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This article is the third installment of NPQ’s series on Community-Driven Philanthropy. In this series, movement leaders explore what’s possible if philanthropy adopts a reparative model—one in which it supports the leadership of BIPOC communities, not just by writing grants, but by shifting assets and control over resources to frontline communities.

Imagine a table. Now imagine a group of people who’ve come together at that table to talk. As at any table around which people gather, hierarchy will shape the ensuing conversation, whether participants acknowledge it or not: Whose table is it? Whose room?

Now, imagine that activists, organizers, and supporters of justice movements have gathered at this table to discuss what needs to change and how, what steps they can take, and where resources are needed. Those conversations, which take place regularly between organizers and movement builders and the philanthropists who fund their work, are also subject to power dynamics. Our conversations are shaped from the outset by the fact that, because they have resources that our communities need, funders set the table and often determine the seating assignments.

Changing the Dynamic

To dismantle oppressive systems on a structural level requires rewriting the standard philanthropic dynamic. The way people think about, organize around, and discuss change, and ultimately the legal and political contexts in which movements work to make change, are prescribed by who holds money and other resources. This “who” needs to change.

Community-driven solutions to persistent racial injustice, environmental degradation, and the lack of housing, food security, healthcare, and more can only happen when communities themselves are given the time, space, and resources needed to directly impact their people. A philanthropic model based on asset reallocation would make such a shift possible. Indeed, the impact of such reallocation could be monumental, fundamentally changing land conservation in the United States and empowering a bold new vision for ecological preservation and climate change mitigation. The Land Back and resource redistribution movements understand that these issues, and our communities, are interconnected.

What Is “Land Back”?

When the NDN Collective talks about Land Back, we’re not just talking about the literal repatriation of stolen lands. We’re talking about dismantling the systems that made land theft possible in the first place. Public lands across the United States are being mismanaged, whether by the federal government or private interests, in ways that mirror the relationship these powers have had with Native people for centuries.

Placing philanthropic resources under Native communities’ control would help Native peoples challenge both public and private centers of power, which have perpetuated subjugation through displacement, and settler-colonialism’s legal and economic systems, which made this theft possible and sustained it. It would support Native peoples to reclaim Indigenous lands and reassert tribal sovereignty, benefitting Native peoples while also empowering their efforts to mitigate climate change, which benefits everyone. Extractive industries and corporate powers work to silo the issues we all face, from economic inequities to climate disaster.

Traditional, white-led conservation efforts too often treat the protection of lands like a real-estate venture. Conservation in this context often operates as colonization, with white settler conservationists and their organizations asserting de facto ownership over lands stolen from Indigenous peoples. The management of millions of acres of land by Indigenous people, supported by new capital resources, would allow Indigenous cultures and languages to flourish again.

Understanding the Power Dynamics of Resourcing

Indigenous people often look to the halcyon days of the past—and with good reason. But what if our best days are not behind us, but ahead?

We must allow ourselves to imagine the possibilities a transformative future. The Land Back movement is a pathway to liberation and justice for all. It encourages us to rethink some of philanthropy’s fundamental problems—its enforced scarcity, groupthink, and refusal to cede power. If its call is heeded, it can enable us to address systemic problems in a truly systematic way.

By changing the power dynamics of resourcing, those closest to the pain and problems created by theft and extraction can finally have the resources needed to lead in developing solutions. Such leadership is lost in our existing, trickle-down philanthropic model, reflecting a failure in the entire philanthropic engine. Dismantling white supremacy requires moving money—and the power to make decisions—out of institutions rooted in extraction and into the hands of groups led by Black, Brown, and Indigenous people.

Some good steps are being taken. Mackenzie Scott’s practice of giving nonprofits large unrestricted grants is a major advance for the field, while the Bush Foundation entrusted NDN with stewarding $50 million to support community building in Indian Country. But while such steps are important, as we remarked upon receiving Bush Foundation funds, “In the larger scheme of things, is this reparations? No. But this is a step in the right direction that all of institutional philanthropy needs to take notice of and needs to start moving in this direction.”

In short, as with any journey, more steps must be taken. They include sunsetting foundations and calling on the very wealthy to not only give here and there, but to redistribute their wealth and assets.

Imagining a Transformative Future

The benefits of empowering Native communities are already apparent in efforts across the country. And increasingly, Native communities are winning back lands.

For example, in Mendocino County, California, 523 acres of the Tc’ih-Léh-Dûñ redwood forest was returned to the Sinkyone Council, a consortium of 10 federally recognized Northern California tribal nations. The land includes 200 acres of old-growth forest and is home to many threatened animals, such as the northern spotted owl and the marbled murrelet. Only five percent of the old growth forest that existed before colonization remains. Now that the land is in Indigenous hands, the consortium intends to “apply a blend of Indigenous place-based land guardianship principles, conservation science, climate adaptation and fire resiliency concepts and approaches to help ensure lasting protection and long-term healing for Tc’ih-Léh-Dûñ and its diverse flora and fauna.”

