Tag Archives: nonprofit quarterly

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

This article comes from the Spring 2021 edition of the Nonprofit Quarterly, “Radical Leadership: Visioning Lines of Flight.”

“There’s this notion that change takes time. But in reality, a lot of change just happens in radical paradigm shifts,” explains Cyndi Suarez, Nonprofit Quarterly’s new president and editor in chief. “If you don’t know that process of transformation, then you don’t know how to harness it.”

In late-December 2020, Suarez was promoted from her role as senior editor, and kicked off 2021 by inviting the entire staff to a five-day virtual vision retreat.

Suarez says, and has demonstrated, that “a different person in leadership with a different set of assumptions can actually shift the system.” Since this leadership transition, Nonprofit Quarterly has refined the editorial line to sharpen its focus on analyzing justice as it pertains to race, the economy, climate, and health. This focus allows NPQ to delve into the ecosystems that comprise these issue areas, especially social movements, nonprofit organizations, and philanthropy. Suarez came to these frames as a result of various conversations with leaders over the past four years, in which the main theme was ecosystem sensemaking.

NPQ has also been restructured to support leading thinking and practice from the field—particularly from leaders of color—which has already been in development through Edge Leadership, an R+D platform for social change hosted by NPQ and launched by Suarez before taking on her new role. NPQ is currently building out a Voice Lab for leaders of color in the field interested in developing their voice. The lab will host writing, podcasting, online learning, and social media workshops; and it will support the development of a body of work through purpose, storytelling mediums, and audience workshops. This unique relationship between Edge Leadership, an environment set up to cultivate voice, and NPQ, a publication, creates the conditions for the knowledge creation needed now within and beyond the sector.

Joel Toner, president and publisher of the Nonprofit Quarterly, is thrilled by the organization’s progress. “We are so lucky to have Cyndi, as the organization is positioned to provide the critical racial equity and leadership perspectives our readers and the sector need right now.”

Suarez and Toner are working closely to strengthen and diversify NPQ’s revenue streams, including fortifying the organization’s grant support, growing its burgeoning membership model, and building out other earned revenue opportunities, including its highly successful online learning program.

Toner praises Suarez’s innovative leadership style, which he says is already transforming all aspects of NPQ’s mission and has quickly galvanized staff. “It creates a more vibrant, creative, energetic, woven organization, where good ideas come from everywhere and not just from the top but from every role in the organization and from everyone in the room,” he said.

Marcus Walton, president and CEO of Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, notes Suarez’s rare blend of imagining new ideas and operationalizing change. “Being able to use this platform to share a perspective that, quite frankly, has never been asked of me before, translated into an elevation of my status in the field.” Walton believes Suarez will lead NPQ to elevate the voices of those who go unheard. “Cyndi’s work, support, and encouragement to share my point of view at NPQ has translated into a level of credibility that could have taken years to achieve otherwise,” he said.

“What excites me most is innovation. I’m attracted to new ideas,” says Suarez, who has been involved in social change for thirty years as an organizer, strategist, funder, and intellectual. “Movements for social change need to create new ways of thinking and being. People who are not used to being seen as having power can take power and create new forms of social change.”

Walton calls Edge Leadership “next level”—the answer to the question, What is next? Advanced practitioners are being engaged on the platform to explore possibilities in ways Walton has not seen before. “Edge Leadership allows us to have a space to explore possibilities instead of negotiating through practical, constrained, preexisting options offered by current inequitable structures.”

This idea that it is possible to create new forms, or ways of organizing life, is central to Suarez’s creative approach. Based on her field research with leaders of color, she has prioritized four pillars critical to creating new forms of civic infrastructure: vision, accountability, knowledge creation and evaluation, and space to replenish. “In essence, edge leaders are creating a new culture,” she says. “They are designing at the edge, between the present and a livable future.” Bit by bit, these ideas are making their way into NPQ via multimedia articles featuring voices from the field, and articles by edge leaders.

Christopher Cardona, program officer at Ford Foundation, marvels at Suarez’s ability to synthesize complex theory into digestible, applicable bites. “It’s a vision of power and mastery that people of color in particular can exercise in environments that are not designed for them, or environments that are even designed to oppress them and force them to not bring their full selves to what they’re doing. Cyndi offers a framework, a way of thinking and being and feeling that helps people in nonprofit organizations understand their own individual and collective power differently and exercise it from wherever they are.”

