Tag Archives: nonprofit quarterly

How is an economy built in which ownership is truly shared and in which we all co-own the future? To addresses this question and many others, four authors from NPQ’s summer 2022 economic justice magazine issue on “Owning Our Economy, Owning Our Future,” build on the articles they wrote and challenge viewers to rethink the future of our economy—touching on a range of themes from restructuring ownership in business, at the level of culture, in the nonprofit sector, and at the workplace.

The panelists participating in this wide-ranging conversation are:

• Kamuela Enos, who is director of the Office of Indigenous Innovation at the University of Hawai’i, of mixed-race Hawaiian heritage, and a longtime activist in the Indigenous rights movement in Hawai’i.
• Rodney Foxworth is CEO of Common Future, an organization that supports a network of leaders who are building a more equitable economy in over 100 low-income communities and communities of color across the country.
• Emily Kawano is codirector of the Wellspring Cooperative, based in Springfield, Massachusetts, and is a cofounder of the US Solidarity Economic Network.
• Esteban Kelly is executive director of the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives, which represents the nation’s estimated 1,000 worker co-ops, and is a longtime leader in the solidarity economy and co-op movements.

Click here to download accompanying slides

Among the many questions explored in this webinar are the following:

• What is ownership? How must ownership rights be restructured to create a more equitable economy?
• What does the future of economic justice look like?
• What are concrete action steps that people can take to advance a democratic economic vision?
• How can nonprofits and community groups leverage their own economic activity to promote a more equitable and democratic economy?
• How can a kinship-based model of ownership support the revival of Indigenous communities and promote equitable regeneration?
• How do you decolonize the economy?
• How do worker co-ops democratize ownership? What role can policy play?
• What does a broader vision of democratic ownership that sustains us—at work, on the land, in communities, and at home—look, taste, and feel like?

Resources:

Steve Dubb and Emily Kawano, “Beyond Capitalism: Owning Our Economy, Owning Our Future,” NPQ, July 13, 2022.

Kamuela Enos and Miwa Tamanaha, Ownership as Kinship: Restoring the Abundance of Our Ancestors, NPQ September 7, 2022.

Rodney Foxworth, “Building Community Institutions of Our Own,” NPQ, July 20, 2022.

Melissa Hoover and Esteban Kelly, “Future Horizons: Visions toward Democratizing Our Economy,” NPQ, July 27, 2022.

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

How can a local United Way chapter change its behavior to be an effective partner with BIPOC community groups seeking to dismantle structural racism?  We ask ourselves this question often these days.

We know the national data. To date, only 1.8 percent of philanthropic dollars goes to Black-led organizations according to the Association of Black Foundation Executives. In 2018, the latest year for which complete grants data are available, the Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity reported that only six percent of philanthropic dollars supported racial equity work and only one percent supported racial justice work. Also in 2018, the National Center for Responsive Philanthropy found that one percent of local grantmaking was going to Black people.

There are consistent inequities between Black and white Americans in all aspects of life—healthcare, education, law enforcement, child welfare, wages, access to capital, and more. According to research from the Racial Equity Institute, Black Americans are 3.7 times more likely to be suspended from K-12 education than white Americans, 5.2 times as likely to be denied a loan, and seven times more likely to be incarcerated as adults.

The preponderance of racial inequities across systems and socioeconomic strata disproves the notion that such statistics are unrelated or that racial inequity is the product of individual actions or Black culture. The Racial Equity Institute finds that these issues have the same root cause—systemic racism—which it likens to contaminated groundwater that infiltrates and poisons our systems.

Designing a Fund That Meets Atlanta’s Needs

The national statistics are damning, but how does this reality translate into philanthropic action at the local level in a community like Atlanta? It certainly helps to know the territory. Two of us (Katrina Mitchell and Kim Addie) work for the United Way of Greater Atlanta (UWGA. Will Cordery, a national philanthropic consultant, supported our exploration as we developed our approach.

In Atlanta, the data tell us that myths of Atlanta as the real-world “Wakanda” notwithstanding, Atlanta has long been home to stark structural racial and economic inequality. As a 2019 article in NPQ noted, “The city has, over recent years, earned the unfortunate distinction of being the most economically inequitable city in the US.”  According to the Atlanta Wealth Building Initiative, as of 2020, the average income for a Black family in Atlanta was $28,105, barely one third of the average white family income of $83,722. The average value of a Black-owned business was $58,805—less than one tenth of the value of a white-owned business ($658,264).

Once we understand the pervasiveness of structural racism, we are left with a cogent conclusion: to solve groundwater problems, we need groundwater solutions. In the past, UWGA had largely funded direct services. But 2020 led to a reckoning about how we can move beyond “band-aid” solutions and leverage our philanthropic resources to tackle equity with a systems-level approach. As a part of changing the philanthropic ecosystem, our goal was to be intentional in supporting BIPOC infrastructure.

Can an Old United Way Chapter Engage in Structural Change?  Initial Steps

This required incubating a new approach in our organization. Wanting to demonstrate that legacy philanthropic models can be responsive, we launched our United for Racial Equity & Healing Fund in 2020. This effort, of course, is part of a broader trend of emerging Black funds in communities such as Seattle, WA; Richmond and Hampton Roads, VA; and Denver, CO.

To develop our equity framing and grantmaking practices. we reached out to Dr. Yanique Redwood, formerly with the if Foundation and now Executive Director of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University. We also spoke with other foundations with similar funds, such as the Pittsburgh Foundation.

We are on a journey. We have made mistakes and learned from them and are striving to include in our work more and more the voices of the communities we serve. Our fund is in its infancy. To date, it has raised and distributed $3.2 million to support local racial justice work. It’s a small percentage of total giving, but it’s a start.

Not just about money, the fund is also about supporting organizations’ capacity building and amplifying community voices. Among the groups receiving capacity-building support are the SisterCARE Alliance, whose self-care and crisis response programs contribute to community wealth building. Integrating self-care into daily wellness practices helps Atlanta women protect themselves, preventing suicide, domestic violence, depression, human trafficking, and economic oppression. The organization fights social injustice in the Black community.