In Utah, the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition is managing lands. This much larger effort comprises 1.9 million acres (nearly 3,000 square miles). The coalition, formed by leaders from five Native nations—Hopi, Navajo, Ute Mountain Ute, Pueblo of Zuni, and the Ute Indian Tribe—came together in 2015. Its goals include: 1) archaeological and cultural resource protection; 2) preservation of historic sites, items of spiritual significance, and ongoing cultural activities; 3) protection for native fish, wildlife, and plants; 4) access for hunting, ceremonies, fuel wood, and herb collection; and 5) preservation of wilderness and scenic values.

To this list one could also add the return of 1,200 acres in the Black Hills to the Oceti Sakowin (approved by the city council of Rapid City, South Dakota), the 2019 return of 270 acres of Tulawat Island in Humboldt, California, to the Wiyot nation, and the cultivation of the largest tribally managed buffalo herd in Rosebud, South Dakota.

In short, land reclamation work is already underway, with tremendous benefits both to the environment and local communities. These efforts not only build the capacity of Native people to care for these lands; they also support the creation of regenerative systems and economic resiliency.

The resources to scale this work exist. The question is: are people in power willing to cede them?

It’s time for those already at the table to pass their seat to someone else. Indigenous people are ready for this power shift. We have interacted with virtually every type of funding organization that exists. We are experts at navigating multiple jurisdictions and the complexity of a settler-colonial system imposed on us. Indigenous people continue to be the most underinvested community in North America. It’s long past time to move resources—and decision-making power over these resources—to Indigenous people.

Returning Indigenous lands to Indigenous people is an act of social justice and liberation. Philanthropy can support such acts, but only if assets are truly transferred, which means shifting power. And it takes both power and resources to make transformative change. Grants, though welcome, are not enough.

Naturally, moving this work forward requires courage and radical solidarity. We believe that our people’s best days are ahead of us, not behind us. The Land Back movement is one way that Native people can build the just future that so many seek.

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

This article is the fourth installment of NPQ’s series on Community-Driven Philanthropy. In this series, movement leaders explore what’s possible if philanthropy adopts a reparative model—one in which it supports the leadership of BIPOC communities, not just by writing grants, but by shifting assets and control over resources to frontline communities.

Who will tell the stories that shape our future? These days, in the United States, this is a matter of fierce disagreement. On one side, a multiracial majority of people believe the US is destined to become a flourishing democracy. On the other, a white nationalist movement steadily advances its vision for a white Christian ethno-state.

To say that the project of US democracy is at risk is far from hyperbole. White nationalists have amassed a political and narrative infrastructure that churns out a toxic pool of ideas and stories, spreading disinformation ever more widely.

In its first five years, the Pop Culture Collaborative—a philanthropic fund co-founded and led by BIPOC, women, and queer funders and field leaders—has taken steps to learn about this white nationalist movement. We now sit with a hard truth: the social justice sector is being outspent and outpaced by a movement that is rapidly gaining ground.

To turn this around requires understanding that securing democracy in the US will take more than tolerating difference. In our work, we draw on concepts of democracy first developed by the Iroquois Confederacy and other Indigenous societies—political theories that connect the democratic systems and pluralist cultural norms that together make societies resilient.

Given the stark realities of generational trauma and structural inequities, building a pluralist democracy in the US requires a multifaceted strategy—coordinated across many movements, industries, and fields—that is accountable for and seeks to repair past injustices. This strategy requires centering narrative and cultural strategy and prioritizing BIPOC leaders as stewards of this work.

It also requires an historic investment of resources.

A Field Ready to Meet This Moment

When Ryan Coogler released the first Black Panther film in 2018, the narrative landscape was forever changed. Even amid contentious elections and polarization, the film produced a watershed of cross-cultural celebration and creative expression among artists, journalists, cultural critics, social justice organizers, and fans. Coogler’s storytelling also rippled through the racial justice movement; Black-led movements, organizations, entrepreneurs, and brands gained visibility, built power, and expanded their support bases.

While Wakanda’s capture of the American public’s imagination is a shining example of what becomes possible when pop culture and social justice movements come together to create change, it doesn’t have to be an isolated occurrence.

In its first five years, the Pop Culture Collaborative invested nearly $20 million in a BIPOC-led ecosystem of pop culture storytellers, narrative and cultural strategists, researchers, and social justice organizers who are building out a sustainable pop culture narrative change field with the ability to achieve narrative reinforcement of core messages reliably, routinely, and at scale.

A core element of this strategy is a narrative systems approach to cultural power building—a methodology rooted in the belief that we move through our lives immersed in “narrative oceans” of ideas, cultural norms, and stories. These narrative oceans shape how people think and feel about themselves, other people, and the world.

