Tag Archives: nonprofit quarterly

Fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic and the mass movement against anti-Black racism that arose in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, many foundation leaders say they are focusing explicitly on racial equity and are modifying their practices as a result. But are they?

This question fueled considerable research and resulted in a report that I coauthored with Naomi Orensten and Satia Marotta, which the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) released this past fall, titled Foundations Respond to Crisis: Lasting Change. In that research we conducted a broad survey, as well as qualitative interviews with over 30 foundation leaders and 30 nonprofit leaders. In both our foundation leader interviews and in the almost 300 survey responses we received, many reported that they had stepped up the financial support they provided to organizations serving African American and Latinx communities.

Yet, when it came to Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) and Native American communities, foundations largely remain missing in action. In fact, the data show that since March 2020, few foundations stepped up giving levels to nonprofits supporting AAPI and Native American communities. The details of this shortcoming are documented in two related reports I coauthored with my colleagues Katarina Malmgren and Hannah Martin, both titled Overlooked. In those reports, almost two thirds of foundation leaders say they provide little or no grant dollars to organizations primarily serving AAPI communities and a similar share of foundation leaders report providing little or no grant dollars to organizations primarily serving Native American communities.

During and prior to the pandemic, AAPI and Native nonprofit leaders we spoke with reported having worse experiences with foundations than their counterparts of other races. These leaders rate their foundation funders lower on survey questions related to the strength of relationships between funders and grantees, funders’ understanding of grantees’ organizations, and the context in which they work. Native American leaders also rate funders lower on the impact that funders have had on the fields in which they work. This data comes from surveys we have conducted between 2011 and 2021 of 761 AAPI and 285 Native nonprofit leaders and interviews with an additional 13 AAPI and Native American leaders.

As Joseph Ironhawk Little of Native Americans in Philanthropy (NAP) asks, “We all must take the time to reflect and ask ourselves: why is this accepted in philanthropy as normalcy?”  Raymond Foxworth of First Nations Development Institute is perhaps even more scathing in his assessment, observing that, “The negative interactions between Native nonprofit leaders—and Native communities at large—and philanthropy is a function of a settler colonial system that ignores and minimizes Native American people, communities, and their sovereign priorities.”

That AAPI and Native American nonprofit leaders and communities continue to be overlooked is concerning for many reasons, not the least of which is the outsized challenges they have experienced these past two years.

Over the past two years, Native American communities have been unduly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Native Americans have been hospitalized and have died from COVID-19 at higher rates than any other racial/ethnic group in the United States. Between April 2020 and June 2021, one in every 168 Native American children in the United States lost a caregiver due to the pandemic. These extremely high death rates, especially among community elders, also threaten the progress made in preserving Native languages. Further, these hospitalization and death rates are likely significantly higher than the data show, because many states do not consistently track data on Native Americans. Compounding the health-related impacts of COVID-19, tribal governments have been devastated by the pandemic.

Over the past two years, AAPI communities have suffered disturbing consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. Pacific Islanders have experienced one of the highest death tolls from COVID-19 in the United States. In addition, Asian-owned small businesses rapidly lost business at the start of the pandemic due in part to discrimination surrounding the origins of the virus. At the same time, across the country, crimes targeting people of AAPI descent have risen substantially, with Stop AAPI Hate receiving more than 10,000 reported anti-Asian incidents since March 2020, and likely many more that have gone unreported.

For decades prior to the pandemic, organizations such as Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy (AAPIP) and NAP have advocated for more support for their communities. AAPIP was created “to expand and mobilize philanthropic resources for underserved Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities and inspire a more just and equitable society.” Around the same time, Native Americans in Philanthropy was founded, in part because, “Native communities had no platform in philanthropy to raise awareness and advocate for funding to Native and Tribal communities.”

While some foundations do support AAPI and Native American communities, as a field the data are clear: foundations have not broadly changed their practices with respect to these communities.

In 2021, when we interviewed AAPI and Native American leaders about their experiences, much of what they shared focused on the lack of understanding that foundation leaders and staff have of their organizations and the realities of the context in which they operate. One AAPI leader told us, “It’s hard for AAPI organizations to thrive in a foundation world where you don’t speak English as well, it’s a long and cumbersome grant application, or the funder has very high expectations for perfect grammar and perfect writing style. Those language barriers, in the same way they challenge our community members, are challenging for our nonprofit organizations.”

One Native American leader recalled being denied funding because their participants didn’t fit into a stereotypical mold of struggling Native people. This leader said, “One time a program officer told us that they couldn’t fund us because the participants in our program were successful emerging leaders. We interpreted that as, ‘They just want to fund drunk, starving Indians on the reservation or on skid row in the city. They’re not interested in what Native American leaders can contribute to the rest of society.’”

Organizations like AAPIP, AAPI Data, NAP, and First Nations Development Institute, among others, have published a lot of data and information over the years to raise awareness about the lack of attention to these communities by philanthropy. But change is unlikely to happen without a commitment by foundation leaders and staff. This requires that funders accept responsibility to become more aware of the needs of these diverse communities. And it cannot happen without concerted effort.

