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Increasingly, people in movement spaces are demanding to work in democratic workplaces. One model often overlooked—the worker-owned cooperative—offers the benefit of having had to grapple with questions of participation, management, and governance for decades. To explore these issues in depth, this webinar, produced by NPQ in partnership with the Democracy at Work Institute (DAWI), features three worker-owners in worker cooperatives, who discuss both the joys and the challenges of managing workplaces democratically.

Our panelists:

• Nicole Koch is a member-owner and cofounder of Technicians for Sustainability, a solar installation cooperative in Tucson, Arizona that converted to employee ownership in 2017 and has 23 employee-owners.
• Yarissa Soriano is training and education manager at the Democracy at Work Institute. Previously, at Paraprofessional Health Institute, she supported Cooperative Home Care Associates, the nation’s largest worker co-op.
• Anj Talley, is general manager of Mandela Food Co-op, a Black-owned worker grocery cooperative in the West Oakland neighborhood of Oakland, California that was founded in 2009 and has nine worker-owners.

This webinar explores:

• What are the benefits of democratic management? What are the challenges?
• What core principles define democratic management? How do worker co-ops balance worker ownership with empowering managers to manage?
• What design decisions need to be made to support a democratic workplace? How are course corrections made if the system runs into problems?
• How does democratic management affect supervision? Do supervisors need to be trained differently? In what ways?
• How does democratic management affect worker access to information? What systems are used to share information with workers?
• How does democratic management affect leadership development and careers ladders? How does it affect compensation levels?
•  How do you balance the tensions between the demands of the market with democratic management?
• What can others learn from worker co-ops’ democratic management experience?

Resources:

Mandela Grocery Co-op, Decision Making Chart, Oakland, CA: MGC, 2022.

Rebecca Bauen, “Democratic Management: Lessons from Worker Cooperatives,” NPQ, June 2, 2021.

Steven L. Dawson, “When the Employer is the Trainer: Lessons from Cooperative Home Care Associates,” The Pinkerton Papers, No. 5, June 2017.

Jennifer Kong, “Solar company powers up with employee-ownership program,” GreenBiz, September 17, 2018.

Nigel Roberts, “New Generation of Black-Led Co-ops Want to End Food Insecurity,” The Root, December 19, 2019.

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

Can universities advance, rather than impede, economic justice? And, if so, how? Those questions were at the heart of a plenary conversation held at this year’s annual Campus Compact conference. Participating in the panel conversation were Richard Guarasci, former president of Wagner College; Nyeema Watson, Vice President of Diversity, Inclusion, and Civic Engagement at Rutgers University-Camden; and Bobbie Laur, Campus Compact’s newly installed president.

The conversation took place amid a growing movement over the past decade marked by universities, which claim to be community-engaged “anchor institutions,” partnering with community groups to address economic inequality. Seven years ago, for example, Campus Compact—an organization of over 1,000 institutions of higher education nationwide that focuses on promoting civic engagement by universities—called on its member campuses to sign onto a “Civic Action” statement, in which signatories pledged to embrace their “responsibilities as place-based institutions, contributing to the health and strength of our communities—economically, socially, environmentally, educationally, and politically.” By early 2018, 464 university presidents had signed the statement.

These strategies have had some practical impacts. In recent years, a growing number of universities have sought to shift hiring practices to hire more residents of color and to change procurement practices to support BIPOC-owned businesses, although the latter can be especially difficult to implement. As Jen Faigel of the Boston-based nonprofit food business incubator Commonwealth Kitchen explained two years ago in NPQ, there is often a large gap between institutional statements in which colleges say they wish to buy more from local BIPOC-owned businesses, and such colleges’ willingness to make the business model changes that would be needed to make that shift happen (such as reducing the size of contracts or buying goods and services directly rather than through third parties).

And then there are vast inequities, at least within elite universities, in the core educational mission itself. Back in the fall of 2019, Andrew Delbanco, President of the Teagle Foundation, warned participants at a conference of anchor institution advocates of a serious dysfunction within higher education that the movement needed to address if it wanted to be credible. Citing public data, which showed that you were often more than 60 times as likely to be admitted to elite universities if your family was among the wealthiest one percent instead of in the bottom 60 percent, Delbanco observed, “The haves are getting more; the have-nots are getting less. Higher education is doing more to replicate inequality in our country than to resist it.” More recently, writing in NPQ, urban studies professor Davarian Baldwin of Trinity College observed that universities have turned many of the nation’s cities into de-facto campuses, with private nonprofit university power diminishing public voice, impeding democratic accountability, and reinforcing economic inequality. “The prosperity of this new economy is not being enjoyed by everyone,” he warned.

