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The cultural sector is seeking alternatives to business-as-usual. This article introduces a new series, titled “Remember the Future: Culture and Systems Change,” co-produced by Art.coop and NPQ. In this series, queer, trans, and BIPOC artists and cultural bearers reflect upon the unique role that culture has played and can play in activating and enacting structural change—and in building a solidarity economy.

Efforts to remedy historic race-based harms by prioritizing care for land, resources, people, and cultural expressions are flourishing. These efforts go by many names—solidarity economics, restorative economics, and just economics—to name a few. Whatever one calls them, they both represent an emergent economy while also building off the nation’s rich social movement history. Economic change is not only possible—it is already happening.

We are seeing growing numbers of economic initiatives in the arts that center solidarity economy efforts, which seek to prioritize people and sustainable community problem-solving ideas over profits. While the pace of change can be frustratingly slow, we are encouraged by growing interest in building a solidarity economy for artists.

In this movement, artists themselves are playing a leading role. In large measure, this movement has been spurred by economic necessity. As Natalia Linares and Caroline Woolard wrote two years ago in NPQ, “It’s clear that artists need a solidarity economy if we are to overcome our status as exploited workers.”

Too often, funders aim to create a harmonious society through diversity, equity, and inclusion practices that only put more people into problematic systems.

There are specific funding strategies that philanthropy can employ to shield artists from the capitalist market. These include supporting below-market loan financing, helping artists acquire affordable studio space and housing assistance, and assisting artists to form worker and producer cooperatives that can help them to achieve dignity at work and economic security.

Nonetheless, too many funding institutions continue to follow well-trodden paths when it comes to economic development and investments in the creative sector. Too often, funders aim to create a harmonious society through diversity, equity, and inclusion practices that only put more people into problematic systems. As Eliya Imtiaz, former managing editor of the “Michigan in Color” section of the Michigan Daily, put it last year, “Similar to most ideals in this country, the current notion of DEI heightens the façade that everything occurs on an individual level.” Or funders deploy capital in ways that, borrowing from Wall Street advisors, are more intent on institutional preservation than shifting power—a point Clara Miller powerfully made a couple of years ago in NPQ, when she wrote about how many of the same funders that had come together to support a community development financial institution to protect residents from foreclosure were investing in the very private equity firms that were the leading beneficiaries of the foreclosures.

Artists are essential to any vision that calls the future into question.

Artists and culture bearers are rejecting those superficial efforts and have some advice to offer. For instance, Art.coop and Grantmakers in the Arts are collaborating to educate funders about power-shifting and solidarity principles, creating shared language and frameworks that funders can draw on as they develop and implement funding strategies.

Artists are also highlighting the role that creative workers play in crafting a collective vision of a just, equitable economy. They are showing that they have the creativity, imagination, and courage to experiment in ways that can, when capitalized, transform culture and power. For example, in Memphis, Anasa Troutman, executive director of Historic Clayborn Temple, is creating new economic systems with artists at their center. Troutman insists, “Historic Clayborn Temple, and others like us, can teach philanthropy a few things.…Artists are essential to any vision that calls the future into question. An artist spends their whole life practicing how to…take something that looks one way and alchemize it.”

Anasa is right: Artists can indeed help philanthropy rethink its pace and purpose. This belief informs the work of our philanthropic organization, the Center for Cultural Innovation. As Linares and Woolard remind us, “There have never been radical movements without radical artists and creators at the helm.” We believe that funders must lend artists an ear and commit to act on more of what they hear from artists and arts workers who have people-first values at their moral core.

For example, CCI supports the Cooperative Community of New West Jackson in Jackson, MS, a grassroots effort to build a sustainable community by securing property in a community land trust. The community is incubating cooperative enterprises based on leveraging the untapped skills of residents, rooted in members’ art and creativity. As Nia Umoja, lead coordinator of the efforts, has explained, the goal is to mobilize residents’ untapped agricultural and construction backgrounds to transform abandoned property into urban farming and cultural spaces, including a community-supported agriculture (CSA) farm, housing rehabilitation, guest house management, and an arts studio. As Sarah Westlake wrote for ArtPlace America, “residents are learning how to add their own forms of artistic and cultural expression to the aesthetic of each creative reuse strategy and are beginning to understand that they have the ability to lead their own revitalization efforts.”