Cathy Garcia of Philanthropy Con Café calls Suarez’s work, particularly her series on Women of Color in Leadership and her book The Power Manual, “foundational.” “When I think of Cyndi’s leadership, I think of somebody who is not afraid to ask really deep, intentional questions. We especially need that in this sector that thrives on politeness and niceness at the expense of accountability and having real conversations.”

Suarez believes it is vital for leaders of color to be at the forefront of imagining the future for nonprofits and civil society. “There’re a lot of spaces for analyzing what’s wrong with the world we have now. But there are not a lot of spaces for imagining the world we want to live in,” she said.

She can’t pinpoint how she developed this point of view. But she remembers, as a teen, going to a feminist bookstore and asking for the section on Latina authors. The clerk pointed her to a tiny section of books, and Suarez remembers thinking, “Great. There’s space for me to write the books that need to be written.”

“People think theory is abstract,” Suarez says, “but for me it is real.” She describes herself as a “theory head from the hood,” and is known for breaking down complex ideas into relevant calls to action. Her recent piece “Forms: A New Theory of Power” describes ways in which we can rethink society.¹ “What Does It Look Like to Support Women of Color to Lead,” written when political strategist and movement builder Wilnelia Rivera helped Ayanna Pressley to win a Congressional seat with the slogan “Change Can’t Wait,” continues to reverberate in nonprofit boardrooms, among philanthropy leaders, and across sectors.² “This design beyond limits is challenging and even dangerous work that shifts not just what is made, but the maker,” says Suarez. “Very few people will take it on. However, it only takes a critical mass of sufficient energy to make a difference.” She describes the four pillars of this change noted earlier, in “Infrastructure for a New World,” in which she articulates infrastructure as “not just physical space or things, but the ability and capacity to be part of what we’re building.”

Suarez’s new podcast series features women of color.³ “I’m really interested in tracking women of color in power this year as part of our key work. Why does it matter for women of color to be in power? How do we do power differently?” Through candid, in-depth interviews, listeners will come to understand how these women embarked on their paths to leadership, how their leadership styles have evolved over the years, how they envision their work now, and what they hope to see for their fellow women-of-color leaders.

Suarez recalls how her thinking about power started early in life. “I remember as a kid when I started to realize that I had racial, gender, and class identities that positioned me as low status in society. But I didn’t think of myself as marginalized. In fact, I saw these as privileged positions for understanding power. It’s easier to see how power works from the bottom, even though it can be hard.”

Kristell Caballero Saucedo, program officer for Racial Equity Initiatives REP Fund at Borealis Philanthropy, notes how the sector gets stuck on criticism, and that Suarez manages to lead in a way that demands people to imagine and offer solutions: “You can play while doing this work. You can imagine. You can create. You can innovate.”

The Nonprofit Quarterly welcomes Suarez’s leadership and a new generation of effort to influence whose voice is heard, how to think creatively, and how to be a liberatory social change agent.

Notes

1. Cyndi Suarez, “Forms: A New Theory of Power,” Nonprofit Quarterly, March 18, 2021.
2. Cyndi Suarez, “What Does It Look Like to Support Women of Color to Lead?,” Nonprofit Quarterly, January 4, 2021.
3. See first in series: Cyndi Suarez, “New Borealis Leader Outlines Bold Vision for Philanthropy,” Tiny Spark podcast, Nonprofit Quarterly, February 4, 2021.

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

How are you spending your time? It’s a simple question. Yet people struggle to answer and tell little lies. In our minds, many of us tell a story of doing all we can to make our dreams come true. It’s all the annoying people and impossible tasks keeping us from living the life of our dreams. I used to think this way, until I started doing the math.

Calculating how our time is spent typically reveals our obligations, inadequacies, vices, and shortcomings. It’s like this when we take a linear view of time. Realizing the nature of this thought pattern is a good first step, revealing where we are burdened, out of balance, or in a scarcity mindset. It may not be pretty to take a look at where your time is going.

As we sheltered in place over the past year, people across the world had to dramatically shift their lives. In a recent conversation with Gibrán Rivera, artist and culture strategist Favianna Rodriguez spoke about how her artmaking practice shifted during shelter-in-place. Instead of traveling over the past year, she completed 300-plus pieces of art. She has deepened relationships with humans, plants, and her animal pack. Now she knows the income from traveling to make art could fall away and her life would not fall apart. If people want her on an airplane, they will have to pay, because she has realized the cost to her, and the value to her of being rooted at home.