The COVID-19 Stress Test

The COVID-19 pandemic has proven to be a “stress test” for many universities that have adopted community engagement strategies. Not only did the pandemic strain many systems and programs, but by laying bare the nation’s vast racial and class inequities, it amplified public pressure for universities to be responsive to communities and act in the public interest. As one anonymous writer, who worked at a private nonprofit university, put it in a letter published by Inside Higher Ed early in the pandemic, “What will be remembered is whether our institution rose to the occasion or pulled back into itself, raising the drawbridge, pulling up the ladder and confirming once again that the town/gown divide never went away despite all the programs and classes and grand intentions.”

Two year later, as universities have returned to in-person instruction—even though the pandemic is not fully over—panelists at the Campus Compact conference sought to assess: Did institutions rise to the occasion or raise the drawbridge? Where does the movement stand now?

There are, as Laur put it, “glimmers of hope.” Luar noted that, “Everyone has examples of where their institution showed up.” One lesson learned that Laur emphasized was the value of “neighborhood level hyperlocal approaches,” which often involve establishing a center off campus in a local neighborhood. Laur cited Drexel in Philadelphia, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Nebraska, Omaha; and Seattle University as examples. Here at NPQ, we profiled a couple such examples ourselves, writing about the University of Chicago’s distribution of mini-grants to keep over 200 local businesses (often BIPOC-owned) afloat when federal support fell short, and the University of Pennsylvania-based Netter Center’s creation of virtual youth leadership development programs for K-12 students in Philadelphia.

Institutions with established hyperlocal initiatives in place, Laur said, “were uniquely prepared when COVID hit.” Why was this important? Laur said it meant “they were trusted messengers, particularly in communities of color… They were able to stay open when everyone else closed.” These centers addressed multiple issues, including food insecurity, broadband access, and housing. “A lot of institutions showed up on housing,” Laur noted. This included doing advocacy to support eviction moratoriums with “boots on the ground.” But, Laur conceded, “There are a lot of things that are paused.” And, she added, questions remain about how (or if) many community partnerships that did not survive the pandemic will be restarted.

Guarasci told the story of his own campus, Wagner College. Guarasci served as the university’s president from 2002 to 2019, an unusually long time to be in that position. He was nationally recognized for his work developing an initiative in the Port Richmond neighborhood of Staten Island. Guarasci explained that the neighborhood, located about two miles from campus, was home to many undocumented residents from Oaxaca, while 20 percent of residents were African American, and the rest white working-class. “They weren’t sending many students, if any, to Wagner College.”

Based on areas identified by community residents, the partnership, first established in 2009, focused on five areas: immigration and advocacy; health and wellness; educational opportunity; economic development; and arts and culture. But come the pandemic, a combination of factors—including Guarasci’s retirement, changes in leadership of community partner organizations, the retirement of principals at key partner K-12 schools, and the pandemic itself—resulted in the cessation of “a lot of the fieldwork in tutoring, mentoring, and civic engagement. All of that went haywire.” Now, people in Staten Island are trying to rebuild the partnerships, Gaurasci said, perhaps in a different form in which the university will likely play a less central role. There is a need, he added, to “rebuild the relationships that were stolen from us by the pandemic.”

Rutgers University-Camden did not face the same leadership shifts that Wagner did. Yet, even with sustained leadership support, its community partnership programs were challenged. Watson noted there was almost nothing that could be done in-person “for close to two years.” She added, “the staff had their own personal challenges.” And keeping students connected in homes that had sub-standard broadband was also “really, really hard.”

Watson, a longtime Camden resident who once attended the city’s public schools, called attention to the fact that, “especially for Black and Brown kids, they have lost years of education.” Then, there are the “lingering impacts of losing family members and classmates” to COVID. Some programs, such as nursing schools and law school clinics, did continue to offer support during the period of remote instruction. And the campus has acquired some funds to restart programs now. But Watson said there remains a feeling of “unease” and a need for “some deep work in-person on academic remediation and social and emotional support. That’s the place where we’re at.”

