Tag Archives: nonprofit quarterly

This article is the third in our series—Community Development: National Leaders’ Visions—that NPQ, in partnership with the CEO Circle, an informal network of BIPOC community economic development leaders, is publishing in the coming weeks. The series focuses on identifying what is required to address key transformational challenges and to help the field of community economic development better accomplish its twin missions of racial and economic justice.

NeighborWorks America‘s roots reside in a Central North Side neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Our organization was modeled after one woman’s attempt to fight back against redlining and the attacks she faced from various entities to marginalize and erase the community she called home. That woman was Dorothy Richardson, and the year was 1968. The same year, the Fair Housing Act was written into law, and homeownership in communities of color hovered around 40 percent. As we know, in an outcome that is, in turn, both shocking and yet not surprising, the percentage of Black homeowners has not changed significantly in more than 50 years. According to the NeighborWorks 2021 Housing and Financial Capability Survey, nationally, the homeownership rate is at 62 percent overall but remains at 42 percent for Blacks, far less than the 53 percent for Latinxs, 63 percent for Asians, and 69 percent for whites.

Over those 50 years, we have not invested enough in desperately needed affordable housing and community infrastructure. But money is only a starting point. If we expect to foster true economic equity and build community wealth for current and future generations that have been historically left out, we must do more than preserve and update homes. We must address the many root causes that have led to the economic stagnation that has harmed communities of color and many low-income white families, too, across the country, both in urban and rural areas.

Admittedly, the inequities may be too numerous to count. Still, as an organization with more than 40 years of housing and community development experience, we have learned that any community revitalization and stability program should include the community’s residents. Borrowing from the refrain of marginalized people from various walks of life throughout history, “Nihil de nobis, sine nobis”—translation: “nothing about us, without us”. We’ve come to understand that any change or investment within communities must include the residents of that community. History has given us far too many lessons on the damaging impact that uninformed planning and development have when a well-intentioned group of planners, investors, and policymakers decide what is best for a place they know nothing about. Not to mention the devastating consequences when well-meant plans are thrown out the window in the name of “capital improvement” and “eminent domain,” especially when neither is ever completed or never reaches past the leveled buildings and displacement of residents.

With history as our teacher, we also know that community/resident engagement can be the life force that sustains and stabilizes the spaces and places we all call home. It can foster economic improvement through housing affordability, provide social equity services, kick-start small business growth, and seed next-generation wealth. When it happens, the solutions not only benefit the immediate community, but they also bolster the larger community/city/town.

For example, Little Tokyo in downtown Los Angeles is one of three remaining Japantowns in the United States. At one point, it boasted a population of 30,000 Japanese Americans. In the fifties and sixties, large parcels of the land were claimed by eminent domain in the name of City Hall and infrastructure expansion. Over the years, as expansion continued, more and more residents, many of whom were seniors and lifelong residents, were displaced. Today, Little Tokyo is much smaller (a five-block area), but the voice of its residents, small businesses, cultural institutions, and stakeholders—and their power to inform the needs of their community—has never been stronger.

When city plans called for the construction of a regional light-rail hub, disrupting a major intersection in the community, Little Tokyo residents through the Little Tokyo Service Center, a NeighborWorks network organization, and their leaders helped the city see a different vision for the hub. The Little Tokyo Community Council—a cross-sector group of residents, community leaders, and business owners—began work in 2013 on a community-based visioning process that included equitable and sustainable development of three pieces of public, city-owned land. Their plan called for the Metro Regional Connector station to be constructed underground to minimize disruption while leaving the city-owned land available for development, guided and controlled by the community planning process. The new Sustainable Little Tokyo (SLT) plan was born, and it included affordable housing, commercial small business space, arts, and flexible-use space on the available land.

Erich Nakano, the group’s executive director said it best: “You cannot have comprehensive community development without considering who it benefits, and how it’s going to impact everyone.” There is more to the bottom line than the fiscal line regarding communities of color and legacy businesses. Little Tokyo’s SLT plan is designed to support residents who seek a community of culture—where their principles, ideas, and language are preserved, and their seniors protected. It is also accommodating and recruiting future generations through its services and amenities like community centers, retail stores, and restaurants—all while supporting legacy businesses that have long been the backbone of the neighborhood. In 2022, with the completion of a light rail project, Little Tokyo will also be the host to one of the largest regional transportation hubs in the city—supporting a robust community well into the future.