Pop culture—the big ideas and stories that flow through television, movies, digital and social media, music, books, sports, journalism, political campaigns, and other cultural platforms with which millions of people engage everyday—is one of the most influential arenas shaping how people make meaning and forge identities. It influences how people behave, whether they value or dehumanize others, and how they participate in democratic process and define their truth and reality. Narrative change investments are therefore critical and need to be supported at a scale equivalent to its level of influence on society and coordinated with other essential organizing and policy change strategies.

Indeed, the power of investment in narrative strategies is already evident. The National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA), United We Dream, and artist Paola Mendoza led the national outcry against the separation of immigrant children and parents at the US border in 2018. Later that year, NDWA partnered with entertainment company Participant Media and filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón to produce an impact campaign that, along with Cuarón’s award-winning film, Roma, highlighted the stories of domestic workers around the globe.

#MeToo founder Tarana Burke, labor organizers Monica Ramirez and Ai-jen Poo, and a diverse coalition of survivor-organizers created the groundswell around sexual harassment and violence when they launched TIME’S UP at the 2018 Golden Globes, convincing most female attendees to wear black in order to make a statement against sexual harassment in the entertainment industry. Imara Jones of TransLash and Elle Moxley of Marsha P. Johnson Institute are mainstreaming the role that transgender and nonbinary people play in the racial justice movement, the fight for abortion access, and the radical reimagining of this country’s future. Nelini Stamp, Sarah Sophie Flicker, and hundreds of other artists and cultural strategists used the experience of joy and the feeling of abundance as a cultural strategy to bring out the vote during the 2020 presidential election, helping to make possible the largest voter turnout in US history. Civil rights leader Eric Ward sounded the alarm on the threat of a well-resourced, organized white nationalist movement years before the January 6^th insurrection.

Yet another inspiring example of narrative strategy is the work of IllumiNative’s Crystal Echo Hawk, whose #TheTimeIsNow campaign forged bonds between Indigenous and Black communities and organized a virtual town hall that  drew more than 190,000 viewers, an important tipping point in the campaign to remove a racist slur from the name of Washington D.C.’s football team. This is just one step in a broader Native-led movement to center Indigenous sovereignty in the story of America’s future.

Powerful narrative transformations also include the work of artists such as Ava Duvernay, Issa Rae, and America Ferrera, among others, who are rewriting the script inside the entertainment industry—shifting who has narrative power by creating innovative content, tools, pipelines, and studios.

But there is more to do. The next great work of social justice movement organizations, and the philanthropic foundations and donors that support them, is to build out a narrative change field capable of transforming toxic narrative oceans—the interconnected stories, frameworks, and norms that create a surround sound experience for millions of us every day—into healthy narrative environments that reinforce democratic systems and pluralist norms in all aspects of our lives.

This work should focus on resourcing BIPOC leaders who are—and who always have been—the most consistent and visionary stewards of democracy, pushing American society towards a just and pluralist future.

This is no small task. But let’s look at what becomes possible if donors, foundations, and business leaders heed this call.

Cultural Power for Pluralist Democracy

Those working to advance social justice in the US have the resources to contend for narrative power—but these resources are largely locked behind the firewall of white wealth. That needs to change. Across the entertainment industry, social justice movement, and philanthropy, change is possible when BIPOC, women, queer, transgender, nonbinary, and disabled artists, movement leaders, and cultural strategists are resourced.

The Becoming America Fund, launched by the Pop Culture Collaborative in 2020, supports dozens of primarily BIPOC artists and cultural strategists to center abundant thinking and civic joy as an antidote to a caustic political environment and historic polarization. These creators engaged in the first large-scale, multimillion dollar test of what it takes to support a narrative network that can reinforce widespread public yearning for pluralist democracy in the US. This initial experiment, which provided grant support to dozens of groups across the country, reached over 100 million people and helped inspire historic civic participation and ebullient dancing in the streets in celebration of the survival of the democratic process.

This fund is one of many efforts to organize artists and media makers to tell a shared story of America’s pluralist future, including strategies implemented by Culture Surge and the Center for Cultural Power’s Movement to the Ballot Box campaign. Yet, despite their impact, philanthropy invested less than $10 million to resource these three initiatives in 2020. The accomplishments of such efforts are testament to how social justice movements and the narrative change field create abundance out of scarcity. They are also testament to the pressing need for philanthropy to go further.

A Philanthropic Strategy for This Moment

What does it mean to relinquish the power to decide how wealth is distributed? This is the soul-searching inquiry that philanthropy must take on, beginning with one critical step: letting go. Foundations, donors, and investors need to consider what it will take to prioritize asset allocation (ie, the investment of their corpus)—not just grants or donations—in their philanthropic strategies. With this historic redistribution of wealth, BIPOC communities can design narrative strategies, build and own media platforms, cultivate movements, and distribute stories that reach millions of people. Implemented at scale, this wealth transfer will generate an abundance that replenishes BIPOC communities most harmed by injustice, while also increasing opportunity for every American.

