Tag Archives: nonprofit quarterly

 

Click here to download accompanying slidesMillions of people in the United States work in jobs that pay them less than the minimum wage. Subminimum wage workers provide many of the services which make our economy run— farming food, delivering goods, and caring for children and the elderly. As we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic, these jobs are called “essential,” but not compensated as such, keeping workers in a state of working poverty. Struggles for wage justice attempt to fight this by demanding sick leave, better pay, and other protections to shield workers from rising inequality. To do so, they face the goliath of corporate power, which is bolstered by a political apparatus designed to privilege profits over people.

This webinar features a conversation between three leaders from nonprofits dedicated to worker advocacy, power building, and fair wages. Our panelists are:

Saru Jayaraman, President of One Fair Wage

Chirag Mehta, Director of Policy and Ideas at Community Change

Erica Smiley, Executive Director of Jobs with Justice

This webinar explores:

• What are the core stakes in the fight for fair wages?
• What are the challenges that campaigns for wage justice face?
• How is wage justice related to other struggles for racial and gender justice?
• How do we build power to transform the subminimum wage economy?
• How do subminimum wages and anti-worker policy affect democracy?
• What kind of legislative policies— antitrust laws or universal basic income, for example— would best support wage justice?
• What can practitioners and organizers learn from current wage justice struggles?

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

The following is a transcript of the video above, from our webinar on “How to Design Democratic Management.” View the full webinar here.

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Yarissa Soriano: At the Democracy at Work Institute (DAWI), we believe that democratic managers need to know and do all the things that any conventional business manager needs to do to ensure that the business is doing well, that the business is successful, and that it moves people and resources towards their goals. What sets a democratic manager apart and the core principles that really makes them different than your traditional management is commitment. Commitment to sharing information transparently, sharing power regularly, and teaching others to do what they need to do in order to really participate fully in the operations and the governance of the business. Democratic managers are developing workers’ capacity through what I like to call “human-centered supervision,” looking at our workers as a whole.

When Peggy Powell and Rick Surpin founded Cooperative Home Care Associates in 1985, they were always intentional about empowering the workers. When managers share power and teach others—I think that’s so key—when they share power, teach others, and invite them to participate in operations and governance, it trickles down to the work, and how they do their jobs. For example, at CHCA, the direct care workers, they were confident in their skill set. They knew that the information and experiences that they had were valuable and important, and they were comfortable voicing that—and that is unique. For those of you who are not in the healthcare industry, direct care workers oftentimes are not seen in most agencies, and they’re not heard. If you are a caregiver, you know that being a direct care worker is hard work, physically and emotionally. They’re going into a stranger’s home, oftentimes bathing, cleaning, and feeding the clients and managing the complexities of family dynamics, mental health, among many other things. They are essential workers, and yet, unfortunately, not seen. Even during the pandemic, we rarely heard about them. Giving them a voice and opportunities to share their knowledge, having managers equipped to build on what they already have, and to improve not only their jobs but the quality of the care that they provide, is critical. That’s one of the key reasons why a business like CHCA has been able to sustain a democratic workplace for the past 37 years.

 

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

 

The following is a transcript of the video above, from our webinar on “How to Design Democratic Management.” View the full webinar here.

Anj Talley: In our bylaws [at Mandela Grocery Cooperative], we have one vote that is required to be unanimous, and that is the vote to hire, Whether or not we’re hiring a new member into the group needs to be a unanimous decision. Everything else is by consensus, which to us is 75 percent, or three out of four. Generally, the way we approach votes is that everyone be in agreement. We’re having a full discussion, where you’re fleshing out every part, every side as much as possible of this decision that needs to be made, and the goal is for everyone to be in agreement. So, very rarely is there major conflict happening in those conversations, because it’s really more of a discovery type of conversation: are we thinking about all sides of this? If there are questions, sometimes we do have to pause it and bring it back the next month at the next meeting, where the expectation is that there’s research that was done, there are answers to the questions that you’re coming with.

When we take a vote, you kind of have a sense, before we even vote, of how this is going to go, because of the types of questions that everyone had the opportunity to ask. But it is important…when we are having a consensus or a vote conversation, that we make space for every single voice to be heard. Even if this is someone who maybe usually is more quiet or less vocal, the expectation is still that you say something, you ask something, because that is how we define participating. Everyone has to participate in these decision-making conversations. So, say something! Then when it comes time for us to vote, everybody either gives a thumbs up or thumbs down, and we do [a super] majority [of] 75 percent.

 

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

 

 

The following is a transcript of the video above, from our webinar on “How to Design Democratic Management.” View the full webinar here.

Nicole Koch: This is really about sharing power and money. In order to share that power, the information has to be there, so that people know how to get involved and what the levers are that make change. For us [at Technicians for Sustainability], that access to information is essential. We talk a lot about rights and responsibilities…if people have a responsibility to make informed decisions, they need that good info— and they have that corresponding right to adequate information to support it.