Another partner grantee, the Kindred Southern Healing Collective, focuses on dealing with generational trauma, using a social healing model to counter racial violence and economic disenfranchisement. Yet another grantee, Policing Alternatives and Diversion Initiative (PAD), intervenes in real time and on-site to keep people from unnecessarily entering Atlanta’s criminal legal system, preventing ongoing harm of Black families and lives.

As Dr. Yomi Noibi, who leads ECO-Action, an Atlanta-based environmental justice group, reminds us, “We have to invest time and money in building transformational relationships among the team and partners that you fund. They [funders] need to invest in potential, not just those that have a track record. The people that need you the most have the potential—you have to take the risk even if you mess up!” Noibi’s counsel drives home why respect for community leadership is so vital for any neighborhood change effort.

Reaching Out to the Black Atlanta Community

To guide the fund, United Way of Greater Atlanta convened an advisory committee of influential regional BIPOC leaders. Over the spring of 2020, we assembled a small, deeply committed advisory board that represents a cross-section of nonprofit and philanthropic leaders who understood the landscape and guide the process of building the fund and helped shape the fund’s priorities. Board members include Tamieka A. Mosely, Director of Grantmakers for Southern Progress; Shannon Cofrin Gaggero, a trustee with the Homestead Foundation, an Atlanta-based family foundation; Kweku Forstall, Director of the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Atlanta civic site; Odetta MacLeish-White, the Georgia lead for the Center for Community Progress; and Nathaniel Smith, Chief Equity Officer of the Partnership for Southern Equity.

We also hired Social Insights Research, a women-of-color-led consulting firm. Our conversations with consultants, board members, and others challenged us to think deeply about how racial healing could best be prioritized by the fund and in our daily work. As a result, we began to look at moving money towards healing justice. This was a significant pivot, and it has guided fund giving over three grant cycles, along with feedback from the fund committee members and grantee partners. For example, Smith reminded us, “We have allowed the nonprofit industrial complex to determine what success looks like.” He called on the fund to act differently and do better.

One of our partners, James Woodall of the JustGeorgia Coalition, spoke to the issue of trauma. “There was no pandemic in the [social justice] movement,” he emphasized. “We were still in the streets, fighting and protesting against police violence in Black communities.” Alison Johnson with the Housing justice League made a similar observation: “We ask ourselves, how do we come into community and be in communion to address trauma caused by all these harms?”

This input has led the fund to focus on addressing generational trauma and countering the criminalization of Black communities in our region. This work included launching a series of community-wide conversations between corporate partners, civic organizations, and donors on the topic of racial equity. The fund launch also created opportunities for UWGA staff to have difficult internal conversations via facilitated dialogues about racial equity across the organization.

Throughout the process, the fund’s committee members and grantee partners have been direct with us about past flaws. This meant there was a need to acknowledge that UWGA would no longer be satisfied with dedicating funds to addressing the effects of racism; rather, it was imperative for UWGA to emphasize racial equity in its funding applications and communication across the entire organization.

We have listened openly to feedback about how, historically, Atlanta’s local philanthropic community, including UWGA, has largely remained silent on racial equity and not sufficiently invested in local community organizing efforts. Our grantee partners asked us to not only change our guidance to grantees, but also through our communications to encourage other philanthropic organizations in Atlanta to put a new model into action and hold our peers accountable to that end.

Preliminary Lessons

The racial justice fund is still young and evolving, but some initial learnings to date include the following:

• Doing healing justice work can itself be exhausting and traumatic. Social justice leaders informed us that they were out of money and energy. As a result, we committed to supporting the health and wellbeing of local leaders who need rest to avoid burnout; now, UWGA enables all grantees to use up to 10 percent of grant awards to support healing and restorative practices for staff.
• Achieving systems-level changes requires moving beyond individual and behavioral change and investing in organizations that deliver services, utilize community organizing, and advocate for policy changes at the local and state levels.
• Support organizations that are grounded in the realities and wisdom of the people who bear the brunt of disinvestment, inequity, and injustice every day.
• Provide multi-year, unrestricted funding to BIPOC-led organizations. This funding gives grantees flexibility to assess and determine where grant dollars are most needed and allows for innovation, emergent action, and sustainability.
• Build trust by working alongside funders and funder intermediaries to deepen understanding of lesser known or emerging organizations. For example, a grant was provided to the Southern Power Fund through Project South, which served as a fiscal agent and intermediary to support frontline organizers leading transformational efforts.
• Don’t forget the leaders in the middle. Investment in leadership development, capacity building, and technical assistance for leaders at public sector agencies is critical, especially as local governments deploy federal dollars stemming from the American Recovery Plan Act and infrastructure spending. As Lois DeBacker and Joe Evans of the Kresge Foundation wrote in NPQ, philanthropy has a critical role in ensuring that these public dollars actually meet community needs.
• Always solicit and act on feedback. Philanthropy is most successful when informed by the expertise and lived experience of grantee partners.

A Call to Action in Atlanta and Beyond

We know structural racism can be dismantled in Atlanta. Not only can it be done, but it must be done.

We end as we began. As the Racial Equity Institute emphasizes, structural racism is in some aspects like contaminated groundwater. We have some experience with contaminated groundwater in Atlanta. The Chattahoochee River, which runs through the city, was once one of the most polluted rivers in the country. Locals were warned to avoid the “Hooch,” as the river was called, because of its toxicity. In the 1990s, local leaders recognized that contamination had to be addressed to ensure the waterway’s long-term sustainability. And it was. Today, the Chattahoochee River is a vibrant, valued resource flowing through Greater Atlanta. It’s not unusual to encounter families floating downstream in tubes on a sunny Saturday morning or to see groups of Black birdwatchers along the riverbanks.

Undoing structural racism is more challenging than undoing groundwater contamination, but in addition to UWGA’s racial justice fund, a growing range of Atlanta-based initiatives give us hope. These include the Kendeda Fund, a national foundation which has made a public commitment to investing in equity in its home city of Atlanta; and the Reimagine Albany Equity Advancement Fund, an effort by a United Way partner chapter in southwest Georgia, the birthplace of the national community land trust movement.

