Tag Archives: nonprofit quarterly

In writing about COVID-19’s impact on the US economy, journalists, economists, and researchers alike have sliced up the for-profit sector by location, size, industry, and myriad other dimensions when searching for and positing answers. Conversely, the nonprofit sector is often treated as a monolith, with catastrophic cases standing in for all nonprofit experience.

While it’s certainly true that many sectors of nonprofits were hard hit, others have moved through the pandemic with relatively little disruption—and some even thrived. A Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) report released in June 2021 noted that more than 30 percent of nonprofits report that the pandemic has had little negative impact to significantly positive impact.

While media accounts of nonprofits all too often smother difference, they are particularly damaging in this moment, as people try to understand where to direct resources and learn from those closest to the solutions. US nonprofits make up about 5.6 percent of GDP (gross domestic product) and represent about 10 percent of employment. The mission, size, and geographic focus of the sector is as varied as the for-profit sector, and the impact of the COVID-19 crisis likewise varies profoundly.

During the pandemic, starting in June 2020, the late Lester Salamon and Chelsea Newhouse of the Center for Civil Society Studies at Johns Hopkins began to produce monthly reports that culled federal labor statistics data to understand sectoral trends within the nonprofit sector. The spread revealed is extraordinary. In one such report, issued in February 2021, Salamon and Newhouse found that employment in health sector nonprofits as of January 2021 was only 3.3 percent below its pre-pandemic peak, while arts employment had fallen 36.3 percent.

For an individual nonprofit, according to the CEP report, COVID-19’s impact correlates most strongly with two factors: 1) program focus (or “industry,” if you will) and 2) the financial reserves the organization had pre-pandemic. Noteworthy here is that neither factor speaks to actual strategic responses by leadership, even though creative responses abound. Evidently, leadership responses are hugely important, even if quantitative data sets often have a difficult time picking up such nuances. Still, these two structural factors frame the field of play in which nonprofits operate and so are reviewed here. 

Program Focus

Often, nonprofits operate in a countercyclical fashion to the overall economy, with demand and funding for services rising in response to an economic downturn. Such was the case, for example, during the Great Recession. Still, when you look more closely at different mission and program areas, there is wide variation on how nonprofits fare. This was certainly true amid COVID-19, with the multiple layers of public health, a long-overdue racial reckoning, and economic crisis. Arts organizations, as noted above, suffered the greatest setbacks, with a disproportionate decrease in demand and revenue and the least clear outlook on what comes next.

Meanwhile, community and economic development organizations—a broad sweeping category that includes financial services, housing support, social enterprise, and community improvement—experienced the opposite. These organizations reported a greater public understanding of the need for their services, as well as increased demand and funding. While this peak came with operational challenges, particularly among those who rely on volunteer workers, existential questions around whether they would survive or need to reinvent their program delivery models were less frequent than in other parts of the sector.

Between these extremes are those organizations that were seen as less critical (at least by funders) in terms of immediate impact, such as workforce development, capacity building, and other intermediaries. These groups often found themselves losing funding while needing to swiftly reinvent themselves and invest in digitizing their programming.

Organizational Foundation

Another determinant was the organization’s “bench” pre-COVID. Specifically, this refers to a nonprofit’s operating reserve and preexisting unrestricted grant commitments to support the quick pivots that many organizations needed to make during COVID, regardless of industry, whether it entailed increasing services to meet a surge in need, bringing programs to a virtual environment, or replacing a volunteer workforce. Those unexpected investments are made possible through an organization’s reserves—particularly when staff and volunteer capabilities are restricted.

It’s surely no surprise that BIPOC-led organizations reported smaller operating budgets and fewer unrestricted net assets. The short-term grant cycle that was unsustainable before COVID-19 became nearly impossible for many.

Prior to George Floyd’s murder and the mass movement against anti-Black racism that arose in response, many Black-led nonprofits were being neglected, even as the Black community was hit extremely hard by the virus. A Building Movement Project study surveyed 433 BIPOC leaders (39 percent of whom were Black) in May 2020. In that survey, 46 percent of surveyed Black leaders reported a decline in grant funding, while only 23 percent reported an increase, with the remainder reporting no change.

Even after the uprising that followed Floyd’s murder, funder response was uneven. CEP reports that 55 percent of funders increased funding to support Black and Latinx communities, compared to only 19 percent for Middle Eastern communities and 29 percent for Asian communities. And while CEP found that government relief, such as PPP (Paycheck Protection Program) and other programs, helped ensure nonprofits took less damage than they otherwise would have, the future financial sustainability of many nonprofits remains unclear. This is especially the case for nonprofits that are led by and serve people of color.

