triggers grief that must be attended to. But where the leader focused on equity may get stuck trying to be fair to everyone, the leader centered on justice is called—simply and purely—to right past wrongs. Any obstacle getting in the way of that has to be removed. By closing the power gap between themself and their most critical people, by bringing them into the room and making sure they have a seat at the table, the justice-centered leader builds stronger lines of communication, deepens bonds of trust and mutuality, and, ultimately, ensures that those closest to the wrongs are also closest to the power and resources to right those wrongs.

2.   Enabling shared solutioning

I was working with a new leadership team, when it became clear that they didn’t know their purpose. Why had the CEO, a woman of color new to the role, formed the team in the first place? When I asked if they knew what their purpose was, there was no clear consensus; nor was there any about what authority they had. Most of the leaders in the room—upper-middle managers, for the most part—considered it a clarity problem. I saw something different. I had witnessed the CEO ask them for help in designing the team. The CEO had heard their request for more “shared leadership,” and wanted to honor that by creating a space for them to define what shared leadership looked like and meant. The CEO could not have been clearer—the team just didn’t know how to react to the ask. They were shell-shocked. Because prior leadership had made major decisions in an echo chamber, the managers in the room didn’t believe that the new CEO really wanted to share power. Thus, the group was choosing self-preservation, and that meant waiting to be told what to do.

Based on what I was observing and what I knew coming in, the only time the group came together was to protest narrow-minded, short-sighted decisions made by prior leadership. The group wasn’t comfortable—or, quite frankly, experienced—operating as a group of proactive, problem-solving leaders. This is indicative of a paradox I have encountered across the sector: many of us know the organizations that we don’t want to be part of, know how to blame management for making decisions we don’t like, but we get stuck when it comes to crafting what we want. Perhaps we are afraid to take power and/ or have a conflicted relationship with power. Perhaps we are so used to pushing back and fighting against, that many of us legitimately haven’t built the muscle or tolerance for the shared decision-making and solutioning—the democracy—that we believe and hope will propel our work forward.

This is where reaching into the past becomes vital. The conferences that Ella Baker organized for NAACP chapters in the 1940s and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) members in the 1960s were designed to build group capacity for organizing. Baker understood that organizing is a skill and that it requires actual abilities and knowledge—not just rhetoric. Therefore, these were strategy spaces, growth spaces, problem-solving spaces. People left these conferences connected and inspired, yes—but they also left knowing how to do new things to advance the movement.

The justice-centered leader recognizes that inasmuch as people believe they are ready to engage in democratic processes, it is likelier than not that the group needs to develop the capacities—both relational and technical—to pull it off successfully. Moreover, they understand that the best way to mend wounds is through the work. Thus, they set up or authorize situations that disrupt the normal way of operating. Shared learning that enables the group to embody shared leadership is one such disruption. In the instance described above, we spent two days together wading through an iterative process of naming, sorting, sifting, arguing, voting, and assigning. In the final analysis, the group was able to hold disagreement without imploding, achieve consensus within a defined time frame, and accept nonclosure without feeling as though they had failed to make legitimate progress. By the time we returned to our regularly scheduled lives, the group had defined next steps and who would be in charge of what.

Notably, this kind of collective work can be especially important in the hybrid work environment, in which not all staff are local. It facilitates semistructured interactions among people whose job functions may not bring them into regular contact. It allows people to talk directly with the CEO/ED, whom they might otherwise not hear from except over email or through intermediaries. Thus, it punctures silos and allows those who feel isolated to connect and contribute in ways that go beyond their day-to-day job function.

3.   Making yourself accountable to the community

In a 2001 essay, “Associations Without Members,” Harvard sociologist Theda Skocpol traces civic America’s transformation from one powered by scores of large, volunteer-led associations in post–World War II to one powered by wealth, access, and professional training by the late 1990s. The initial catalyst of the transformation, argues Skocpol, was the Civil Rights movement.¹⁰ She wrote, “Inspired by civil rights achievements, additional ‘rights’ movements exploded”—during what she termed “the long 1960s” (“mid-1950s through the mid-1970s”)—“promoting equality for women, dignity for homosexuals, the unionization of farm workers, and the mobilization of other nonwhite ethnic minorities. Movements arose to oppose U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam, champion a new environmentalism, and further a variety of other public causes. At the forefront of these groundswells were younger Americans, especially from the growing ranks of college students and university graduates.”¹¹

The justice-centered leader recognizes that the loss of deep civic engagement with communities and the rise of deep-pocketed do-gooders pose an ethical problem.