For too long, Atlanta has used its image of being a Black Mecca as a kind of shield to exempt itself from criticism, even as a substantial majority of its Black residents fail to benefit. It’s past time for philanthropy and policymakers in Atlanta to move beyond the mirage and invest in a truly thriving Black community.

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

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

Editors’ note: This article is from the Summer 2022 issue of the Nonprofit Quarterly, “Owning Our Economy, Owning Our Future.”

In the past two years, the U.S. economy has revealed an undeniable truth: it runs on care work. The essential work of cooking and delivering food, caring for children and the elderly, and cleaning homes and offices is both necessary for our lives and not paid a living wage. This labor, done mostly by women of color, is often made invisible: performed quietly and cheaply by those at the margins of society, who work hard without good pay or protections. How do we counter this tendency of capitalism to devalue what is most important and intrinsic to our survival?

The pieces all articulate in common that care work is work—and that it’s time to value it as such.

We asked four leaders of care organizations to put the consequences of this problem—and creative solutions to it—into words: Ai-jen Poo of Caring Across Generations coalition and National Domestic Workers Alliance; Adria Powell of Cooperative Home Care Associates; Dennis Hogan of Service Employees International Union, District 1199NE (SEIU 1199NE), who cowrote with Dulari Tahbildar of the Rhode Island Child Care Training Program for SEIU Education & Support Fund (ESF); and Ellen Vera of Co-op Cincy. All are part of national or local organizations at the forefront of fighting for economic and racial justice in care work, advancing policy to create change in the sector, and building democratic models that remake the care economy.

Respondents were invited to speak to this year’s theme of “Owning Our Economy, Owning Our Future” directly, or to use it as a point of departure to talk about an aspect of the sector of their choice. The pieces all articulate in common that care work is work—and that it’s time to value it as such.

Poverty-Wage Care Work: Unsustainable Before, Unthinkable Now

by Ai-jen Poo

The narrative about care in our culture has long been misaligned with the reality of care in our society and economy. The capacity to care for children, disabled family members, or older loved ones is either taken for granted—work that should be quietly performed by family members, particularly women, before or after hours of full-time work outside the home—or assumed to be something that underpaid care workers, often women of color and immigrants, will quietly enter our homes to do for us. Care is poverty-wage work, seen and treated as unskilled and unprofessional, and yet it could not be more valuable. And despite all of us requiring some form of care at some point in our lives, if we struggle it is treated as an isolated, personal problem—even a personal failure. When we’re doing our best, it never seems to be enough to relieve the mounting pressures, especially with baby boomers aging and millennials having families of their own.

As a society, we must take ownership of the care economy we rely on and invest in the strength and resilience of our care programs, our caregivers, and our care workforce. From child care to home- and community- based services, care work is an essential part of the infrastructure for a strong workforce and economy.

Access to child care enables parents to work. Access to home- and community-based services enables many older adults and people with disabilities to live in the home and community, work, stay healthy, live whole lives. Investing in care jobs would transform what are now poverty wage jobs without benefits into jobs with real economic security, so that care workers can care for their own families, too.

What would this look like? Investment in home- and community-based services would advance equity— supporting women and especially women of color, who shoulder a disproportionate amount of care work, whether as family caregivers or formal care workers. Young workers would join the home care workforce with the confidence that this was a career worth investing in. Tens of millions of family caregivers would have the support they need for their family members while continuing their own careers. States would save money in the long term, because home care is much less costly than nursing home care.

The pandemic revealed some of the risks of our cultural norms and narratives about care, and helped us all see that we have care in common. Our time in quarantine helped us see that we need more than individual sacrifices and patchwork programs if we are to recover, sustain, and succeed in the future. Social distancing and COVID protocols shut down the minimal care supports we had, and millions of mothers and family caregivers were pushed out of the workforce. Now, two and a half years later, we have an opportunity to transform our culture around care work.

Care work wasn’t considered infrastructure or a part of the “real” economy before the pandemic. A part of our economy long governed by norms rooted in gender discrimination and the legacy of slavery, care work can no longer be sidelined. The status quo was unsustainable before the pandemic, and it’s unthinkable now. The post-pandemic care economy must be one that is dignified for all, including care workers, their families, and all of us who rely on care.

Investment in a solid care economy will enable future generations to care for their families from birth to death. Future generations are counting on us.

Making the Invisible Visible: Fair Pay For Home Care

by Adria Powell

One of the most significant challenges home care workers face today is the lack of value society accords them and their critical work—work that runs the gamut from daily assistance with getting out of bed, bathing, dressing, and meal preparation to assistance focused on helping clients with physical disabilities maintain gainful employment—allowing older adults and people with disabilities to remain in their homes and communities safely and independently. That we allow society to undervalue these jobs and not invest in these workers is inexcusable. These workers face inequities across the board. It is a result of who does the work (overwhelmingly, women, people of color, and immigrants), the legacy of slavery, and where the work is carried out (in someone’s home) that a bias emerges toward viewing the work as obligatory and undeserving of adequate compensation.

Perhaps it’s connected to the declaration I hear from so many home care workers that they “love” what they do, that their passion for this work comes “from the heart,” or that they feel like they are “part of the family” that we believe it is reasonable—even acceptable—to provide home care workers with poverty-level wages. When it comes to human services work, there seems to be a direct correlation in our society between work coming from the heart and low pay. Of course, reasonable people understand that workers deserve to both love what they do and be fairly compensated for the services they deliver.

The lack of value placed on these workers and their jobs results not only in low wages but also minimal investments—training, ongoing support and development, career advancement, and so forth. And because home care workers work within someone else’s home, they are largely unseen and unheard. They work alone, and the job can feel excruciatingly isolating. It is the perfect setup for invisibility.