BIPOC cultural stewards have already established a strong proof of concept for what becomes possible when philanthropy and industry take such a bold step together. The vision of Black economic and political power generated by Ryan Coogler’s bold visualization of Wakanda is one example. Ava DuVernay’s choice to offer her ARRAY creative campus as a home to artists is another. Issa Rae’s decision to focus her HOORAE entertainment studio on young, emergent creators is a third.

Through such efforts, BIPOC social justice and cultural leaders are setting the stage for a collective redesign of our future. To achieve this tectonic shift, advocates will need to resource creators and organizers to not just “change the narrative,” but transform the narrative oceans that validate policies that deprive millions of people of civil rights, access to care and safety, and pathways to survival and opportunity. 

Based on five years of grantmaking and learning, we know that substantial financial investment is needed in four areas:

1. Transformational content, to seed new narrative oceans and experiences that help people reckon with the past, build power around present realities, and unlock imagination about democratic futures
2. Narrative infrastructure, to build and expand the capacity, coordination, and scale that the field of narrative strategy needs to transform narrative oceans
3. Fandom and communities, to sustainably move transformational ideas and behaviors into the digital and in-person subcultures in which millions connect, bond, create, and act
4. Learning and knowledge sharing, to ensure that a diverse field of practitioners and funders can constantly collaborate, learn, and recalibrate together

Can such an unprecedented rematriation of resources occur? We believe that it can, and that advocates for democracy must take this leap as though our lives and the future of our society depend on it.

Spoiler alert: they do.

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

We live in times of social crisis, featuring extreme wealth inequality and declining democracy as well as a renewed attention to labor organizing and mass uprisings for racial justice. What does it take to demand that the wealthy pay their fair share and win prosperity for working people? Strong coalitions made up of labor unions, community groups, and social justice organizations making big and broad demands both at the bargaining table and in the streets— a strategy called Bargaining for the Common Good.

In this roundtable, leaders reflect on how Bargaining for the Common Good stands out as a multi-levered, intersectional approach to racial, gender, climate, and economic justice. Join us to learn how to build new forms of collective power and advance a multiracial movement that can take on 21^st century capitalism.

This roundtable explores:

• How unions can leverage their contracts to benefit communities
• Why racial justice should be centered in our demands
• How we build statewide coalitions, and what they can do
• The importance of rank-and-file leadership
• What sectoral bargaining can bring to an industry
• Strategies to link legislative fights to labor issues
• And more!

Roundtable Speakers:

Saqib Bhatti, Co-Executive Director of ACRE

Ramon Cruz, President of the Sierra Club

Sheri Davis, Rutgers Center for Innovation in Worker Organization

Stacy Davis Gates, President of the Chicago Teachers Union

Cindy Estrada, Vice President of the United Auto Workers

Puya Gerami, Executive Director of Recovery for All

Alex Han, Bargaining for the Common Good

Anjali Madgula, Rutgers AAUP-AFT

Emma Tai, United Working Families

Todd Wolfson, Rutgers AAUP-AFT

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

In the Locked Out: Black Women, Wealth, and Homeownership series, members of Insight Center, Springboard to Opportunities, and several expert co-authors connect the lived experiences, hopes, and dreams of low-income Black women and their perspectives on homeownership to the historic and current policies that fuel our exclusionary housing market—and its impact on health and wellbeing—to advocate for equitable housing solutions for Black women.

Over the course of this series, we have laid out the myriad ways that our housing markets fail Black women. From current discriminatory practices in the private lending market to historic exclusion from public home-buying programs, the effects of these inequitable practices and policies on Black women include a lack of wealth and an incalculable loss of mental and physical health.

The harms that Black women face in our housing market are the result of decisions made by the government and real estate industry to segregate housing markets, setting the stage for corporations to profit off Black women’s pain. Without understanding the decisions that got us here, we cannot build a housing system that is just and equitable.

A History of Racist Policies

Modern-day inequities in the housing market are rooted in exclusionary policies that embedded racism into the very bedrock of the US housing system. Shortly after the turn of the 20^th century, real estate developers required prospective white home buyers to sign racist covenants that prevented these buyers from selling or renting housing to Black people. At the same time, real estate agents “steered” Black buyers and renters to areas that were designated—formally or informally—as Black neighborhoods.