While member-led associations continue to exist and be relevant players, it is hard to dispute that today’s nonprofit sector—the direct descendant of the peculiarly American voluntary spirit first detected by Alexis De Tocqueville in the nineteenth century—has untethered itself from meaningful accountability to the communities and people it claims to serve. This isn’t to say that organizations are indifferent to community; it is to say that what exists—in place of the thousands upon thousands of people who at one time might have composed a given association’s constituency, paid membership dues, bought its newsletters, determined its actions, and voted on its leaders—are largely unaccountable networks of paid staff, boards, and donors. Social entrepreneurs can “sell” ideas to address social problems on spec without any substantial support from any community or relevant background experience. They only need a 501(c)(3) seal and an entity or individual—perhaps themself—who is willing to fund the project.

The justice-centered leader recognizes that the loss of deep civic engagement with communities and the rise of deep-pocketed do-gooders pose an ethical problem. They understand that they undermine the values of democratic citizenship. Moreover, they see the danger of dependence on elites and their institutions to drive the radical social changes that are necessary to create a just society.

This is a dilemma with no quick answers. But leaders are experimenting with new strategies to create more accountability. Some are establishing youth councils or designating spots on their boards for community members. These are all solid starting points.

One very promising approach to closing the accountability gap that I have seen up close is participatory action research—a formal process and practice of engaging people to investigate their own problems. Last summer, I was hired by an executive director of a foundation, a Black woman, to steward a strategic planning process led by 18 members of the community. The members were predominantly people of color and immigrants who had never before participated in anything like this. The foundation compensated them for their time; if they needed childcare or transportation support, the foundation made sure it was provided. The strategic planning team, not the board, designed the research questions, identified other community members to speak with and learn from, conducted the research, reviewed the research findings, and, ultimately, selected the organization’s strategic priorities.

The entire process posed an immense risk for the leader. What if the strategy team came up with priorities that the foundation didn’t know how to advance? What if the board didn’t buy in? What if donors disapproved of the new direction? To their credit, the leader accepted the possibility of all these outcomes and moved forward anyway. The leader was committed to serving the community; if that meant losing supporters or having to learn new skills, then so be it. It was more important to align and anchor the foundation to the people in whose name it claimed to be operating than to exist at the pleasure of a handful of well-intentioned individuals.

* * *

The justice-centered leader has internalized these lessons. They are fully aware that we are steeped in systems that need to be rehabilitated or abolished. They recognize the need for accountability and repair. They also know that, if indulged, people will deplete themselves and their organizations fighting the wrong battles with the wrong people. Accordingly, the leader makes space to validate all the truths that their people are naming about the internal structures and processes that should be attended to without letting any of it become an excuse for not doing the important work they have been called to do. Thus, they absorb the hard feedback they are receiving and channel it productively, asking: What does this mean for our work? How does doing this get us closer to achieving our goals? How does this improve people’s material conditions? Rather than letting people spin in self-indulgent circles of complaint, the justice-centered leader reminds people where they started, how far they have come, and where they are headed and why. In this way, the justice-centered leader reignites a disciplined focus on the prize. Every bit of energy is required for that purpose—because when it is all said and done, that alone is the ultimate accountability measure.

 

 