One Native American leader offered this counsel to foundations: “I think the biggest thing is listening. Not hearing but listening. Listening to understand. There’s a big difference between listening to understand or listening to reply. I think a lot of times in America, people listen to reply. They listen to win. They listen to be right. They don’t listen with an open heart about what people are saying. That’s a big problem.”

“Listening is a process,” the leader continued. “It’s not just a passive experience of sound vibrating your eardrums. It’s taking in what people say and reflecting on it and accepting it as their truth.”

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

Unions and worker cooperatives have a lot in common when it comes to passions and principles for democratic workplaces. Where they differ is in strategy and tactics. At this moment in history, it is clear to many that much needs to be torn down and much needs to be built up. To face this challenge and change our economic system to achieve genuine workplace democracy requires new ways of doing business and a multi-pronged approach.

To explore these issues in greater depth, the Community and Worker Ownership Project at the City University of New York (CUNY) published a report titled A Union Toolkit for Cooperative Solutions, which highlights seven case studies of how unions and worker co-ops have together built worker power.

More such collaborations are sorely needed. The current rules and values of our capitalist, imperialist, white supremacist, and patriarchal system set the table for how work gets done, and how money and resources move. Worker co-ops and unions each can contribute to changing this reality. Worker co-ops provide a means to collaborate within a framework of deep collaboration fostering inclusion and agency at work. Unions help take on corporations and their rules and regulations, with a rich history of struggles, both wins and losses. Today’s labor and ownership laws reflect a capitalist paradigm. Challenging that paradigm requires knowing what levers exist with the current system to better conditions, even as new systems are developed that lay the groundwork for more egalitarian ways to be together at work and in communities.

This work is not easy. Audre Lorde cautioned that, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” In short, to have a chance at transformative change, not just inside, but also outside strategies must be employed. Together, unions and worker co-ops offer the possibility for making considerable progress in this direction.

Multiple Pathways to Create Worker Cooperatives

Worker cooperatives are businesses that are owned by their workers and have a member-driven democratic governance structure that values transparency and justice. Like any business, they fulfill an economic need. And they develop in many ways. Here are four:

Stand-Alone Start-Ups: When people come together to form their own, new co-op business, they usually have a strong entrepreneurial person on the team. Any start-up comes with risks, traditional or cooperative. No guarantee of steady income, as any new business has a lot to take on and a lot to learn. This is likely the oldest form of an economic system of exchange based on need and skills to be shared. It is the closest now to what mutual aid looks like as people, under duress, work with what they have and what they face for what they want and need.

Conversions: Conversions are when businesses transition from one type of ownership to a cooperative model of ownership. More and more, planners, community development advocates, activists, and policymakers are looking at local needs for more sustainable supply chains; examining what enterprises are needed, and what assets exist in their communities; and then assisting local business owners, particularly when nearing retirement, to preserve locally based businesses by selling them to their firms’ employees.

Incubation: This is a model where a nonprofit gets a cooperative going and is linked to other economic and workforce development strategies that can support start-ups through this lens. The formation of Gem City Market, which opened in West Dayton last year, is an example of an incubator approach. An important feature of the Dayton effort is that the co-ops being incubated there explicitly follow a union co-op model—that is, workers are both owners of the worker co-ops being incubated, as well as members of the union backing the incubator.

Worker Takeover: These are rare in the US but can occur when workers organize to save a firm by occupation and takeover. Technically, this is a type of business conversion but taking over a failing business is radically different than a standard business conversion where a willing owner sells his or her business to the firm’s employees. Although the takeover model is more known outside the US (especially in Argentina), in Chicago, New Era Windows formed this way and workers were backed by a union (the United Electrical Workers) to achieve this change.

Union Power as a Lever for Change

Cooperative businesses and union representation can go hand-in-hand. Both worker co-ops and unions foster a sense of collective belonging, which is critical in this world of alienation and isolation. Both offer means for dignity and agency at work. Unions of course help workers combine their forces to face the power of capital. But unions can also act as a market player and shaper to help construct rules for an industry; they lobby for policies that raise the floor and level the playing field.

Unions can also—and sometimes do—utilize their principles and resources to support cooperative economic development. For example, Cooperative Home Care Associates (CHCA) in the Bronx, the largest worker-cooperative with 2,000 employees, did not have the power or influence to raise the floor for standards across their industry on its own. But after joining SEIU 1199—the 450,000-member healthcare division of the Service Employees International Union—they got the New York state legislature’s attention and made legislative gains that raised homecare worker pay standards.

Unions, in short, do far more than represent workers at workplaces. Collectively, they form a larger movement with the power to broker political terms and regulations that can impact many companies across a market. Take a moment and thank the union movement for bringing us the weekend. (As much as COVID capitalism is trying to take it away.) Unions invest sizable resources when they decide to organize an industry. In New York state right now, a strong union collaborative is acting to shape the cannabis industry with justice in mind as it evolves.

Unions sometimes can also help directly create co-ops. The groundwork for a conversion can be held in a union’s collective bargaining agreement (CBA) with their companies, if and when unions negotiate for their membership’s right of first refusal to buy the business if a firm is put up for sale. Unions can also dedicate researchers and lawyers to tackle the ownership constraints and possibilities. And the union can institute training and education so members can become effective operators of the firms. With the legal help, education and training, and prepared operations manuals that comport with a collective bargaining agreement, unions can help workers to be ready for ownership—even for hostile takeovers if it comes to that.

