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As we emerge from a global pandemic, there is growing recognition that so much of our food system has its roots in unjust systems of land theft, slavery, and extractive capitalism. We are commodifying things that should be basic human rights—access to food, health, dignity via livable wages and safe conditions, land, and home.

I work at the Midwest Organic & Sustainable Education Service (MOSES). We started as one of the early advocates of the “organic food” movement. But the organic movement is changing. The goal is no longer just organic products people can buy, but rather a broader and deeper movement for environmental and food justice.

In particular, we believe a solidarity economy for organic agriculture, sometimes known as “regenerative agriculture,” can be part of a more equitable and resilient system that puts farmers, workers, and eaters in control—not large corporations. Clearly, the country has a long way to go, but through connecting existing models already familiar to farmers and eaters, we are encouraged.

Understanding the Nation’s Current Fragile Food System

While advocates see a lot of hope ahead, this is no reason to lose sight of the fact that the current US food system has been swallowed by corporate monopolies that control the supply chain from seeds to grocery stores. Human-scale farms are going out of business, gutting rural communities. Even the organic label, with its hard-fought standards meant to codify soil-building practices and environmental stewardship, is being watered down by large corporations.

As the Farm Action Alliance reports, four multinational meatpackers in the US control 54 percent of poultry processing, 66 percent of pork packing, and 85 percent of beef packing. As eaters, we are all impacted. Cheap food is not cheap. Hidden costs include chronic disease, obesity, and farmland lost. But the current food system is not broken; it is functioning as intended, with only a select few profiting while farmers and workers along the food supply chain are unable to make a living income.

The cost for small farmers has been high. The farmer’s share of the retail dollar has fallen from 50 percent in 1952 to 16 percent today, according to the National Farmers Union. For many Black and Indigenous farmers, and farmers of color, the situation is more dire.

Resistance to addressing this imbalance is intense. Discrimination against Black farmers is well documented; the Pigford settlement provided $2.3 billion in belated compensation, but was only a fraction of the estimated $250-$350 billion loss that Black farmers have suffered.

The Biden administration has sought to make partial amends, but the $4 billion in the American Rescue Plan set aside for Black farmer debt relief has been held up due to a lawsuit brought by white farmers in Wisconsin; implausibly, the plaintiffs claim that remedying past discrimination suffered by farmers of color would harm them.

A shift to center the planet and people in our farming system is critical. Globally agriculture accounts for roughly 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Decades of corporate control over seeds and fossil fuel-based fertilizers, and the harmful pesticides designed to be used with them, define this extractive way of farming. It has promoted farmers’ reliance on these companies and the myth perpetuated by former US agriculture secretary Sonny Perdue of “go big or get out” as the way to feed the world.

Never has the fragility of the nation’s food system been more obvious. Amid COVID-19, we saw meat supply interruptions and animals euthanized needlessly. Frontline food workers in processing, on farms, and in restaurants, bore the brunt of illness and death, with the majority being from Black, Brown and immigrant communities. The current system is fraught with injustice and inequity.

Building a New System

Despite the many challenges, there is a way forward. We see this in the many farmers managing smaller plots of land, utilizing organic methods, choosing seeds from plants that have thrived in various changing climate zones, building diversity, and avoiding genetically modified organism (GMO) monocrops. These farmers are both climate stewards and the movement leaders. Organic priorities align with a more democratic agricultural system that builds communities and soil. While for many solitary farmers, this can feel like ‘just one farm in one community,” those individual efforts do add up.

The emerging farming solidarity economy is a sum of a range of practices, rooted in solidarity economy principles of pluralism, democracy, equity, mutualism, and sustainability. The connected and circular nature of life on a diverse farm forms the ecosystem that enables all to thrive.

Pluralism within the solidarity economy model posits that there is no set approach. There may be many different spokes all moving toward the center of one wheel. Just as our farms and farming methods may vary slightly, we uphold the organic principles of building soil and human and animal health as the basis of a truly regenerative farming system. The autonomy of place and community to achieve shared goals and values is critical in farming and understood.

Connecting Familiar Systems to Create an Agriculture Solidarity Economy 

The fate of farms, farmers, and farm workers often seems to lie in the hands of lobbyists and corporations. But farmers can take back control if they connect to each other. Many of the companies controlling markets for farm inputs and commodities are vertically integrated, which means they own multiple stages of the supply chain, from inputs to production to distribution. A solidarity agricultural economy can create alternative vehicles for integration, such as cooperatives, credit unions, and other ownership structures that benefit the entire supply chain.

For example, in the Midwest, a group of regenerative chicken farmers put these concepts into practice and created their own brand. Called “Tree Range Chicken,” farmers raise poultry, own a processing facility, and are distributing their products themselves.

Cooperatives, another critical aspect of a solidarity economy, have deep roots in agriculture. The first US cooperatives for dairy and cheese formed in 1810. Although these early, more independent efforts were short-lived, the value of cooperatives to combat difficult economic circumstances for farmers re-emerged as marketing cooperatives later in the 19^th century. For over 50 years, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives has worked to support rural farmers and protect and grow Black land ownership. In Wisconsin, a multi-stakeholder cooperative called Community Kitchen is forming that includes farmers, cooks, bakers, food preservationists, and eaters. Utilizing both a cooperative business structure and a community-supported meal service, these people are making connections and de-commodifying local, organic food.

The pandemic has also resulted in more farmers selling directly to eaters through mechanisms like Community Supported Agriculture or CSAs. At the heart of the CSA model is the value of assuming shared risk. Community members, by buying a “share” of vegetables or other food products, provide farmers with a guaranteed market. As younger farmers enter agriculture, they see the value of CSA models and cooperatives as viable ways to raise capital. When the time comes to purchase seeds, equipment, build farm infrastructure like animal housing, and even access land, farm shares paid upfront by CSA members ahead of the growing season can help foot the bill.