Beyond the individual stories, the economics of many universities have also been affected. While elite universities have benefitted from record endowment increases, many less well-resourced public universities and community colleges—the ones that often have the strongest connections to their communities—have seen declining enrollments and therefore declining revenue. A Washington Post article last fall reported that in Virginia and Maryland, community college enrollment is nine and 14 percent lower, respectively, than in 2019. In the District of Columbia, community college enrollment is reportedly down an astonishing 29 percent.

A New Democratic Civic University?

Last summer, writing in NPQ, Ira Harkavy and Rita Hodges from the Netter Center for Community Partnerships at the University of Pennsylvania issued a call for a “democratic civic university” that “would involve significant and ongoing engagement of an institution’s comprehensive resources (academic, human, cultural, and economic) in partnership with community members to produce knowledge and educate ethical students with the ability to help create and maintain just, antiracist, democratic societies.”

The call addressed themes that resonated on the Campus Compact conference panel. One of the lessons learned from the pandemic, perhaps, was that it’s time now to think beyond programs and initiatives and to focus more on effecting durable shifts in institutional culture and practice. It was not lost on Laur, for example, that part of the work involves being prepared at community meetings to “really be the recipient of calls for change, where our institutions have caused harm. I appreciate the late-night calls and early morning conversations that we have all had, both internal and external challenges,” she said. “This work is hard. It is messy. It is difficult. A lot of ups and downs,” she added.

For his part, Guarasci noted that, “We have tried to put through anchor pipelines,” but he believed the work itself needed to be conceived of differently. “We are building not just K-16 pipelines. We are building democratic units for communities that have been left out. We are trying to build, not only a generation of transformational leaders, but ourselves. Building an interracial democratic culture and reality,” he said.

Watson also emphasized the importance of a cultural shift in university practice. “It has to be intentional work,” she noted. One step that her campus had taken to better sustain community engagement work institutionally, Watson pointed out, was reflected in her title. Last year, the university made the decision to integrate diversity, equity, and inclusion with civic engagement in her office. To make notions of democratic practice building meaningful, Watson observed, requires both embedding the work internally while remaining externally facing. It requires taking care to regularly “look outside your door.”

Closing Thoughts

As is often the case, the panel ended with more questions than answers. A weakness of community engagement advocates has always been that their good work can be undone by other university departments—such as real estate or public safety—as Baldwin has documented.

As for current efforts to build a democratic university, certainly the pandemic has been bruising in many respects. Yet it has also fortified advocates in their resolve. Laur emphasized that going back to the practices of two years ago would not be sufficient. Rather, she contended, the work must deepen: “We have a window to really start anew in this moment, which is really important.”

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

“The story of philanthropy in the United States has not been fully told, for it has been told historically as a largely white story, a largely inherited wealth story” — So begins a new report by Hali Lee, Urvashi Vaid, and Ashindi Maxton, titled Philanthropy Always Sounds Like Someone Else: A Portrait of High Net Worth Donors of Color.

At NPQ, we have written often about the racial wealth gap. The latest Federal Reserve data, based on the 2019 Survey of Consumer Finance, which john powell cited in NPQ earlier this year, indicates that US median white household wealth was $181,440 compared to $20,730 for Black Americans, with the median Latinx family at $36,180. Because the wealthy boost the average, the mean is higher: $951,348 for a white household, compared to $139,797 for a Black household, with the mean Latinx household wealth at $192,200. Slice the data as you will, one message is clear—white wealth exceeds Black wealth by an extraordinary degree.

Perhaps in part because wealth is so racially skewed, philanthropy—particularly big-dollar “high net worth individual” giving—is often treated as an all-white realm. But the data show otherwise. Lee, Vaid, and Maxton note that, despite the racial wealth gap,  there are “at least 1.3 million households led by a person of color in the United States with net liquid assets of one million dollars or more” (2). This makes sense. If you look at Figure 2 in powell’s article, you’ll notice that the wealthiest 10 percent of Black and Latinx households in the US as of 2019 had a mean net worth of over $1 million.

So, how do these households give? This is a key framing question for the study. Between 2016 and 2018 the study’s authors conducted 113 long-form (average of 90 minute) interviews of BIPOC millionaire donors, making their report “the largest qualitative research study conducted thus far of high net worth and ultra-high net worth people of color in the United States.”

Understanding the Data: Which Donors Were Interviewed? 