Union-Worker Co-op Collaboration in Action: White Electric Coffee and CUPS

Union worker co-op collaboration is growing. Our report covered some of the cases discussed above—such as New Era Windows, CHCA, and the co-op efforts in Dayton—but some cases were too recent to include in the report. One of these involves a cafe in Providence, Rhode Island, known as White Electric Coffee. During the first months of the COVID pandemic shutdowns and the shattering news of George Floyd’s murder, the workers held a series of self-organizing meetings in the local park to discuss going back to work and to examine the terms and working conditions they wanted. They carried in their collective consciousness awareness of how their workplace could be better. A list of demands was created that included worker safety, diversity, accessibility, union representation, and the added desire to own and democratically operate the business as worker-owners. To do so, they formed an independent union, CUPS (Collaborative Union of Providence Service-Workers).

With official recognition by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), they became the first unionized café in Rhode Island! With technical assistance from the Cooperative Fund of New England, a community development financially institution (CDFI) that specializes in co-op lending, the workers bought the firm and established democratic worker ownership. Worker-owners and the union co-op proudly adhere to worker justice principles of living wages, workplace democracy, cooperation, collective bargaining, profit sharing, business transparency, BIPOC/LGBTQ+/women co-ownership and co-leadership, and community engagement.

Why the White Electric Case Matters 

The White Electric case is inspiring, but is it significant? Before dismissing it, it may be worth noting that Starbucks alone employs over 200,000 workers nationwide. The potential for further expansion in the café industry is not small. It is also worth examining what happens when workers fail to secure ownership.

Take the example of Workers United. In 2017, in upstate New York, baristas at Gimme! Coffee signed with the Workers United! union, which is affiliated with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). The workers were delighted with the improvements they achieved in their first contract in February 2018, which was not only their first contract, but the first union contract with coffee shops in the nation. In 2019, the same union successfully signed a contract with workers at SPoT Coffee, a coffee chain with locations on the East Coast and Canada, effectively establishing the largest union of a café or restaurant chain in the United States. And very recently, the same union went on to unionize two Starbucks franchises in Buffalo, New York, sparking a wave of unionization efforts at Starbucks stores across the country.

When COVID-19 came, Gimme! Coffee experienced temporary shutdowns and unforeseen shifts, much like White Electric. But at this shop two other things happened during the early months of the virus shutdowns. The owners reached out to a nonprofit co-op developer to assist them with selling the business to the firm’s workers. And a worker filed with the NLRB to decertify the union, a right that occurs when a collective bargaining agreement is about to expire.

Superficially, this would seem to be similar to White Electric. Not so! Rather, the move to decertify the union ended up being a clever means for the employer to frame worker ownership as an alternative to the union. The co-op developer, which was working with the owner to sell the company, failed to approach the union to gain its support. They instead worked with the single worker who had filed for decertification—thereby engaging in discussions with the owner’s choice of which worker to talk with, rather than the union that workers had democratically chosen as the group to represent them.

If asked, the union might have backed the sale to the workers, but the owner was hostile to the union. The pandemic clouded events and the co-op developers were loyal to the deal to be made for the owner, not the already organized and represented workers. What a miss. What a loss.

Imagine for a minute that union representatives had helped shape a deal to buy Gimme! Coffee for the workers to own the firm, becoming a union co-op. Then the Starbucks workers in Buffalo would also have had a unionized cooperative behind them within their own union in their own state. Developing fair trade along the entire supply chain requires worker representation and control. This has been missed by some in the field who see unions as only being necessary to remedy badly managed businesses and restrain hostile employers. This couldn’t be more inaccurate. It is when unions partner with good businesses that the union movement grows worker power—by adapting and replicating what works. Ownership and control work. Democracy works. Solidarity works.

Why Shared Strategies to Achieve Worker Ownership and Control Are Required

There are no easy answers here. But this is a call for worker co-ops and unions to be more intentional in developing overlapping strategies to advance worker empowerment in the economy. Clearly, the challenges are not only on the co-op side of the equation. Indeed, employee ownership advocates’ memories of union betrayal are not forgotten. For example, in 1977, the Steelworkers’ union—now a major supporter of union co-ops—helped torpedo an effort to enable an estimated 5,000 workers to take ownership of a steel mill in Youngstown, Ohio. The failure then had enormous costs—and the plant shutdown that followed was an early step in the path toward the creation of what became known as the “Rust Belt.” Indeed, the Youngstown shutdown proved a harbinger of what is today called neoliberalism.

The point, in short, is not to rebuke a co-op developer’s misjudgment in a single case, but to lift up the importance of conscious collaboration. Fundamentally, achieving worker justice and power requires thinking beyond one business at a time. Sector-based approaches are required too. (The Fight for 15 is a prominent example of this approach). Opportunities to build economic power will be missed if worker ownership is not aligned with broad-based representation for frontline workers.

The Union Co-op Council of the US Federation of Worker Co-ops will be discussing some of the issues raised in this article on Friday, February 11^th, 1:00-2:15 EST. Free registration is available here.

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

These days, US democracy is under threat. And efforts to protect democratic institutions are critically important. But the threat is multifaceted. Indeed, in many respects the nation is already a plutocracy—that is, governed and controlled by a wealthy elite. More and more, in America, it is the billionaires who rule.