Notes

1. Aspen Institute Roundtable on Community Change, Glossary for Understanding the Dismantling Structural Racism/Promoting Racial Equity Analysis (Washington, DC: The Aspen Institute, 2016), www.aspeninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/files/content/docs/rcc/RCC-Structural-Racism-Glossary.pdf.
2. “Some People Hate,” on Jay-Z, The Blueprint²: The Gift & the Curse, Roc-A-Fella Records and Island Def Jam Music Group, 2002.
3. SNCC Legacy Project, “In Memoriam: Ella Baker,” accessed February 28, 2023, org/in-memoriam-ella-baker.
4. Todd Moye, Ella Baker: Community Organizer of the Civil Rights Movement, Library of African American Biography (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 47–76.
5. For more on this, see James Gilbert Cassedy, “African Americans and the American Labor Movement,” in “Federal Records and African American History,” special issue, Prologue 29, 2 (Summer 1997).
6. This is all well documented in several historical texts, most notably in Martin Duberman, Paul Robeson (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1988) and Gerald Horne, Black and Red: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro- American Response to the Cold War, 1944–1963 (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1985).
7. See Brian Landsberg, “The Federal Government and the Promise of Brown,” University of the Pacific, Scholarly Commons, 1995.
8. For more on MLK’s relationship with German philosophy, see Josh Jones, “How Martin Luther King, Used Nietzsche, Hegel & Kant to Overturn Segregation in America,” Open Culture, February 11, 2015, openculture.com/2015/02/how-martin-luther-king-jr-used-hegel-to-overturn-segregation-in-america.html.
9. Local NAACP chapters did hold elections for chapter leaders, but national NAACP leadership positions were
10. Theda Skocpol, “Associations Without Members,” American Prospect, December 19, 2001, org/power/associations-without-members/.
11. Ibid.

 

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.

A James Beard Award-winning restaurant in San Francisco’s Chinatown was abusing its staff, forcing them to work brutal hours, and stealing enormous sums through wage theft for years. For too long, city agencies failed to protect those workers. So far, sadly, this is pretty much the standard account that you might find in any US city.

But then something different occurred. The Chinese Progressive Association—in coalition with other groups, including the Asian Law Caucus—not only helped workers take a stand, but they leveraged a “co-governance” arrangement with the city’s labor standards enforcement agency to secure a record-breaking settlement of over $4 million on behalf of 280 workers on back wages that they were owed. As our organization, Partners for Dignity & Rights, noted in a recent report co-published with Race Forward, these Chinatown workers are part of a larger national trend of communities staking claim to a share of public authority.

The restaurant workers’ victory is just one example of how co-governance—that is, governing arrangements in which local authorities cede partial decision-making power to community residents and community-based groups—is making a difference in cities across the country.

While the term “co-governance” has only recently become common in popular discourse, the ideas underlying it have been around for centuries. Its roots go back to the historic village and tribal communitarian practices prevalent in Native, African American, and US immigrant communities. More recently, in the sixties and seventies, this approach can be seen in how welfare rights organizations, environmentalists, labor unions, and health advocates have forced governance changes. For instance, activism by ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) famously led to life-saving changes in the drug approval process, with patient advocates participating in drug development decisions in a way that was rare before.

In the case of the San Francisco restaurant workers, CPA set its sights on improving the effectiveness of labor standards enforcement by building the capacity of both a municipal agency and workers through a collaborative relationship. They were able to establish, codify, and fund a relationship with the city’s Office of Labor Standards Enforcement such that they were able to be directly involved in setting policy, and workers were centered in implementation.

There is still a lot of work to do to protect low-wage workers in San Francisco and across the country, but CPA’s organizing over the years illustrates the potential of co-governance to build formal and informal structures to make collective policy decisions, co-create programs to meet community needs and ensure those policies and programs are implemented effectively.

 

The Power of Co-Governance

Building power is more important than ever, as communities grapple with efforts by racist, authoritarian forces to marginalize, disenfranchise, and strip away basic human rights. Community groups need strategies that amplify and strengthen the real good that public agencies can do when people at the margins can help form and implement solutions together with state and municipal agencies, as well as elected officials.

The key is for community groups to see public agencies as a site to organize—not just among elected officials but civil service agency staff.

Too often, community groups are marginalized, or only given token input into the policies that directly affect their lives. Moreover, city agencies are frequently hamstrung by their lack of on-the-ground experience that only the community holds. But when community groups and government can come together, they can build power by leveraging the insights of the former and the authority of the latter.

Co-governance offers an opportunity to build public capacity through collective action to meet shared needs and improve real outcomes in people’s lives. In so acting, communities are building models of participatory democracy from the ground up.

Co-governance requires shifting power and building trust between two sometimes adversarial parties. To be sure, public authority can be (and often is) abused, taken over, and used to serve the interests of the powerful and wealthy. Dangers abound, but the key is for community groups to see public agencies as a site to organize—not just among elected officials but civil service agency staff. Done well, this organizing can assure that public power serves its named (if often unenacted) purpose—that is, to embrace those most in need and work with those communities to offer solutions.