The community’s goal is to surround this hub with community-driven and -controlled development—serving low-income families and seniors, longtime businesses, and local artists and cultural institutions. Little Tokyo took a big step towards this goal when the new city councilmember created a lease on city-owned land across the street from the light rail station for Little Tokyo Service Center to build a project with 240-plus units of affordable housing and commercial and arts components, implementing the SLT vision. The community’s next target is to shape an upcoming RFP (request-for-proposals) process for the remaining large parcels of city land adjacent to the transit hub.

Accountability is not all about reinvestment—it is also about capacity building. NeighborWorks America has always been proud of our commitment to our network organizations; we are often “first-in” when it comes to investiture and grant-making for projects that we know are sound investments but may take years to develop. We recognize that the support and resources we provide are often the seed funds or

sometimes the sustaining funds for organizations that are genuinely struggling to compete and justify their visions for the work that will bolster the communities they serve. The challenges they face are often rooted in historical challenges to the very existence of their communities and the importance they hold to the families and businesses that trace their roots back several generations to these sacred spaces.

Madison Park Development Corporation (MPDC) is one such organization in one such place. The Roxbury community of Boston was once considered the heart of Black culture in Boston. Urban renewal, economic disparity, and suburban flight made their inevitable impact on the community as Lower Roxbury became an easy target for blockbusting and bulldozers. The founders of MPDC and the community residents fought hard to keep their homes, businesses, and community. While the city had plans to develop a giant campus space that included a central city high school and a park, the residents of Lower Roxbury through the Lower Roxbury Community Corporation (now MPDC) came up with their vision for Madison Park Village.

The Madison Park Village plan, one of the first community resident-designed development plans in the country—included townhomes, senior living, and mixed-use space. Fifty-five years later, they are still building on that plan. The residents of Lower Roxbury understand that the burden for ensuring the viability of their community is a shared one. Beyond developing a plan, they have worked at the state and federal levels to demonstrate they are the appropriate conduit for community investment funds in their community and require their fair share. In addition to affordable rental units and subsidized properties, they have worked to make their properties more than just tax-credit eligible. They have leveraged their impact to ensure that their community is not dwarfed by new development and leveraged an anti-displacement policy that works to bridge inequity through homeownership.

Madison Park in Boston and Little Tokyo in Los Angeles are very different communities that exemplify workable solutions while highlighting the challenges exacerbated when accountability is missing from the equation. Without accountability, decline and disinvestment can take root. We find ourselves trying to restore and maintain entire blocks of disrepair to keep things up and running, unable to invest in projects or community priorities that would propel them forward. It also ensures that the community’s needs are addressed and facilitates growth and sustainability.

Accountability also ensures we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past and learn from the lessons that decimated far too many communities, especially those of color, in the name of progress. A point driven home by Madison Park executive director Leslie Reid, who talks about the Sankofa (a mythical bird with its feet firmly planted forward with its head turned backward) and its meaning: go back to the past and bring forward that which is useful. “Our People, families, and businesses are the fabric of our communities, and they deserve respect and a seat at the table. We’ve seen what happens when they are not there, and we can’t let that happen again!”

It is not enough to invest in education, housing, and jobs unless these investments are made with the people and equity in mind. Yes, of course, it is important to fix the roads, expand the access to and affordability of broadband in rural areas, invest and improve faltering homes, and protect affordable units. Still, in doing so, governments must work with communities and their residents so that the residents can be a part of the solution. It will take a cross-sector approach of government, business, and nonprofits working together to stabilize the economy; bridge the health, wealth, and education gaps; and foster future generations of wealth through homeownership, affordable housing, and community development.

Playing communities short does not work. Today, we have an opportunity to invest in strategies that address immediate issues but also could provide long-term stability. The time is upon us to act with both present-day needs and a bold vision for the future in mind.

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

I first read about the Historic Clayborn Temple in history books. The church served as the home base for Memphis sanitation workers organizing and striking against unsafe and inhumane working conditions faced by Black garbage collectors. This strike took place during the height of the Civil Rights Movement in 1968 and produced the powerful “I AM A MAN” images that many of us remember. And it was while supporting those sanitation workers, just a half mile away at the Lorraine Motel on April 4^th of that year, that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.