A related example on this theme: two artists—Victoria Jones, executive director of the Black arts organization, TONE, and James Dukes, CEO of the Memphis-based record label, Unapologetic—are working with the Community Development Corporation of Orange Mound to purchase and develop a seven-acre site that will be owned by a community-based organization, such as a landholding cooperative or community land trust, and will provide resources and places for artists to work and create.

What magic might unfold if more funders chose to imagine and plot with people like Jones and Dukes?

James Baldwin once said: “Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.” Though people often say that economic systems that honor people and our planet will never work—the phrase “there is no alternative” has long been a refrain—or that alternatives are too risky, or that artists and culture bearers are “peripheral” to our economy and quality of life, plenty of historic and contemporary examples suggest otherwise. African Americans’ central involvement in the US cooperative movement as described by scholar Dr. Jessica Gordon Nembhard, many Indigenous practices and traditions, past and present, sou sous, mutual aid efforts, community land trusts, and more recent successful capital raises and cultural activations for the Boston Ujima Project and East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative (Oakland), which seek to shift power, capital, and ownership to BIPOC communities, are just a few.

Our current system of neoliberal racial capitalism is designed to perpetuate inequalities. Finding the offramp from this economy to one that serves all can be difficult work. Systems are like walls; they don’t come down easily or by themselves. If we are paying attention, however, there are guides to help with this work. Artists most affected by historic and systemic harms are showing us how to imagine and build paths to a better world, and one that will benefit us all.

Artists and culture bearers are showing that they have the creativity, imagination, and courage to experiment in ways that can, when capitalized, transform culture and power.

Some of these artists’ voices and stories are featured in this series, co-organized by NPQ and art.coop. For example, a writer from the Applied Mechanics Collective in Philadelphia describes how the collective is not only artist-run and -operated, but it is also producing public artistic performances rooted in speculative fiction to tell stories that open the imagination to visions of radical self-governance and conflict resolution. Another article tells of a partnership in Western Massachusetts between a theater company and a Native cultural center that supports the Nipmuc nation both by building the local Indigenous economy and supporting youth education in Nipmuc values. A third article illustrates the many connections between cooperatives, the arts today, and African historical traditions. More broadly, the final author in the series suggests that through their many contributions, artists are showing us a way towards liberation.

There is, in short, much movement afoot. Of course, no one can predict when a fundamental economic shift will happen. But two facts suggest that systemic change may occur sooner than most think: the economy doesn’t work for most people, and it doesn’t work for the Earth. Artists and culture bearers are showing that they have the creativity, imagination, and courage to experiment in ways that can, when capitalized, transform culture and power. Society may be undergoing such a shift. What we learn from it will be determined by our openness to problem solvers who seek liberation, equitable wealth distribution, and the ability of communities to direct their destiny.

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

The following is a transcript of the video above, from our November 16, 2022, roundtable, “Building a Movement for the Common Good.”

Sheri Davis: I think it’s important to name when we also have leadership that is willing to name and call things as they are—that we are actually speaking to a base that is beyond membership, right? That we’ve actually built relationships. Because the conversation around CTU [Chicago Teachers’ Union] and I think the beauty of having this article, is an understanding that you don’t get to wield that kind of power without doing the work.

So, there’s work that’s being done around the place where you’re in and sitting with the many issues that oftentimes we’ve been pitted against, right? There’s a way that when we started talking about what was happening with teachers, before this fight back, teachers were being blamed for everything! Literally everything!

And when we start thinking about the defensive, there’s a reason why people were coming after women, right? You have a situation where your organization is powerful enough to actually push what happens in a city or state in a particular direction. That kind of power is risky!

Like when they’re bringing a particular care ethic and thinking about things as it relates to a broader community and not in these narrow ways. And so, I do think that there’s something around leadership. There’s something around the organizations that are the vehicles for being able to do BCG [Bargaining for the Common Good] work.