Similar to marketing cooperatives like Organic Valley or OFARM (a grain distributor), in some regions CSA farms are forming cooperatives of their own to centralize roles related to marketing, distribution, and specialization of farm products. In this way, farmers can focus on what they grow or do best. There are also hundreds of food hubs, many of which have formed as cooperatives or nonprofits, that enable farmers to access wholesale or institutional markets, in addition to consumer sales. These hubs also advance equity—for instance, by providing market access to farmers previously excluded due to farm size or cultural and language barriers. Because they centralize so many distribution functions, cooperatives enable farmers to focus on production.

Credit unions also play a key role in farm financing. The Farm Credit Administration  regulates agricultural lending. Many of its loan products are distributed through credit unions. Because credit unions are owned by members and are non-profit, they are another critical piece of an agricultural solidarity economy. Forty-three percent of farmers and farm-related businesses have loans through this network.

With the rapid disappearance of farmland due to development pressures, alternative ownership and financing structures must evolve and build on these proven structures to address issues of land access. Investor groups like Iroquois Valley Farmland REIT, a certified B corporation, promote organic agriculture. Several land trusts across the country also purchase farmland and then through conservation or farmland easements and long-term leases, can get Black, Indigenous, farmers of color, LGBTQ+, and women farmers access to land.

From Here to There: Nonprofits as Conveners of a Solidarity Economy

Nonprofits have long provided organic and regenerative farmers with education and technical assistance related to productions methods and more recently, business planning. At MOSES, after more than 25 years of working with farmers, it is becoming more evident that in addition to educational resources, farmers also need financial and social supports. We see the following as some of the critical next steps.

• Connect farmers to each other. Communities of practice and farmer affinity groups based can engage growers and help them find others. These groups can also guide program content and approach. They also potentially are a way to truly democratize organizational governance. Farmers can find each other for the purpose of forming cooperatives or efforts that would benefit from collective effort, like meat processing or marketing. Eventually, these farmer groups also find each other and connect. For example, CSA farmers that graze livestock will find the farmer co-op that has a butchering and processing facility.
• Promote alternative business models. Whenever possible, ask who is profiting from spending decisions. Evaluate all business relationships, particularly those where nonprofits are customers. Forge relationships, through service contracts and sponsor/partnerships with other businesses that are cooperatives, employee or consumer owned, have union labor, and align with solidarity economy values. Collaborate with other organizations and universities to create resources that enable farmers and food entrepreneurs to write business plans employing these alternative ownership models. Consider sponsorship guidelines that are based on solidarity economy principles, critically evaluating funding sources and only engaging with those further these values.
• Develop domestic supply chains that follow fair trade principles. These supply chains should lift up businesses that center people and the planet over profits, and therefore are environmentally sound and pay living wages across the chain. Create new markets from crops that benefit the environment, have a market value for the farmer, and right livelihood for workers as well. These supply chains may be vertically integrated, like the Tree Range Chicken brand, or a result of farmer, public, and private partnerships.
• Track policies at the local, state, and federal level. The solidarity economy principles of pluralism, democracy, equity, mutualism, and sustainability can be used as critical lenses for analysis. Prioritize approaches that lead to land access for marginalized farmer groups, incentivize cooperatives, build rural social human services, and resource organic farmers as the early adopters of climate-smart agriculture.
• Promote abundance and collaboration. This means partnering with other farmer, public, and private organizations. The end result can be a solidarity farm economy and ecosystem of regenerative farm practices, grounded in organic production while honoring Indigenous ways of knowing the land and seeds.

Building the Regenerative Food Ecosystem

Competition and profits have been the measure of success for so long; it is difficult to overcome a scarcity mindset. However, mutualism and reciprocal relationships will be critical for farmers, businesses, and nonprofits in agriculture to thrive and form a new food system. As Dr. Vandana Shiva says, “food is the currency of life. And food sovereignty is an ecological process of co-creation with other life forms.”

We must create a new food system that is democratic, equitable, ecological, and resilient. The fragility of the current system, and the inequities exposed by the pandemic, especially in BIPOC communities, create a window of opportunity for those interested in a new path. To build the organic farming solidarity economy, we can use the lessons learned from the current unjust system and benefit from it, but not let it define or manage us. Collectively we are stronger than any single farmer’s story.

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

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

Editors’ Note: This article comes from the Summer 2021 edition of the Nonprofit Quarterly, “The World We Want: In Search of New Economic Paradigms.”  This article also marks the final entry in our six-article series with First Nations Development Institute (First Nations) on economic justice work in Indian Country.

How we tell stories matters. The storyteller. The timing. The word choice. The form the story takes. It all matters, because stories shape how we see the world and how we envision our role in its shaping.¹

History is often told by the colonizer, yet that is only one perspective. And the story of our food, tied to so many other stories—of land, of war, of sovereignty and lack thereof, of agriculture, of water … of all the parts of who we are as people, as communities, as a nation—is rife with the myths, lies, and assumptions of the Europeans who colonized this land. In 2021, as we examine the events and stories of the past year, we need to reconsider, retell, and reinvent the stories told about our food systems, and understand how that storytelling has served to prop up these systems’ inherent injustices.

The Story

For far too long, the story of the American food system as it is told has begun with Squanto, “the Indians” feeding the newly arrived American Pilgrims, and Thanksgiving. These “Indians” were Wampanoag, who lived in the village of Pawtuxet, but we rarely hear their names.

Thus originated a story of food insecurity—with the settlers being food insecure and “the Indians” the providers—and from this story was birthed a “nation,” a holiday to commemorate the relationship between the founding of our country and the land to be renamed “America,” millions of pounds of turkey, and the idea that if America is in trouble, there will be some group of “Indians” to save it.

But the story of those events, of course, becomes very different when we hear from the Wampanoag people—who still exist, live in their homelands, and practice traditional food gathering, hunting, and fishing. The Wampanoag remain among us,² despite attempts to erase their names from history in the Thanksgiving story; attempts to take their land base;³ and the constant barrage from federal, state, and local townships and their citizenry challenging their right to hunt, fish, and gather in their own homelands⁴—the same homelands that provided the illusory “first” feast.