At Cooperative Home Care Associates (CHCA), we have worked for decades on building a model home care agency designed to demonstrate how investing in quality jobs is important for both home care workers and clients. Established in 1985, CHCA is now the largest worker-owned cooperative in the United States, growing from twelve home care workers to a prepandemic high of twenty-three hundred workers. We have long recognized that these jobs need to be good jobs—jobs that engender dignity and in which workers are treated with respect. Our worker-owned cooperative structure is ideal for countering the issue of invisibility. Workers in a cooperative are owners, and with ownership comes the opportunity to vote on key decisions, serve as part of a governing body, and have a stake in profits generated by the work.

CHCA develops and trains workers to advocate for policy changes needed to improve jobs in the field. And within the organization, we improve job quality by providing robust training both in how to be a home care worker and what it means to be a member of the cooperative. Workers are encouraged to participate in all aspects of the organization at whatever level feels attainable to them. The continuous learning and opportunities for advancement demonstrate to workers that they are valued and that their work is respected.

But the challenges home care workers face cannot be overcome by one organization. We are part of an enormous ecosystem in healthcare that is fraught with inequity and deep-rooted system failures. The long- standing problems must be addressed and corrected at the macro level. In New York State, we are part of an historic coalition of home care stakeholders seeking to bring about this correction. The coalition is engaged in a campaign: Fair Pay for Home Care. For two consecutive years, we have had the Fair Pay for Home Care bill introduced. The bill would increase home care worker wages from $13.20 per hour in some regions of New York State to $22.50 per hour (or 150 percent of the highest regional minimum wage) in New York State, which would help to lift hundreds of thousands of women, people of color, immigrants, and their families out of poverty and represent fair compensation for home care workers.

The coalition has achieved a modest gain for home care workers in the New York State 2023 budget. Home care workers will see a $3 hourly increase over the next two years. Additionally, New York State will invest over $2 billion annually for bonuses for healthcare workers who earn less than $125,000 per year (unfortunately, home care workers were eliminated from this pool because they received the $3 increase over two years in the budget). We are part of the Fair Pay coalition that has remained intact for the past two years, is a political force, and has gained considerable momentum. We will continue to work to reach the end goal of Fair Pay for Home Care—a real and achievable solution to the lack of investment in these workers and jobs, with effects that are positioned to reach well beyond just the home care workforce in New York State.

Child Care: The Linchpin of Our Economy

by Dennis Hogan and Dulari Tahbildar

Child care has always been the linchpin of not just the care economy but also the economy more generally. Parents who have access to affordable, high-quality child care are able to participate in the labor force, earn more money, and advance in their careers. The pandemic has only amplified the need for affordable and reliable child care as a key part of our society’s larger workforce strategy.

Child care providers are often the very first teachers a child has (not to mention the adults with whom they spend much of their time), and experience with a skilled early childhood educator has benefits for developing children. Yet, training, compensating, and valuing child care workers is too frequently an afterthought. This is in part because the work is overwhelmingly performed by women—many of them women of color, and many of them immigrants. Indeed, the profession has been devalued because it is considered “domestic” work—that is, work that in many places and contexts has been performed by women, in the home, and often for little or no compensation.

In Rhode Island, family child care providers came together in 2013 to change that reality—first by unionizing with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) 1199NE, and then by successfully negotiating for a training fund benefit and partnering with the SEIU Education & Support Fund (ESF) to administer and leverage that benefit. ESF recognizes that the reality of professional child care today requires a worker- centered, relationship-based educational and training model that allows child care providers to reach their highest professional potential.

By coming together to assert and celebrate their value as well as grow together as professionals, the providers who pursue professional education through their union training fund demonstrate the values of collective action.

Rhode Island’s collectively bargained family child care training fund benefit represents a truly unique offering in the world of early childhood education: working closely with members themselves, ESF staff design and deliver programming targeted specifically to the population of home day care providers in Rhode Island, with a special focus on culturally competent education that meets personal as well as professional needs. ESF programming is offered in both English and Spanish—and during the evenings, when providers are more likely to be able to attend. Beyond providing a pathway for providers to grow as professionals and achieve certifications that move their facilities into higher-quality ratings and higher compensation levels, ESF likewise offers providers ownership over their own educational progression, through a peer mentoring program that pairs experienced providers with new participants and offers courses taught by providers themselves. Finally, ESF cultivates a space of sharing, conviviality, and mutual support—a crucial function for a workforce that experiences isolation from peers, where providers work individually and gather only infrequently.

Training funds have long been an established norm among unionized workers in other professions, from healthcare to the building trades. For employers, training funds guarantee an adequate supply of highly trained professionals with a demonstrated commitment to the work and the workplace. For workers, training funds offer not only a path to greater stability and greater benefits but also a chance to participate in a collective endeavor of self-improvement. By adopting this model and reinventing it to suit the unique home- based child care workforce, members of SEIU 1199NE are taking ownership of their businesses as care workers, and changing their own lives in the process.

Creating Our Own Solutions in the Face Of a Broken Child Care System

by Ellen Vera

The child care system in the United States is broken. On average, families are paying the unsustainable amount of over 10 percent of their monthly income; child care workers are some of the lowest- paid workers in the country, making an average of $13.31 per hour; and the number of child care businesses have decreased by 10 percent (or sixteen thousand facilities) since the start of the pandemic, because market conditions are so challenging. This field is in dire need of a complete overhaul and significant investment from our federal government.

The United States is one of the few industrialized countries that does not have a strong state-sponsored child care system. The monthly Child Tax Credits that the federal government issued during the pandemic were an important and impactful start, bringing 3.7 million children out of poverty. But unfortunately, due to political stalemate in Washington, even this relief has disappeared.

It is in this vacuum of not having a large, systemic, government- driven solution that families, child care workers, and business owners are coming together to create better child care solutions for their communities.

In Cincinnati, Co-op Cincy has been researching and working to create teacher- and parent-owned child care cooperatives since 2017. We started by digging into the economics of our local child care system, which had recently received a substantial amount of public funding through passing a local ballot initiative: Cincinnati Preschool Promise. The initiative articulated options for how our city could fulfill a commitment that was made during the campaign to raise the minimum wage from an average of between $10 and $11 per hour to $15 per hour, as spelled out in the report Strategies Towards Wage Equity in Early Childhood (Cincinnati Union Co-op Initiative, September 17, 2018). These options included the possibility of creating a shared services cooperative to help small child care businesses achieve economies of scale.