One of the last trips I took before the pandemic was to visit Anasa Troutman in Memphis to learn more about her restorative development strategy to reclaim the Historic Clayborn Temple as an anchor for a local economy rooted in love, dignity, and collective well-being.

To me, the temple is a humble reminder that the solutions to our most pressing problems are not always shiny and new. The Temple remains standing through years of disrepair, as a symbolic representation of longtime Black residents confronting the push-and-pull of displacement and gentrification. It’s a sacred space for dreaming and building a future world where Black people, and all oppressed people, can come together and heal through building and creating projects and systems that treat all people with care and dignity.

Under Anasa’s visionary leadership, a leadership council of 23 longtime residents from North and South Memphis serve as the governing body for the Temple’s restoration. The council aims to develop the site as a cultural center and economic hub for a local restorative economics strategy rooted in resident-owned housing, cooperative food systems, and worker-owned businesses. Historic Clayborn Temple is a beautiful articulation of what is possible when workers and residents are not limited to fighting for their deserved rights but have the skills and resources to build the communities and livelihoods they want. What is possible is not reduced to what others are willing to give.

Oppressed people around the world have fought for freedom, liberation, and the right to self-determination for hundreds of years. Whether revolting against fascist powers or organizing a protest to win human rights, the compulsion for autonomy and agency over our lives, livelihood, and well-being cannot be denied. We might not be able to describe a place that we have never seen, but we will intuitively know in our body once we have arrived at that place of freedom and joy.

While it is hard to imagine economic models beyond present-day capitalism, it is becoming clearer that our current economic system is deepening the chasm between the haves and have nots at the expense of communities on the frontlines of climate justice, economic disinvestment, and state-sanctioned violence.

Restorative economics invites us to envision what a just economy might look like—to remake society with structures and systems that honor our humanity, invest in our collective healing and well-being, and help us transition towards a model of democratic governance where all communities can live and thrive together.

Restorative Justice and Economics

To end the racial wealth gap and transform our economy, we must first restore and make whole communities that have been harmed and excluded from our current economy. This form of reparations may look like investing in the infrastructure, social programs, and services that make a community strong and vibrant—such as water management systems, public preschool education, or raising the national minimum wage. In other words, restorative economics strategically reinvests resources back into economically oppressed communities so that they can develop the capacity and skills necessary to identify their community economic development priorities.

Achieving those economic objectives also requires engaging in a restorative justice process where we name and acknowledge the economic, and therefore social and political, harm that has been done; understand the root causes of that harm; and identify practices to ensure that those harms are not repeated. Going through a process of accountability, reconciliation, and restitution means:

• Refusing to ignore the harm created by present-day economic policies and practices in Black, Indigenous, and all communities of color
• Centering the needs and interests of those most impacted by an unjust and extractive economy
• As much as possible, restoring those who have been harmed and make them whole, so they can actively participate in creating the next economy.

Why Do We Need Restorative Economics?

In our current market-based, hyper-capitalist system, profit maximization comes first. The consequences are evident: the constant erosion and undermining of rights, protections, and job quality for workers; exploitation of labor from undocumented immigrants and incarcerated people; water and air pollution which exacerbates climate chaos; putting holes in the social safety net; and more. This holy grail of profit by any means necessary ends up amassing and consolidating wealth and power within the hands of a few. And, in the United States, those few hands tend to be white and male.

In 1971, Lewis Powell, later a US Supreme Court justice, addressed a memo to the US Chamber of Commerce. Powell’s memo served as a guide for how corporations should position themselves to take over US democracy. This manifesto, which Greenpeace has labeled a Corporate Blueprint to Dominate Democracy, demonstrates the deliberate and rigorous commitment of corporations to consolidate their power at the expense of vulnerable and oppressed people. Nearly 50 years later, the average CEO earns 264 times more than the average worker’s wage within the same company.

Further compromising democratic control are rampant voter suppression tactics, corporate lobbyists, and laws like Citizens United. Transformation, not reformation, is needed to upend these and many other deeply entrenched injustices.