The Wampanoag story covers a long period of interaction with Europeans that includes slavery, genocide, decimation by European-borne disease, and century-long (and counting) struggle.⁵ The storyteller and what information is omitted matter.

The traditional Thanksgiving story provided a mythical foundational depiction of relationship between peoples. It has been further leveraged as evidence of the righteousness and inevitability of colonization even today, despite the untruth of the whole story. Now that we have recognized the lie, we should use it as a lens through which to recognize the patterns of storytelling about American food, the environmental and economic systems that support that food system as it evolved to what it is today, and solutions to the food injustices these systems have perpetuated.

The Table is Set

Much like the mainstream version of Thanksgiving, the story of American food systems begins with a table already set, with food already prepared. Similarly, the story of agriculture and food systems begins with the idea of an American “pioneered” farm, row cropping, anthropocentrism, and the inevitability of long, technically driven supply chains. In the same vein, solutions to food insecurity are usually of the short-term, unsustainable kind, described as creating “efficiencies” in production or the supply chain, instead of recognizing the foundation of the supply chain itself as a problem.

The land as a living entity/ecosystem, stewardship of the land over long periods of time, systems of people and food management, life and growth cycles, preparations and processing, and accurate historical presentation are not part of the American food systems story as we are told it. In the Wampanoag version of the story, food storage caches, hunters’ knowledge of game counts and seasonal fowl, growers’ understanding of harvest seasons, yields, and excess that could be spared from winter storage play starring roles. More important, the Wampanoag story is rooted in empathic values—recounting, for example, gifts of food to those in need over long periods of time—despite the Wampanoag’s own need of sustenance for survival during hard winters. Time lines matter. The Thanksgiving story isn’t about one meal on one day in one community. The story encompasses an entire era of settler colonial and Indigenous relationships.

Resetting the Table

While we often think of ourselves as knowing better and doing better today, we see the same historical drama of food storytelling unfolding. Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, when much of the country was experiencing food shortages—and more vulnerable communities like Tribal Nations were experiencing extreme food shortages—there was a strong focus on moving food around within the supply chain (food is already on the table) quickly (time lines should be short and focused) for vulnerable communities (there is one perspective, one storyteller).

Food security in this context describes activities, policies, and actions, often external to the community meant to be served, to create food shipments for populations who are experiencing “caloric deficiencies.” This approach often results in more production, overproduction, and/or reallocation strategies—regardless of the capacity of land, farmers, or labor force—and, in times of emergency, cost. We hear this approach in conversations about “food deserts” that describe an absence of retail food availability, and thus focus on creating retail opportunities or moving surplus food to places without. Or we see this play out with approaches that focus on individual education and behavioral change rather than on the systems of production, wealth and land accumulation, and policies that create and support concentrated capital power in some communities while resources are extracted from others.

Meanwhile, the overwhelming response of Tribal and Indigenous program services has been to focus on food sovereignty. Food sovereignty in this context describes the relationships among a person and their community, their identity, their traditional food structures, and their activities of gathering, hunting, and fishing—as well as a person’s or community’s relationship to policies for food grown, collected, hunted, gathered, or “shed for the purpose of feeding people within that community.

Countless communities reinstituted and redoubled efforts to rebuild or create community gardens and artisanal meat production;⁶ they also returned to traditional gathering, hunting, and fishing.⁷ We saw this when Tribes like the Oneida Nation used their own long-standing food system approaches that include buffalo herds and meat processing and logistical food planning to serve not only their own Tribal population but the entire Green Bay community.⁸ The Traditional Native American Farmers Association, located in Tesuque Pueblo, along with other Indigenous seed keepers and seed banks, sent traditional, Indigenous, heirloom seeds to communities labeled “food insecure.”⁹

Overwhelmingly, Tribal citizens like those in Cochiti and Kewa Pueblos or White Mountain Apache or Turtle Mountain or Standing Rock create their own networks of care. This includes checking on elders, feeding children, making supply runs, and reallocating existing supplies to meet their own community needs. Tribal Nations have existed and continue do so because we know how to care for one another and how to execute those care networks in our greatest moments of need. It is our way.

The Tribal response is the meaningful systemic change that will enable sovereignty, community, and environmental well-being. Adapting and adjusting existing food supply chains with an external response focus, no matter how transformative this may look at first glance, maintains dependence on a food system where Tribal communities are still only underserved consumers—if served at all. In contrast, a focus on food sovereignty strategies that incorporate identity, community action, Indigenous history, and cooperation activate skills that allow communities to respond and meet their own needs independently.

As COVID-19 continues to devastate Indian Country and as America continues to build COVID-19 recovery plans, there are takeaways. When we examine what passes as food security in this country, we find that the market-based system and accompanying solutions have inherent weaknesses: (1) the food supply chain can only reach as far as the dollars stretch, leaving communities without cash resources food insecure; and (2) food security is dependent on individual (or individual business) control and action. Yet it was community that created resiliency during COVID-19. It was community that responded to, cared for, and ensured that people were safe and fed, even in isolation, with existing resources available in their own community. That is food sovereignty.

***

To reexamine and retell the story of our American food system, we often must return to the beginning of the story and listen closely to the story being conveyed. In the case of Thanksgiving, we should be asking ourselves why we don’t hear the Wampanoag version of the same story—and follow up with actions to ensure that the Wampanoag version becomes commonplace.

It is through telling and listening and retelling the complete, uncensored stories of our human experience that we become empowered to change the patterns of how we order the world, all that supports us in the world, and who develops the narratives that become our collective “history.” In terms of our food system, if we limit our solutions to the existing structures, we are giving power to structures that depend on consumption—if not overconsumption—and pay little heed to the extractive, unsustainable, and unjust characteristics of these systems.