 

Co-Governance in Action

Examples of co-governance today are wide-ranging. They can include when a worker center has a memorandum of understanding with a government enforcement agency; when a community gathers for people’s assemblies, and their resolutions are given priority access to city council and mayoral agendas; and when community group members have designated positions on community boards, task forces, and coalitions that include government representatives and institutionalize lines of accountability.

The most powerful examples include formalized agreements between the community and government entities. Effective co-governance measures include: 1) structures that ensure community groups have a direct say in crafting both policy and its implementation; 2) provisions for authentic outreach and engagement of community members as part of the policymaking and implementation process; and 3) the use of public dollars to fund the activities.

But there is no need to be doctrinaire about what is and isn’t co-governance. Co-governance exists on a spectrum. Some successful examples might include some, but not all, of the elements described above. The People’s Assemblies in Jackson, MS, have effectively empowered the community and affected policy decisions, but there is no formal, codified agreement between the community organizations facilitating the assemblies and the mayor and city council.

Sometimes, effective advocacy can begin to tip into co-governance. In Paterson, New Jersey, the Paterson Education Fund, a community group that has been pushing for years against punitive and racist disciplinary policies in the school district, secured a commitment from the school superintendent to implement restorative practices in every school by June 2023. Most of their work involved old fashioned relationship-building and determined organizing over the span of 10 years. But now PEF has formal MOUs with two district schools, and its members sit on the district’s facilities team, search team, disciplinary task force, and attendance task force.

The difference between their (very effective) advocacy work and where they are today lies in the institutionalization of community access to public decision making. Now, when members notice a problem with how student lateness is being recorded, they can bring it up at an attendance task force meeting and change it, which they did.

Co-governance provides a pathway to create and implement policies that reflect the real, lived, and on-the-ground experience of community members.

However, we do want to be clear about what co-governance is not. It is not a way to paper over the pernicious impulse by city officials to engage in “public/private” partnerships that are simply another way to privatize public goods. When a city contracts out to an organization, even a nonprofit, to do the work that should be done by the government agency to “save money” or be “efficient,” it is often just another example of the thin edge of the wedge of privatization. A contract is just that—money for services paid. It is not co-governance.

 

Benefits of Co-Governance

Co-governance provides a pathway to create and implement policies that reflect the real, lived, on-the-ground experience of community members, especially those with the least power. Through decades of work in the Bay Area, the Chinese Progressive Association was able to engage both their community, including low-wage workers in the garment and restaurant industries, and government agencies to both strengthen the existing laws and then enforce those laws.

Too often, we have a constrained view of citizenship, one that begins and ends with voting every two or four years.

CPA’s co-governance role is critical because it speaks workers’ language and has earned worker trust, two elements that are essential to workplace law enforcement (even assuming goodwill from public officials). Restaurant workers risk their livelihoods if they make complaints against their employers for abuse and wage theft, with no guarantee of success. But because CPA has built relationships and trust over decades, a few brave workers did come forward and helped organize more workers. Ultimately, the CPA and its allies, working with city agencies, clawed back millions of dollars in lost wages and helped change the very culture around abuse and wage theft.

But the benefits of co-governance also go deeper. Too often, we have a constrained view of citizenship, one that begins and ends with voting every two or four years. With co-governance, community members help both set policies and see their implementation through. In Jackson, People Assembly participants are transformed by the experience of finding themselves welcomed into a substantive discussion of the issues and challenges that concern them, and then together imagine the solutions.

“Every time we have a people’s assembly you can feel the gears turning in people’s minds,” said Brooke Floyd of the People’s Advocacy Institute. “People want better. They just don’t know how to get it. It’s not that people don’t want to vote or be involved with politics. It is intimidating—this state tries to make sure that the people who are being hurt the most don’t know anything, keep them not involved, keep them uneducated, so they can’t fight for what they deserve.”

For example, addressing crime and violence was a priority for the Jackson community. Members held an assembly, out of which the #FundCommunities campaign emerged. That, in turn, led to the mayor and the city council to refrain from raising the police budget, but instead take a $750,000 grant from the National League of Cities and put it towards crime prevention measures instead.