Moving Forward

The COVID-19 pandemic, of course, is not over. For nonprofits and philanthropy to respond effectively, it is critical to have a clear picture of the terrain.

Data is a vital starting point, but it is only useful if acted upon. Clearly, nonprofit leaders in hard-hit sectors must articulate their needs—and many are doing so. But donors and philanthropy must also pay attention and be responsive to those calls.

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.

This article comes from the Summer 2021 edition of the Nonprofit Quarterly, “The World We Want: In Search of New Economic Paradigms.”

Early in 2020, the board of the U.S. Solidarity Economy Network (USSEN) called on like-minded organizations that were engaged in economic justice and systems change work to gather at a Resist and Build summit at the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, Tennessee. The center, founded in 1932, has played an outsized role as a movement-organizing space, known for helping to train labor organizers in the 1930s and civil rights organizers in the 1950s and 1960s.¹

The call to action in the event invitation read: “This is a critical moment in history. We face multiple crises: environmental, growing social, economic and political divides, and a slide toward fascism, economic instability and war. There is an urgency to both resist these trends, and to build an alternative system for a just and sustainable future.”²

The goals of the gathering were three-fold:

1. Articulate our collective position on connecting resist and build.
2. Sharpen the analysis of what system change we’re working for: post-capitalism versus reform capitalism. Model a constructive dialogue about differences and aim to identify areas of collaboration/common interest.
3. Figure out how to work together by working together, for example, messaging on resist and build, strategizing, and implementing concrete actions.

This was prior to COVID-19 and spoke to long-term trends of wealth and income inequality that long preceded the pandemic, leading to increasing questioning of neoliberalism, as NPQ covered at length back in February 2020.³ These trends were publicly visible. Indeed, in late February, Bernie Sanders won a landslide victory in the Democratic Party’s caucuses in Nevada.⁴ Yes, soon Joe Biden would dominate the path to the Democratic nomination and, in November, win the presidency; but the world of early 2020 was one in which nominal prosperity was offset by increasing depths of despair, mounting student debt, and growing economic precarity.

This was the context in which the Resist and Build summit was called. But then came COVID-19, which not only dramatically altered the political and economic context but also made in-person events exceedingly difficult to hold. The three-day solidarity economy summit was expected to be a small gathering that brought together leading national economy justice groups working on system change, including the U.S. Solidarity Economy Network, New Economy Coalition, The Democracy Collaborative, Climate Justice Alliance, Center for Economic Democracy, Common Future, Transition US, Green Eco-Socialist Network, and a smattering of local initiatives on the USSEN board. Scheduled for March 19–22, it was cancelled on March 13.

What emerged in its place, however, proved to be far more significant. First, in lieu of the in-person conference, a series of two- to three-hour Zoom gatherings were held in March, April, May, and June. There have since been follow-on virtual gatherings, in October 2020 and March 2021, along with the development of an ongoing working-group system.

In the crucible of COVID-19, a stronger movement emerged.

GETTING GROUNDED

The first virtual Resist and Build gathering, held on March 20, 2020, had originally been envisioned as the first full day of the in-person summit. A large part of the meeting was about participants and the different organizations in the virtual “room” getting to know each other better. This was also a time to introduce the framework that motivated the original summit in the first place. The summit’s explicit purpose was to align building strategies (i.e., strategies that support the development of co-ops and myriad other forms of democratic, collectively owned initiatives) with resistance strategies (both community-organizing-based and electoral) and culture-building work. A Venn diagram was displayed that sought to illustrate the interconnections among the different efforts:

At the first gathering, virtual breakout groups were held around four themes based on participant interest—building a solidarity economy narrative about COVID-19, creating a tool kit to guide local mutual aid efforts, supporting funder and capital organizing, and developing resources for online popular education.

It’s worth recalling just how new the pandemic-induced shutdown was at that point. The previous day, the U.S. Department of Labor had issued its weekly report on new unemployment claims for the week ending March 14; the number of claims was a modest 281,000, only a 70,000person increase from the week before. A week later, that number would jump to 3.28 million.⁵

Even so, very early on in the pandemic, the need for mutual aid was evident. The challenge, noted one participant, was to move from a “charitable framework” to one rooted in principles of community self-care, solidarity, and support.

CONFRONTING THE CHALLENGES OF SYSTEM CHANGE

A month later, when the group reconvened on April 17, the initial shock of the shutdown had subsided somewhat, but the severity of the crisis had come into fuller view: 22 million Americans had received layoff notices in the intervening month.⁶ One conference organizer referred to the experience as “feeling a new normal of overwhelm.”