Every so often in my life, I realize it is not the way I thought or intended. Our time on the planet is our currency, our experiences. It is more valuable than anything we can possess. For many, especially those who have never experienced significant loss, “the future” holds the space where they live the life they want, yet I have found that the more people vision and enact what they want in the future now, the faster that future overtakes present reality.

What you do and think about, that is your life. Start noticing and documenting how you wish you were spending your time. Maybe it’s five minutes in the strawberry patch, or stopping just for a moment to take in the precision of water on rocks. Design your life like the flowers, each crocus and tulip both of its kind and of itself. Rodriguez is encouraging folks to make a list of things that changed during shelter in place that we want to keep or never allow back.

This tool helps you see where your time is going. When we know where our time is spent, we can identify our “Super Power” activities, the things in life that might serve multiple purposes with a small amount of time. Figuring out which activities are non-negotiable good things in our days is our responsibility, and our making it happen holds the potential for our own balance in order to be of greater service.

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

Kendra Hicks, Director of Radical Philanthropy at Resist, convened and hosted Justice is Essential, a three-part series. The first conversation, “Organizing for the New World,” between Joshua Allen and Barbara Smith took place on November 17, 2020. In this excerpt, the speakers discuss catalytic factors over time that contributed to uprisings during the height of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic for Black lives in New York and across the US, and what to prioritize moving forward.

Joshua Allen: I kind of want to expand a little bit on what this moment of catalyst is that we’ve been experiencing this summer. In my personal experience, it doesn’t feel like it’s just because of the murder that we saw on camera, the lynching of George Floyd on camera. I think had a lot to do with Breonna Taylor, and also a lot to do with years and years and years of buildups, of murders, of pervasive systemic racism. And as Barbara, you point out so wonderfully, the virulent spirit of white supremacy in this country. And I feel like those instances of violence is kind of what sparked the uprising, of course, as well as the coronavirus pandemic and the shutdown. A lot of people, I think, have just been angry and frustrated at the government’s response or lack of response to the very deadly conditions that we’re all living under every day.

I thought, for a very long time in the beginning of June, “Was it safe for me to go out in public? Would I be putting myself, my family, my community at risk?” But really, the kind of driving factor that brought me out to the streets was, if I thought to myself, if we don’t stand up and fight for each other now, who’s going to be left to stand up and fight for us later? And so, I took to the streets every single day, starting on June 1^st. Me and my comrades, we did maybe some days three or four protests a day, hopping around the city. I want us to have a dialogue, but from how I see it, where I am, we have this kind of moment of extreme uprisings in June that have continued in a number of ways—not just protesting on the streets, but really leaning into more mutual aid, leaning into more ways that we can keep each other safe and protect each other; how we can reimagine what safety looks like, not just when we think about police violence and incarceration but when we think about access to fresh water, to housing, to healthcare and safe food as well.

And so, I think that the uprising has moved from the streets—although it still very much still exists in the streets—to a real movement of us who are all making a concerted effort to reimagine what the world could look like if we were to come together and keep each other safe, because a system that reports you never will. I’d love to hear how the uprising looks from your perspective, Barbara.

Barbara Smith: I haven’t seen anything quite like this. I think it’s a really difficult time. And although I’ve been doing nothing but organizing, it seems, during practically the entire time, the pandemic has been not managed in any reasonable way on a national level, so it puts us all in so much more danger. I see a huge amount of passion among people who did take the risk and do take the risk of being out in the street. And in fact, one of the things that I was doing in the early spring was concentrating on trying to get Governor Cuomo, who everybody thinks is a hero, to put into motion policies to get people out of the prisons, which are just cauldrons, of course, of danger around the pandemic and around the virus. So, we would have car caravans, and I would find myself cutting open a grocery bag and carefully writing things like “COVID equals death” and “Free them all,” things like that, and taping them to my car. And then, you know, we coordinated all that, and I was one of the organizers for those kinds of actions.

So, as I said, early days, concentrating on issues around prison, and getting elders and other people who are vulnerable out of prison. And then, with the lynching of George Floyd, a few days after that, I found myself doing something unusual, which was writing without having an assignment. I started writing about white supremacy, and as of yesterday, I’ve written three articles about white supremacy, because that’s what’s happening here. I think that this period has revealed, if you didn’t know it already, all of the contradictions of living in an oppressive society, a capitalist society, a heteropatriarchal society, a racist society, a white supremacist society. So that’s what we’re dealing with. And we’ll see what the next chapter is. I think we’ll be talking about some of that as this conversation goes on this evening. Challenging time to be doing organizing, and yet a lot of energy and a lot of passion around justice.