 

Limits of Co-Governance

Co-governance, however, will not solve all community problems. This can be seen with the water crisis in Jackson. Earlier this year, the state government of Mississippi sought to override the community, the city council and the mayor and take control of the city’s water management—and in the process seize control of federal funds. While those efforts were beaten back, state attempts to limit the authority of Jackson’s city government continued.

These state actions ignore the will of the local community, which has been holding people’s assemblies to address Jackson’s crumbling infrastructure as far back as 2013. Notably, one of the first actions of the late Mayor Chokwe Lumumba—who became mayor in July 2013, but was in office only eight months before dying of a sudden heart attack—was to push through by initiative a one-percentage-point increase in the sales tax to fund local infrastructure. That measure passed with a stunningly high 90 percent “yes” vote, but state actions quickly limited that revenue source. Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba, son of the former mayor, has called the latest moves by the White-dominated state government to usurp control over the largely Black city “apartheid.”

There are, of course, other limits. Too often, attempts to democratize begin and end with maximizing individual participation. Participation is important, but we must also balance power and protect human rights. “Democratic participation”—in housing and land use planning, schools, tax revolts, and other arenas—has too often been used to exclude and subjugate Black people, Native people, women, workers, people with disabilities, and other communities. As Meg Massey and Ben Wrobel observe in their book, Letting Go: “The concept of participation is a little bit like the concept of democracy: vague, abstract, and easy to co-opt.”

Community groups must, therefore, always be careful to ensure the processes that they agree to are truly inclusive, equitable, and transparent. And, certainly, there is always the danger of exclusion, elite capture, bureaucratic gridlock, and the like.

When community groups engage with public officials, they typically must deal with the agency directors they have, who are often constrained, slow to act, risk-averse, and short on resources. Furthermore, one cannot ignore that local agencies exist within a power structure that typically favors the wealthiest and most powerful. Advocacy to push, compel, and even shame public officials to work with and those with the least power is always necessary. For these reasons, a co-governance strategy does not make sense in every scenario. Even when it does, organizing from the outside to keep the pressure on remains an essential element of movement strategy.

It is also important to remember that active democratic engagement is work—and is often time-consuming and exhausting. When the least powerful among us are asked to engage with the government, it’s an ask being made of the people with the least bandwidth to participate.

 

Meeting the Challenges

One key to addressing these kinds of challenges is to make participation fun and attractive, which lightens the burden for everyone. The other is to build processes that reinforce community power so that the interaction is genuinely uplifting and fulfilling. The People’s Assemblies in Jackson always start with a meal. Participants feel truly engaged and listened to. True, deep democracy can be invigorating.

It is no secret that the United States today is struggling with a profound democracy gap. We all want and deserve the basics of a good life; a nice home and a decent job; good schools for our kids; and health care when we need it.

These days, public officials are too often failing to provide those things. And the risks are even greater. As john powell and Sara Grossman recently detailed, authoritarianism is ascendant. Forging new models of co-governance today is more important than ever.

Co-governance, we believe, offers a vital bulwark against White nationalism. It is also a powerful strategy for building a multiracial democracy, one in which everyone’s needs are met, anchored in values of equity and racial justice. Co-governance, in short, provides a pathway to help ensure that people who have been marginalized have a direct say in the choices that define all our lives.

 

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.

The following is a transcript of the video above, from our webinar on “Remaking the Economy: Caring for the Care Economy.” View the full webinar here.

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Adria Powell: Broadly defined, [the care economy] is the work that underpins this country. It allows for all other work to occur, and it’s a huge driver and contributor to the overall work of this nation. In the home care sector, there’s incredible growth that’s going on as our country ages. In New York State, where I’m focused, we have a huge growth need for home care services…

New York State has the fourth-largest population of older adults in the entire country—16 percent of New Yorkers are over age 65. The older adult population is growing faster than any other segment in our state, and it’s expected to grow to 5.3 million people by 2030—and 1.2 million of those are folks who will be over the age of 80. When surveys are conducted, you see 90 percent of people want to be able to age or live with a disability in their homes. People are not generally interested in having to be in nursing homes or congregate care settings. We’re all much more comfortable in our own homes and communities, where we are connected to our loved ones, networks, and the things that we know.