A central focus of the second gathering was to consider what is meant by economic system change and compare reformist progressive or “social democratic” policies with a more transformative, postcapitalist approach that reorganizes the entire economy along principles of solidarity, equity, participatory democracy, and sustainability.⁷

Participants were divided into four groups and were asked to imagine two alternative scenarios: one, a social democratic response, in which “a government following Keynesian/FDR/Bernie Sanders–type policies had been in power when the pandemic broke”; and another, in which the “capitalist structure itself had been replaced” by a solidarity economy model. Participants were asked to consider how each would have dealt with the pandemic differently from the actual U.S. policy response.

A central theme that emerged was that a social democratic/New Deal–type response that, for example, kept people on payroll, would have been better than, say, the chaotic rollout of the Paycheck Protection Program.⁸ But, as one participant noted, reformist efforts like the New Deal are “inherently unstable as long as capitalism is still the predominant economic system.” The reasons are not hard to discern. Indeed, U.S. history of the past few decades illustrates the ability of corporations to organize to cut regulatory controls and reduce their tax burden, undermining the ability of the public sector to finance social services.

At the same time, the challenges of developing a solidarity economy—not just as an idea but a living reality—were widely acknowledged. On the one hand, the crisis posed by the pandemic enabled people to “imagine things we couldn’t imagine and critique things we wouldn’t have critiqued before,” noted one participant. On the other hand, as another person cautioned, “Crises can always cut both ways. Yes, it opens space for radical imaginings, but it also can make people long for what was before. It will also rely on countless one-on-one organizing conversations. Crises are collective problems that require collective actions. The system that we live in is brilliant in guiding people into individualistic solutions to resolve tensions of the system.”

One conference organizer added, “A question we need to grapple with is that white supremacy predated capitalism and is a broader cultural and ideological container. How do we ensure our solidarity economy movement is also effectively undoing white supremacy patterns, systems, institutions, ideologies, etc., which are very much present?”

It was clear that there remained much work to do. As one participant noted, “We have a Next System Project,” referring to a program of the nonprofit The Democracy Collaborative that seeks to promote the study and discussion of economic alternatives. “We don’t have a next system movement. We need to build that.”

CASE STUDIES OF LOCAL ACTION

The third virtual gathering, held May 15, sought to lift up local organizing efforts in Massachusetts; Humboldt, California; and Jackson, Mississippi. In Massachusetts, Ariel Brooks of the Center for Economic Democracy⁹ and Emily Kawano of USSEN outlined how a statewide solidarity economy network was built in 2019 to buttress and connect local community land trust and cooperative organizing, and how that network had been mobilized during the pandemic to direct financial support to mutual aid and solidarity economy groups.

In Humboldt, California, David Cobb of Cooperation Humboldt outlined some of the group’s efforts in Humboldt County, a community of 135,000.¹⁰ Among their efforts is an “honor tax” campaign that earmarks 1 percent of revenues for unrestricted funding for the native Wiyot nation, and support for a range of cooperative development initiatives.¹¹ The group also participated in a 2018 campaign led by a local Latinx group that led to the passage of a countywide immigrant sanctuary resolution.¹²

In Jackson, Mississippi, Kali Akuno talked about the work of Cooperation Jackson, which launched in 2014.¹³ Akuno identified five focus areas of the group’s work: mutual aid, organizing the unemployed, co-ops, political education, and food sovereignty. Akuno also talked about the group’s efforts to engage in small-scale community production as a pathway to greater community economic self-sufficiency. “We think small-scale industrial capacity is important,” Akuno noted. He added that the goal is to “mix that in” with urban agriculture to “attain a level of food security and food sovereignty.” Amid the pandemic, Akuno added, mutual aid and developing solidarity economy supply chains were of the utmost importance.

WEAVING THE THREADS

The last of the monthly gatherings took place on June 19. In the intervening month, George Floyd had been murdered, and a global uprising against anti-Black racism had resulted. The central discussions at this gathering hinged on two key organizing questions: (1) What seems possible now that wasn’t there before?; and (2) How does it connect with the solidarity?

More broadly, to paraphrase Septima Poinsette Clarkwho, at Highlander, had led the development of citizenship schools to enable African Americans to vote during the civil rights movement—participants sought to be “weavers of threads” and identify areas of connection.¹⁴

One participant pointed out, “One of the connections that is really important is to understand that the way the United States responded to the pandemic is itself a form of state violence.” Reopening where the virus is growing, noted this participant, was a form of state violence that was ravaging BIPOC communities in particular.