In 2017, Co-op Cincy also began supporting an alternative co-op child care model: parents coming together to lower the cost of care while paying a living wage, through a small nanny-share cooperative called CareShare Cooperative. Co-op Cincy is also part of a national cohort of co-op developers who are working to launch and support child care co-ops, including Wellspring Cooperative, in Springfield, Massachusetts; Cooperation Jackson, in Mississippi; and Cooperación Santa Ana, in California.

Most recently, Co-op Cincy has been helping existing child care centers to preserve their legacy—and keep their businesses in the hands of the people who helped build them—by selling them to their teachers through our Business Legacy Fund program. In January 2022, the owner of the small, nature-based Montessori child care center, Shine Nurture Center, sold the center to her workers, saying that she wanted to give the employees an opportunity to make the business their own. “It’s just such a great group,” she notes on Shine’s website. “I really wanted to take myself out of it, let them take Shine in the direction they see fit. I honestly think it will get better and better.” She continues, “The responsibility of a business like that on one person’s shoulders is a lot. When you can spread it over 5 shoulders, there’s more opportunity for growth.” And Co-op Cincy is currently working with a second child care center in the Greater Cincinnati area, one that has been an anchor in the community for over four decades and that is preparing to transition to worker ownership within the next few years.

Broadening ownership in our community through these types of transitions is such an important strategy for opening the door to wealth building for the families of these workers, in a way that otherwise would not have been possible; and for the community, these successions are anchoring important child care centers in the community for the long term.

The inadequacy of our current child care system is a universal problem across our country—and until our government decides to create a universal solution, the only choice our communities are left with is to come together to form our own solutions. Creating the best models we can—to make care more accessible to families, make wages and working conditions better for workers, and create viable long-term businesses in our communities and co-ops—is an important step along the way.

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

In the social change field, some phrases are repeated so often that we no longer ask what they require of us. But words matter. I have pages and pages of notes with reflections on the work of folks like Dr. Tiffany Manuel, Phil Agnew, and Rashad Robinson, who write about the critical role that narrative plays in building power and pursuing liberation. But living and working in ways aligned with one’s values and beliefs is more difficult than taking notes.

Recently, my colleague, Melissa DeShields, wrote an article in NPQ about the “crisis of conscience” she has had while leading a capacity building intermediary, Frontline Solutions. Foundations engage Frontline to work with their grantees in a variety of ways. However, the most common scenario is some configuration of the following:

A foundation hires or supports Frontline to assess the skills and competencies of the foundation’s nonprofit grantees via an “objective” third party tool, which the foundation assigns or Frontline chooses. Then, Frontline shares its findings with either the nonprofit or with the nonprofit and funder. After the assessment and reporting, Frontline facilitates skill-building in areas identified or confirmed as priorities by the assessment. 

In her article, Melissa argued that capacity building processes are often implemented in ways that lack reciprocity and reinforce harmful power dynamics. I want to add my own confession. The phrase, “capacity building,” has always bothered me. It focuses on deficits rather than assets. If words matter, then why do we use a term—and operate within a framework—that might be harmful?

Guided by this question and those raised in Melissa’s article, I’ve been asking our staff, clients, and partners the following questions:

• What does capacity building really mean to community-centered nonprofits and organizations?
• Does capacity building truly contribute to helping Black and Brown folks and institutions get free?

Based on these conversations, here are four reasons I believe that the social sector should retire the capacity building framework:

1. Capacity building overvalues the perspectives and acumen of the capacity “builder.” One often unspoken assumption embedded in capacity building is that the funder knows best. And the funder imbues power in consultants or intermediaries like Frontline Solutions, often at the expense of the supposedly benefiting community-based organizations.

Over the last 17 years in the field working with community groups, it has become increasingly clear to me that effective and sustainable institutions are not built by identifying organizational deficits that racism and patriarchy have contributed to creating. Rather, powerful, resilient, and liberatory organizations are built by complementing the genius, expertise, and Indigenous wisdom that many BIPOC-led and centered organizations possess.

Think about the thousands of Black and Brown students whose educational attainment was thwarted or significantly impacted due to teachers’ implicit (or explicit) bias and  school systems’ assessment of the ability of Black and Brown youth to learn and thrive. Similarly, positioning consultants like us and ostensibly objective third-party survey creators as authorities on the value and capacity of Black and Brown nonprofits is an irresponsible and structurally inequitable allocation of power and influence.

We often hear from funders and third-party survey creators that community-based nonprofits “don’t know what they don’t know.” But they do know what they do know. What if we started there?

What if our work was asset based? What if rather than building, we focused on dreaming. In that case, our questions, surveys, and tools would center organizations’ strengths and visions and ask what additional supports are needed to realize those visions. What if power and agency were ceded to Black and Brown nonprofits, instead of to consultants and intermediaries? We must urgently consider these questions.

2. Capacity building expects transactions to produce transformational results. Transactional work is not without value. Consider nonprofits who help people raise their credit scores. The credit rating system is racist; US financial systems were built to exclude Black and Brown folks, and they perpetuate lower credit ratings for people of color in a multitude of ways.

The credit counseling and repair industry lays out steps that lead to improved credit: Pay your bills on time. Keep your balances low. Strengthen your credit history by not closing old accounts. Refrain from taking on new credit. Over time, such steps lead to predictable increases in one’s credit score. And increasing that score can help a family purchase a home, transforming that family’s life chances.

In the capacity building field, funders often believe that supporting transactions designed to build a community-based nonprofit’s capacity will likewise produce such transformational results. They think of capacity building as the organizational equivalent of raising a peron’s credit scores.

But organizational capacity is not like a credit score. A board development training plus a communications audit does not equal sustainability in seven months. A technology plan combined with an organizational culture audit does not equal organizational resilience in a year. Why? Because on their own, competency building and skill development do not enable Black and Brown leaders and organizations to overcome the structural inequities that make it difficult for them to thrive.