[Care economy] work is disproportionately done by women of color, immigrant women, and people of color. The job—unfortunately, because of historically who has done it—has been devalued and underpaid. Paid caregivers lack support, having limited benefits and limited control over their work[ing] conditions. In New York, we’re talking about a population that has to survive. More than half (57 percent) of New York home care workers are reliant on some sort of public subsidies, and 49 percent lack affordable housing. So, we’re struggling to attract and retain workers for the growing population, and we are faced, within New York State, [with] the worst [workforce crisis in the nation], as people need more and more services. We’re seeing people with less access to the services, but more and more need is emerging.

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.

This is the fourth article from A Green New Deal on the Ground, a series produced with Climate and Community Project, a progressive climate policy think tank developing cutting-edge research at the climate and inequality nexus. The series examines how Green New Deal initiatives aim to create climate policy that positively impacts everyday life. It also explores the political coalitions and campaigns centering environmental justice and equity in decarbonization across the US and champions both broad-based movement building and institutional power to harness resources and push for change.

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In August 2022, Pennsylvania saw a major win for public investment when the state legislature established the Whole-Home Repairs Program. Designed to improve housing livability and affordability and prepare state residents for a low-carbon future, the program will fund grants for low- and moderate-income homeowners to undertake significant home repairs. It will also provide loans and other support to small landlords (accompanied by affordability protections for renters) to repair homes.

The program merits review as it reveals that home repair and retrofitting are popular programs that can mobilize coalitions and secure large-scale public investment. Such programs can simultaneously advance progress toward both climate and housing justice—including increasing affordability, remedying legacies of racial inequality, and securing better housing for the elderly and disabled—all while creating jobs.

 

The Whole-Home Repairs Program

WHR’s main sponsor is Nikil Saval, a progressive Democratic senator representing Philadelphia’s District 1. Saval was elected in 2020 on a democratic socialist platform, which included housing justice and a state-level Green New Deal.

In August 2022, after a year-long coalition-building push that led to WHR’s passage, the program’s language was written into Pennsylvania’s fiscal code. The state’s Department of Community and Economic Development was named the program’s administrator. The Pennsylvania General Assembly approved an initial $125 million for WHR in the 2022–2023 state budget. This funding was sourced from Pennsylvania’s share of the federal American Rescue Plan, approved by the Biden Administration in March 2021 for broad-based pandemic relief and recovery efforts, and from a 2022 state budget surplus. This first year of funding will seed the program and show proof of concept. Saval and other coalition partners intend to level ongoing pressure to increase funding in future budget cycles.

Each Pennsylvania county may apply for a share of WHR funding, allocated according to a formula based on counties’ median income by household size, the average age of housing stock, and the number of households that meet a set income limit. County governments may run their WHR program themselves or authorize a nonprofit entity to do so.

Counties may spend up to $50,000 in WHR funds per home on repairs through grants to eligible homeowners and loans for small landlords. Homeowners are eligible if their household income does not exceed 80 percent of the area median income. Landlords are eligible if they own no more than five properties and if they keep rent at affordable rates. Eligible uses of WHR funds include repairs or retrofits to address quality and safety concerns, improve energy and water efficiency, and add accessibility infrastructure, such as wheelchair ramps and handrails for people with disabilities.

WHR funds may also be spent on county-level program administration (for example, hiring new staff to work with homeowners on the application process) and to create workforce development programs—training qualified home-repair workers, supporting apprenticeships, and connecting trainees to jobs through employer partnerships. Dedicating resources to growing the workforce that will construct and transform homes is essential to building large-scale, lasting change.

Homeowners should be able to apply for funds in spring 2023 and start to receive funding in spring or summer.

 

Making Home Repairs Affordable

WHR presents a novel solution to two major problems confronting existing home weatherization and retrofitting programs: delivering enough resources upfront to cover major repairs and providing grants that do not impose further financial pressures on cost-burdened households.

A central challenge facing home-repair efforts is lower-income households’ inability to access the financial resources needed to pay for them—even interventions like energy-efficiency retrofits that should pay themselves back over time in the form of lower household energy bills. While many utility, nonprofit, and government programs—such as the federally funded, state-administered Weatherization Assistance Program, or WAP—provide some weatherization assistance to low-income homeowners, these programs have historically been underfunded, understaffed, and over-subscribed.