The table is not set. We can challenge and determine what we have at the table. When Tribal communities focus efforts on seed saving, community and local production and operations, intergenerational traditional food gathering and processing, community feeding programs, small and local artisanal meat processing, and locally controlled and networked food pantries, and when they bring their own Tribal laws to bear vis-à-vis their food systems and peoples, we are offering an alternative to the production and agricultural systems that have resulted in, among many other harms, ongoing food insecurity.

Legitimizing and retelling the unexpurgated food story—the story that includes the narrative of the land, the people, the natural resources, the relationships and ecosystems, the learning and management, instead of consumption only— opens up possibilities for solutions from unheard perspectives and results in dollars spent on these solutions in and with community rather than for communities.

And isn’t that a much better story?

Notes

1. Robert J. Miller, “American Indian Influence on the United States Constitution and its Framers,” American Indian Law Review, vol. 18, no. 1 (1993).
2. Anna Patterson, “Expanded funding for Indigenous businesses in the U.S.,” The Keyword (blog), November 23, 2020, blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-org/expanded-funding-indigenous-business-owners/.
3. Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, News, “Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe Threatened with Land Disestablishment, Tribal Leaders Step in to Address Ongoing Land Issues and Threats to Sovereignty,” March 30, 2020, mashpeewampanoagtribe-nsn.gov/news/2020/3/30/mashpee-wampanoag-tribe-threatened-with-land-disestablishment-tribal-leaders-step-in-to-address-ongoing-land-issues -and-threats-to-sovereignty.
4. Jessica Hill, “Wampanoag members fight to keep winter fishing traditions alive,” Cape Cod Times, March 4, 2021, www.capecodtimes.com/story/news/2021/03/04/wampanoag-people-fish-during-winter-lament-environmental-changes-indian-traditions/4554582001/.
5. David Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present (New York: Riverhead Books, 2019).
6. Covid-19 in Indian Country: A Call to Integrate Food Systems and Food Security toward Sovereignty (Colorado: First Nations Development Institute, not yet published).
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.

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

“Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.

We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”

Arundhati Roy, “The pandemic is a portal”

We’ve been through it all—a terrorist attack, a flood, a hurricane, multiple global financial crises, political crises, an uprising against racism and police brutality, and a global pandemic. Time and again, we’ve come together to rebuild our cities, our missions, and our goals for social progress. This time it’s different: we’re not going to go back to what was. We’re going to create what can be.  For nonprofit capacity building, this means that this time, we’re going to upbuild.

What upbuilding means

Here’s an example of how upbuilding is different from rebuilding: In the aftermath of a hurricane, where homes are destroyed, rebuilding means that we repair the damage, replace the windows, the roof tiles, the siding, and install a sump pump. We try to get the homes back to the state that they were in before the hurricane.

If we use upbuilding as our frame, we recognize that these homes were built on low-lying land that is now eroding. We see that the median income of people living in those homes was dramatically less than those in higher, more inland properties. We see the difference in the races of people living there. Upbuilding after a hurricane requires us to employ soil preservation techniques, build hurricane resistant homes more inland or upland on land made affordable and accessible, institute measures to address the climate change roots of hurricane frequency and intensity, and ensure that resources distributed to that community are distributed equally to provide access to those who may be marginalized because of age, ability, race, and other factors.

Upbuilding is what happens when infrastructure is defined expansively, centering humans and communities, and with a strong equity, anti-oppressive lens. Upbuilding requires having the willingness and imagination to question why things are the way they are, whether they serve or oppress, and whether they can be done differently. In short, upbuilding means building something new and different as opposed to recovering and going back to “normal.”

Why upbuilding matters

Building something new is important and transformational. Transformation starts with people and moves at the speed of trust.

The call to upbuild centers care, equity, and resourcing in how we approach nonprofit capacity-building. Upbuilding asks us to really care for the humans who make up the nonprofit sector workforce, as well as the humans who benefit from that work. Caring also requires being equitable and anti-oppressive.

Upbuilding requires pivoting away from the way we have traditionally spoken about nonprofit infrastructure investments: we have not centered anti-oppression, equity, dismantling white supremacist norms, racial equity, and materializing (rather than emptily pledging to support) deep love and care for people in how we build up nonprofit capacity. Even when we speak of leadership, only recently has there been an effort to ensure that BIPOC leadership pipelines and support are created and sustained.

Let’s unpack the terminology being used here. Nonprofit infrastructure means the internal management systems, strategies, and processes that support leadership and leadership pipelines, strategy development, talent management, diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging, governance, communications, technology, fundraising and risk management, and financial management. It is vital work that nonprofits need to embrace in order to meet their mission and goals. This is where capacity-builders come in: they are organizations and consultants that support nonprofits to do these things, and to do them well, in service of impact that the nonprofits want to achieve in the world.

Because it’s not readily visible, because it’s internal work, capacity-building often gets sidelined, and it is also dismally resourced. But when times get challenging, there is a dramatic difference between an organization that has strong infrastructure and one that doesn’t: one is resilient, while the other struggles and may even fail. Accordingly, there has been ongoing advocacy urging more investments in nonprofit infrastructure so that we can support nonprofits to be more resilient, stronger, and more impactful, all of which increase in urgency during challenging times.

To date, much of infrastructure spending has replicated systemic oppression itself: a bulk of resources go towards larger nonprofits, rather than the small to mid-size organizations that do most of the work. Support for coaching leaders of organizations on the front lines of that work is inadequate. Leadership and professional development for young BIPOC nonprofit workers is still underfunded. Upbuilding the nonprofit sector today should be understood as enacting a set of capacity-building efforts that are human-centered and dismantle structural racism and oppressive systems.

Furthermore, if the nonprofit capacity-builders themselves don’t reframe their work to focus on people, then they do a disservice to the movement organizations that are leading the charge around our shared social justice goals. Be it climate, racial equity, women’s rights, or immigration, at the heart of every movement is a nonprofit that could benefit from capacity-building, and at the heart of every nonprofit is a human that deserves care (dare I call it “care-pacity” building?). In fact, movements are mobilized by people, in and out of institutions, so we must ensure that capacity-building and resourcing nonprofit infrastructure also entails thinking about who is not in a nonprofit and ensure access for them, too; for example, this includes the activists and volunteers who are often on the leading edges of movements.