It may seem odd to write this, but one of the more interesting report sections is the authors’ discussion of methodology, particularly because this report establishes a baseline. As the authors point out, “There were no data sets of wealthy BIPOC givers to which the research team had ready access.” In fact, they add, “the project has itself created that data set.”

For this reason, finding a pool of interview subjects relied on an organizing, rather than a statistical sampling, approach. To identify donors to interview, the researchers relied on personal networks, along with 30 public presentations they made to over 1,500 people (about 50 people per forum). Interviews were done in person, which meant limiting interviews to a set number of urban metropolitan areas, including New York City, the San Francisco Bay Area, Dallas/North Texas, Phoenix, Denver, Boston, Washington, DC, Seattle, and Miami.

Finding interview subjects who had the ability to give $50,000 a year or more was not easy. Of the 113 interviewed, 34 reportedly gave $50,000 or less a year, 55 between $50,000 and $300,000 a year, and two dozen over $300,000 (13 of whom gave over $1 million a year). Combined, the interviewees reported giving an annual total of $56 million, an average of nearly $500,000 per person. All told, 27 of the 113 interviewees reported having over $30 million in assets, making them qualify as “ultra-high net worth” donors.

The personal networks heavily influenced who was interviewed. On a four-person research team, two were South Asian (both from India), one was East Asian (South Korea), and one was African American. The researchers’ demographics were mirrored, albeit imperfectly, in the racial makeup of who got interviewed:

African American                                                                  41

South Asian                                                                          23

Asian Pacific Islander (other than South Asian)                   22

Mixed race                                                                            13

Latinx                                                                                    13

Native American                                                                   1

Total                                                                                      113

One other notable result of this sampling technique was that immigrants were heavily over-represented, with 45 of the 113 interviewees—more than a third of the total—being born outside the United States.

What Do the Data Tell Us? Five Themes

In their report, the authors organize the interview data in five themes, identified below:

Self-Made Wealth: Most of the people interviewed (74 of 113) were born in modest circumstances and only became wealthy during their lifetimes. Only 11 of the 113 listed inheritance as the main source of their wealth. The remaining 26 credit marriage at least in part for their wealth—eight interviewees identified marriage as the primary source of their wealth, and 18 said their wealth came both from their earnings and marriage. By contrast, the authors estimate that only 35 percent of the Forbes 400 families come from low-income or middle-class families (14).

Being a generation away from poverty has many effects. One impact the authors emphasize is the widespread practice of giving money back to friends and family. Of the 113 people interviewed, 88 reported making major gifts—ranging from $2,400 to $1.2 million—to friends and family for a range of expenses including “crisis responses, living expenses, educational expenses, cultural experiences, and major life events such as weddings or funerals.” Most respondents did not perceive this as “philanthropy” but rather as familial obligation. One Black man in his fifties said these pressures could be challenging: “When you are in an environment in which there is no money, when you get money, it drains away because everyone around you needs it.”

Structural Racism: In the interviews, experience with racism was universal. This made some donors more willing to disrupt the status quo. “Many of the people interviewed spoke about how to deploy their resources—investments, charitable, and political—to tackle the social issues they care about in ways that can bring about systemic change,” the authors write (22). One respondent, an Asian American woman in her forties, told the authors that, “Our current system of capitalism is going to run us into the ground in so many different ways. We have to change modes of our economy, otherwise we’re always going to be fighting the same fights” (22).

Cultural Translation: The authors also sought to identify if the group had a unique culture of giving. Instead, they found wide variation. For example, some donors gave for religious reasons, with tithing being popular, while others eschewed faith-based groups altogether. One common theme that emerged, however, was that donors often found themselves, by choice or necessity, playing the roles of translator or cultural broker. As one Black man in his sixties told the authors, “Culturally, Black people are accustomed to living in two worlds. In order for us to survive and succeed, we have to learn how to live with white people in power. White people don’t have to do that” (31).

Social Justice Orientation: A fourth section focused on donor practices. Nearly two in three respondents listed education as one of their top five giving categories. This is also the leading category for white donors. But otherwise, a strong social justice bent was evident: not only did 44.4 percent name social justice as a factor in their charitable giving (second most popular choice), but women/gender rights ranked third (39.7 percent), racial justice fourth (36.5 percent), and, after health, income inequality ranked sixth at 31.7 percent (32).