It is not enough for us to talk about what everybody else needs to do and to take on the boss and to take on the primary villain. We actually have to unpack some of the reasons why we got to the places where we are as unions in many ways anyway.

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

Organizations that work in organizational and leadership development (aka capacity building) not only support the nonprofit sector, but shape it. How they do so matters. That is why capacity builders need to take a stand. We have power. And we’re uncomfortable with it.

For too long, many in the capacity-building field have pretended to engage in neutral skill-building work, but such neutrality is a myth that is no longer tenable. Those who seek to “build the capacity” of nonprofit organizations must reflect critically on who is being served and toward what ends. Their work must be grounded in values of social justice. This requires imagination because, as Octavia E. Butler said, “There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns”—a metaphor that speaks to the possibility of developing new paradigms and creating new centers of gravity in our thinking.

Those of us who have worked in the field for years know that the capacity building paradigm must change—we must move from a focus on building clients’ technical capacity toward a focus on partnering with organizations to build cultures of liberation.

Capacity builders have written extensively about transforming capacity building, about reframing the power of capacity building work and who benefits from it. I myself have written about upbuilding, a framework built on the tenets of care, equity, and anti-oppression. In this framework, what I call care-pacity building is a key positional shift; the entire field must center care for people because, ultimately, capacity building is about supporting people, navigating change, and shaping culture.

Beyond Neutrality

As the late historian Howard Zinn noted, you can’t be neutral on a moving train. In other words, capacity building is never a neutral process. Building capacity requires adopting particular missions, visions, and goals. Capacity does not exist in a vacuum. If you are enhancing a group’s ability to act, you must ask, to what end?

As with policy advocacy, there is a material shift in people’s life circumstances when we do our work well. Well-run organizations can change the world. When we increase organizational efficacy, we become part of world changing efforts. A capacity builder must choose who to serve. Not all nonprofits, after all, have social justice-oriented missions.

We can start with two guideposts as we reimagine our work. First, capacity-builders are sector-shaping powerhouses, and we are often uncomfortable with that power because we know we’re not frontline social justice warriors. But we can’t hide in the back office. We need to look reflect on who we’re serving and why.

For example, at CRE (Community Resource Exchange), the nonprofit that I lead, our role is to support movements for racial and economic justice. We also believe community-based organizations drive social change. And at the heart of community-based organizations are people.

In our soon-to-be released strategic plan, we champion community-based organizations and advocate for them in philanthropy. Increasingly, we’re calling ourselves coaches—and not consultants—because we know that organizational development that fails to center people does not achieve durable impact. And because we prioritize working with BIPOC folks, we know we need coaching not just in leadership, but to unpack our conditioned beliefs that are often not true, but products of a racist, patriarchal, capitalistic system.

Second, we must redefine success, which too often focuses on technical measures, rather than on whether the organization is shifting power or changing narratives in the directions they desire. Liberatory, anti-oppression approaches and tools like the “appreciative inquiry” approach and “strengths-finders”—which do not use a deficit mindset but, rather, an asset-based framework—are steps in that direction. Such redefining also requires ensuring that the communities we support define success.

One Capacity-Building Story: My Own

Capacity builders have the power to shape definitions of success. Let me tell you a story.

Long before I led CRE, I was a client. At the time, I directed Sakhi, a community-based organization serving South-Asian survivors of domestic violence. We did not measure success according to the quantity of orders of protection or court proceedings that we were involved in—in contrast to most anti-domestic violence organizations. But it was difficult to articulate an alternative metric.

Working with a capacity-building adviser helped us to craft a theory of change that captured the true success and importance of our work: namely, self-sufficiency for the women who came to us for support, community-centered interventions, multi-generational impact, and other metrics outside the carceral system.

Our new metrics didn’t land well with our government funder, but capacity building support helped us to center ourselves and have frank, transformative conversations that positioned our group as a progressive, feminist, anti-violence organization. That, in turn, led to unprecedented success—as defined by us!