Of course, trainings and workshops have value. Sometimes they can even contribute to the ability of community-based organizations to produce long-term, liberatory results. But the current configuration of capacity building is inadequate. What if capacity building efforts were more honest about structural inequities? What if they were structured around how to grow collective power and dismantle barriers? What if nonprofit organizations could ask how funders and intermediaries should change to be better partners?

3. Capacity is the wrong word. In 1991, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) defined capacity building as “the creation of an enabling environment with appropriate policy and legal frameworks, institutional development, including community participation (of women in particular), human resources development and strengthening of managerial systems.” The term was subsequently popularized by the international development sector, and over the last 30 years, it has been embraced in the US social sector.

All of this to say that the term capacity building is jargon. Its origins are as removed from local communities as its applications are often confounding to them. We’ve found that Black and Brown nonprofits are unfamiliar with the term at best and deeply suspicious of it at worst. In an informal and anonymous survey, I asked folks at 11 Black-led community-based nonprofits that are current or former Frontline clients, “What do you think of when you hear the word capacity building?”

Their responses were rich and varied, but two stood out. The first: “Capacity building is the consolation prize money that foundations offer when they are willing to pay for us to get advice, but they aren’t willing to resource us to help our people get free.” The second quote resonated with most of the folks we interviewed: “When I think of capacity building, the first thing I think is that capacity is the wrong word.”

Capacity is a tepid word. Once an organization’s capacity is built, what does it become? Capable? Sufficient? Competent? Capacity building is a process without a tangible aspiration. It is an investment with an unambitious return.

Capacity is the wrong word. More importantly, it does not resonate with the very nonprofits who are supposedly its beneficiaries. And so, count me among those who join the choir of Black and Brown nonprofit leaders who recommend that the term be retired.

4. Capacity building tends to perpetuate white-dominant norms of effectiveness. Perhaps the strongest case for planning a retirement party for the term capacity building is that the term can further entrench definitions of effective nonprofit organizations that privilege and affirm whiteness. Indeed, largely white-led foundations have long claimed for themselves the role of defining what it means to be an effective organization. The nonprofits they fund are then “supported” or “invested in” to meet a goal or standard that these same nonprofits don’t necessarily buy into. Too often, they’re never asked what they think.

I’d like to propose a different path: The Black Equity Collective (BEC) is an ecosystem of funders and communities who are partnering to strengthen the long-term sustainability of Black-led and Black empowering organizations in Southern California. The collective was born out of the Black Equity Initiative, an effort that began in 2017.

Four Black equity principles for philanthropy have emerged out of this work: 1) truth, 2) strategic disruption, 3) strength, and 4) love. BEC has organized a subcommittee of its ecosystem to co-lead a nine-month process to develop a set of metrics with which to measure the organizational effectiveness for each of these four principles. For example, BEC defines its principle of love as “honoring the inextricability of our shared humanity.” Thus, the BEC subcommittee’s process seeks to identify a set of measures that are indicative of Black nonprofits’ effective embodiment of the principle of love.

BEC’s process of reimagining how to measure the effectiveness of Black nonprofits is necessary because philanthropy’s current indices of what it means to be an effective Black nonprofit center whiteness. The collective’s work illustrates the labor required to go back to the drawing board. BEC founder Kaci Patterson says her group has already retired the term capacity building and replaced it with organizational resiliency. Such work is groundbreaking and should inform funders and intermediaries who work with BIPOC-led and rooted nonprofit organizations.

We need to have many more conversations about where the philanthropic field has gone wrong in the past, what has been learned, and how, in our intermediary and consultant work, to better center principles like the ones laid out by BEC. Words matter. That’s why it’s time to retire the term, capacity building. If we follow the lead of BIPOC nonprofits and communities, we can come up with something better.

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

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

Editors’ note: This article is from the Summer 2022 issue of the Nonprofit Quarterly, “Owning Our Economy, Owning Our Future.”

What follows is primarily the intellectual work of Kamuela Enos, and presents in the first-person voice (his), with assistance from Miwa Tamanaha in producing this work in written form. Kamuela Enos and Miwa Tamanaha are spouses to each other, creative thought partners professionally, and coparents to their children in every space.

This article explores kinship from a Native Hawaiian perspective as a binding construct of “ownership.” Kinship with place—and the integrity of the ecologies, wisdom, and people our places hold—stands as a central tenet of ownership often lost in our contemporary nomenclature born of capitalism.

An important underlying technology Hawai’i has to offer its contemporary self is kinship to land. Kinship is our unbroken connection to our “operating system,” so to speak—the OS of our lands, our complex and interdependent relationship with the ecological systems that allow for life, our ancestral sciences (in service of living in and creating abundance). This connection persists and thrives despite almost two hundred and fifty years of brutal assault, including catastrophic population loss from introduced diseases, racist policies, political overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy, and deliberate and continuing dispossession of land. It is the foundation for a just, abundant economy in Hawai’i.

Here I share my father’s kinship story, my kinship story, and some of the lessons I have gleaned from living them. This story is a Hawaiian story, but it is repeated across our planet. Vested in kinship to land, the contemporary work of Indigenous communities is iterating prototypes and frameworks for a resilient, just economy.

My Father’s Story, My Story

In the 1970s and 1980s, my father was part of a broad movement of Hawaiians and non-Hawaiian allies who organized in protest of Native Hawaiian land dispossession perpetrated by the U.S. government and U.S. corporations in Hawai’i. In particular, my father sought the return of lands to lo’i kalo.

Lo’i kalo is the ancient Hawaiian practice of cultivating the staple crop of kalo (taro) via wetland terraces. Lo’i kalo was a core engine of precontact Hawai’i’s economy. Lo’i systems are bounded by a waterway that starts at the headwater at the top of a valley, passes through terraced farms, and exits into an estuary. The nutrients that feed these parcels also nourish nearshore and pelagic (open sea) fisheries. From nearshore to mountaintop, this system is contained in the land unit of the ‘ahupua’a (basic self-sustaining unit)—where all of the complex carbs and lean proteins, building material and medicines, and implements for the creation of weapons can be developed in a hyperlocalized, highly skilled economy.¹ Absent the forces of industrialization and colonization, Native Hawaiians were self-sufficient, not only on our islands but also in our valleys.