A Restorative Economics Theory of Change

The methodology of restorative economics leverages community-owned and -governed projects to bring residents together to create shared prosperity, self-determination, and collective power. Restorative economics fosters cultural, economic, and political power for impacted communities through its design, process, and outcomes.

Community Ownership for Shared Prosperity

Cooperative business models and collective ownership are not new ideas. In the South, Ella Josephine Baker helped organize the Young Negro Cooperative League in the 1930s to help Black families leverage their combined resources to boost purchasing power and reduce the cost of goods and services to fellow cooperative members.

Looking back, we can see the creative ways our families and community members supported one another outside of our dominant economic systems. For example, there is the practice of sou-sous, akin to giving circles, in West African traditions, and the Islamic practice of not accepting riba, or charged interest. What may be new is our ability to proliferate and formalize practices of solidarity in the face of global capitalism.

Proposed solutions to addressing structural racism and systemic barriers often focus on identifying social benefits to support disproportionately impacted communities. This may look like creating more entry-level jobs through a workforce development program for residents in underemployed zip codes or creating more green space in urban neighborhoods. While elected officials, corporate contractors, and speculative investors tell impacted communities to be appeased by these benefits, they are earning even more profits, deepening the racial wealth divide—the root cause of the structural barriers that were supposed to be addressed in the first place.

This is not sufficient. Economically oppressed communities need to control capital and exercise agency over their day-to-day lives. Prioritizing investments into projects that are community-owned and stewarded means the project, program, or business is structured so that profits are distributed among all community members. Having an explicit community ownership structure—be it a cooperative, member collective, or multi-member limited liability corporation—helps ensure shared prosperity and builds community wealth, as opposed to benefitting a wealthy individual or corporation.

Governing for the Common Good

What would it look like to have our democratic values shape our economy, instead of having a capitalist economy that shapes our democracy?

Governance is both about how decisions are made—the structures and processes—and who makes the decisions. A focus on the common good invites lawmakers, public administrators, voters, and the public to engage in a process of deep democracy through collaborative governance that fosters transparency, shared understanding, and healing. This includes studying facts and figures, listening to individual experiences, and weighing pros and cons to comprehensively understand a problem and collectively craft a solution before casting a vote.

Governing for the common good emphasizes that when the most vulnerable and impacted community members can live, work, play, and love with dignity, then the rest of society will be able to do so as well. When certain populations are disproportionately impacted by different systems, we must center their voices and interests.

Angela Glover Blackwell, founder of PolicyLink, refers to this as the “curb cut effect.” When disability rights activists won the 1990 Americans with Disability Act, one of the first steps local governments took was to cut the curbs out of sidewalks, making it easier for wheelchair users to use sidewalks. This also made the sidewalk more accessible for people with walkers, pushing strollers, jogging, riding bikes, and more. The law prioritized people with disabilities as the impacted population, and one of the benefits was an improvement in the quality of life for many more people.

Building Power 

The transition to a more just and equitable economy involves not only redistributing wealth and changing how decisions are made, but also shifting power. Power is the ability to have choice and exercise agency in making decisions that shape our lives and well-being, and then having access to the resources to implement those decisions. Restorative economics analyzes how power shows up in communities in three different realms that shape one another: culture, economics, and politics.

Cultural Power encompasses the values, norms, and traditions of society. While many subcultures exist, a wealthy elite exercise outsized influence. These values can be seen in today’s economy in the extraction of natural resources from the planet; exploitation of people’s labor, knowledge, and resources; a growing concentration of wealth; exclusion of vast numbers from participation in the economy; and the consolidation of power into the hands of the few. These values manifest in a narrative of bootstrapping, meritocracy, and “entitlement” programs for the poor.

Economic Power builds upon cultural power by using the values and norms of society (extraction, exclusion, exploitation, accumulation, and control) to shape how goods and services are exchanged between people and businesses. For example, national campaigns like OUR Walmart and One Fair Wage have been organizing to raise the minimum wage to a more livable $15 per hour. This economic campaign includes a cultural narrative strategy that challenges the notion that people should get the bare minimum needed to stay alive, insisting instead on the right to live with dignity on a 40-hour workweek. The interplay between cultural and economic power is important because centering new values can reshape how money, services, and products are exchanged.