That is what upbuilding requires of us.

Cyndi Suarez redefines infrastructure in this vein, in articles advocating for infrastructure efforts to support leaders and the communities they serve, and for the movement goals themselves, as opposed to focusing on nonprofit organizations.

In the nonprofit sector, there is tension between what nonprofits do and how the nonprofit itself is organized. In large part, the organizations or institutions that hold the work are built on inherently racist, oppressive structures that are not serving the people doing the work, the movement, or the communities they serve.

For example, why do nonprofits have boards of directors? Because they are incorporated under a state’s corporation law. Nonprofits are created as one kind of corporate entity, under regulatory code that was created to protect assets and limit liability. However, most nonprofits are created in order to be a container to hold people who have come together to solve a problem and to work towards a shared vision of future social justice goals. And so that they can receive philanthropic dollars. Nonprofit staff and leadership often struggle to work with boards of directors who may not share the same values, knowledge, and journey of an organization.

Of course, this is a sweeping statement. Not all boards are the same. However, there exists a very real disconnect between nonprofit boards and the organizations they are tasked with governing. They may have a deep connection to the mission, be excellent fundraisers, support leadership, and help set strategy, but they’re often removed, unaware of the daily truths of the organization and where the field is moving. The disconnect is even starker in organizations that are on their racial equity journey. In most instances, the internal staff are light years ahead of their boards in terms of the work being done and already prioritize building an equitable and inclusive workplace culture. This leads to very real tension.

When you layer on the fact that nonprofit boards are overwhelmingly white, the disparity between racial equity work on the staff and board levels can lead to huge harm. Nonprofit boards are tasked with hiring the leader of that organization, and if they do not have a racial equity lens or analysis, then they risk bringing on a leader whose racial equity values do not match that of the team. The fish rots from the head, the saying goes, so you risk losing the growth and journey that the organization has made by bringing a leader who does not share the same values. This is true for racial equity and other guiding values of the organization.

But why do we need boards? Because we are organized under 501(c)(3) codes.  Corporation law. What could be another way for us to come together to do the work?  What if, as we emerge from the pandemic and focus on upbuilding, we reorganize as collectives, or as mutual aid societies?  Dean Spade has a new book on exactly this topic, and we should all read it.

Do we risk philanthropic dollars? Maybe not—but even if that was at risk, then philanthropy should change. The tax code should change. Revise the tax code to ensure that donors get tax breaks when they give to people directly, to collectives, and to mutual aid societies. Yes, that’s right: revise the internal revenue service tax code.  Dismantling these systems and structures is going to be disruptive as hell, but this is what upbuilding contemplates.

After upbuilding

Investing in change, in generational change, requires investment in the infrastructure needs of the nonprofit sector, while at the same time dismantling the legacy of structural racism and oppression that has informed how institutions in the sector are created, managed, and evaluated.

Many communities have never enjoyed “normal”—or more to the point, what has been normal has been oppression and subjugation. For many, decades of disinvestment, hundreds of years of racism, living in systems that were not built for us—and, in fact, were built against us—means that we do not want to go back to what was. This time must be different.

The toll that the pandemic, years of disinvestment, and an entire aeon of racism has exacted on BIPOC communities cannot be overstated. For every dollar moved, an equal dollar in upbuilding is needed. Upbuilding means:

• Investing in people’s leadership and professional development, even if they’re not affiliated with an organization, because the front lines of movements are often in the hands of volunteers and activists.
• Exceeding previous thresholds for capacity-building support by philanthropy; resourcing, with new dollars, the infrastructure needs of the social justice sector.
• Centering small and mid-sized nonprofit organizations and not equating infrastructure investments with support for mergers or consolidations. The pandemic showed the power of small community-based organizations to get the job done. In fact, new organizations were born in the pandemic, and they need investment. Learn about them, support them, trust them.
• Valuing the work of capacity-building, healing, culture, equity, and the people who support others in their journey in this work. This work should be valued, well-resourced, and accessible to all.
• Addressing racism head on, how it impacts the way nonprofits are organized, and how they resource, evaluate, and build up people, institutions, and movements. We can’t hide from the legacy and the journey that racial equity requires of us, even for things that might be considered separate, such as developing a budget or starting a capital project. Values show up in those spaces as well.
• Resourcing people to imagine different ways to come together, thrive, and achieve shared goals in a values-aligned way. This requires many steps, starting with reimagining governance structures that share power and leadership and that promote transparency.
• Changing human resource practices and recentering power, meaning shifting who has voice and resources within the organization. Talent management systems must acknowledge the disparate impacts of race, identity, gender, and sexuality in how it designs its employee lifecycle.
• This includes organizing tests to evaluate the use of more trust-based practices that shift power and authority into the hands of the folks at the front lines. It involves testing shared leadership structures. It requires redesigning technology so that access, literacy, and strategy are intertwined. For example, it’s one thing to give your team laptops, and it’s another to understand and solve for the team members who may not have access to good internet. Upbuilding requires consideration of all those issues as team and organizational capacity are built.

This list is just an offering. It is a start. Upbuilding requires naming and dismantling things that don’t serve the collective good and uplifting things that do. It means committing to not going back to what was and, instead, imagining a different future. Imagination is an evolutionary tool. During challenging times, it can seem like a luxury to imagine. But let’s be liberatory and let’s imagine together what a post-upbuild world looks like.

A post-upbuild world centers equity, empathy, and imagination as part of building up people, communities, organizations, and systems. Social movements require strong infrastructure to thrive. Strong infrastructure means, at its heart: strong, resilient, people. Creating a world of strong, resilient people entails seeing and perceiving the full expression of power of every individual. A post-upbuild world has invested in people, paying particular attention to what different people need to thrive.

In a post-upbuild world, perhaps nonprofits are now all mutual aid societies. People have come together with shared values, vulnerability, and vision in structures and systems that support trust building and equity in how we work together. In this world, people uphold the promises made to each other in service of common values and goals.