Redefining Metrics

Capacity builders have the benefit of working with multiple organizations, which, if you listen closely to the people you work with, broadens your perspectives on success in leadership and organizational development. That said, one does find common threads across organizations, such as “leadership is a test of resilience.” Indeed, resilience is essential to working in the nonprofit sector—the ability to bounce back, engage in practices of care, and most critically, understand that any imposter syndrome and self-doubt you may feel is produced, in large part, by the oppressive system you work in.

Being able to bounce back requires being able to face failure and work through it. Resilient leaders must be courageous. For this reason, bravery ought to be an indicator of the success of leadership programs, and we must have ways to measure it. For example, one might ask the organizational staff being served: Do you feel braver than when you started? Are you more comfortable with failure? Do you feel supported? And the capacity-building organization might ask itself: How are your programs delivering an increase in metrics in such areas as supporting brave and caring leadership development? Success indicators can measure if nonprofits center people and equity—whether they are staffed by inspired people.

This is not to deny that importance of more conventional measures—such as “Is this organization well managed?” Because nonprofits operate in an ecosystem of partnerships and coalitions with other nonprofits, government, foundations, and communities, management for liberatory ends still involves ensuring that organizations deliver on outcomes and are reliable partners. Even as nonprofits might seek to dismantle parts, if not all, of the system, they must navigate this system.

Challenging Nonprofit Board Norms

Another emerging critique in the nonprofit sector—one that’s been festering for a while—focuses on the inequitable relationship between nonprofits and their boards. The latter have extraordinary power yet are often least vested in the organization’s work and success. In part, in response to this critique, more people are forming collectives and organizations outside the 501c3 system.

Does this mean capacity builders should work with nonprofits to better manage their boards or to work around them if needed? Or does this mean helping nonprofits to dismantle their 501c3 and set up a different sort of organization? Are capacity builders ready for our own anti-oppression work so that form follows function, even if that means helping the groups we work with develop organizational forms that may not be nonprofit in structure?

Cultivating the Capacity-Building Garden

A world without capacity builders who operate under a different sun—that is, who shift their focus to liberatory, anti-oppressive approaches to social justice and not simply building capacity for capacity’s sake—would be a loss to the sector, particularly for smaller nonprofits, many of which are held together by pure passion and commitment to their communities. As the former executive director of Sakhi, I know what capacity building did for me. It went against the norms, and the result was enlightening and productive.

Canceling capacity building sounds good, but even better would be doing such work differently. “We must cultivate our garden” as Voltaire said. And so, capacity builders must imagine what care-pacity building really looks like.

Again, many nonprofit workers know that they seek to shift power and change narratives—and upend oppressive systems. In Sakhi’s case, we needed a coach, ally, and supporter. Fortunately, we found a capacity builder who played this role. If, rather than just provide technical support, we reflect critically on how we use our power to advance social justice, and if we truly listen to and partner with the nonprofits we serve, capacity builders can be effective values-aligned change agents that accelerate the realization of social justice goals.

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

Leaders in many places facing economic decline—be they post-industrial cities in the Rust Belt or depleted communities in former coal mining towns—are increasingly looking to entrepreneurship as a means of revitalization. And when they do so, the model that dominates their thinking is the high-tech growth model best exemplified by Silicon Valley.

Business leaders, community organizers, and local policymakers in these places have attempted to replicate the success of Silicon Valley by attracting venture capital, creating business incubators and accelerators, and building an entrepreneurial ecosystem. Yet, these attempts have not significantly reverted economic decline. The next Google or Facebook has yet to emerge from places plagued by chronic poverty, and even when a high-tech sector sets foot in low-income regions, it often exacerbates income inequality.

Why does the method that worked in Silicon Valley, Boston, Austin, Seattle, or Boulder not work for places like Detroit? Anna Kim at McGill University and I pursued this question through in-depth fieldwork in two Detroit-based business incubators, which sought to revitalize Detroit through entrepreneurship but employed contrasting approaches.