A report back from a breakout group emphasized that the rise of Black Lives Matter offered a chance “to raise conversations around reparations and Black community wealth…the prison-industrial complex cannot be reformed, just like capitalism [cannot be]. That is a connection.”

Another participant added, “Defunding the police and the military-industrial complex are vital demands, because they help make possible the major transfer of resources needed for social transformation.… As we ask, ‘What are the police for?,’ the solidarity economy movement can provide some answers. The alternatives proposed are centered in values of ‘caring, mutuality, solidarity.’”

BUILDING FOR THE FUTURE

After June, the four-stage virtual conference had ended; but the network-building effort has expanded to include other organizations, both sectoral and local, working on systems change, and continues through working groups around the arts, education, mutual aid, narrative change, politics, and policy, among other themes. The different work groups have met twice: in October 2020, to hear from the Southern Movement Assembly and reconnect in regional breakout sessions, and in March 2021, to reflect on the new political environment shaped by the Biden administration (but also the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol). Most of the network-building work happens between meetings. (This edition of the Nonprofit Quarterly, for example, is one of the many products of the ongoing network-building work.)

In April 2021, the Resist and Build network, led by Cooperation Humboldt, convened the Post-Capitalism Conference. At one session, Nia Evans, who directs the Boston Ujima Project, spoke of the step-by-step work needed to build an economy rooted in racial and economic justice and solidarity.¹⁵ “We see our work,” Evans explained, “as providing as many opportunities as possible for people to practice everyday activities that would lead us to post-capitalism and a solidarity economy…we are actively building this every day. This is real. This is reality. We will win. We are winning in different ways every day.”

NOTES

1. For information on the United States Solidarity Economy Network (USSEN), see “Our Story,” USSEN, accessed May 18, 2021. For the history of the Highlander Research Education Center (Highlander), see “88 Years of Fighting for Justice,” Highlander Research and Education Center, accessed May 18, 2020.
2. Personal correspondence from the U.S. Solidarity Economy Network, February 18, 2020.
3. Steve Dubb, “After the Next Recession: The Search for an Economic Path Forward,” Nonprofit Quarterly, February 19, 2020.
4. “Nevada results,” 2020 Primary Elections, NBC News, February 25, 2020.
5. For the records from March 19, 2020, see “Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims,” U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), March 19, 2020. For the report from March 26, 2020, see Quoctrung Bui and Justin Wolfers, “More Than 3 Million Americans Lost Their Jobs Last Week. See Your State,” New York Times, March 26, 2020.
6. Jeff Cox, “Weekly jobless claims hit 5.245 million, raising monthly loss to 22 million due to coronavirus,” CNBC, last updated April 16, 2020.
7. For a more detailed explanation, see Emily Kawano and Julie Matthaei, “System Change: A Basic Primer to the Solidarity Economy,” Nonprofit Quarterly, July 8, 2020.
8. Steve Dubb, “Anatomy of a Rollout Disaster: The Paycheck Protection Program,” Nonprofit Quarterly, April 10, 2020.
9. “Our History,” Center for Economic Democracy (CED), accessed May 18, 2019.
10. On Cooperation Humboldt, see “Who We Are,” Cooperation Humboldt, accessed May 18, 2021. Population estimate is from “QuickFacts: Humboldt County, California,” United States Census Bureau, accessed May 18, 2019.
11. “Wiyot Honor Tax,” Cooperation Humboldt, accessed May 18, 2021.
12. “Did you know that Humboldt County is a sanctuary county?,” Redwood News, KIEM-TV, January 17, 2021.
13. “Who We Are,” Cooperation Jackson, accessed May 18, 2021.
14. Paraphrased from civil rights leader Septima Poinsette Clark, “I am not weaving my life’s pattern alone. Only one end of the threads do I hold in my hands. The other ends go many ways, linking my life with others.” For more information on Septima Poinsette Clark, see “Septima Clark,” Digital SNCC Gateway, accessed May 18, 2021.
15. For more information on the Boston Ujima Project, see the organization’s website at ujimaboston.com. Nia Evans made her remarks at: The Democracy Collaborative, The New Systems Reader at the Post-Capitalism Conference, Eureka, California, Humboldt State University, April 23, 2021, published on YouTube on April 26, 2021.

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

The reckoning with racial injustice that the United States and others around the globe have been going through has generated important, powerful changes for individuals and institutions, with more, we hope, on the way. But the path to multiracial democracy and an economically equitable society faces many barriers.