Political Power speaks to policies and practices that can be upheld in a court of law, through legislation, or judicial precedent. Political power cements the norms and values that govern how goods and services move throughout society and establishes the legal infrastructure to defend their right to do so. This is an ongoing struggle to determine who has which rights to do what with. Ultimately, political power determines what rights we can exercise in society and defend in the court of law.

Conclusion

The framework of restorative economics provides a roadmap—albeit one with forks, detours, twists, and turns—to arrive at a just and equitable economy.

As always, the challenge lies in the implementation. Restorative economics asks us to prioritize five guiding principles: democratic governance, capacity building and human development, non-extractive integrated capital, power building through social movements, and systemic change.

Some of these principles may push funders to lean into unconventional approaches. For example, at the Kataly Foundation where I am CEO and managing director of our Restorative Economies Fund (REF), we are committed to an integrated capital strategy. Recognizing that 501c3 organizations are just one vehicle for change, and strategies like electoral organizing cannot be funded by grant dollars, we deploy different forms of capital to advance real solutions on the ground. This can include loans, loan guarantees, lines of credit, as well as non-financial support such as technical assistance.

The work is complex and unpredictable. We are called to redefine risk, to develop relationships with grantee partners that are deeply rooted in trust and respect, to have challenging conversations with peers, and more.

But these complexities and unpredictable moments make the work beautiful. I dream of the day when I can revisit the Historic Clayborn Temple in Memphis and see Anasa’s vision come to fruition. I do not know exactly what it will look like, but I know what it will feel like: freedom.

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

Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) leaders of environmental and climate nonprofits experienced a surge in support from US foundations in response to COVID-19 and the murder of George Floyd. But that tide of funding may already be receding, according to a report released last spring from the InDEEP initiative.

The Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity in Environmental Philanthropy (InDEEP) initiative interviewed 14 BIPOC nonprofit leaders for the report (Conservation, Environment, and Race: Implications for Funders). The scope of the work of the leaders we surveyed was broad and included people working in the fields of climate justice, food justice, energy advocacy, clean water, conservation, and biodiversity. The scale of the groups surveyed ranged from local organizations to national ones. Additionally, we incorporated data from InDEEP’s fall 2020 virtual learning series for funders.

The report aims to help funders engage more with BIPOC leaders, center BIPOC leaders and communities, challenge funders to advance racial equity, encourage funder engagement with BIPOC communities, build an equitable funding culture, and improve collaboration with BIPOC leaders and communities. InDEEP team members wrote the report in partnership with the Institute for Strategic and Equitable Development and the William and Flora Hewlett, David and Lucile Packard, and Doris Duke Charitable Foundations.

Many interviewees expressed concern that conservation and environmental funders could not recognize the connection between current crises—the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on BIPOC communities and the murders of Black people by police—and the endemic crises faced by Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities.

BIPOC leaders also worried that current levels of funding would drop significantly and that funding for projects focused on racial equity might disappear completely. A particular concern was a potential return to pre-COVID grantmaking practices, many of which were prohibitive to BIPOC-led groups receiving funding.

“Everybody got caught up in the sensationalism of Black Lives Matter this summer with George Floyd’s murder at the hands of the police. And all of a sudden, Black lives were put at the forefront,” said one BIPOC nonprofit leader.

“But as soon as they got tired, they started to digress, and now we’re back to the same old thing.… It’s going to perpetuate the same nonprofit industrial complex where 80 percent of funding goes to white organizations and 20 percent is given out to BIPOC leaders.”

These fears are hardly unfounded. BIPOC leaders have been discovered—and then forgotten—by philanthropy before. As Will Cordery wrote in NPQ, after the death of Michael Brown in 2014 at the hands of Darren Wilson of the Ferguson, Missouri police, a similar rush to fund BIPOC leaders occurred. But as Cordery reminds us,

It did not …take long for philanthropy to begin to shift its priority from funding Black-led movement to funding specific interventions it thought were best for Black communities. This distinction may seem minor, but it has proven to be critical in how resources would flow to Black-led organizing work and who determined what was ultimately the best approach. Less than three years after Mike Brown passed, the philanthropic commitment for Black-led movement work had largely unraveled.

BIPOC Communities and the Climate Emergency

One area that the interviews surfaced was funders’ difficulty applying an intersectional lens to conservation and environmental work concerning BIPOC communities. An intersectional lens marks an ability to draw connections between needs connected to personal identity and societal needs (e.g., a majority-Black community concerned about the school-to-prison pipeline and climate justice).