A post-upbuild world sees resources being distributed in a manner that acknowledges the systemic oppressions that have held back communities for generations, that acknowledges how wealth was originated and how it is equated with power, and that uses a reparative framework that defers to the grant-seeker rather than the grant-giver.

The small and mighty community-based organization (or mutual aid society) is supported in a post-upbuild reality—over the multi-million-dollar thinktank—because the vision of impact and success has been built on trust in the community and the people most impacted by issues. They know best what solutions resonate for them. And if they say that working with a local community-based organization filled with people they trust is how they will get to sustainable solutions, so be it. Foundations do not judge for themselves in a post-upbuild reality—they listen, they trust, and they fund. Not just pledges but checks.

Nonprofit infrastructure spending is not a term used anymore; in a post-upbuild world, there’s no need to justify this investment. Nonprofits are simply resourced abundantly, and with long-term sustainability goals in mind. It’s just multi-year general operating support, all the time.

Sound utopian? Upbuilding is less utopian than many social justice movement goals, and no less vital. It is clear that there will be no recovery—not on an economic, social, or ethical level—if nonprofits and movement activists do not wholly embrace upbuilding the nonprofit sector through equity-based, human-centered infrastructure investments. This time, let us be bold and upbuild together.

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

In the decade following the September 11^th attacks, I ran a national nonprofit organization that advocated for the rights of South Asians in the United States. Many of those early years are a blur. Looking back, I can see how our staff, board members, and volunteers were attempting to meet two nearly impossible objectives at once: responding to the backlash facing South Asian communities after 9/11 while simultaneously building the infrastructure and foundations of a new organization in the wake of a generational crisis. This meant that we were often responding to a community concern around hate violence or an impending deportation while identifying staff and partnerships to attend to these needs in real time.

I wasn’t the only executive director in this predicament. Aparna Bhattacharyya, the director of Raksha, noted in a reflection on the 20-year anniversary of September 11^th, “In the immediate days following 9/11, calls from survivors of gender-based violence dropped severely because of special registration and the constant fear of being targeted by government systems. There were no organizations working on these issues in the South.”

Organizations such as Raksha in Atlanta struggled to respond to community needs in the wake of 9/11, as did many others. After 9/11, new organizations formed while others had to shift their programs and services in response to emerging needs in the Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and South Asian (AMEMSA) communities. In New York City, direct service providers supported restaurant workers and cab drivers who had lost jobs and benefits. Sikh and Muslim organizations around the country fielded complaints of profiling at airports, hate violence, school bullying, and workplace discrimination. In the Bay Area, groups like the Alliance for South Asians Taking Action participated in antiwar protests and teach-ins. Local organizers at groups such as Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM) in New York City mobilized communities who were targeted by surveillance, detention, and deportation. By the 10-year anniversary of 9/11, the work of these groups had expanded to include multiple strategies beyond rapid response, such as advocacy and grassroots mobilization. Despite the growth in strategy, organizations were still addressing a range of unmet needs in their communities with inadequate resources and staff and leaders who were new to managing nonprofit organizations.

My organization and others turned to the philanthropic sector over the past two decades for support and stability. In the immediate days and weeks after 9/11, mainstream and corporate foundations consolidated funds for recovery and relief efforts. A 2003 analysis by the Foundation Center notes that corporate and public foundations provided $1.1 billion to organizations in the arts and culture, human resources, education, and community development sectors through the September 11^th Fund, the Twin Towers Fund, and many others. To access disaster relief, organizations working with AMEMSA communities had to demonstrate the need for supporting people targeted by bigotry, or for areas like Coney Island Avenue in New York City, where small businesses closed down because law enforcement began to detain and incarcerate South Asian and Muslim immigrants who owned or worked in restaurants and stores. Family members were separated through deportation, jobs were lost, and mental health concerns increased among young people growing up in the shadow of 9/11. In New York City, the New York Police Department conducted surveillance of Muslim schools, South Asian restaurants, mosques, and public parks where community members played cricket and soccer.

Yet issues such as surveillance and deportation were perceived by many funders as being tangential to the immediate crisis of 9/11. Funders were wary of what were perceived to be national security and immigration policy concerns that went beyond immediate social service and crisis response. South Asian, Arab, and Muslim organizations had to keep making the connection between the economic recovery and backlash that happened right after 9/11 with the ongoing consequences of the War on Terror that affected the same communities.

The Stages of Post-9/11 Philanthropy

The initial phase of disaster relief funds after 9/11 supported organizations responding to the many crises following the attacks—addressing economic needs, mental health support, and backlash and bigotry.

The second phase of post-9/11 philanthropy began around the 10^th anniversary of the attacks and lasted through 2016. It included strategic investments in narrative change and advocacy, with the realization that the War on Terror continued to affect communities through national security and immigration policies. In 2009, the Rise Together Fund became the first national donor collaborative to support AMEMSA communities dealing with post-9/11 issues. The Pillars Fund, created in 2010, has distributed over $6 million in grants to Muslim organizations and leaders, with an emphasis on narrative change.

The third phase of philanthropic support occurred in response to the 2016 presidential elections and the Muslim ban. The Just and Inclusive Society program at the Democracy Fund, for example, committed to supporting Muslim, Arab, South Asian, and immigrant communities whose civil rights and safety were particularly endangered in this political climate.

These investments have brought about significant changes in the growth and capacity of the AMEMSA field. For example, there’s now a network of local and national organizations that engages in a range of strategies from organizing Muslim students on college campuses, to advocating for humane laws, to representing Sikh community members facing discrimination. This network works together in a coordinated fashion through RISE Organizing, a rapid response formation that was supported by the Rise Together Fund in the wake of the 2016 election. In addition, philanthropic investments in ally groups have helped flank and support the AMEMSA field, from the Brennan Center for Justice that provides policy analyses, to the CLEAR project at the CUNY School of Law that takes on litigation and documentation, to Veterans Against Islamophobia and interfaith groups like Shoulder to Shoulder that educate non-Muslims about Islam. Through projects like the Pillars Fund’s Muslim Narrative Change Cohort (in collaboration with the Pop Culture Collaborative and Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art), Muslim artists, academics, and thinkers have the capacity to share Muslim stories with wider audiences.