Kendra Hicks: Thank you so much, Josh and Barbara, for sharing your thoughts on what we’re seeing, really, in this moment. What I’m getting from what you’re sharing is really that we’re not seeing a single catalyst moment, but we’re experiencing the accumulation of all of these moments throughout history that have really created the reality that we live in today. And what’s happened is that it’s ignited people in ways that we really haven’t seen before.

…

Kendra Hicks is a first-generation negra from the Dominican Republic, a mother, and an installation artist from Roxbury, MA. Anchored by a commitment to bring the margins to the center, Kendra supports organizations in building the culture, structures, and strategies necessary to interrogate white supremacy’s impact on their work. In her current role as the Director of Radical Philanthropy at the Resist Foundation, Kendra is using her head, heart, and hands to explore how foundations, as a part of the nonprofit industrial complex, can be more accountable, emergent, and responsive, pushing them to use their imaginations and expand beyond the realms of possibility toward liberation. Kendra Hicks is running for Boston City Council, District 6.

Barbara Smith and her colleagues in the Combahee River Collective are credited with originating the term “identity politics,” defining it as an inclusive political analysis for contesting the interlocking oppressions of race, gender, class and sexuality. Now widely referred to as “intersectionality,” this analytical approach has shaped scholarship, teaching, and progressive activism. Barbara’s work has been a source of guidance and inspiration to individuals and movements committed to battling both external and internal oppression.

Joshua Allen is a black transfeminine organizer and abolitionist whose work revolves around issues of race, gender, and policing. Their work of coordinating direct actions, movement building and analyzing the intersections of race and gender have been featured in major news outlets such as CNN, MSNBC, BBC, and ABC. Joshua has been invited to workshop, keynote, and organize at universities, conferences and within movements in countries across the world.

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

The idea for Letting Go, a book we recently published on impact investing and participatory grantmaking, came out of a conversation we had at a conference in 2019, one of the last we attended before the pandemic turned the world virtual. The conference was held in an immense former stock exchange in Europe; the main hall was filled with foundation leaders and venture capitalists who had paid upwards of $1,500 to mingle and learn about the latest trend in philanthropy, impact investing.

The funders saw suffering in the world, and they nobly aimed to heal it. The big ideas discussed—greenhouse gas reduction, microfinance, sustainable infrastructure—were certainly important. Yet the people in the room were mostly white, mostly male, and almost entirely from the United States and wealthy European cities. Several times during the conference, speakers (including, to their credit, the conference organizers) pointed out the lack of voices in the room from marginalized communities.

To put it bluntly, the funders mostly talked to each other, devising “solutions” to problems many of them had never experienced. The stock exchange setting, with its cavernous ceilings, completed the picture of an echo chamber of privilege.

Other People’s Problems

We work in a field often labeled the “social sector,” one in which foundations, impact investors, and nonprofits collectively aim to address the world’s thorniest problems.

This kind of work can be very appealing, especially to a certain kind of young person trying to figure out how to use privilege for good. Social critic Courtney Martin has called this the “reductive seduction of other people’s problems,” writing that “if you’re young, privileged, and interested in creating a life of meaning, of course you’d be attracted to solving problems that seem urgent and readily solvable.” She notes that “There is a whole ‘industry’ set up to nurture these desires and delusions … encompassed so fully in the patronizing, dangerously simple phrase ‘save the world.’”

But over the past few years, we, like many of our pedigreed peers, have become more critical of this industry, its power dynamics, and our own role in it. The social sector, like so many institutions, faces a moment of reckoning. Books like Edgar Villanueva’s Decolonizing Wealth and Winners Take All by Anand Giridharadas have punctured the air of righteousness around the architects of social change. Twenty years into philanthropy’s so-called golden age, the unchecked rise of global inequality raises questions about just how effective those trillions in largesse have been.

Within philanthropy, the field may be said to have reached a moment of self-reflection. At the 2019 Skoll Forum, normally a place for heady optimism about the state of innovation and social change, one plenary session asked, “Is Philanthropy Part of the Solution or the Problem?” The moderator began by asking the roughly 250 people in the audience if they agreed with the statement that “philanthropy is at a moment of reckoning.” Nearly everyone raised their hand.

Still, many of the big ideas for reform emanating from philanthropy over the past year— pledges to waive grant restrictions, or to “listen” to community members—have proven inadequate. At this moment, when so many nonprofit leaders are feeling disconnected from and disrespected by the institutions that fund them, and when massive inequality is creating a growing chasm of lived experience between people with money and people with ideas, shifting who makes decisions and how is vitally important.