Climate justice is not a standalone issue; it has many layers and often affects majority-BIPOC communities far more harshly than predominantly white ones, due to a long history of environmental racism. Especially with the long, racist history of redlining in the US, Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities suffer the most.

Meanwhile, philanthropic work in the environmental sector can often be relegated to silos, obscuring the ways that people show up in the world—complex and as a sum of multiple identities. In the broader field, funders often see issues in black and white—emphasis on the white—and impose their own solutions on what they perceive to be the most important problem to address.

“Funders are not seeing the relationship between the work that we do [in connection to the field],” said one of the interview subjects. “I think part of combating anti-racism in the food system or in everyday [climate and environmental] issues is being able to see the interconnectedness of anti-Black racism, police brutality, and food access.”

“Funders like to think that they listen to us, but I really think that they have already decided what they want us to do,” another of the report’s interviewees said. “And we try to make our work fit [their priorities]. It would be nice if they just acknowledge they have a lot more power, influence, and control.”

This funder mindset is a barrier to addressing the climate crisis with the speed that is required. BIPOC leaders need funders to think outside the institutional box and engage in cross-movement, intersectional work if they want to solve big, thorny environmental justice issues in ways that are holistic and responsive to the lived experiences of Black and Brown people.

Working Together Yields Better Results

BIPOC leaders recommend that funders talk with BIPOC-led organizations to find out community needs, build trust, and make room for more meaningful collaboration.

“[The relationship between funders and grantees] shouldn’t be just about them giving us money,” one BIPOC leader said. “It should be more about, ‘how can I help you sustain yourself outside of this foundation funding?’ [And saying] ‘here’s some additional funds so that you can spin up a fundraising program.’”

These conversations also increase the likelihood of achieving environmental justice by expanding both the perspectives involved and overall support of the movement. That includes switching from looking at funding from a lens of scarcity and deficits to one of abundance and assets.

Interviewees were also asked to suggest actions funders can take to achieve these goals over the next five years. Key ideas that arose include:

• Cultivate relationships and networks (including shared power, accountability, trust, and [dismantling white normative] perceptions of leadership).
• Implement nontraditional funding policies, including collaborative funding opportunities.
• Simplify reporting processes.
• Support community-led needs assessments to identify community priorities.
• Provide rapid response investments to enable nimble community responses to immediate needs.
• Make funding commitments that involve multiyear general operating support.
• Be transparent and accountable, including by engaging in sustained outreach and development of BIPOC leaders and BIPOC-led organizations.
• Work with legislators and decision-makers by advocating for BIPOC-led movement work.
• Invest in the development of BIPOC leaders and BIPOC-led groups’ capacity.
• Foster donor affinity groups to accelerate learning and transformation.
• Develop external grantmaking processes with community advisory boards.

Some good news: the current political climate in the US creates new openings. The Biden-Harris administration acknowledged the need for more diverse voices and a more holistic approach to environmental issues when it announced the members of the newly formed Environmental Justice Advisory Council in March.

The council, which includes volunteers from across the United States, will provide recommendations to the administration on a wide range of connected subjects, such as fighting environmental racism, reducing pollution, and creating jobs. The administration also made an historic hire of Michael Regan, the first Black director in the US Environmental Protection Agency’s 51-year history.

“We know that we cannot achieve health justice, economic justice, racial justice, or educational justice without environmental justice. That is why President Biden and I are committed to addressing environmental injustice,” Vice President Kamala Harris stated in a press release.

Despite the move toward diversifying the federal government’s approach to environmental issues, funders must remember that while some of the recent challenges faced by BIPOC leaders and communities may have eased, the resource need has hardly diminished.

“There are plenty of ongoing crisis situations in BIPOC communities that need attention all the time,” a BIPOC interviewee said. “So some of these protocols about flexible funding that were special for COVID should be considered for [BIPOC] communities as the norm in the future because the emergency didn’t start this year and it’s not going to stop [after] this.”

If funders want to make a difference in the communities that are most impacted by the effects of climate change, they must listen to community leaders and let them lead.