If evidence is required, just look at what happened in 2021 to President Joe Biden’s promise to tax the rich. Despite an overwhelming majority of people supporting a wealth tax or a billionaires’ income tax, the US Senate killed both measures. At the same time, a hobbled Build Back Better bill adds new tax breaks for wealthy taxpayers by expanding the state and local tax deduction, also known as “SALT.” Guess who is calling the shots?

Congress has failed to increase federal taxes on the rich despite the explosion of wealth by the country’s wealthiest one tenth of one percent and by its billionaires who, though less than 0.0005 percent of the nation’s population, have outsized power. Depending on which day of the week you check—wealth is closely tied to stock market values—US billionaires have added $2 trillion to their holdings (or is it hoardings?) since the pandemic began. Two trillion, by the way, has a “2” in front of twelve zeroes.

Plainly, our political and economic system is rigged to benefit the elite. The wealthy fund political candidates and have outsized influence over elected officials. They own mansions and yachts that allow for hobnobbing with presidents. They fund think tanks and media outlets that set the dominant narrative. And they make very visible charitable contributions to polish their images—just in case someone questions how they earned all that money.

Walk into virtually any major art museum and what do you see? Benefactors’ names are etched onto the building and appear prominently in the galleries. Their art is on the walls, with paintings chosen by curators whose positions they fund. Heck, you don’t even have to walk into the museum—the Koch fountain sits outside in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Who doesn’t love gushing water? Or medical centers? Or new dormitories? Don’t look behind the curtain and ask if the people responsible for such largesse made their money selling guns, tobacco, or opioids—or are blocking meaningful action on the climate emergency.

As ProPublica has made clear, billionaires will pay little or no income taxes on those trillions. For example, reportedly, between 2014 and 2018, Jeff Bezos paid an average effective tax rate of less than one percent.

One mechanism to achieve such outcomes are charitable contributions. The rich can make charitable contributions of the appreciated value of their investments and not only get a charitable deduction against other income they might have (up to certain limits) but avoid paying any tax on the investment gains.

Contrary to the old saying that “nothing is certain but death and taxes,” for many of the elite what is certain is evasion from taxes. Nowhere is this more obvious than with the estate tax. As Gary Cohn, chief economic advisor to former President Donald Trump, once said, “Only morons pay the estate tax.” In large part, this is thanks to the charitable deduction. When billionaires who signed the Giving Pledge give half of their estates to charity, the value of their estates that should have been collected in taxes (the current rate is 40 percent) will instead most likely go into their private foundations.

As Rob Reich argued in his book Just Giving, philanthropy is a tax-subsidized extension of plutocracy, and the subsidy is absurd. When a middle-class taxpayer gives $100 to her alma mater, she gets no tax benefit because she doesn’t itemize deductions, and even if she did it would be a small fraction of her gift because she’s in a low tax bracket. However, when the billionaire sends his $100 check, depending on which state he lives in and what the state’s tax policies are, he will get tax benefits of at least $40, and, in the case of donated stock, as much as $70-90.

Why Current Reform Legislation Is Inadequate

The nation’s current system incentivizes the wealthy to make charitable contributions even as most Americans receive hardly any tax incentive for donating. For private foundations, this system is highly functional. Donations from the wealthy plus a booming stock market have helped private foundation assets grow to over $1.3 trillion.

Among foundations, as with society at large, a few at the top have dominant positions. Indeed, one tenth of one percent of them control 40 percent of these assets.

Lately, donor-advised funds (DAFs) which total nearly $160 billion have been getting a lot of attention. Although growing, these DAF funds still represent only a fraction of the wealth held by foundations and an even smaller portion of the $13 trillion in combined wealth held by the nation’s richest one-tenth of one percent.

Nonetheless, DAFs are the main focus of current charitable reform efforts, as outlined in the Accelerated Charitable Efforts (ACE) Act. Of course, advocates like Jan Masoaka of Cal Nonprofits are not wrong when they say DAF distributions should be regulated, and the measure surely would do some good. But such reforms, even if passed by Congress as the legislation is currently written, will do little to retard rising megadonor domination of philanthropy. If advocates are serious about dismantling plutocracy in our nation’s giving systems, more severe medicine is required.

A Modest Approach to Democratizing Philanthropy: Three Critical Steps

To seriously curtail plutocratic control requires three key steps:

1. Step up foundation payout requirements for large foundations.
2. End loopholes that allow the wealthy to use charitable contributions to evade taxes.
3. Increase charitable tax incentives for everyone else.

The combination of these steps is important. If public policy only reduces incentives for the wealthy to donate but fails to raise incentives for others to contribute, this risks reducing nonprofit sector revenue. But if public policy also replaces the largesse of the rich with the largesse of the many, then perhaps a more democratic philanthropy can truly take hold.

The place to start is with the private foundation payout requirement, which is now set at a minimum level of five percent (which includes charitable expenses). A modest proposal is to increase the payout requirement to 10 percent on foundation assets above $50 million (only two percent of foundations have assets in excess of $50 million). Distributions to DAFs and charitable expenses would each be limited to 10 percent of qualifying distributions for the purposes of meeting the payout requirement.