These are important interventions, and they have been the impetus for a strong and vibrant AMEMSA field that is engaged in every aspect of social and civic life—service provision and advocacy, organizing and culture change, leadership development and political participation. It’s important to note that many of these strategic investments through philanthropic institutions have occurred because of the vision and advocacy of program officers who identify as Muslim, Arab, South Asian, or Sikh and feel a sense of responsibility to their communities.

Of course, there remains room to grow. In order to ensure more foundations support AMEMSA communities, there are a variety of misperceptions and biases that philanthropy must dismantle. One is the view that AMEMSA communities are frozen in time and only deal with post-9/11 issues. In dispelling this notion, philanthropy can move to support the swath of issues AMEMSA communities face beyond immigration, racial backlash, and Islamophobia—such as housing, jobs, gender equity, elder care, and more. Another is the perception that AMEMSA communities are wealthy and thus capable of funding our own organizations without the assistance of organized philanthropy.

A third misconception is the belief that AMEMSA organizations, particularly those that work with Muslim communities, are “risky” investments—a reflection of Islamophobia within philanthropy. (Watch here as Shireen Zaman, former director of the Rise Together Fund, in conversation with Darakshan Raja, co-director of the Justice for Muslims Collective, addresses Islamophobia in the philanthropic sector in BMP’s Move the Money series on social movements.)

Lastly, there’s the idea that AMEMSA organizations can survive on rapid response funding without organizational infrastructure that is at scale to support our communities. One of the consequences of providing resources in times of rapid response is that it forces organizations to operate on a cycle of boom or bust. To prevent this cycle from continuing, philanthropy must provide sustained, multi-year funding, even during times of relative stability.

Beyond dismantling these misperceptions, the philanthropic sector must also make a deep and long-term commitment to building the infrastructure of an ecosystem of local and national organizations that can both support their own communities during times of crisis and beyond while also participating in broader movements for justice, equity, and liberation. That means engaging in the following practices:

• Supporting local grassroots organizations that are mobilizing AMEMSA communities around the country, including in areas that are seeing demographic growth
• Investing in movement infrastructure by providing multi-year, unrestricted funding to an ecosystem of local and national groups with various strategies, including social services, organizing, advocacy, civic engagement, and narrative change
• Supporting movement leadership, from healthy leadership transitions to leadership development for new leaders entering the nonprofit sector and the AMEMSA field
• Ensuring that organizations on the front lines of rapid response have the necessary funding to support communities dealing with the pandemic, political polarization, climate change, and other pressing issues
• Investing in healing and wellness of AMEMSA staff and leaders who have been carrying the weight of direct and vicarious trauma for 20 years
• Supporting solidarity-based partnerships with broader movements for social change so that AMEMSA groups have the capacity to participate in coalitions, campaigns, and networks
• Educating funders about how Islamophobia shows up in decision making, the War on Terror’s ongoing consequences, and the links between post-9/11 policies and today’s crises
• Making it easier for new AMEMSA organizations to learn about, apply for, and obtain funding
• Encouraging and providing incentives for non-AMEMSA grantees to collaborate with AMEMSA organizations

The philanthropic sector can transform the AMEMSA field with strategic and long-term investments that reflect the current moment with a nuanced understanding of the trajectory that has brought us to the 20^th anniversary of 9/11. In fact, current funders of the AMEMSA field recognized the importance of this time by releasing a call to action for philanthropy in September 2021. They write:

“As philanthropies and philanthropic serving organizations who support Black, African, Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and South Asian (BAMEMSA) communities deeply impacted by the response of the United States to 9/11, we want to reaffirm our commitment. They have been on the front lines of creating a just, multiracial democracy in the United States. We ask funders to join in our commitment to supporting BAMEMSA communities during this important year and beyond.”

The lead signatories (Democracy Fund, Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundations, and The RISE Together Fund) are committing to raising $50 million over the next five years to support communities.

The next decade should usher in a different experience than mine for AMEMSA leaders building their organizations. I hope that the next round of executive directors will feel nourished and supported in their work, have the space to make mistakes and course-correct, and receive funding without being asked to perform and make their case time and again. More than anything, new directors and staff should have the time and space to imagine bold visions for our futures—and to make them a reality.

…

Deepa Iyer is a South Asian American writer, lawyer, and activist. She is the Director of Strategic Initiatives at the Building Movement Project, where she curates a project called Solidarity Is, which provides trainings and narratives to build deep and lasting multiracial solidarity. Deepa was the former executive director of South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT) for a decade, and has held positions at Race Forward, the US Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, the Asian Pacific American Legal Resource Center, and the Asian American Justice Center. Deepa’s first book, We Too Sing America: South Asian, Arab, Muslim and Sikh Immigrants Shape Our Multiracial Future (The New Press 2015), received a 2016 American Book Award.

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

Your recently ordered sofa might take several months to be delivered because the raw materials for the cushion stuffing are in short supply. Or, that bathroom remodel is taking extra months because the fixtures you ordered are on back order. Food, daily household items, and wares—everything is starting to feel scarce and expensive.

If you’ve been wondering about this, you aren’t alone. The pandemic has created myriad problems in healthcare, economic, and supply chain systems. With labor and supply shortages during the pandemic having disrupted so many global supply chains, I wondered: “Is there another way to approach the supply chain? What if supply chains were aligned with community values?”

Values-based Value Chains Defined

In the local food sector, there have been great strides in many places toward what is called “values-based value chains.” Now might be an opportune time to apply a similar approach to other sectors.

The concept of a values-based value chain is easiest to understand through the lens of the food system and defined as a value chain (the goods and services distribution chain) approach that seeks and values input from all stakeholders in an equitable manner to ensure fair prices, wages, and support for the entire system.