In the 1930s, the federal government refused to insure mortgages in Black neighborhoods, a practice known as “redlining.” Simultaneously, the Federal Housing Administration subsidized new residential suburbs while stipulating that none of these new homes be sold to Black families. Private banks also redlined Black neighborhoods, denying loans to Black homeowners seeking to maintain their properties and causing building stock in many Black neighborhoods to deteriorate. The government’s new Public Works Administration (PWA) Housing Division then “routinely razed” these neighborhoods to build public housing projects that denied Black applicants. Even after passage of the 1968 Fair Housing Act, which prohibits discrimination in housing based on race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status, and disability, exclusionary zoning laws continued to offer “a loophole for discrimination,” keeping low-income people out of neighborhoods with more amenities and opportunity.

By locking Black homeowners out of such neighborhoods, US housing policies contributed significantly to the racial wealth gap and reduced economic opportunity for Black Americans while subsidizing wealth-building opportunities for white people. They also excluded Black families from access to high-quality public education. But the harms of these policy choices go deeper; they set up Black families for extraction.

From Racist Exclusion to “Predatory Inclusion”

Policies in the 1970s that purportedly encouraged Black homeownership resulted in what Dr. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor describes as “racist exclusion [giving] way to predatory inclusion.” When homes went into foreclosure, the government paid mortgage lenders in full, incentivizing real estate brokers and mortgage bankers to target poor Black families as poverty would likely drive such borrowers to fall behind on their mortgage payments. And because Black people were being sold overvalued homes—another strategy to squeeze as much profit out of Black borrowers as possible—lenders knew that they would profit from repayment until the borrowers could no longer bear the financial burden. They could then move on to extracting from the next poor Black family eligible for federal mortgage lending programs.

Given this sordid history, it is no surprise that during the 2000s housing bubble, lenders and Wall Street investors disproportionately targeted Black homebuyers—and especially Black women—for predatory subprime mortgages. Black women lost their homes and wealth while the banks that issued manipulative subprime loans made billions of dollars. In short, banks profited from racism while also, as it so happens, triggering a years-long economic recession.

While unscrupulous lenders siphoned off Black wealth, Black women paid the biggest price, and today, bankers continue targeting Black women for exploitative high-cost loans. They form part of system that fails to recognize Black women’s humanity and need for stability. As Black women have expressed, stable housing is essential to economic and personal security. Carol, a low-income Black woman in Clay County, GA, said having a home of her own after a lifetime of renting is her biggest dream: “Even if I don’t have lights, I have a roof over my head. I can lay my head in peace and not have to worry about someone telling me I have to get out.” Tiyonda, a Black mother who currently lives in subsidized housing in Jackson, MS, agrees: “It would mean peace for me. It’s something I really want to experience.”

Toward Repair: Addressing Black Women’s Exclusion from Housing

We cannot expect a housing system that was built on predatory practices and anti-Blackness to work for Black women today. Small tweaks cannot tackle the vast inequities baked into the US housing market, nor can they make our society see that Black women’s housing security impacts Black people’s collective economic security. As a first step towards repairing the US housing system’s entrenched inequalities, we must address Black women’s exclusion from access to housing and reimagine our housing system to center Black women and their needs.

Confronting and rectifying these historic wrongs requires leading with two core principles: 1) reducing the outsized power of bankers and other lenders, which allowed them to get away with extractive practices such as predatory lending, and 2) demanding governments acknowledge that the system is broken and fix it. Regulating housing finance, curbing predatory lending, increasing public investment in housing, and ensuring that the country’s fair housing laws are fully enforced are just a few of the ways policymakers can hold the private sector to account. Policymakers should also pursue rent stabilization policies to stop skyrocketing housing costs and take on profiteering landlords who use inflation as an excuse to drive rents to unsustainable levels. Only by using all the policy tools at our disposal will we build a housing system that does not extract wealth from Black women.

Policymakers must also advance policies designed to empower Black women. For too long, Black women have been funneled into low-quality, low-wage jobs, denying them the security and stability that wealth accumulation brings. Policy solutions must use a “both, and” approach, focusing on programs that combine ways to build both income and wealth. Insight Center has laid out a framework, Generations Ahead, for creating such a policy. Similar efforts are being undertaken locally, such as Saint Paul’s CollegeBound Boost program, which combines a guaranteed income with college savings account investments.

A New Vision: Centering Black Women in Housing

Still, better policy choices will only get us so far. Ultimately, creating a just housing system must start with collectively creating a new vision, policies, and programs for housing that center Black women’s thoughts and experience. That means refining current policies to better target and uplift Black women. It also means treating housing as more than a commodity by listening to the experiences of Black women who describe a home as a place of safety, privacy, community, family, and joy.

What would our homes, neighborhoods, and cities look like if we centered Black women’s joy, dreams, and notions of safety? Efforts such as the Black Thought Project, co-designed by Alicia Walters and the Insight Center, offer a window into how grounding our policy solutions in Black women’s experiences can help us envision solutions. The Black Thought Project transforms public and private walls in Oakland, CA, into interactive art installations, providing Black people with community chalkboards to share and reflect on their perspectives. Black women’s responses to these walls touched on the importance of kinship networks and family, the harm caused by and distrust in government programs and policies, the pain of changing neighborhoods and gentrification, and the desire for financial and emotional safety.