Between 2012 and 2014, we immersed ourselves in the workings of these incubators then followed their nascent organizations through their growth trajectory until 2020 (see published articles out of the project here and here). Our research revealed compelling reasons why trying to replicate Silicon Valley in places like Detroit may not be feasible. Perhaps more importantly, it suggests an alternative that may better nurture self-reliance in low-wealth communities.

A Misplaced Focus on Scaling Up

Our years-long journey to track the birth and growth (and for most, ultimate demise) of the Detroit ventures led us to an important discovery: the scale of venture growth matters.

Scale is not equivalent to size. Instead, scale refers to the temporal and spatial properties of an ecological (and social) process. For example, while tornadoes in general have a short temporal scale (days) and a relatively narrow spatial scale (a few states), climate change unfolds over a long temporal scale (centuries) and covers a broad spatial scale (the entire globe). We found this concept of scale useful in capturing the difference between the two incubators we studied as the incubators’ ventures grew at contrasting scales.

This difference was imprinted on ventures from the very beginning, at the stage of business model design. One incubator, which we called ACCEL, had the goal of “turning Detroit into the next Silicon Valley” and mentored each of its ventures to become “a unicorn” that would attract venture capital.

Regardless of their original vision, ACCEL founders—like many who seek venture capital financing—changed their ideas (or pivoted) so that their ventures could reach a national, if not global, market in three to five years, following a typical venture capital timeframe. This resulted in ventures that scaled up, expanding nationally (broad spatiality) in a short time (short temporality).

However, because scaling up required infusion of financial capital at an increasing rate, as well as easy access to industry talent and knowledge, the more successful ACCEL’s scaling-up ventures became, the more likely they were to leave Detroit for wealthier regions that could satisfy these needs.

Furthermore, the design process, which focused on designing ventures to quickly go global, radically reduced their connection to Detroit (because relying on the local ecosystem in Detroit would make the businesses “not scalable”). This had unintended consequences: ventures might succeed at scaling up, but their success was increasingly decoupled from local employment and the local Detroit economy.

Most often, ventures that succeeded were either bought out by big businesses headquartered elsewhere, or they migrated out of the city. Initial investors and founders reaped some financial rewards, but impoverished communities in Detroit gained little.

Why Scaling Deep Can Build Self-Reliance in Communities

While the scaling-up ventures mimicked the much-celebrated growth trajectory of Silicon Valley’s high-growth ventures, the ventures of another incubator, which we called GREEN, grew differently in terms of time and space. Following their mentors’ unconventional guidance to avoid the financial risks of early fundraising, GREEN’s founders sought to develop business that could grow by relying on locally available resources. Through this process, which we called local bricolage, they scaled deep, rather than up.

Because the resultant ventures grew by creatively repurposing and recombining the resources that other local actors possessed, the more successful the ventures were, the more deeply embedded they became in the local economy.

Spatially, their growth was increasingly anchored to Detroit—none of the ventures we observed expanded beyond the city, but they extended their reach to different parts of the city. Also, because successful collaborations with local actors benefited all collaborators, one success bred another, creating a chain reaction of more local bricolage that extended the ventures’ duration.

As a result, the ventures’ growth was not fast, but steady and durable. While most scaling-up ventures from ACCEL “failed fast” in a year or so (a popular Silicon Valley term), most of GREEN’s scaling-deep ventures remained in operation for years. While some ACCEL ventures “went viral,” GREEN ventures grew “like an oak tree.”

This different scale of venture growth impacted the city in different ways. While scaling-deep ventures never resulted in lucrative initial public offerings (IPOs) or million-dollar acquisitions, they created stable employment, unleashed the productive potential of underutilized local resources, and most importantly, provided new solutions to local problems, such as the lack of access to fresh food, a stray dog epidemic, and rampant waste tire pollution.

A How-to Guide for Scaling Deep

In our contemporary economy obsessed with unicorns, there is no shortage of guides for scaling up. However, the concept of scaling deep is a novel one, and there is little publicly available knowledge on how to create a venture that scales deep into its impoverished place of origin.