My father’s and his peers’ efforts to reclaim lo’i kalo and bring it back to life was driven by the needs of the Native Hawaiian community of their time. Generations of displacement of Native Hawaiian people and families by colonizing forces had relegated many to conditions of dire poverty. I was raised in the public education system in a community that was predominantly Native Hawaiian, at a time when the dominant narrative told us our ancestors were savages and that our occupation by colonizers could (if we acted correctly) afford us the comforts of modernity for which we should be grateful. The idea of restoring lo’i kalo in this context seemed absurd to many, but my father held to a conviction that reclaiming the brilliant innovations of our ancestors is central to restoring well-being for all people for whom Hawai’i is home.

On the land my father reclaimed and stewards today, Ka’ala Farm, I walked with my ancestors.² I learned to be attuned to how water flows, how nutrients move along those pathways, and how cleverly the waterways had been designed and constructed.

In the dominant economic model of the time, the role of the people of our community was labor. If you were lucky, skilled labor. Even ownership of businesses by local community members often required their participation in the degradation of the landscape and practices. This was the pathway provided for economic development—we were to understand it was the only way.

We continue to restore the broad systems our ancestors deployed at scale and replicated across the archipelago—systems that allow for the production of goods and services, are greeted by an eager market, and are not extractive/ do not externalize the cost of production onto people and landscape.

My father and his peers came to question why the lo’i kalo—the core engine of an economic system that served the people of Hawai’i for centuries—could not be a viable means of regional economic development that centers people, place, and ecology. They asserted that it could. The lo’i kalo of Ka’ala Farm and like spaces across the Hawaiian archipelago have taught and inspired thousands of young people. Today, more people on more lands are restoring the flow of water and growing food for their communities than has been seen in well over a century. The economic development to which my father and his peers demanded access is an ever-growing reality.

I continue to live this story; it forms the foundation of the ideas I share in the following section. The steps I outline are not a checklist or recipe. These steps articulate practical lessons and a path made by walking, learning from, and living into my father’s story today toward a future we all cocreate.

An Indigenous Vision of Economics

Step One: We Restate Our Value

Where some saw a savage past, my father saw regional economic development. Today, Hawaiian knowledge, practices, and brilliance are still often relegated to the past—albeit, perhaps, romantically—by boxing them up as “Hawaiian culture.” We continue to resist the box. We have been bequeathed ancestral sciences and technologies of integrated systems management that we continue to innovate. We continue to restore the broad systems our ancestors deployed at scale and replicated across the archipelago—systems that allow for the production of goods and services, are greeted by an eager market, and are not extractive/do not externalize the cost of production onto people and landscape.

Step Two: We Uphold Standards—The Triple Piko Analysis

In bringing forward ancestral sciences and integrated systems management to our contemporary context, we must continue to support standards with rigor (recent history is rife with examples of appropriation of Indigenous ideas, innovations, sciences, and technologies). The Triple Piko Analysis is a framework with

built-in principles of practice that protect it from cultural appropriation and subsequent mishandling.

Revered Hawaiian Elder Uncle Kekuni Blaidell taught me the term piko, which means “portal.” He noted that the ancestors of Hawai’i had identified in the physical body three portals connected to the past, the present, and the future: the fontanelle (Piko O), the navel (Piko I), and the genitals (Piko A). They define kinship to past people, present people, and future people, and represent a unified transect in which all decisions are to be vetted: continuity of the work of your ancestors; application/practice and relevance to those alive with you now; and generative abundance provided for future generations.³

Piko O: Alignment with ancestral prerogatives. This first layer of analysis asks you to identify the Indigenous practice(s) you intend to bring to a contemporary space. To protect from co-option/appropriation, this layer of analysis requires you to be specific. Piko O requires you to have researched that practice, to have immersed yourself in that practice, and to share the lineage of your teachers. Ownership, responsibility, and genealogy of knowledge/practice must be put front and center. Figure 1 (below) provides in schematic form an analysis of how Native Hawaiian society operated prior to the period of European colonization.
Piko I: Empowering contemporary generations. The second layer of analysis asks you to articulate how your practice will provide agency to Indigenous communities. How does it affirm, restore, and grow that practice toward the creation of meaningful economic development, educational opportunity, and political support that accrue power to Indigenous people and our ownership of and kinship to our resources, ideas, and stories of our homelands? This work also requires mapping the existing challenges as they are outlined in Figure 2 (next page).

There is a continued need to build strong containers for ancestral sciences and integrated systems management in a contemporary context.

Piko A: Providing a foundation for future abundance. The final layer of analysis asks you to demonstrate how your practice will provide for and protect the agency of future generations to live in and create abundance. At this layer the aperture is widened to encompass not just a specific community, but all peoples. How might the global systems of which we are part move toward alignment with our proven ancestral models for social/ ecological/economic resilience? Figure 3 (next page) provides an illustration of our vision.

Step Three: The Just Container

There is a continued need to build strong containers for ancestral sciences and integrated systems management in a contemporary context. We must attend to the power structure of the organizations that carry these efforts, and how these efforts receive investment that protects and perpetuates community and practitioner agency, including agency to define our own success.

For over ten years, I worked at a social enterprise in my community, called MA’O Organic Farms.4 Founded by partners Gary and Kukui Maunakea-Forth, MA’O recruits young adults from Wai’anae, a predominantly Native Hawaiian community, to run the daily operations of the farm enterprise in exchange for a full tuition waiver to attend our regional community college. MA’O has grown to become the largest commercial organic farm on the island of O’ahu. At MA’O, our understanding of our success is rooted in the celebration of Makahiki.5 Prior to the U.S. occupation of Hawai’i, chiefs would gather the people in their domain during Makahiki time, and the community would show their bounty—what they had been able to produce—and demonstrate their fitness by performing feats of physical and intellectual strength. MA’O identified and adopted two contemporary Makahiki metrics to help measure the enterprise’s effectiveness: fitness of people as measured by education level, and abundance of land as measured by sales of organic produce. The focus on metrics of meaning has allowed MA’O access to different tables of

decision-making when it comes to the well-being of regional youth and articulating what is the best practice for a rural community.