Centering Blackness could also mean building a housing system that is structured around the village, re-envisioning the single-family house and city grids to better support kinship networks, which are integral to Black culture. Such a system would reflect the legacy of generations of Black families who make up the lifeblood of many American cities but are currently facing gentrification-induced displacement. Scholar Mehrsa Baradaran’s proposed 21^st Century Homestead Act provides a framework for just this; it would combat racially discriminatory housing policy by transferring land to residents of small and medium-sized cities with high housing vacancies.

We see examples of such a holistic approach in the work of Moms 4 Housing, a grassroots group in Oakland, CA, comprised of unhoused and housing-insecure mothers. Moms 4 Housing describes its goal as “reclaiming housing for the community from speculators and profiteers.” In late 2019, several Black women affiliated with the organization took over a vacant home in the city for nearly two months before being evicted. Their direct action highlighted the unfairness of letting houses sit empty while families—particularly those headed by Black women—are denied homes, and it drew the support of several politicians and community advocates.

The group’s assertion that housing is a human right is part of a long history of organizing that places shelter at the center of fights for economic and gender justice. Sixty years ago, the National Welfare Rights Organization’s Johnnie Tillmon called for a guaranteed income as one way to provide Black women with the resources needed to survive. She pulled no punches with her assessment of the massive inadequacies of the existing social safety net: “The man, the welfare system, controls your money. He tells you what to buy, what not to buy, where to buy it, and how much things cost. If things—rent, for instance—really cost more than he says they do, it’s just too bad for you. He’s always right.”

For too long, Black women have been navigating a racist housing system that was designed to extract their wealth. Policymakers have failed to recognize housing as a right and confront the underlying racism and sexism in our housing system. Building a housing system that works for Black women can start with policy changes—whether regulations that safeguard people from exploitation or large-scale investments in housing—but cannot stop there. Rather, we need a new vision that brings Black women to the table and lets them shape an alternate future of housing that works for all.

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

This talk was originally presented at the Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO) 2022 National Conference, which took place in Chicago, Illinois, May 16–18, 2022.

At GEO’s 2022 National Conference, hosted in partnership with Forefront, grantmakers and other practitioners had the opportunity to come together in Chicago, Illinois, to explore challenges and uncover solutions with fellow grantmakers who are leaning into transformational change in order to create a just, connected, and inclusive society where we can all thrive. The conference program included Short Talks—engaging, 20-minute, keynote-style presentations that challenge current philanthropic culture and practice and inspire participants to think about the topic, their work, and/or their lives differently.

Tanya Watkins: Can y’all hear me? Yeah. OK, y’all ready to hear some bad words? Yeah. OK. You said you were. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. We in Chicago. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. My name is Tanya Watkins, and I’m the executive director of Southsiders Organized for Unity and Liberation, also known as SOUL. See? And its sister C4 organization, SOUL In Action.

SOUL is a radical, Black-led and Black-centered faith-based organization, working at the intersection of racial and economic justice in Chicago Southland. If you come across someone who happens to be familiar with SOUL and you ask them, what does SOUL do, they might say, “Oh, yeah, that’s that organization that goes out there and fights with the police.” Or, “That’s that organization that stood outside the Chicago Board of Trade and fought with the banks and the billionaires.” Or, “Those are those people that are always fighting to #FreeThemAll and defund the county jails.” They might look at me and say, “Hey! Ain’t you that loud girl that’s always fighting with the mayor and got dragged out of City Hall in handcuffs?” And I’d be like, you’re not wrong. Even when my kid was little and they were trying to describe what I do to their teacher, they were like, “My mom fights mean white people.” Imagine having to explain that at report-card pickup.

But that word, “fight.” That word was in every speech that I gave in direct actions. It’s been my go-to word to rile people up at every meeting. Hell, it even felt like I was fighting for funding. “Fight” had not only become synonymous with my organization, but it had begun to encapsulate my very personhood. I started to believe that the only way I could survive in this world, particularly as a Black woman and especially in this work, was to thicken my skin, build my brigades, and just resist. My reality as a so-called movement builder was to be in perpetual struggle with everything. I mean, that’s really what folks would like you to believe, right? The words we’ve been called, the words I’ve been called—a thug, a terrorist, a BLM Soros-funded gang member. And for the record, I don’t even know George Soros. I have never seen this man, and he has never given me a check. But in the eyes of the public—and oftentimes philanthropy—movement builders like me exist solely for the battleground, if we even exist at all. Loudspeakers in hand, risking our safety on the frontlines of marches and direct actions, our value intricately wrapped up in the number of bodies we turn out, how much noise we make, how many sound bites the press picks up, the number of legislators we unelect or run screaming out of office, or the pieces of bad policy we fight back.