So, how we do that? We do it in a few ways. We do use open book management; it’s really our own flavor, our own in-house style of that. We have a version for all employees that happens on a weekly basis through our email newsletter. We have some critical numbers we look at each week and keep an eye on, and those are meant to be a quick check-in for people, no matter where they are in the company or what their role is. Whether they started Monday, like one of [our] new staff members, or if they’ve been with us for 16 years, they can get a sense of where the company is and how they’re doing each week. Then we do a deeper dive version for owners once a month, which is looking at the financials. There’s a lot of education that happens in that. For some folks, even a couple of years into their ownership process, people are still learning and wrapping their heads around all the different aspects of our very complicated profit and loss balance sheet. We also work to build an understanding of strategic decisions as they’re made. If they’re made at the ownership level, those go out as cascading messages to all employees so that they can inquire about it, so they can learn about it, so they can sort of see behind the curtain as to how decisions are getting made, what the rationale is for decisions. [We do this] so that we can bring everyone along in that process of sort of learning the business, of doing our business.

 

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

We want to support and amplify our communities, so how do you find the balance as a global market brand and maintain integrity as a Native person?         

Bethany Yellowtail, Los Angeles Times, November 29, 2018

As the quote from Yellowtail—a Northern Cheyenne fashion designer—attests, Indigenous artists routinely face tensions between the stories they want to tell on the one hand and the demands of a white-dominated US arts marketplace on the other. A new study by the First People’s Fund, which has supported Native artists for over 25 years, and NORC (formerly the National Opinion Research Center) at the University of Chicago, and funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, highlights these Native American stories and analyzes such tensions. Titled Brightening the Spotlight: The Practices and Needs of Native American, Native Hawaiian, and Alaskan Native Creators in the Performing Arts, the 100-page report features 39 qualitative interviews of Indigenous storytellers.

The report’s authors focused on the performing arts because “comparatively little research has focused on the practices and impacts of Native creators who engage in performance-based forms of expression” (11). Most interviewees were from the fields of dance, music, or theater. The authors organized the report around three sets of questions:

• What performance-based practices do Native American, Native Hawaiian, and Alaska Native creators engage in?
• Why and how do Native creators engage in their practices?
• What resources and systemic changes do Native creators identify as high-priority needs? (22)

 

Art as Telling Intergenerational Stories

Some of the tensions that Indigenous artists face in the white-dominated American art world are linguistic ones. As the report’s authors point out, many Indigenous artists prefer to call themselves storytellers rather than artists. For instance, Yellowtail, the fashion designer cited above, describes herself as a “storyteller in fashion.” Even the phrase “artist” or “performing artist” is seen by many Native creators as antithetical to Indigenous values, which identify creative practices or art, not as a separate sphere of activity, but rather as inseparable from beauty, form, spirit, culture, and life itself. Of the 39 Indigenous creators interviewed for the study, only about a third were comfortable with using the term “artist” to describe themselves.

That said, the economics of the art world requires the other two thirds to also describe themselves as “artists” in some contexts. Within their own Indigenous communities, these creators might describe their work as storytelling or education—externally, they call themselves musicians, dancers, or artists, because their compensation depends on doing so.

As one person interviewed for the report noted, “’I’ve had to tease and pull out certain parts of myself and leave others behind to fit into a type of box, a binary, for getting resources for a particular kind of project.” Framing the work as storytelling, noted one respondent, helps to disrupt “settler modes of containment and logics of assimilation” and creates “space for us to be ourselves.”

Another tension people interviewed for the study identified was pressure to define their work as either “traditional” or “contemporary.” Not surprisingly, more than half of those interviewed described their work as a blend of both. Back in 2018, Gerald Clarke Jr., a Coahuila artist and professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, Riverside, noted the contradiction to the Los Angeles Times: “The mainstream wants to commodify the object and have it as part of the overall art market, but they don’t really want to know what we think. Who decides what’s authentic? Is it the academic, the art historian, or is it the community?”

In the report, the authors noted that several interviewees saw their work as building on both traditional and contemporary influences. The authors add that several respondents described their work as drawing on a “lifetime of wisdom and knowledge—and not just one lifetime, but many lifetimes, because it’s intergenerational.”

 

Indigenous Creators’ Goals

In the second section of the report, the authors discuss the motivations of the Indigenous creators they interviewed, which were wide-ranging. In terms of individual motives, a third of the interviewees told the authors that their creative work was integral to their mental health and well-being. Many interviewees described their work as part of their healing or therapy. One person told the authors, ““[t]heater is my number one way of expressing and being in the world” (40).

Many respondents mentioned that their creative work was helpful in negotiating their own identity among both Indigenous and non-Indigenous worlds. As one respondent explained, “[a] lot of my work is concerned with kind of this idea of existing in between. I’m Native, I’m also a German American, I’m also gay, I’m also like gender queer, so I feel like I failed to fit into a lot of boxes successfully. And so a lot of my work is about that and creating…experiences that sort of undo our preconceived notions of the world, and how we’re told it exists” (41).