Why is this modest? The private foundation is a vehicle almost exclusively reserved for the rich, who get a current tax deduction for their gift to the foundation but are not required to distribute more than five percent of it per year to operating charities. Others have suggested no charitable deduction until the private foundation distributes the gift. Some have pushed for limiting the life of foundations to five or 10 years. With this proposed change in payout requirement, it will still take 25 years, with five-percent real investment returns, for a one-billion-dollar foundation to reduce its endowment by half and 50 years to reduce it by 75 percent. In other words, the donor’s grandchildren or possibly great grandchildren will still have control of a $250 million foundation.

A second key step is to put an end to one of the biggest abuses of the charitable deduction—namely evading capital gains tax through gifts of appreciated property or stock. This can be cured by valuing the charitable contribution at cost basis (as distinguished from market value). If one has stock that cost $10 and is now worth $100, the donor can either get credit for a $10 charitable contribution or sell the stock, pay taxes on the gain, and donate the balance.

Another loophole is the estate tax charitable deduction, a benefit available only to those lucky enough to exceed the estate tax threshold of $11.7 million for single people, $23.4 million for married couples. This deduction should be changed from 100 percent of estate value—which, as one law firm notes, essentially makes payment of the estate tax “voluntary”—to 50 percent for contributions to operating charities and 30 percent for gifts to private foundations or DAFs. If one has $50 million subject to the estate tax and donates it to charity, $25 million is still taxed.

Again, one might ask, why is this policy change “modest?” Although a strong argument can be made to eliminate entirely the estate tax benefit of charitable giving for the wealthy, this proposal allows a scaled-down charitable write-off. The bigger question, for which various studies come to conflicting conclusions, concerns just how much do tax incentives affect charitable giving levels by the wealthy. If the public subsidy for large donors is cut, will Jeff Bezos reduce his charitable giving and buy a second $500 million yacht? Investment manager Alliance Bernstein, for example, points to evidence that changes to the estate tax don’t affect charitable giving.

Even if there is a drop-off in giving by the rich, will the hole be filled by contributions from everyone else? It might be, if the current income tax deduction, which only benefits the small percentage of taxpayers who itemize, is replaced with a tax credit. The Congressional Research Service’s comprehensive review of the data points out the difficulty in making these assessments. What we know is that lowering the value of charitable deductions for those in the highest tax brackets, while increasing the giving power of people of modest means, would democratize who gives and encourage nonprofits to court the interests, and therefore the more diverse preferences, of a broader range of Americans.

A charitable tax credit could be structured to apply to all gifts, excluding the first $100, equal to 20 percent of the contribution, with the tax credit for gifts to private foundations limited to 15 percent. In this way, no matter where one is on the income ladder, or whether one itemizes deductions, a $500 charitable contribution would get an $80 tax credit ($500 less $100 exclusion multiplied by 20 percent). The $100 exclusion reduces both the cost of the tax subsidy and of administration.

As we enter a third year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the nation faces no shortage of crises. Yet the US donor class remains stingy. A study by University of California, Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman found that in 2018 the 20 wealthiest Americans gave 0.8 percent of their wealth to charity; and, if you exclude Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, that number falls to 0.3 percent. At the same time, most of the wealthiest private foundations, with a few exceptions, stick to the five percent minimum legal payout. Rather than subsidies that fail to produce much-needed public investments, the donor class needs a kick in its assets. The proposal I outline here would provide at least a meaningful start.

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

Last year NPQ published an article by Dax-Devlon Ross titled “Generational Differences in Racial Equity Work” that really resonated with our readers. Increasingly, these differences are a dividing line in the work, especially in communities of color. We recently hosted a conversation with a few leaders of color working with this challenge, including Ross, to learn more about it and what we could be doing.

Context

The context for these generational differences in racial justice work is a period of social justice movements, some say a transition between a dying worldview and an emerging one. It is a time when power is being challenged across the board in society. Political philosophers Hardt and Negri’s observe in Assembly that the main challenge to social change leaders now is organization, or more specifically, leadership and decision making. They write,

We need to take up the problem of leadership under current conditions and investigate two primary tasks: how to construct organization without hierarchy; and how to create institutions without centralization. (14)

They call this nonsovereign leadership and argue that it “marks a profound break from the political logics of modernity,” or from representative democracy to participatory democracy (14). Sovereignty, in contrast, is exclusive in the right to decision making. They propose that “for a multitude to take power a first requirement is this: to invent new, nonsovereign institutions” (39).

In particular, the Black Lives Matter movement moved many organizations to make promises to change practices that harm people of color, especially Black people. Nonprofit organizations, many with decades-long records of predominantly white leadership, who had resisted systemic change, are finally hiring leaders of color as a way to address long-term (often inaugural) organizational racial justice issues.

Now, leaders of color are being tasked with shifting dominant culture organization—but to what? A term used, one that I propose in my book The Power Manual, is “liberatory.” Leaders at the edge are exploring how to build liberatory organizations. But, many have not ever experienced it. And this is actually a field-level issue, as Hard and Negri point out, not simply a leadership issue.

Generational Conflict Is an Issue

Kad Smith, a millenial nonprofit consultant at CompassPoint says,

 This is exactly what I’ve been experiencing…as a leader in an organization, experiencing it as an intermediary partnering with organizations that are doing power building, everything from power building organizations to kind of more traditional big wig, white-led nonprofits, some elements of what Dax was speaking about was a direct reflection of my day to day.