Previous government efforts to muster more resources to meet this challenge have taken the form of public-private partnerships and exotic forms of debt finance sold to low-income households. For example, California, Florida, and Missouri have started using residential Property Assessed Clean Energy lending, a novel financing tool, to pay for bigger retrofitting jobs. But consumer advocates have charged PACE lenders with predatory lending practices.

Weatherization funds have not historically covered the full cost of needed repairs. For example, replacing a roof might cost $10,000—but the average WAP grant is only around $8000 per household. Further, WAP typically defers or denies applications to fix leaky roofs if the homes have major mold issues since fixing such leaks might worsen indoor air quality, an issue affecting over 50 percent of households applying for Philadelphia’s WHR funds. A significant goal of WHR has been to fill this gap by funding bigger repair work and connecting households with programs that can provide further resources for more modest repairs and technological upgrades.

WHR will also build more durable county-level infrastructure for assisting homeowners applying to other home-repair programs, whose application processes are often piecemeal and overly bureaucratic. The program’s technical assistance funding is intended to help counties increase enrollment in home-repair programs across the board by creating a clear entry point and connecting programs through tools like a one-stop digital application portal.

 

A Public Good

As in most other states, Pennsylvania’s housing stock needs major repairs. The issue is particularly serious in Pennsylvania because the state has some of the oldest housing stock in the country. More than half of all homes in Pennsylvania were built before 1970, and more than 60 percent of renter-occupied homes and apartments are over 50 years old.

Drawing on Data for Progress polling, Saval and coalition partners have argued that one in four Pennsylvanians lives in a home that needs a critical repair. US Census data suggest that more than 280,000 homes in Pennsylvania have moderate to severe physical deferred maintenance problems, like exposed wiring, failing roofs, dysfunctional heating and plumbing systems, lead plumbing, and mold.

At 69 percent, Pennsylvania’s homeownership rate is high relative to other states, though the number of renters is on the rise. The Philadelphia Energy Authority has characterized the city’s housing situation as one of high poverty with relatively high homeownership. It notes that many homes are passed on between family members.

As in other US states, homeownership rates in Pennsylvania are marked by racial inequality. For example, while over 75 percent of White households in the Philadelphia area own their homes, only around 50 percent of Black and Latinx households do.

Moreover, the state is experiencing a housing affordability crisis as housing prices and rents rise. As the most recent Pennsylvania Comprehensive Housing Study puts it, “Increasing income inequality, combined with fewer low-cost housing options, is translating into large cost burdens and a deficit of affordable and available units at the low end of the income spectrum.” In the face of these housing challenges, advocates for WHR have argued that it is “a great way to preserve the affordable homes that people are already living in” by making needed livability repairs possible and reducing the costs of basic home operations—important factors in forced home abandonment.

Given rising electricity costs, home energy bills have become a serious driver of unaffordability—more than 20 million US households are behind on their utility bills. Such costs are a major argument for energy-efficiency repairs and retrofits. Older homes are particularly impacted as they tend to be poorly insulated and energy inefficient; over half the energy used in Pennsylvania homes goes to space heating. Half of Pennsylvania homes heat with natural gas, and Pennsylvania homes remain unusually dependent on fuel oil and propane: almost 20 percent of households in the state still used these older heating fuels in 2020, particularly in rural areas.

After Pennsylvania’s Public Utility Commission allowed the state’s COVID moratorium on utility shut-offs for unpaid bills to expire in 2021, 116,000 customers were disconnected. Pennsylvanians’ utility power bills rose by as much as 50 percent in the winter of 2021, and September of 2022 saw another round of double-digit increases. The price of propane and fuel oil skyrocketed by 28 percent and 86 percent, respectively, between March 2021 and 2022. Meanwhile, natural gas prices for Pennsylvania households went up 30 percent between February 2021 and 2022 and were consistently up 13 to 28 percent in 2022 compared to the previous year. Transformative levels of investment are needed to repair Pennsylvania’s aging buildings and tackle its legacies of deferred housing-stock maintenance.