The Value of Networks:  Of the 113 high net worth donors of color interviewed by the authors, 95 reported belonging to networks, and 39 reported that their networks had influenced their giving. By contrast, only two respondents reported using paid philanthropic advisers. Among Black donors, “fraternal organizations were often cited as important networks. These include the Links, the Boulé, Jack and Jill, Girlfriends, and the ‘Divine Nine’ fraternities and sororities” (41), as well as historically Black college and university alumni networks. In certain cities, key historically important Black nonprofit institutions have become hubs, such as the YMCA in Dallas and the Blair-Caldwell African American Research Library in Denver. Giving circles were also cited as important networks and advising mechanisms in all BIPOC communities.

A New Network Emerges

Lee, Vaid, and Maxton did not just use an organizing approach to build their interview pool. They are organizers themselves and cofounders of the Donor of Color Network, which developed directly from their research. The network, they inform us, was founded in 2019, after “an inaugural retreat of 48 donors of color (joined by leading social and racial justice organizers) was held” (6). To paraphrase from the report, the network aims to: 1) center racial, gender, and economic justice and the interplay between them to foster systemic change; 2) increase resources available to racial justice groups; and 3) build joyful, cross-racial communities and leverage network members’ power and experience (46).

As if often the case, the report raises as many as questions as it answers. Four key implications that the authors emphasize are the following (53):

1. Donors of color have a growing number of opportunities to leverage their giving and build their knowledge of how to achieve greater impact.
2. Nonprofits that adapt and develop specific fundraising strategies to engage HNW [high net worth] donors of color can diversify donor bases and secure new resources.
3. Financial and donor advisory service providers as a field could diversify and/or build new knowledge to better serve HNW donors of color.
4. More research is needed to understand the values, priorities, and giving potential of HNW donors of color.

Forty years ago, Lee, Vaid, and Maxton wrote, “philanthropy as a field grew in its knowledge, reach, and donor base through the development of women’s funds.” Later, they point out, a powerful LBGTQ donors’ network also was built. Today, they contend, “The increased organizing and networking underway among donors of color represents a similar field-building moment for philanthropy” (53). Fundamentally, they add, “power in the world of philanthropy will shift as more BIPOC emerge as donors and as leaders” (56).

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

This is the second installment in a series for NPQ based on excerpts from Shawn Ginwright’s new book, The Four Pivots: Reimagining Justice, Reimagining Ourselves. Read the first feature, “Healing-Centered Leadership: A Path to Transformation,” here.

I grew up in a working-class Black neighborhood in Southern California. My summers were spent playing hide and go seek and football on asphalt streets. I wore Tuff Skins jeans with holes from which my knee would poke when I ran. After playing with my friends, we would return to one of their homes to listen to the magical music of Funkadelic. I didn’t know then that the group’s futuristic soul would have an indelible impact on me and my work in Black communities even to this day. The music was a funky portal to Black possibilities where I could dream about my future and imagine my life. As lyrics like “One nation under a groove, getting down just for the funk of it… nothing can stop us now” soaked into our souls, my friends and I would make up fantastic stories about our superpowers. These phrases showed me a Black future and pointed me toward a vision of possibilities for my work.

It wasn’t until I created a nonprofit organization that I realized that my vision of a Black future wasn’t widely shared by others. I learned early on that in order to secure funding and raise money from donors, I couldn’t simply share with them my dream of creating healing sanctuaries for Black youth. I couldn’t write about the significance of Black joy in funding proposals, nor could I share my vision of hope and love as an intervention to the many challenges Black youth confronted. So, instead, I learned how to highlight problems in the Black community where I worked, rather than lifting up its assets.

The tendency for Black nonprofit leaders to identify challenges in Black communities rather than highlight and build upon Black communities’ assets is one of the greatest threats to Black nonprofit organizations. Often, Black led nonprofit organizations aren’t afforded space for innovation and imagining new solutions to old challenges. While philanthropy encourages innovation and risk taking for white-led organizations, Black organizations are often relegated to the restrictive confines of crisis management and addressing problems, not innovating. Thank God for Funkadelic’s music because, without it, I may have never curated a vision to see beyond the restrictive confines of white supremacy that frequently shape philanthropy today.