There’s that word again—fight. We’re expected to tirelessly collect human beings living within the very vulnerable communities we claim we want to liberate, train them, and build their resiliency to stand on the frontlines and fight with us. We play through this cycle over and over again as we burn out, as we burn them out, while funders either tire and move on to the next hot movement issue or cry for us to give them more bodies and more spectacle. Their most important question always being, “So, how many people did you get on the bus to the state capital?” All while people that look like me are literally fucking dying. And for a long time, y’all, I bought into that. I spent every hour of every day searching for more bodies to get on those buses or to turn out at the next big protest, struggling to piecemeal my organizational budget $10,000 grant at a time, chasing issue after issue, perpetually responding to Black death and Black trauma, all while being Black and traumatized my [own] damn self. I literally fought so much that I think that I completely lost sight of what I was fighting for. There was no forest beyond the trees. And it felt like the only trees I could ever see were always on fire.

But in 2016, I had an experience that would drastically change how I approach this work and how I saw myself in the movement. You see, early that year, I would get an introduction to this brilliant organizer by the name of Charlene Sinclair. Charlene was absolutely captivating, this beautiful, larger-than-life sister who unapologetically just took up space. Every word that came from her lips danced through the air like butterflies. And you just wanted to catch each one and just hang on to it. Her very presence was just so damn powerful—so powerful that you didn’t realize until after she had left the room that she couldn’t have been more than five-foot two-inches tall. And in that first meeting, what was most interesting about Charlene Sinclair to me was that this absolutely brilliant woman thought that frontline organizer Tanya Watkins was worth investing in. In that very same first meeting, Charlene invited me to a gathering of Black and Brown women in Los Angeles, California. Now, at first, I refused because our budget at the time did not include a line item for traveling to Los Angeles, California, or any place else for that matter. Charlene looked at me and she said, “I didn’t ask you what you had money for. I asked you if you’ll be there.” And when a Black woman looks at you with such a divine certainty in her eyes, I suggest you agree to do whatever it is that she’s telling your ass to do.

So, on September 2016, thanks to Charlene, this frontline organizer had a round trip ticket to LA. I remember practicing my words on the plane. I was determined to show these strangers, organizers from across the country, who I’m sure were doing amazing things, that I was worthy of being in that room. I was scrambling to be able to talk fluently about every win and brag about how many marches we had done, and how many people we had turned out, and how we had just ousted a racist prosecutor in Cook County, leading to the election of our first Black woman state’s attorney. I had, like—oh, yes, give it up, give it up. So, I had, like, six hours to figure out how to pretend like I was a real organizer, y’all. Even though I didn’t have the organizational budget, I felt I needed to prove it. When I got to Los Angeles, I got an Uber to the address that Charlene had given us in the itinerary. After about 15 minutes, we pull up to this beautiful hotel. Walking in, I felt like I did not belong in this place. If this convening was taking place in this hotel, Charlene had picked the wrong bitch.

This was not me. I glanced at the itinerary for the second time and realized that this was the hotel that I would be staying in. And the order for the remainder of the day was rest. I was like, rest? The fuck is that?

Organizers like me don’t get to sleep. The next day, Charlene would bring us all together. I arrived at this colorfully painted building that just looked like a piece of art. As I walked towards the doors, I could smell burning sage and feel the beating of African drums beneath my feet. I was greeted at the door by these two beautiful sisters in flowing dresses and head wraps who just embraced me and invited me in. It honestly made me hesitate. I was uncomfortable. I don’t think I was prepared for what it felt like just to be affirmed. I couldn’t even remember the last time that my body had been touched as an organizer in a way that wasn’t violent or dismissive. We actually spent that first day singing songs and talking about who we were as human beings outside of organizing. They actually didn’t care that we had just kicked out Anita Alvarez. They didn’t care about the hundreds of people we had marched down to city hall.

Talking about my personhood, my own humanity, was actually frustrating. Organizing and marching and protesting had become my identity. It was who I was. I was like, when are we going to talk about the work? When do we get to the part where we talk about the fight? And Charlene looked at me and she said, “Baby, this is the work. We know that you have done amazing shit and led hundreds of people in Chicago. But we want to hear about who you are and where you are leading them to.” No one had ever asked me that. Being stripped of the numbers, the turnout goals, the policy battles that have been handed to, me was terrifying. And now I was supposed to talk about a vision that I never had time or space or breath to even realize. Most of my organizing career, I was out there literally throwing my body at the police. Here I am, away from Chicago, in a room full of loving strangers—warm and fed and rested and terrified of my own inability to dream. This is the undue burden that we have put on movement leaders for far too long. We love to quote MLK (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.) in this work. But for most of us on the front lines of movement, we never have time to have a dream.