Angela Romans, a Gen Xer and Founding Executive Director of Innovation for Equity, says,

Five years ago, I was co-leading an organization’s internal DEI work with a Latina millennial woman. Our working group actually had three generations: Baby Boomers, Gen X’s, and Millennials. And these conversations started showing up…. Our leadership team was majority people of color. And we felt a lot of challenge from our “younger” folks who are in less positional authority saying, why aren’t you doing better? And we were an organization that led racial equity work outside. Our external work was on point! But internally, our folks were like, “Y’all are not walking the talk.”…Now I work with leaders of color, mostly Black leaders. And I’m seeing these nuances continue to happen….What can we do about it? What’s my role in helping to be more liberatory in my behavior?

Sean Thomas-Breitfeld, a Gen Xer and Co-Executive Director of Building Movement Project, whose work explores generational and racial differences in leadership, says,

I teach a class on race and inclusion in nonprofit organizations, and it’s interesting and sometimes challenging talking about organizational change….It happens…in the workplace…these differing perspectives about what it takes to make change and what the standard should be around equity inside of organizations and as an instructor.

Ross, a Gen Xer, and an author and equity consultant, says,

We need to talk about these things, because if this is showing up here, here, and here, then there’s something going on. And so that was what inspired me to write, and I think why I’m in this conversation right now is because as I continue to talk to folks who feel like they can reveal themselves—especially the folks in sort of the elder side of the spectrum, and when I say that, I mean folks who are older Gen X, and even younger Baby Boomer—I find just a lot of internal conflict, a lot of it linked to the choices they made in order to become who they became in the world, and under the belief that that was the way to do it. And to have that be upended and questioned, I think it creates a lot of strong emotion. And there’s not a place for that to be articulated without it being perceived as if you’re just salty. And I think it’s more complicated than that. And I think it needs to be made more nuanced.

Mistinguette Smith, a baby boomer and nonprofit consultant, says,

I am someone who turns 60 this year. I am someone who started doing work helping organizations do their work around racial equity 30 years ago. And I am preparing to leave this space. And I am trying to discern what I need to ensure that I leave behind and not just take with me.

The Points of Tension

Thomas-Breitfeld observes that there are differences in what it means for an organizational workplace to be equitable. This is exacerbated by the fact that positional power often overlaps with age, so older people with more experience tend to be in leadership. And, he highlights, this is further complicated when the leader is a person of color.

For so many leaders of color, their path to having positional power was very fraught, and often extended, in comparison to what they’ve seen of their white peers. And there’s this sense, which was put perfectly in a focus group that I did in Memphis a few years ago, where someone said, “Look, I have all these young people who are trying to get me to give up my positional power without recognizing that I just got here.”

We’re seeing a lot of transitions, and a lot of people of color moving into those executive leader positions newly. And it happens to coincide with a time when we’re also contesting what executive leadership means, and what kind of power people should wield, and it’s hard, I think, for those of us as leaders of color to not somehow feel like our leadership is being contested in part because of our race.

Ross adds that people expect more from leaders of color and there is often lack of agreement about who’s vision leads the organization.

That contestation could also be from a place of, “But I do also expect more from you.” I think that that in and of itself could be a problem. It’s not just that I see you as someone I can challenge, but I see you as actually someone who I expect to hold accountable. I implicate boards in this as well, because I think what a lot of boards have done is used it as a cover: “Let’s go get a person of color in here, and let’s have that be the thing that we’re going to do to address our challenges around diversity, equity, and inclusion, and not really have a deeper conversation about what our politics are.

Thomas-Breitfeld agrees. He has seen this trend of boards hiring leaders of color to address organizational equity and justice issues without appropriate support and resources.

We did a set of interviews with organizations here in New York, where we talked to the outgoing white leader, the incoming leader of color, and someone who was on the board. And what Dax is describing absolutely was true of that small sample, that a lot of boards were trying to solve for DEI challenges that had been leveled against the white predecessor by replacing that person with a person of color.

And so then what happens is: that person of color comes in and still has to lead the organization, grow the organization, and we know that funders are not always as supportive of people of color as they claim they’re going to be. So they’re going to do that and also have to do all the cleanup from the DEI mess of their predecessor.

Oftentimes people complain about the executive director job not being sustainable anyway, but I think these are the sorts of situations that make it particularly burdensome and unsustainable for executive leaders of color.

Mistinguette Smith also agrees and adds that often leaders of color do not have the power to make the changes asked of them.

And what is implicit and often not safe for a person in that position to say is, “I just got here, and I don’t yet have the power to do the things you want. In fact, I’m not sure I have the power to protect you. Power is not positional, power is accrued over    time, and I just got here.” That is never explicitly on the table, but I take a lot of phone calls from people who want to talk about that privately.

And she adds a crucial element, Black people are often working outside their cultural values, especially in how they deal with conflict.