Crucially, resolving these livability and affordability crises will simultaneously advance Pennsylvania’s decarbonization efforts—critical in a state whose energy supply remains dominated by nonrenewable sources. According to Saval, the multiple benefits of home repair and retrofitting helped draw together a coalition of WHR supporters, including housing, economic, racial, and climate justice advocates from across the state. Saval explains,

The Whole-Home Repairs program is a housing security initiative, an energy initiative (and thus, a climate initiative), an anti-blight initiative, a jobs initiative, a community safety initiative, and an anti-gentrification initiative. The cumulative effect of all of these things means that this program can tackle many of the root causes of community instability by keeping people in their homes and keeping these homes safe and healthy.…[Moreover, it is] not an urban issue or a suburban issue or a rural issue. With hundreds of thousands of homes across the state in need of critical repair, this is an issue that transcends geography, and, of course, that transcends political affiliation.

According to Saval’s team, central organizations in the WHR coalition include POWER Interfaith, Pennsylvania Stands Up, and Make the Road PA—entities deeply committed to racial and economic justice and which organize in diverse communities across the state. However, the coalition included nearly 60 organizations statewide, many of which operate outside of the state’s major urban areas.

The coalition organized rallies, public hearings, call-in days, and other tactics like messaging discipline to grow support for WHR. This sustained, broad-based movement building helped organizers realize WHR’s progressive vision despite Republican control of the state legislature at the time. WHR’s organizing drive is helping coalesce a statewide housing justice movement for the first time and creating new openings for energy communities to build alliances with justice and labor advocates.

WHR makes crucial headway on a challenging set of problems and has the capacity for further ambition and scale. For example, in a state heavily dependent on fossil fuels, retrofits provide an important pathway toward decarbonization, as well as protection from volatile energy prices and crises. While WHR does not yet fund such technological upgrades, the program could be expanded to do so.

There will be substantial obstacles to a just, low-carbon transition both in Pennsylvania and across the United States. However, Pennsylvania already has a robust network of activists and organizations working toward this goal. With WHR, they have shown how to build a foundation for a better future.

 

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.

Nearly a year after the fall of Roe v. Wade, the fight for abortion access, dignity, and power is raging on in most states nationwide. Activists, medical practitioners, and legal experts are working in concert to safeguard in-clinic and medication abortion and to keep pregnant people and those taking abortion care into their own hands from being criminalized. In this webinar recording we will discuss the ongoing organizing efforts within the reproductive justice, health, and rights movements. This session is designed to build narrative power by centering the voices and experiences of movement workers on the frontlines who will share stories about the successes, opportunities, and threats they face.

Panelists are:

Rafa Kidvai, Esq. is the Repro Legal Defense Fund Director at If/When/How. Prior to joining If/When/How, Rafa was a public defender at the Legal Aid Society’s Brooklyn Criminal Defense Practice, Legal Fellow at Court Watch NYC, and Equal Justice Works Fellow in the Sylvia Rivera Law Project’s Immigrant Justice Project. Rafa attended CUNY School of Law and Hampshire College.

Lindsay Rodriguez has created and cultivated an unwavering voice at the National Network of Abortion Funds by building and leading a brilliant all-star team as Communications Director. She co-chairs Liberate Abortion’s Narrative and Culture Change Committee, bringing 10 yrs of abortion fund leadership expertise to messaging. Now in Denver, still Texan to the roots, Lindsay enjoys nachos, drinks, and books on patios. She rants on Twitter, baby talks to her dog and 2 cats, and watches, like, A LOT of TV.

In her role as Grassroots Organizing Coordinator at Feminist Women’s Health Center, Kristen Baker develops organizing strategies and activities in collaboration with Reproductive Justice centered organizations in the South. This work includes advocating for progressive legislation that promotes reproductive freedom, coordinating voter registration and civic engagement activities, state and local legislative advocacy, and working to center our community in all of those efforts.

The moderator of this session is Shanelle Matthews.

Shanelle Matthews collaborates with social justice activists, organizations, and campaigns to inspire action and build narrative power for social justice and liberation. She is the communications director for the Movement for Black Lives, founder of Radical Communicators Network (RadComms),—a global community of practice for social movement communications workers, and former faculty of Resistance Narratives at The New School. In the fall of 2023, she joins City College at the City University of New York as their incoming Distinguished Lecturer. She is co-editor of a forthcoming anthology that details world-building narrative campaigns and strategies led by social movement communications workers in the 21st century.

 

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.