For instance, a values-based value chain in the food sector considers the following factors:

• The quality of the soil in which a tomato is grown, and whether it’s sustainably farmed without chemicals
• The farmer who plants and tends the tomato plant, and the fair labor wages that farmer and the laborers should be receiving
• The true cost of producing the tomato (the cost of the organic or heirloom seed, labor costs, processing costs, and delivery and distribution costs)
• The amount a chef or restauranteur is willing to pay for the tomato and the price these businesses can reasonably charge for it in a menu item

Farmers get together and discuss prices with processors and value-added producers and work with chefs and restaurant owners to set prices and discuss what is needed on both sides of the food market equation. This creates strong relationships and trust. It helps producers and consumers to stop thinking about food as a thing and more as a relationship.

It’s a symbiotic relationship with equal value given to all participants along the chain. And it is a system that values fair wages and sustainable practices transparently. If you’ve eaten at a local café that has committed to this type of local sourcing, you’ve likely seen a list of farmers or food vendors on their menu. You’ve probably thought about seeking out those farmers yourself at the farmers’ market because of this transparency. And you may have agreed to pay more than you would at a local café that uses a large-scale food distributor that sources from large agricultural companies for the lowest prices possible. Even you, as the eater in this chain, are a stakeholder in this system, having sought out a more conscious café for brunch.

In a traditional value chain—read, the extant supply chain that is currently coming to a standstill—the “value” is about pricing and low or competitive costs. In contrast, the values-based value chain is about ethics, standards, and social impacts. If the overarching goal of a traditional value chain is to deliver the most value for the least cost to create a competitive advantage, a values-based value chain has a different goal—namely, delivering on the most values in terms of impact on people, the planet, and production.

Social Impact versus Values-based Value Chain

Values-based value chains could be a pathway to a better future, and could be applied to nonprofit enterprises and small businesses, but where to start? In my experience as a business consultant, I would suggest that it helps to start small and localized.

Currently, most nonprofits and social enterprises do not apply the values-based value chain to their services. While phrases like “social impact” and “triple bottom line” abound, truth be told, there are no hard and fast rules for how to organize a supply chain in your business strategy to achieve social impact.

If all nonprofits and social enterprises evaluated where they sourced their products from and demanded values-based value chains, a shift might become visible, along with greater impact in local, regional, and global communities.

While the B Lab certifications for sustainable businesses that track environmental, social, and community impact are effective for larger companies and nonprofits, the process can be lengthy and time-consuming for small, locally owned businesses that intend to have a social impact through their fair wages and sourcing protocols. Some of those certified large companies have departments dedicated to sustainability and social impact measurement. Small, locally owned businesses and nonprofits often can’t afford the certification, nor do they have the resources to continue to implement or track their certification standards.

One way to achieve values-based results in supply chains for a small, locally owned business or social enterprise is to implement a questionnaire for a potential client or vendor that asks specific questions about their values and culture to determine if there is alignment. A questionnaire that reflects the values-based value chain circulated among the social impact and social enterprise sector could have quite an effect. Asking these questions sets a standard of practice from the get-go, with embedded values that are ethical and sustainable. 

Putting the Values-based Value Chain to Work in Other Sectors

As noted above, the values-based value chain has become a standard in many local food systems, so how might it apply elsewhere? Furniturecycle is a solutions lab working on this very problem for the furniture industry and is catalyzing systems change within the industry. Jamie Facciola, the founder of Furniturecycle, is a board member for the National Upholstery Association and a member of the Sustainable Furnishings Alliance. Facciola believes that “in a circular economy, downstream is the new upstream. Orphaned, imperfect furniture is a decentralized problem that needs a localized, place-based solution.”

Perhaps during the pandemic your sofa wore out. If so, it’s likely you put it out on the curb, hoping it would go to a good home for free or get picked up by the local waste truck to go…where? It ends up in a landfill.

Typically, US consumers are disconnected from the sources of products. Especially in the consumer goods sector, consumers don’t know where things come from or how they are made or produced. It’s common for US consumers not to think about the people who produce what they consume. And it is even more common not to think about where those products end up after they have been used and discarded.

This is where Furniturecycle comes in. Facciola is working tirelessly to educate through social media and in sustainability conferences and discussion rooms about how the industry needs to think about furniture waste differently and how all stakeholders can have equitable shared input in the sector.

According to Facciola, an award-winning social entrepreneur, the most important pieces of values-based value chains for the furniture sector are:

• Borrowing from existing models (such as the local food sector)
• Bringing it all forward—the purpose and intent with reusing furniture (transparency)
• Backfilling the pieces that are missing (education)
• Examining how people are paid (labor, fair wages)
• Examining how workers are treated (working conditions)
• Understanding whether the use is residential or commercial (which can inform consumer campaigns)

Agriculture Marketing Service, a branch of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), found in its 2014 report, Food Value Chains: Creating Shared Value To Enhance Marketing Success, that three key tasks are often critical for the businesses that engage in values-based value chains:

1. Reconceiving products and markets by identifying new products and services that meet social needs or serve overlooked customer segments
2. Redefining productivity in the value chain, which may require new choices in areas such as production, marketing, and distribution and create demand for equipment and technologies that save energy, conserve resources, and support employees
3. Building supportive industry clusters at the company’s locations to enable achievement of social mission objectives through an enhancement in local procurement and reliance on less geographically dispersed supply chains

For nonprofits and social enterprises seeking to support local economies, organizing outside the food sector today is parallel in some ways to the situation many local advocates had once faced in the food sector, back when conscious nonprofit activists saw value in discarded produce and began creating education campaigns and programs about how to turn that ugly, bruised, Grade-B tomato into a valued, viable product.

With supply chains collapsing, can communities rethink their supply chains and apply a value-based framework to other sectors? It seems likely that adopting the now-normalized model of local food systems into other sectors could be successful. It will take effort and accountability on all sides of the system, including consumers. But it could prove to be at least a small step toward a more sustainable future.

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