“[I need funders to recognize] that there’s a whole relational component that is critical to making those funds be manifested in ways that are really mutually beneficial,” one BIPOC leader said.

Another chimed in: “Just start having conversations about what folks need and what they don’t need. I’m sure if a donor had a conversation with a BIPOC leader about what the needs were, they might say, ‘Oh, well, we didn’t realize that you just need, you know, extra access to vehicles, we can do that.’ I think there’s just this idea that the only way to support is to give money.”

A Path Forward

Fortunately, environmental philanthropy is growing more aware of the need to fund BIPOC-led organizations in the climate justice space. Fourteen US foundations have signed on to the Donors of Color Network’s Climate Funders Justice Pledge, promising transparency in their grant reporting and committing to “direct at least 30 percent of all climate giving to organizations run by, serving, and building power for communities of color” within two years. Two other organizations pledged to transparency only.

Seventeen foundations have also signed up for InDEEP’s latest offering, the Closing the Gap initiative, which aims to narrow the funding and resource gap between BIPOC-led and white-led organizations focused on fighting climate change. Attendees from each participating organization will engage in a six-month learning journey to gain a greater understanding of how climate and environmental grantmaking practices can be more inclusive.

The NGO Green 2.0 also offers a glimpse of accountability around staff and leadership diversity for the 40 largest nonprofits and foundations in the US with its annual Transparency Report Card. In 2020, Green 2.0 said several foundations outside of the top 40 volunteered their information so they could also be scored, with a total number of 13 foundations participating. Green 2.0 does this by gathering data submitted by the organizations to Guidestar by Candid.

Other individual foundations have made their own commitments and created programs designed to increase funding to BIPOC-led groups. The type of collective action seen in the Climate Funders Justice Pledge and the Closing the Gap initiative will hopefully lead to lasting equitable funding practices throughout the sector.

“You know, trying to foster a mentality of abundance, sharing, and of collaboration is going to be some big work for foundations,” said one person interviewed for the report. “The funders who have all the money and all the power, ultimately, have to say [they] want to foster collaboration. [They must] want to foster teamwork between organizations that have an affinity for each other as opposed to, you know, ‘y’all duke it out, and we’ll pick the best organization.’”

In the end, environmental philanthropy’s work is not just about climate justice. Leading with a people-first mindset instead of prioritizing policies allows funders to flip from an issues-based perspective to a values-based one.

“This is not about one particular issue,” Color of Change CEO Rashad Robinson told attendees of a two-day convening hosted by The Presidents’ Forum on Racial Equity in Philanthropy in late 2020. “People don’t experience issues, they experience life, and the forces that hold folks back are deeply interrelated.”

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

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

Last year marked the beginning of a racial reckoning, spurred by the tragic murder of George Floyd and a pandemic that disproportionately ravaged the wealth and health of non-white Americans. Across the country, white Americans found themselves pressed to recognize inequities that, for years, communities of color have been screaming into a void about. Given the complexity of social issues, rarely had structural racism’s presence and impact been so visibly documented.

Part of what has helped to provide white Americans with plausible deniability have been persistent myths which posit that inequity is the result of choices by individual people in BIPOC communities, rather than structural racism. Often those myths have resulted from poorly reported data, largely collected by white researchers.

As the deputy director and inaugural director of research at the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Initiative (LPPI), we understand the capacity of data intimately to tell new stories and help communities build power. With emerging interest in addressing structural racism, there is an opportunity to finally dispel harmful myths that undermine racial justice. However, to do so will require building the data and research infrastructure to help make visible those who have been ignored. It will also require investing in new stories that tell uncomfortable truths and which empower key stakeholders to build political power.

The harmful narratives that impact the lives of people of color should be familiar because they are so ubiquitous. They appear, for example, in stories about Latinx people being concentrated in low-wage work because of a lack of education rather than a system of workforce segregation that creates barriers to upward mobility. Or in stories that Black and Brown people have higher incarceration rates because they commit more crimes, rather than because their communities are overpoliced. Or in stories that Black Americans face higher unemployment rates because they don’t want to work rather than because there is bias in hiring practices.