Here, I address this shortcoming by summarizing some key insights we garnered from Detroit about how to develop a venture that scales deep. This is not the guide for scaling deep, but a first step towards building practical knowledge about the process.

1. Start from your community’s resources: One common misunderstanding we faced with local bricolage is equating it with merely replicating existing business models using locally available resources. In fact, successful scaling-deep ventures originate from business model innovation, yet not through lean startup or customer validation (popular methods for scaling up), but through local bricolage.

We have learned from Detroit that building scaling-deep ventures that have a more profound impact on the locale for a longer duration requires innovation, albeit not the version that is taught in most business schools. In most cases, when people start a new business, they tend to begin with a known business model, make a list of required resources, then find ways to mobilize those resources. For business model innovation, the sequence should be reversed: not from a business model to resources, but from resources to a model.

Bricolage is an anthropological concept that refers to addressing an urgent problem by making do with resources at hand. Local bricolage involves repurposing existing local assets and recombining them through a community’s existing social relations to generate viable solutions to the locale’s urgent problems. As such, an entrepreneur who wants to build an impactful scaling-deep venture should have rich knowledge of the resources available in the local community and how those resources can be creatively combined to address local problems.

We observed that founders of successful scaling-deep ventures began with a clear focus on local problems and canvassed Detroit’s landscape to identify actors who have resources that can be used to address those problems. Novel business models emerged out of an iterative process of putting these resources together in different ways.

For example, we followed a team of founders who were committed to supporting “cottage” food entrepreneurs—mostly women of color who had excellent cooking skills but lacked business skills and ready access to fresh ingredients and licensed kitchens. The founders addressed this problem by organizing a series of collaborative projects that creatively combined various local resources: underutilized kitchens in churches and daycare centers, excess produce from the city’s urban farms and community gardens, restaurant spaces during their downtime, and the customer exposure and business support capacities provided by the local farmers’ market. As successful projects became routinized and new businesses spun off from them, the incubator helped establish a new business model that could be readily utilized by local entrepreneurs. This business model innovation enabled enduring impact in the city: the incubator grew to support over 200 food entrepreneurs of color in Detroit, who collectively generated $7 million of revenue in 2019.

2. Focus on honing entrepreneurial imagination: Although local bricolage places strong emphasis on local contexts, individual founders are still at the heart of scaling deep for they creatively discover novel usages of existing local assets and weave repurposed assets into new solutions to local problems. Innovative entrepreneurs’ unique perspectives turn the seemingly barren landscape of a depleted community into fertile ground of underutilized resources.

To unlock this creativity, GREEN devoted its first weeks to deep reflections on the founders’ identities, passions, and competencies. These discussions led to discovery of the emerging venture’s “seed,” a succinct articulation of the founders’ aspirations that is rooted in their personal identities. For example, one founder who initially wanted to open a store for reclaimed pet products came out of weeks of reflection sessions with a clear vision for her venture: a service that helps her customers address relational problems with their animal companions.

The seed serves as a lens through which to identify local problems. By seeing the Detroit landscape through the lens of the seed described above, the founder discovered that her venture could help address the city’s stray dog epidemic, which was intensifying as more residents abandoned their pets along with their homes. Packs of abandoned dogs were roaming city blocks, attacking pedestrians, and even killing a child.

The seed not only helps identify the locale’s challenges, but also reveals local resources. When seen through the lens of relational problems between human and animal companions, the city’s animal shelters offered an opportunity to prototype and refine the founder’s consulting/training services. Neighborhood book clubs were repurposed as platforms with which to educate pet owners. The city’s animal rights organizations and municipal government became channels through which the founder’s unique approach could reach all city residents by shaping city regulations to ban animal abuse.

As shown in this example, a seed that reflects the founder’s unique vision, rooted in addressing previously overlooked local problems, reveals new solutions when it feeds on local resources. Of course, a central authority engages in local bricolage when it mobilizes local resources to address local problems. Yet, our experience tells us that a higher level of creativity and effectiveness can be achieved when local bricolage is driven by a “seed” rooted in an individual founders’ idiosyncratic imagination.