And there’s another piece that’s connected to that, for me, that is specific to Black people. We know that we often finally get hired for the thing that we were qualified for 15 years ago because they now need a brown person to come do the HazMat cleanup. And we’re doing that, and the hazardous material we’re trying to clean up is distrust. And all of us do trust-based work based in the cultures we come from. And one of the things that is hardest for me, having seen what is now the third wave of work toward racial justice happening in the nonprofit/social sector, is that this is the first time I’m seeing African American people trying to do that work based    not in African American cultural values, but in nonprofit cultural values.

In traditional African American culture, what challenge looks like and how challenge is responded to looks way different than what I’m seeing in meeting rooms where people say things to an elder who’s been holding it up for 20 years with no dollars and no public support such as, “Well, if you had done a better job, we wouldn’t have to be here at all.” Like that is not a thing that would have happened inside of African American culture but is actually vaunted in nonprofit culture.

This resonates with Kad Smith, who shares that being raised by his grandmother informs what he perceives as acceptable challenges and unacceptable ones. And, he adds that there is a polarity between younger people feeling there’s not enough time and older leaders feeling they just got here.

It can be particularly tough for folks to show up in those conversations with humility and with an open ear towards, “Well, what am I missing about your experience that would help me bridge the gap between what it is that we both think is getting in the way—but are coming to conclusions around why it’s getting in the way and how it’s getting in the way from very different places?”

Perhaps this and the next exchange captures the heart of the challenge.

Ross sees a conflation of organizing work and nonprofit work.

Such that people think that they’re working for social justice organizations when actually they’re working for sometimes really mainstream organizations that do some social service work. That’s not actually what they were set up to do. And you want it to now be social justice work, but that’s not actually what it is. So you need to find some place to do your movement work.

Kad Smith asks how these apparent polarities become more integrated.

I’m working with organizations that are using radical approaches to pedagogy, radical frameworks, in environments that I wouldn’t from first glance say are conducive to it….So if we’re going to be really trying to be bold and imaginative and radical in our approach, where does it also get paired with some pragmatism and some practicality of what that’ll look like when we get into the work?

To summarize, the generational conflicts these leaders are seeing are:

1. Lack of agreement about what it means for an organization to be equitable
2. People expecting more from leaders of color than from white leaders
3. Lack of agreement about whose vision leads the organization
4. Leaders of color not having the power or resources to make the changes asked of them
5. Black people are often working outside their cultural values
6. Polarity between younger people feeling there’s not enough time and older leaders feeling they just got here
7. Disagreement about whether nonprofits and movements occupy different spaces, or whether they need to be somehow more integrated

What Can Be Done?

I recall one very powerful moment, a few years ago, at the Race Forward conference in Detroit. There was a panel of Native leaders on climate justice comprised of an elder and two young leaders. There was a point at which the elder stopped one of the younger people who was speaking, to correct him. And she did so so lovingly, and so gracefully. And the younger person stopped and thanked her, was very grateful for her correction. I remember being captivated by that interaction and thinking, “Well, that’s really different.”

Romans takes this up, calls it “the gentle correction,” and asks,

Culturally, where’s the space for gentle correction? And how is that taken on the side of folks who are managing up, saying, you know, I really need you to do this differently. And also the older folks who are in positions of authority who are trying to gently correct folks who are younger, and they’re not having it. It’s triggering on both sides.

How do we touch and connect with those cultural spaces, the cultural traditions that we have of correction, on both sides? Sort of up and down and across and all around? That’s not how, traditionally, nonprofits have operated. And how do we do this in the political social climate that we’re in right now where nothing is gentle?

Romans is also seeing more entrepreneurship at a younger age.

I’m seeing more folks at younger ages get in positions of leading an organization, being the highest leader of an organization. It’s the “I don’t want to stay in an organization for 20 years and not be recognized and not see progress. Therefore, I’m going to start my own.”

Also, I’m seeing some of those leaders advance through organizations more quickly now, because there is that push from boards, from other external places to put a leader into that position, put a person of color in a position of power to clean up the mess, all the things that folks have said, to do that damage control.

And that is, I think, raising a lot of questions for me. Will they do it better than we did, than the folks who toiled? How could they do it better? What could we learn from them? And how can we share some lessons learned with them in the spirit of being intentional about, as Dax was saying in his article, telling the story.

Kad Smith sympathizes with both sides, but notes there is a need for humility, empathy, and synchronicity.

I can’t imagine what it would feel like to be in an organization for 20 years, and only on my 18^th and 19^th year feel like we’re starting to make the progress that I thought was possible two decades ago. Comparably, can you imagine what it feels like to be someone who’s excited to come into a career and to be completely disillusioned to a sector that says it wants to do one thing with these very particular vehicles and seemingly is doing something entirely different. So I think it’s about the perspective piece and about the humility of willing to be empathetic. I mean really, truly be empathetic to where people are coming from and the totality of lived experiences that keep them in the work. How does that make us stronger as people who choose to be a part of organizations? So it is different than a family, it is different than the community. We’re choosing to be here. And that choice grants us   access to the membership that then means that there’s a certain level of accountability we have to one another when we start to talk about how differences are not actually helping us move in a synchronized way.

For him, having mentors who share and are adaptable is important.

The organizations I partner with don’t seem to have that practice really developed, especially when we’re talking about BIPOC leadership. But when you have access to mentors who can give you the game, who can tell you what it’s been like, and can also show that they can adapt and care for you, that is an invaluable resource for new leaders.