Often white supremacy shows up in philanthropy as missionary-like efforts designed to “save” broken and dysfunctional Black communities. While addressing problems such as youth violence is significant and important, this savior tendency in philanthropy has strangled black innovation and suffocated Black power building. There is an underlying logic in philanthropy that says, “show us how big and bad the problem is for Black folks, and how you plan to solve it.” While evidence of progress and effectiveness is important, the scope, scale, and history of issues like violence, poverty, and food security in Black communities requires deeper thinking, innovative action, and moral and ethical decision making, all of which are ingredients for deep systems change.

Over time, the tendency to focus on problems influenced how I defined my work and even shaped how I talked about Black communities—as problems to be solved. White supremacy leads Black nonprofit leaders into the seductive trap of what Trista Harris, author of Future Good, How to Use Futurism to Save the World, calls “problem loving.” Harris defines problem loving as the tendency for Black nonprofit leaders to assume that awareness of the problem is the same as solving it. We are often trained to clearly articulate the problems in Black communities. The myth of problem loving is that knowledge of the problem is all we need to solve it. We think we can fix the problem by simply showing and pointing out how bad the problem is!

I recall conducting a training with school district principals about the racial differences in academic outcomes among their students. I had prepared my PowerPoint with slide after slide of evidence that proved there were dramatic differences in performance across racial groups in their schools. I had them break out into small groups to discuss the data that I had proudly presented. When they returned to the large group, one of the principals asked me a simple question: “Can you provide us with some solutions to these racial disparities in academic outcomes?” I had convinced myself that my job was simply to illustrate the problem they had in the district; I hadn’t considered the possibility of providing solutions. As a result, the question puzzled me, because my assumption was that once they understood how significant the racial disparities were in their schools, the principals and teachers would come up with solutions on their own.

I was wrong.

White Supremacy—The Root of Problem Loving

The problem with “problem loving” is that Black nonprofit organizations aren’t given the space to dream of new and innovative solutions to many of the problems Black communities face. This is of course by design, and it’s how white supremacy works! The conditions of oppression and the challenges of everyday life force Black nonprofit leaders into daily survival mode and ongoing crisis management. Working in survival mode, combined with persistent work frenzy, renders our imaginations inert. As such, Black nonprofit leaders rarely have the space to imagine and create new solutions to persistent challenges. No fundamental change has ever come from problem fixing. When we focus on fixing problems, we only reform and repair systems, institutions, and social relationships. There is no radical transformation.

Black nonprofit leaders need more space to innovate, more time to dream, and more opportunities to fail. Innovation, dreaming, and imagining (that is, Black future thinking), are not new to our work for freedom and justice. Take, for instance, enslaved Africans whose visions of freedom drove the Underground Railroad. Their profound capacity to dream of freedom even when enslaved conjured something more than abolition of slavery. Freedom was for them, as it is for us now, a total transformation of society involving…new social relationships, new ways of living and interacting, new attitudes toward work and leisure and community.¹ All of this comes from developing a clear picture of a Black future.

Clarity about a Black future forces leaders to dream, imagine, and discover while we also address problems, prevent suffering, and fight for inclusion. Strong Black organizations will need to take a lesson from Funkadelic, and lean into the funk, the bold imagining of a possible Black future. These organizations will need to indulge in a profound Black imagination and Afro-dreaming of what our communities should be, thereby expanding the terrain of possible solutions to the challenges Black communities are currently facing.

The Funk and Black Future Thinking

Creating Black futures will involve new ways of thinking about solving old problems. Innovation and Black future thinking is rooted in ancestral knowledge and indigenous wisdom; it wasn’t created in the technology companies of Silicon Valley. Innovation and Black future thinking can also emerge out of the necessity to cure sickness without medical care or out of trying to provide access to healthy food in a food desert. As Black nonprofit leaders, our job is to lean into the practice of Black future thinking and action in order to strive for the future we want. This is difficult work, given the urgency, scarcity of resources, and limited time. However, if we are in the business of making deep change, we must transform what we believe is possible. It’s really the only way. We have to recognize how oppression limits our vision and predetermines our actions—and approach our work in a different way.

Not long ago, I was conducting a training with a group of Black-led nonprofit organizations in a medium-sized city in the Midwest. The leaders within these organizations hadn’t worked well together in years, and in fact there was a great deal of distrust among them. The executive directors didn’t trust the largest funder in the city, and the funder had lost trust in some of the leaders. Many of the organizations battled over the scant resources the foundation provided, leaving them underfunded and distrustful of one another. So, when the foundation and one of the community organizations asked me to help facilitate a healing process to restore trust and create a collaborative process for the group of nonprofits, I jumped at the opportunity.