To overcome these barriers requires decentering whiteness. But what does it mean to truly decenter whiteness? And what must the movement built to achieve that look like? These questions animated a report and community dialogue guide that we jointly authored this past June, titled Advancing Well-Being by Transcending the Barriers of Whiteness.

Where to begin? One place to look might be the nation’s response to drug abuse and the stark differences between how white and Black Americans have been treated in this discourse. Notice that when white Americans without a college education started to experience an unprecedented decline in life expectancy, dialogue centered on the economic losses and related pessimism behind the trend. The grim, fatalistic tone was signaled by the titles of such articles and books as Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, and The New York Times’ “Who Killed the Knapp Family?”

An extraordinary amount of attention has been given recently to substance abuse, suicide, and other problems faced by a class of white people whose worsening health and discouraged outlook had fueled right-wing populist politics. This attention was accompanied by greater recognition that substance abuse is primarily a health challenge to be prevented or treated, rather than a crime to be punished, as had been the dominant frame when it was perceived as mainly an issue in Black communities. However, a deeper and broader point is sometimes overlooked: Structural racism not only led to policies and practices that repress Black Americans and deny them freedom, health, and opportunity—it also generated “deaths of despair” among whites and has prevented constructive solutions to pressing problems for the whole country.

That realization reinforces why the nation must leverage the moment to seek to transcend the barriers of whiteness. This will be essential to improving the health and well-being of the 100 million Americans of all races who live in economic insecurity. It will be fundamental to creating an economy that is less extractive and more sustainable. Fortunately, the seeds for this kind of transformative change have been planted, and the efforts to overcome these barriers are well underway.

Whiteness, in the sense that we are using it, does not refer to individual prejudice but rather to the fact that white identity remains the implicit standard of normalcy and entitlement to the rewards of society. This leads to acceptance of the marginalization, “othering,” and, too often, dehumanization of those who are not white. This acceptance is often paired with denial that racism is still an important issue for US society.

Whiteness is also a design challenge. Our laws, regulations, customs, and institutions were designed to advance it and to deny others opportunity. These now need to be redesigned. It’s an enormous task, but also a chance for society to recast norms and institutions in accord with the nation’s core democratic principles. It’s a chance to make sure national norms and institutions meet everyone’s needs—including white people!

The pattern of racialized national politics that we know today, and the divisiveness it fosters, began its modern form in the 1970s and has included several strands of strategy and tactics. There have been several generations of “dog whistle” messages that convey racist sentiments without having to make them explicit or overt. There has been concerted opposition to the scope of the federal government, nominally based in race-neutral libertarian values but in practice growing directly from states’ rights segregationist origins. Racialized appeals to voters reached a new level of messaging sophistication, particularly via social media, by 2016, and fed on not only anti-Black racism and anti-immigrant sentiments directly but also on scorn for “liberal elites.”

Each mainstream institution, profession, and component of government has a legacy and contemporary form of whiteness it needs to confront. The political challenge is to find ways to transform structures, change the rules of the game, and embrace true multiracial democracy.

The failure to have addressed race and racism on a structural level in the past is reflected throughout society. For example:

• The dangerous and inept ways in which police confront and too often kill or wound mentally ill people of all races is a direct consequence of the broader militarization of the culture of law enforcement to control Black and Brown communities.
• The roots of the current housing crisis, affecting entire generations and people of all races, lie in government-sanctioned redlining and other discrimination, which distort home values, undercut the viability of neighborhoods, and diminish financial incentives to build housing for anyone other than the affluent.
• Failure to invest in public education is not only hurting people of color but also hobbling the national economy.
• And, as noted above, the lack of an effective prevention strategy or response to the opioid epidemic now ravaging white working-class communities is a direct consequence of the policies enacted, and alternatives not supported, by the so-called “war on drugs” and resultant mass incarceration of Black and Brown people.

In short, overcoming the barriers of whiteness is essential to addressing almost any social problem one could name, problems which have generated personal pain and perpetuated systemic inequality for a long time.

The extraordinary events of 2020 gave great urgency and new direction to this analysis and to our ideas for how to bring about positive change. The movement confronting anti-Black racism built up great moral force and gained widespread attention and influence. The “racial reckoning” and the support shown by so many white people and mainstream institutions was heartening but merited caution, given the nation’s long history of superficial or short-lived expressions of such solidarity. Indeed, the oppositional messages and backlash to the BLM movement expressed during the 2020 election campaign remind us that white backlash cannot be ignored. The insurrection at the Capitol reinforced the threat to maintaining even conventional representative government at a time that an expanded and reenergized democracy is sorely needed.