When we see folks modeling what it looks like to adapt as a leader, and that can take shape in many different ways and forms, paired with creating and prioritizing the space to connect and really be able to share what is it that makes us want to be a part of this organization. I think that goes a long way.

Finally, he’s committing to addressing ageism as well as racism.

Ageism is one of those things that I used to always think about it towards one end of the spectrum, for myself, being a young person told that grown folks are talking. It wasn’t until I got into adulthood that I realized that ageism is a very real phenomenon that our elders experience, and I can now see that so much more clearly. Conflict cannot be pathologized to the point where ageism continues to play out in ways that actually makes our efforts significantly weaker. Every organization that’s doing racial equity work should be thinking about how ageism intersects in their specific context.

Romans agrees that mentorship is important, and connects it to succession that builds liberatory organizations.

Doing that in a way that is intentional and thoughtful is important. We talked about the “I just got here,” but some of them really didn’t just get there. And so what does it mean for folks to be able to rest? Does that mean you need to trust me more? Does that mean I need to show some mastery that you’re not seeing from me? Does that mean there’s a retirement plan for you? What do you need?

She also wants to see more spaces for intergenerational conversations,

Some of that is desperation, out of pain, of not having their voices heard and not knowing where there are spaces for that to happen. So I think building on Mistinguette’s point about more intentional intergenerational spaces for conversation, for storytelling, for trust-building, and funding that. Because there’s a need for that.

Mistinguette Smith notes that community care goes both ways. For example, older leaders of color should be cared for financially as they leave the work.

Whereas, particularly for Black people, and also for other people of color, moving out of organizational leadership doesn’t mean moving out of community, doesn’t mean moving out of the movement. What it often means, though, is falling off of a financial cliff. And so the holding on is not about holding on to community and meaning the way it is for white leaders; it is literally holding on to the ability to pay the gas bill.

She shares an experience she had when she ran into Black feminist leader Barbara Smith at a conference.

She talked about how one of the things that was really meaningful, was having younger people who are discovering her life’s work anew also discovering that she is currently living with financial insecurity and doing something about that. So, thinking about community care as not just a thing for younger people but as an intergenerational obligation.

I help people experience what that looks like in small bits of practices. A small example of which is facilitating a conversation that was a Black Native dialogue about land, holding a ritual where we were helping young people learn that you don’t eat until your elders are all holding a plate, and having that cultural, spiritual ritual be really meaningful for those who serve, even though their noses were out of joint at first, and also those who were served, because they have been hungering for that literal and cultural food.

For Thomas-Breitfeld, it’s unpacking individualism.

I think some of that boils down to real deep conflict around individualism versus what is the kind of community that people are having in mind? It would be interesting to unpack that, because I do think that there’s a level of hyperindividualism that lets the critique of elders and critique of leaders of color run wild in ways that can potentially be undermining of the institutions that everyone is actually a part of.

Ross hopes that we can make space for Black leadership to express itself in multiple ways.

There is room for a variety of different kinds of Black leaders and Black leadership, and they don’t all have to only live in this specific orthodoxy. Let’s not expect them to show up in the particular kind of ways we say they must. Or we fall into the binary trap once again. And that binary trap which we recognize has always created problems.

So what can we do to begin to address intergenerational differences in racial justice work?

1. Practicing humility and empathy when engaging across difference
2. More entrepreneurship, starting new organizations
3. Seeking synchronicity over agreement
4. Being mentors who share and are adaptable
5. Addressing racism and agism
6. Supporting leadership transitions to build liberatory organizations
7. Creating more spaces for intergenerational conversations
8. Expanding beyond individualism and the organizational frame, to practicing community care
9. Supporting multiplicity in Black leadership

The nonprofit sector faces a challenge: creating social change organizations that support multiple and synchronous types of leadership. Leaders of color are at the forefront of this challenge. But the sector is not supporting them. It’s time to take on the challenge, especially those who care about organizational development, leadership, and infrastructure. Let’s move beyond foundation-sponsored affinity groups for leaders of color. These are not simply leader-level issues. We need experimentation with higher-level organization that incorporates what exists into something bigger. The nature of growth and transformation is integration and complexification. This is an evolution in how we organize ourselves for social justice.

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: Information, the Media, and Economic Justice.” View the full webinar here.

Candice Fortman: We have this boredom, sometimes, as people who work in this industry: “Well, you know, I told this story, I’m moving on to my next story, because it’s about me, right? It’s about what my interests are, the things I think will help me become a popular, successful journalist. The things that’ll help me win awards.”  

It can’t be about you. You have to remove yourself from the conversation and center your community. And that means that if you write five stories about bus transportation every week for the next five years until somebody fixes the bus system, oh well! Here we still are, writing the same story until something changes. And I think that that is not how we have thought; we’ve stopped thinking about news in that way, that you continue to tell a story until it catches. 

I think that’s why I love the fact that I didn’t come out of J-school (journalism). I came from a marketing and public relations background, and so that means that I was taught that your audience does not hear a message until maybe the tenth or twentieth time that you’ve said that message. They are actually not listening to you the first time. So that means that if you take that sort of idea of marketing and PR, and you put it into the production of journalism, that means you should be telling and writing that same story over and over again, until something actually changes. 

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