You see, that wasn’t what philanthropy was investing in, directly impacted Black folks like me to have dreams. They were instead pumping resources into big policy houses, think tanks, academia, nonprofits secretly fueled by government officials. Those were the people funded to imagine a new world for me. Those were the people who decided what issues folks on the ground should be working on. Those were the people who were trusted to tell us what was possible. But baby, God bless Charlene Sinclair because she was sparking the revolutionary brilliance within us. What she realized was that those closest to the problem were not only closest to the solution, but were the best architects for a society where everyone is served. She fought to invest in the inventiveness of the people who bore the greatest brunt of the failures of American capitalism. She did this by not only reconnecting us with our own humanity and forcing us to contend with big-picture questions about the world as it should be, but by providing us resourced spaces to imagine and dream. I can’t tell you how important that space was because Black dreams, for some reason, are a threat. The ugly truth that we run away from about Dr. King’s legacy was the fact that a Black man had the audacity to dream. And that is what ultimately got him killed. At that time, he was considered radical because he imagined a world where Black people could be safe.

So, over the next few years, Charlene would continue to fight for those spaces, much to the chagrin of the funders—stealing organizers off the ground, even if only for a few days, to talk about building a world beyond incremental policy shifts and issue campaigns. She wasn’t just making us better organizers, but she was building leaders armed with a greater understanding of the society we are fighting for. Because of her, I grew to know myself as an abolitionist in the present-day sense, not solely fighting back against police or reactively activating in response to state-sanctioned violence, but constructing and designing a world where we no longer need police, prison cages, or violent, punitive punishment in order to be safe. But just as Charlene was helping folks like me challenge what was possible, philanthropy, which is largely centrist—I said what I said—seemed to be working just as hard trying to convince directly impacted organizers that a new world was impossible.

Despite the lack of support from national funders, a few foundations here in Chicago got it. Some of those people are probably in this space with y’all today. Many former organizers themselves, just about all who are women, and many who are women of color, they were stirring up bold ideas in philanthropy. I’d be remiss if I didn’t give honor to people like Jane Kimondo at the Crossroads Fund; Angelique Powers, formerly of the Field Foundation; Carmen Prieto formerly with Wieboldt; Michelle Morales of the Woods Fund—[applause]—Leslie Ramyk with the Conant Family Foundation; and Heather Parish with the Albert Pick Jr. Fund, who was also the reason why I get to be in here saying all these curse words with y’all today. She… blame Heather. She invited me.

Bold women, who are intently listening, giving frontline organizers voice within their respective organizations, and using their influence to give them citywide and even nationwide platforms, challenging us to dig deeper, and funding spaces for community members to be in conversation and dream with us. Okay. So, I only get, like, 20 minutes with y’all today. And I felt like I’ve already talked too much. I’ve sucked up all the air in the room. I know I’ve got to get to the point. Here it is: There are billions of dollars floating around the philanthropic pool of justice. So why does it feel like we’re still losing? How is it possible that with all we know about the decades upon decades of harmful and racist policing that we can sit in our homes and watch a man being choked to death on TV by the cops? How in the hell can we be sitting in the middle of a pandemic that is literally killing our loved ones and still be debating the need for affordable health care? How is it possible that in the year 2022, we are still fighting to prove that Congress doesn’t have the right to police our uteruses and strip us of the agency of our own bodies? How can we accept living in a country where armed white nationalists are considered patriots, while non-violent Black activists are considered terrorists?

Maybe it’s because we’re allowing the people that literally want to kill us to dictate our every move and keep us on the defensive because we don’t value making our own spaces to dream. They are unapologetically co-conspiring to design the world that they want to live in. And the only resources that we get are to constantly push back. Are we investing in spaces where the most impacted people have time and place to reimagine new systems that work for all of us? Or are we funding in endless cycles with the intent of keeping the most vulnerable folks perpetually in struggle? Are we growing and investing in our own leaders that reflect our values? Are we making demands that are bold enough to get us closer to the world we actually want to live in? Are we willing to imagine a world where we actually no longer need philanthropy or nonprofits—[applause]—because we just have justice, and safety, and equity? Are you funding abundantly, long term, for actual liberation? Are you helping to create resource spaces for Black folks to dream, design, and build radical futures for themselves, where we all don’t just survive, but we actually thrive? I’m not sure. I don’t know. But because of Charlene, I am dedicated to building beautiful imagination spaces for my people to dream because I know that they deserve opportunities to visualize a future beyond the fight. I’m no longer afraid of SOUL being called radical because if [the word] “radical” means building a world that I’m not afraid to raise my child in, then by all means, call me radical.

Do we still get out there and march and hit the streets? Hell, yeah. All day. The only difference between us now and us then is that, when we march now, we can see the liberated future that we’re leading our people to. So, the question I leave you with today is: Are you bold enough and radical enough to come with us? Thank you.

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