3. Align capital with the right scale: Fundraising matters for scaling deep, but founders must choose financing sources that tolerate or even encourage spatially anchored and temporally durable venture growth. Crucially, for scaling-deep ventures, securing financial resources does not drive business model design but complements local bricolage. The scaling-deep ventures that we observed in Detroit raised funds from various sources, most prominently value-aligned grants from nonprofit organizations.

Different sources of funding come with different expectations for how ventures grow. If one receives venture capital investment, the venture’s growth should be able to create a 10-fold return on investment in three to five years. Yet not all funding sources impose the same pressure. Alternative sources of funding, such as patient capital and slow money, have different scale implications. Because scaling-deep ventures typically address urgent issues in local communities, they can be more readily eligible for grant money from local foundations and government agencies.

These alternative sources typically do not match the size of venture capital investment, but they may be adequate for scaling-deep ventures because by design such ventures’ primary resources come from local collaborators, not investors. When raising funds, founders of scaling-deep ventures should ask if the scale of growth that their potential funders expect matches the scale of growth that they intend.

Concluding Thoughts

Given the recent history of remarkable successes by high-growth ventures, there is no doubt that ventures that scale up can bring about regional prosperity. At the same time, our research indicates that scaling up alone would not turn a Detroit into a Silicon Valley.

Just as healthy ecosystems have a diversity of species, healthy entrepreneurial ecosystems may require scale diversity among its ventures, wherein scaling-deep ventures enhance the region’s self-reliance and ensure that scaling-up ventures stay put. To increase scale diversity, more efforts have to be made not to attract more financial investment to the region, but to stimulate more entrepreneurial imagination to unlock the productive potential of what is already there.

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

Sabrina Joy Stevens: […] we’ve got to be thinking in terms of relationship, we’ve got to be thinking in terms of who are we actually connected to, versus trying to say, convince the people who are spreading the false information intentionally. Our goal can’t be to try to change their minds, but rather to think about, when we’re talking to our friends, our communities, our professional communities, all of these places, these are all opportunities for us to be either upholding narratives that are going to help people find, claim, use their power well or are going to be upholding narratives that cause people not to use their power well. And so, every time we’re making those choices, we need to think about how are we helping set people up to take the kind of action they need to, in order to help blunt this sort of movement?

Something that I remind people of consistently is that bad actors are outnumbered. That is why they work so hard to…trick the rest of us into repeating their framing, into repeating their messages. And it’s focusing on the things they want us to focus on. Because there’s an opportunity cost; when we’re focusing on what they want us to focus on, we can’t also be focusing on what we want to be focused on. Rather, we can’t have people thinking about two different things at the same time.

And so, a lot of the work that I do is in helping people understand how to be doing double duty with their communications. How are you talking about your communications in ways that are not only neutralizing, are not only moving your own agenda forward, and they’re helping people build the world they want to see, but are also neutralizing the lies and misinformation that they’re getting from so many other places?…that’s a lot all at once.

…it’s obviously a very challenging moment, but it’s also really exciting because I think more people than ever are realizing the importance of being really intentional about this kind of work. Because you don’t accidentally do a good job of fighting against disinformation. You actually have to make a choice. This is what I want to be talking about. And despite the concerted efforts to pull me off of my message, to pull me off of my narrative, to pull my focus away from what I can do, and to either pull me into doing something that’s unhelpful or demoralize me so that I do nothing, because that’s really what’s going on here. There’s a divide and conquer attempt. There’s an attempt to mislead and misdirect people into unhelpful action. And then there’s an attempt to just overwhelm people so that they don’t do anything at all.

And so, when I know that that’s what’s going on, that gives me a new sense of agency and urgency, to be really, really intentional about how I’m using every single opportunity to communicate. I think about this kind of stuff when I’m talking one on one in the grocery store line. I think about th[is] sort of thing when I’m communicating en mass to my email list, when I’m on TV, et cetera. We want to help people get that mindset that they’re seeing every opportunity to speak as either upholding something that’s going to help people use their power well or that’s going to undermine people’s ability to use their power well.

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