The COVID-19 pandemic, with its extreme racial disparities, gave an equally powerful jolt and guidance to our understanding of the relationship between structural racism, health, and well-being. The prevalence of the virus and its correlation with racial inequities in housing, employment, and incarceration reinforced the need to tackle those underlying problems.

Given these immediate and long-term challenges on so many fronts, is transcending the barriers of whiteness even possible? We remain optimistic that it is. We see promise both in the development of new narratives and new policy approaches.

New narrative frameworks and innovative policies, we believe, can generate support that reaches both “persuadable” whites as well as people of color. Our goal should be to not only affirm and equip but also to expand the range of people and organizations committed to racial justice. That expansion calls for a new kind of community dialogue, one that builds upon a common aspiration for well-being that could provide a bridge across racial, class, and cultural divisions.

The new narrative, to be effective, must tap into and resonate with underlying beliefs and perceptions, what Ian Haney Lopez calls “the hidden scaffolding” that undergirds political communications. It should vary to connect with different groups with respect to crafting and delivering messages, but all variants should point in the same direction: generating an understanding of justice that is inclusive rather than divisive and which lays the foundation for powerful collective action to improve health and well-being. Here are four narrative strategies for implementing these changes in governmental, corporate, nonprofit, and philanthropic policies that we invite readers to consider.

1. Convey the reasons for economic disruption and dislocation in terms and stories through which white workers can see the common roots of their losses in the experiences of Black ones, as a product of how contemporary capitalism relentlessly sheds jobs and disinvests in places.
2. Make the case for how policies initially intended to provide access to the people most excluded by social and economic structures can also benefit many other groups, and indeed the entire nation.
3. Present “centering Blackness”—policies and practices that intentionally seek to lift and protect Black people—as an alternative to opinions, attitudes, and beliefs that center whiteness. Centering Blackness is a perspective that will promote collective healing and better outcomes for people of all races.
4. Raise public expectations for government to become a force for solving significant economic and social problems.

Already, advocates are hard at work on myriad campaigns to realize these notions in tangible ways. For example, the executive order in support of racial equity by the Biden administration has led PolicyLink and allies to generate a racial equity blueprint for federal agencies. Grassroots efforts for housing justice, health equity, a new vision for public safety, and many other priorities are exhibiting ever-greater alignment. Building the infrastructure and securing the capital for this equity movement will be as critically important as getting its narratives and policy agendas clarified and aligned.

These, then, are the places where advocates need to engage. Recognizing and confronting the barriers of whiteness will make some uncomfortable, and there will always be other worthwhile activities to pursue instead. But movement leaders need to keep, as the saying goes, their eyes on the prize. Addressing underlying issues of economic inequality and structural racism is critical to building a powerful movement for an authentic and just multiracial democracy.

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

The publication I co-direct, Shelterforce, has covered community development for 46 years, and I’ve been around it in some way for over 20 of those years. We’ve covered a lot of housing and community development policies and programs in that time, and because one of our roles is to spur connectivity among people in the field, often we’ve covered promising or exciting new ideas early in their development. And let’s be honest; for some of this work, five or 10 years in is still early in their development.

But earlier this year, we decided to do something different. Specifically, we opted to return to some of our past coverage and see what had happened to the promising practices we uplifted since we first wrote about them. Our Whatever Happened To… series turned out to be so popular that we’re now making it into an ongoing feature.

For the first series of articles, we reached back as far as the late 1990s. Looking over the stories we covered, here are four key lessons that stood out.

1. We tend to underestimate just how much things can change over the course of decades—and how many things can take decades of concerted effort to change.

Even those of us who understand that neighborhood conditions aren’t intrinsic and “natural” still tend to approach this work under the assumptions that housing markets, job markets, political climates, and technology are going to change slowly, if at all, when in many cases changes can really be quite sudden. This doesn’t mean that slow, steady, consistent work isn’t needed; far from it. It often lays the groundwork for desired change—and builds the relationships, institutions, and systems that allow for adaptive responses to unexpected change.

We found changes in Newark, New Jersey, for example, that many people 20 years ago would have had trouble believing would ever come—but the activists who did expect them put the city in a better position to handle the changes than many other places have been. Meanwhile, the financial and foreclosure crisis threw a wrench into the expected trajectory of change—and the planned responses to it—around Atlanta’s BeltLine, causing a need for significant regrouping.

Similarly, we found that the political climate has changed notably in recent times on topics like rent control and universal vouchers in ways that few would have expected. Nonetheless, even though these measures are much more popular than they were, say, back in 2010, getting reforms passed into law still requires a long-haul, multiyear effort by tenant organizers who started resuscitating the tenant movement over a decade ago.