During our first community meeting I listened to residents raise concerns about the police and to many Black nonprofit leaders who talked about the lack of funding they were receiving to support their work in the neighborhood. After the meeting, people pulled me to the side for a series of one-on-one conversations about why I shouldn’t trust a particular person in the community, or why it was going to be impossible to do anything collaboratively. “Nothing you do will work here, Dr. Ginwright,” they said, “people just can’t see another way to work.” Some said to me, “this community has a lot of trauma, and the trauma created a lot of hurt and distrust among some of the leaders here.” They listed reasons why working together was impossible, highlighting past failed attempts to restore community trust and collaboration. The group was entirely focused on problem loving—rather than Black future thinking—because of the deep wounds of the past, and they offered clear and compelling reasons for why the collaborative effort would fail.

The truth is that the leaders of these organizations were struggling with small budgets, were stressed from a litany of community problems, and were frustrated by an inability to have a significant collective impact in the neighborhood. Conditions of oppression had limited their ability to see anything outside of the daily survival to which they had become accustomed. There was no evidence, in their experience, that they could work together collaboratively towards a common vision.

While the significance of the problem was important, the group also needed to pivot from problem loving to Black future thinking. It was really hard at first because the harm was so deep that problem loving had become the only way they knew how to work together. We used a few practices to help the group lean into Black future thinking and introduced tools to help the group understand when they slipped into problem loving and how to get back to thinking about, envisioning, and planning for a compelling Black future in their community.

After nearly two years of working with the group, participants began to heal their wounded relationships, established a common vision for their community, and began to imagine advocating for and creating a city tax that would create a designated pool of funding for their collective work. Together, the group shared a vision of a way to work that could redefine their collective efforts. The leaders had a vision, and it was not simply to improve their community: they transformed how they showed up for each other and cultivated a sense of freedom to work together differently.

Building A Black Future

Creating a Black future and building new solutions to deep-seated challenges is the most important work of Black-led organizations moving forward. Building a Black future will require foundations to open space for Black leaders to convene—not just to work, but to reflect and dream. This future will require philanthropy to invest greater risk capital into Black-led efforts. It will also require Black-led organizations to create reflection time during which we intentionally pull out of the frenzy of the work week in order to connect, learn, and imagine together. Building a Black future isn’t always easy, and from time to time, I, too, fall into the trap of losing my Black future perspective, focusing instead on problems we face in Black communities. A pivot away from focusing on problems is not easy, yet it is worthwhile if we want to build stronger Black organizations that can transform Black community life. More importantly, when we begin to pivot to building on Black communities’ assets, we are creating and affirming a Black future. This is exactly what I learned while listening to Funkadelic as a young person. It is important that Black nonprofit leaders see the future, despite how far off it might seem, and courageously move toward that vision while basking in Black joy during the journey.

A pivot to possibility means that we have to cultivate another outlook where we can see each other, even if we don’t agree. The greatest challenge before us is not simply a political or economic one, but rather, it is failing to collectively imagine the future we want. A pivot to Black future thinking is not a panacea to heal the wounds from the legacy of America’s racial trauma, nor will it resolve continued harm caused by economic inequality. Yet, we have to all want something better for ourselves, our communities, and the world.

As I once heard someone say, if we want something we’ve never seen, we have to do something we’ve never tried.

Notes

1. Adapted from Robin Kelley’s Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Penguin, 2003).

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

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

Deborah Frieze: We mean two things when we say integrated capital. One is we mean every type of capital: equity, debt, grants, and everything in between. Guarantees, warrants royalty, finance, convertible notes—all of the tools that you could possibly have in the quiver. But we also mean financial capital, social capital, knowledge capital, all the capitals. And if we’re going to address the ecosystem gap, the reason that entrepreneurs of color and communities of color are not receiving the access to capital or the ownership and stewardship of resources to build wealth, we have to look at this sort of integrated capital to help solve the problem.

It’s really about shifting from what I would call an economics of separation—which defines our current economic system, which sees us all as competitive, selfish, separate, and trying to win at the cost of everybody else losing—to an economics of relationship, where we recognize ourselves as cooperative, generous, and interdependent. We can rise and fall together. We work together. We’re connected to each other. And that is a shift to an intersectional or systemic lens, which is the opposite of conventional finance.

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