Often, these narratives have been supported by dubious research and data that pathologizes and stereotypes marginalized communities. Frequently in these studies researchers mistake correlation for causation because the results confirm their preexisting beliefs. A famous example is the Moynihan Report of 1965, authored by future New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D). As controversial as the report was, even when it was published, it was still successful in creating a narrative of broken families as the reason for Black people’s various challenges that persists to this day. The report’s focus on Black family structure fed into preexisting ideas in white America about the lack of morality in Black families. This confirmation bias made it possible to convincingly blame Black Americans for their problems and ignore how intersecting systems like redlining and segregation have failed them intentionally. Such narratives not only lead to bad policy but also elide the countless contributions that people of color have made to build this country and strengthen democratic practice.

The same process is at work in Latinx communities. As Latinx numbers have grown, so too has negative reaction to their presence. Since the 1990s, research on immigrants, particularly those who are undocumented, has been used to portray Latinx people as takers and criminals rather than people who richly contribute to the nation’s social and economic fabric. That rhetoric, advanced by Donald Trump, helped his administration target immigrants through purposeful policy decisions that, among other things, separated children from their families. This led to children without parents being caged and unwanted hysterectomies on Latinas in federal detention centers.

These racist practices and narratives hide the immense contributions that Latinx people make in the US every day. For example, if the Latinx population of the US was its own country, that nation would be the 7th largest economy globally. Latinx people also have the highest workforce participation of any racial or ethnic group.

Over the years, activists have opposed narratives that buttress structural racism. Yet this debunking task has often been hindered by a lack of comprehensive data and research. As any good social science researcher knows, the questions we ask often greatly influence the answers we receive. As more and more researchers of color are positioned to ask questions, the resulting data and insights provide tools for rejecting old racist narratives and recasting public policy to truly begin to dismantle structural racism.

For example, a study that connected the stress of racism to higher pre-term birth rates in Black women is pushing policymakers to promote health equity in Black communities, such as the recent “Momibus” bill passed in California. Similar studies can and must inform policy and practice in Indigenous, Latinx, and other communities.

To dispel harmful stereotypes and narratives, comprehensive, reliable, and standard repositories of data that document the needs, challenges, and most importantly, the untapped opportunities within communities that historically have been neglected are needed. Key steps must include:

1. Build community visibility.
2. Put a critical lens on policy.
3. Dissect how well-intentioned interventions do not always lead to good outcomes for all communities.
4. Be responsive to issues and crises in real-time.

At LPPI, we seek to pursue these goals. Most recently, this involved mobilizing data to illustrate how state and federal policy were helping to reinforce the racially disparate impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Data was key to understanding that Latinx communities were not being prioritized in access to vaccines even though they were one of the most adversely impacted by the pandemic. Data also illuminated that the distribution of loans through the Payment Protection Program widened pre-pandemic racial inequalities.

These are just a couple of examples showing how critical closing data gaps is to understanding social and economic issues and addressing specific challenges communities face. Alas, remaining data gaps are large. For example, because of how racial and ethnic information is collected in the juvenile justice system, Latinx youth are often undercounted. Thus, specific interventions to address Latinx populations are not prioritized and do not receive sufficient funding.

An investment in data collection is not just good for identifying issues. It can also prod action, as well as support evaluation afterward. When there is a data void, decision-makers can easily shirk responsibility for poor outcomes. Once data gaps are filled, it is easier for advocates to tell a new story and hold public officials accountable.

But closing data gaps alone won’t set us free. Researchers must build relationships with the people who might employ their findings or the data they identify might remain unused. This, too, is part of the critical narrative infrastructure-building work. In an era when “fake news” is on the rise, authentic relationships are essential.

Additionally, investment in the communication of research results to tell new stories is needed. Social science researchers must understand their roles, not just as research conductors but as data partners and storytellers. Such was the case when the co-founders of our center provided expert testimony and data analysis during congressional hearings laying the groundwork and the evidentiary basis to support H.R. 4, the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Enhancement Act.

This kind of engagement, especially by researchers of color, is key to developing more intentional public policy that places equity at its center. Researchers must come out of their ivory towers to become trusted partners and arm policymakers with the data and arguments needed to navigate increasingly polarized political environments effectively.

The racial justice uprising of 2020 provides an opening for change. But without data and research that shines a light on structural racism and debunks false, harmful narratives that reinforce racist assumptions, critical truths may remain hidden, with the risk that inequity is entrenched rather than rooted out.

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