2. Success doesn’t necessarily lead to replication, especially when it requires someone to give up some power.

Some of the field’s most exciting examples—the democratic philanthropy of the Southern Partners Fund, the cooperative ownership models of the Evergreen Cooperatives, and the robust and ongoing neighborhood-level democracy of Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (we didn’t actually cover them in this series, but I felt they belonged on this list)—all took courage and risk on the part of not only the organizations themselves, but their funders and elected officials, to let go of normal ideas about their roles and types of support they would provide. Yet despite positive results, few have replicated them thoroughly. 

3. Don’t underestimate the work of implementation and enforcement—and of designing programs with the long haul in mind.

As an article that reviews community benefits agreements illustrates, promises made on paper have little meaning without teeth. Sometimes what happens after the first win makes more practical difference than that first win does. Advancing equity requires both big, strong vision and close attention to detail in implementation over a sustained amount of time.

“The problem was [comprehensive community initiatives or CCIs] were structured in the form of an ‘initiative’ because of the way foundations thought about things,” says Anne Kubisch. “If you have a theory of philanthropy that says, ‘We want to pilot something, show how it works, and then move on,’ you automatically by definition have this time-limited sense.”

While she was speaking about funder-led CCIs in the 1990s and 2000s, she could have been referring to so many different types of community development initiatives, themes, or programs.

Speaking of the importance of attention to detail, in one of our stories we found that activists in San Francisco who won commitments from the city to donate surplus land to affordable housing were stymied by the fact that it wasn’t actually the city that owned most of the surplus vacant land that they were seeking.

4. You need to ask people who are directly affected to find out how to design functional programs (and determine program goals).

The need to involve those who are most affected is not a new observation, of course. I think it shows up in some form on 90 percent of lists of lessons learned in planning and community development. However, until we all get better at it—and call out the instances where it isn’t happening—it’s worth reiterating. I would also add that frontline staff and organizers who directly work with affected folks are both good resources, and in some ways also directly affected by program design, if they are doing their jobs right. Tap those resources.

The Road Home program, formed after Hurricane Katrina for helping New Orleans homeowners, was admittedly initially created and rolled out quickly. But after widespread feedback about the ways that it wasn’t helping low-income homeowners, it was disappointing to revisit the initiative and find out that little had changed. The people with the most knowledge of the needs were still being treated more like potential fraudsters than experts in their situation. Ignoring that information is not only patronizing, but foolish.

…

As we continue to periodically revisit new ideas and promising approaches of the past, I expect to find more failures, or sort-of successes, than successes. That’s not because I don’t have the utmost respect for people doing this work, but because the work is hard and the support often not forthcoming. It is also the case because that’s how it should be if you are trying new things and truly being ambitious. It’s a shame that our culture (and funding structures) often makes it hard to learn from what didn’t work. We still do not learn very well from failure in our field. The result is often to encourage risk aversion when risk taking is far more often indicated.

I also expect to discover some incremental but important changes—like Seattle’s transit agency figuring out the details of affordable housing development—and some more truly delightful wins that have stuck around, as with the Southern Partners Fund and the evicted tenants in Minneapolis who ended up as homeowners.

As we look back at additional past initiatives, I’m looking forward to learning more.

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

Last month, Black Philanthropy Month (BPM), a group founded to honor the United Nations’ International Year for People of African Descent in 2011, celebrated its tenth anniversary. This year’s summit (held virtually) had the theme “TENacity: Making Equity Real” and took stock of racial equity pledges made by philanthropy and corporations in 2020 are whether they were being honored in 2021. (The capital “TEN” alludes to the group’s 10-year history.)

BPM’s vision centers on “informing, involving, inspiring, and investing in Black philanthropic leadership to strengthen African American and African-descent giving in all its forms, for the benefit of our planet, our communities, our organizations and our lives.” The scope is global; the conference included sessions on the United States, Canada, the Caribbean, Brazil, Africa, and Black women’s philanthropy.

At BPM’s annual virtual gathering in 2020, based on surveys of 1,500 conference participants, BPM developed a set of 10 Black funding principles. In brief, these are:

1. Public, transparent annual Black funding goals for impact
2. Long-term, multi-year funding
3. Remember small- to medium-sized Black businesses and startups
4. Trust us for a change
5. Flexible, general support for operations
6. Funding with a social justice lens
7. Preservation of the Black philanthropic practice of self-reliance and mutual support
8. Supporting Black innovation and creativity
9. Supporting an intersectional human rights agenda
10. Inclusive and mutually supportive funding across the global Black community

From the perspective of 2021, how much movement have philanthropy and business made on these goals? To begin to address this, at the opening session, Ford Foundation president Darren Walker was interviewed by Dr. Jackie Bouvier Copeland, founder of BFM and executive director of the WISE (Women Invested to Save Earth) Fund, an internationally focused nonprofit based in northern California.