Another important motivation was economic. As the authors point out, being able to support one’s family is an important part of self-care. Several interview respondents told the report’s authors that ““supporting a family” was a “main goal” of their work (40).

In terms of community motivations, again there were a mixed set of concerns. Many of those interviewed emphasized the importance of serving their own Indigenous communities. One person explained, “I try to remind people that 1978 was the year that we actually regained the right to practice our culture.” The person added that this created a sense of duty to serve the “generation who was taken away from their families” and for whom “a lot of the culture was lost” (42).  Many noted that the stories they share through creative works serve as “good medicine.”

As Edgar Villanueva (Lumbee) has detailed, “In Native traditions, however, medicine is a way of achieving balance.…In the Indigenous worldview, many kinds of things can be medicine…for something or someone to serve as medicine, it only needs to be filled with or granted a kind of mystical or spiritual power.” In the report, one respondent explains that stories can “uplift our minds, uplift our spirits, not just on a personal level, but on a communal, on a community level.…the stories [are] the medicine” (44).

About a fifth of respondents named career advancement of fellow Indigenous creators as a major motivator. Collaboration through paid work is perhaps the most direct means to achieve this end. The report cites many examples. A musician notes that “for every [music] video we’ve ever done, we have a Native director, or Native producers, or the on-set people are Native people.” A playwright emphasized prioritizing the employment of Native actors. During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, an elder creator put together an online show featuring Native storytellers “to highlight more artists and to uplift more artists” (48). One producer created a music studio on their home reservation that is free and open for other Native musicians to use. Several of the respondents work with Native youth, often sharing their practice in schools—generating modest income for themselves while training the next generation.

Although much of the discussion of community focuses on Indigenous communities, roughly half of the people interviewed also “described engaging in performance-based practices meant to be shared with ‘non-Native,’ ‘mixed,’ or ‘global’ audiences” (52). In addition to the economic benefits of such interactions, the people interviewed saw in their engagements with non-Indigenous people opportunities to “challenge racism against and stereotypes of Native people, increasing Native representation in Western-dominant culture, and connecting people and imparting empathy on the most fundamental, human level” (52). As one dancer explained to the authors, when performing for non-Native audiences “our big goal is to tell our stories through dance, but also to show the beauty of our culture” (53).

 

Resource Needs

The final section of the report is directed primarily at the performing arts funder community. A few of its recommendations are as follows:

• Increase access to supports that can help Indigenous creators earn a living, such as professional grant writers and professional development courses in fields like marketing.
• Expand the kinds of training and support that are considered valuable, so that arts degrees from Ivy League colleges and the like are less critical and Indigenous cultural training receives greater consideration.
• Be more accepting of non-elite venues. One respondent noted that “the further you get from your [Native] community, the more rewarded you are for it” (70). Another interviewee commented that just because “you might not be selling out a stadium…doesn’t mean you’re not having an impact” (71).
• Offer Indigenous artists more creative license. As to what that might mean, the report highlights the case of an Indigenous theater producer who “was able to negotiate the hiring of Native individuals to fill a broad spectrum of roles on the production, including actors, visual artists, producers, and even caterers” (75). It was also noted that making provisions to keep some seats open so that Indigenous audience members can attend productions is important.
• Change the structure of funding. Six reforms in particular were recommended: 1) streamline grant applications (such as using universal forms across institutions); 2) make forms more culturally responsive (such as by allowing others to write about the creator’s contributions rather than insisting applicants do so); 3) incorporate Native communities into the grant evaluation process; 4) increase grantee autonomy in how funds are spent; 5) allow grants to support a fuller range of Native creators’ life needs (e.g., food, housing, healthcare, family care, and community-building); and 6) increase support for Indigenous community collaboration and community creative production spaces.

 

Building Indigenous Community Infrastructure

The need for infrastructure appears often in the report. One interviewee told the report’s authors that there are “so many artists from my era” who didn’t “succeed” creatively or continue to pursue their creative practices, “and it’s not because they didn’t try; it’s not because they didn’t do a good promo game; it’s because the community wasn’t built to [support their practice]. And so, ultimately, I want to see communities celebrate themselves a bit more, and I feel like the way to change that is through building…[community] art spaces” (87).

In fact, one quarter of interview respondents called for more supports for Native-led organizations doing community-based work. Many interviewees expressed their frustration that predominantly white institutions get funding to diversify, which may lead to two days of Native programming a year, even as many Native-led organizations “are doing 365 days of Native programming” yet receive far less support (86).

“There’s a level of invisibility there that needs combating,” one interviewee noted. A good first step for funders, this Indigenous creator suggested, would be to identify and work with existing Indigenous organizations to build out the infrastructure that could support creative voices throughout Indian Country.

 

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