Step Four: Live Our Agency

I don’t discount the effects of the code-switching that is inherent in walking this path—the complexities and complications and, yes, the compromises. We are called to show up each day whole in our humanity, in a broken world. In all of this, we make the choice to live our agency.

I am convinced now more than ever that our kinship— to land and to each other—shapes our economic futures.

Ka’ala Farm endures, and continues to pave the way for community economic development in Wai’anae and beyond. At MA’O, hundreds of students have received associate’s degrees, affirmed their kinship, and honed their land stewardship practices. In the last few years, MA’O’s farms have secured blended capital to scale from 24 acres of land to 281 acres. In the midst of a global pandemic that has shaken global supply chains, MA’O revenues have soared.

Today, I head the Office of Indigenous Innovation at the University of Hawai’i, where I work to advance and raise resources for our ancestral sciences and integrated systems management—bringing forward the solutions they hold in a contemporary context. I am convinced now more than ever that our kinship—to land and to each other—shapes our economic futures.

Among our learnings to date are the following:

• Native Hawaiian practices are sciences and technologies that sit at the cornerstone of a resilient economy for Hawai’i, and they create the conditions for resilience for Hawai’i (even as defined by other—external— cultures).
• These sciences and technologies thrive today—evidence of their
• Indigenous communities are now iterating prototypes and frameworks that are attracting the attention of policy-makers, philanthropists, and business leaders globally. Ally support (dollars, political backing, and effective policies and mental models) is needed (and requested) for growth.
• Kinship is a core tenet of an economy that is disruptive, generative, and

We see the benefit of this work every day. Ancestral sciences and integrated systems of management are improving soil quality for food production, creating new techniques for native seaweed aquaculture, and innovating climate-adaptation strategies—to name just a few innovations. The outcomes are tangible. The time is now.

***

The practice of ancestral sciences and integrated systems management is not romantic, does not live in the past tense, and is not easy. It is born of commitment and rigor—physical, intellectual, and spiritual. Kinship— like all relationships—requires work: of Indigenous peoples, of immigrants, of settlers, and of the descendants of colonizers. All of us. Zero-sum schemes, scarcity-minded policies, and extractive practices have led us to our current state. Now we have the opportunity to grow a resilient economic future seated in our ancestral sciences and integrated systems management—in the wisdom of our places.

Hawai’i has always been and continues to exist today as a multiethnic polity. In 1883, the sovereign Hawaiian government was overthrown by American plantation owners and business leaders, backed by the U.S. military. In 1993, the United States issued a law, informally known as the Apology Resolution, that acknowledges its role in the illegal overthrow.⁶ Still, today, Hawaiian lands are occupied by the United States and its military. Land claims remain unsettled. Native Hawaiians and non-Hawaiian citizens of Hawai’i continue to work to shape a just, resilient future for Hawai’i.

The ideas that we share here have been shared with us. First and foremost we must recognize the ancestors of Hawai’i in deified and human form that developed these systems and intentionally designed them to be bequeathable. We also must recognize Kamuela’s father, Eric Enos, and the people he brought to us to be in relationship with, including Puanani Burgess, Uncle Walter Paulo, Uncle Eddie Ka’anana, and Bob Agres. We also recognize Lilikalaˉ Kame’eleihiwa and Jon Osiorio, professors at the Hawai’inuiaˉkea School of Hawaiian Knowledge at the University of Hawai’i, Dolores Foley and Luciano Minerbi, professors in the department of Regional and Urban Planning, University of Hawai’i, and Karen Umemoto, a professor in the department of Urban Planning and Asian American Studies at UCLA. We recognize Kukui and Gary Maunakea-Forth and all the people of MA’O Organic Farms, the many people of, and the lands of, Ka’ala Farm, the Purple Mai’a Foundation, Hawai’i Investment Ready, our ‘ohana KUA, ‘Ewa Limu Project (Uncle Henry Chang-Wo, Wally Ito, and ‘ohana Fuji), Kuˉha’o Zane, Huihui and Luka Mossman-Kanahele, Haˉlau ‘Oˉhi’a and ‘ohana, Aunty Lynette Paglinawan, Dr. Manu Meyer, Kumu Miki’ala Lidstone, and our whole community of peers. Finally, we recognize the Kanaka’ole family—whose matriarch, Edith Kanaka’ole, shared the legacy that she held with all of Hawai’i, and who fundamentally and unabashedly exhibits ancestral practices of sciences and technologies that are rooted in profound spiritual relationship to the living landscape that preceded us, molds us, and continues to guide us in the restoration of abundance.

Notes

1. For more on lo’i kalo, see “Ahupua’a: An Introduction: Home,” Library & Learning and Resources, Kapi’olani Community College, accessed May 18, 2022, library.kapiolani.hawaii.edu/ahupuaa; and “Ahupua’a,” Kumukahi, accessed May 18, 2022, www.kumukahi.org/units/ka_honua/onaepuni/ahupuaa.
2. “Welina Mai!,” Ka’ala Farm, accessed April 28, 2022, kaalafarm.org/.
3. It should be noted that there are many variations on the nomenclature, and the Piko O, Piko I, and Piko A framework was taught to me by my kumu (teachers).
4. “Growing Food, Growing Leaders,” MA’O Organic Farms, accessed April 29, 2022, maoorganicfarms.org/.
5. “Makahiki,” Ancient Hawai’i, Hawai’i History, accessed April 30, 2022, hawaiihistory.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=ig.page&PageID=534.
6. “1993: President Clinton apologizes for 1893 overthrow of Hawaiian monarchy,” Native Voices, accessed April 29, 2022, nih.gov/nativevoices/timeline/578.html.

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