Walker noted that “there is a huge gap” between the aspirations of young Black entrepreneurs and their ability to raise funds from friends and family to get started. Walker added, “That is something we have to talk about. It is not enough to say, ‘I’m going to start a loan program for Black entrepreneurs.’ Black entrepreneurs don’t need loans. Black entrepreneurs need equity.”

Walker said the Ford Foundation intended to place a sizable portion of the $1 billion pledged in 2017 for impact investing over 10 years “in Black-managed funds.”

As for those investments, in March, Anne Field reported that “initial areas of focus have included affordable housing in the United States and access to financial services in emerging markets.” Ford has also identified “quality jobs” and “diverse (fund) managers” (the field Walker mentioned) among its focus areas. As of June 30, 2019, Ford reported investments of $129 million toward its $1 billion goal.

As for moving corporate policy, Walker named two areas where he believes that leverage exists to advance racial equity. One involves employee resource groups. Walker observed that 20 years ago formal groups were rare, but now they are common. “Black employee resource groups are a critical part of how we will advance this [racial justice] agenda in the future,” Walker said.

Walker also emphasized the importance of changing who’s on company boards. Walker noted that as of 2020 one-third of the 500 companies that constitute the Standard & Poor’s index did not have a single Black director. An important step in this direction was taken days after Walker’s remarks by the NASDAQ (National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations) stock exchange, which announced new rules that require companies listed on its US exchange to “publicly disclose board-level diversity statistics using a standardized template [and] have or explain why they do not have at least two diverse directors.” Companies have until the end of 2022 to come into compliance with the new rule. Among the companies listed on the NASDAQ exchange are such leading tech firms as Apple, Microsoft, Google (Alphabet), Facebook, and Amazon.

A follow-on panel—moderated by CNN analyst Bakari Sellers and including Christina Lewis of Give Blck, Dr. John Jackson of the Schott Foundation, Nneka Eze of VestedWorld, and Dr. Bhekinkosi Moyo of the Africa Centre on Philanthropy and Social Investment in Johannesburg—picked up on some of Walker’s themes.

Had business funding increased? As Walker noted, enormous gaps persist in the US. According to Eze, the situation in Africa is not better. Asked if the availability of capital was increasing, Eze responded, “On the venture side, I would say not really. The gap is so significant that the amount of capital that would need to come in is probably too much, but I hope that changes.… There are a few funds-of-funds starting; they are mostly focused on the US. You’re not really seeing that attention on the continent.”

By contrast, philanthropy has increased. Moyo noted that in Africa, due to COVID-19, there was “a huge increase compared to what has happened in the last 10 years.” A recent Bridgespan report found giving in Africa by philanthropy to nonprofits was $269 million, compared to an average of $103 million per year between 2010 and 2019. Still, the population of Africa exceeds 1.37 billion. Even at $269 million, that’s less than 20 cents per capita. And funds reaching local grassroots groups remain limited; Bridgespan estimates their share at nine percent.

For the US, the best data came from Lewis. Give Blck, which Lewis cofounded in 2020, maintains an online portal to enable donors to give to Black-led nonprofits. The site presently lists over 500 Black-led nonprofits. Lewis said she surveyed the list’s members and that 80 groups responded. “More than half,” she said, reported at least a 20-percent increase in donations over 2019.

Building Peer-to-Peer Connections

One consistent theme throughout the conference was the call to build more peer-to-peer linkages among Black communities, both within countries and across the world. At the panel, Jackson highlighted the role of institutions like historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), while Lewis emphasized the value of giving circles.

At a separate session, Dr. Nelson Colón, president of the Fundación Comunitaria de Puerto Rico (Puerto Rico Community Foundation), focused his remarks on this topic. Colón has helped launch an initiative which he calls the Racial Equity Building Institute for the Americas or REBIA. Aided by seed funding from the Mott Foundation, REBIA seeks to, as Colón puts it, “build the capacity of networks and organizations to close equity gaps” and “to connect the US diaspora with their countries of origin.”

One goal, Colón notes, is to create an Afro-descendent communicators’ network “of journalists, communicators, and artists that will generate narratives and blueprints for change.” Network building, Colón emphasizes, “presents ample opportunities for philanthropy.”

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