Shifting Power

The term of art is “participatory grantmaking,” but what this really means is a shift in power so that participation is meaningful. The idea behind participatory grantmaking is both simple and powerful: What if we shifted decision-making power away from supposedly expert grantmakers and investors? What if people with lived experience had the power to devise and implement solutions to the problems they face?

Participatory grantmaking is a form of trust-based philanthropy that extends listening much further by directly engaging community members, including grantees, in the decision-making process around grants. In the past decade, it has grown rapidly—from newer activist-led foundations like the Disability Rights Fund and Young Feminist Fund, to the halls of some of the biggest foundations in the world, including Ford.

There are a small but growing number of mainstream funders experimenting with participatory grantmaking today. Ford Foundation and Open Society Foundations have both supported smaller participatory funds through regranting. The Nike Foundation and Global Fund for Children have signed onto donor collaboratives that cede control, like the With and For Girls Collective. And major foundations like MacArthur Foundation are experimenting with participatory pilots.

We believe that foundations have a moral obligation to engage in participatory grantmaking. But they won’t necessarily do it on their own—because it’s unfamiliar, because it challenges their authority, and because it can be hard to form authentic connections with people who are not them.

For all these reasons, social movement and nonprofit leaders as educators, advocates, and community intermediaries have key roles to play in advancing the participatory grantmaking movement and pushing philanthropy to change:

1) Educate: In our interviews with foundation leaders and donors, a common theme emerges: Trust in philanthropy is eroding and philanthropists know it. Philanthropy is only effective if philanthropists find social movement and nonprofit partners. Many grantmakers recognize something must change, and this group appears to be increasingly open to alternative models for giving.

This means there’s a chance to educate funders on what alternative models might look like. There are many “how to” resources available, like Grantcraft’s fantastic guide Deciding Together, which the MacArthur Foundation cited as an inspiration for its participatory pilot. A broader resource is the Participatory Grantmaking Community, a community of practice for grantmakers interested in learning among peers regarding how to shift grantmaking power away from themselves and towards those most affected. Founded in March 2020 at the start of the pandemic, the group has grown to have over 300 members within philanthropy. There is, in short, a growing cultural shift within the field that can, if shoved from outside philanthropy, be amplified.

2) Advocate: A year ago, the Chronicle of Philanthropy published an op-ed encouraging grantmakers to loosen restrictions on funding. Diana Samarasan, founding executive director of the Disability Rights Fund, and philanthropic consultant Katy Love were unimpressed. They responded with a strongly worded letter to the editor challenging funders “to go further and ask, ‘Who is sitting at funder decision-making tables?’” This kind of constructive debate is critical and will need to be driven by grantees at conferences, on webinars, and across tables.

3) Connect: One major cost that can scare some funders away from participatory grantmaking is the time it takes to engage with community members. The process only works if the foundation can build authentic relationships with people who represent the communities they serve.

Here social movement and nonprofit leaders can also be highly influential. Some of the most successful recent participatory grantmaking models have been created in partnership with nonprofit intermediaries. The Disability Rights Fund partnered with the International Disability Alliance, an umbrella network of global and disability organizations, to nominate a diverse group of disabled activists to sit on its grantmaking committee and board. And the MacArthur Foundation worked with a community intermediary as it built an 11-person grantmaking panel for a participatory arts program in Chicago.

Mainstreaming Participatory Grantmaking

Will participatory grantmaking become the mainstream?

In his foreword to Letting Go, Edgar Villanueva envisions a world where at least 50 percent of the people who make funding decisions have direct lived experience. Getting to that point will be an uphill climb. There’s an urgency in how funders talk about participation that is often not matched by the urgency of their actions; there’s a danger that participatory grantmaking will be a passing fad, a buzzword, or remain siloed off—a nice add-on to what remains traditional, top-down philanthropy.

Perhaps most worrisome is the possibility that participatory grantmaking will be framed only as a tool to make philanthropy more effective—rather than as an ethos that demands philanthropists let go of power. A tool can be tested and then ignored, while an ethos is built into the very fabric of a grantmaking strategy.

Still, it is possible that at this moment, coming out of a paradigm-shifting pandemic, participatory grantmaking can catch a wave and fundamentally change philanthropy for the better. If so, then that top-down, closed-off model we all know—and by which most foundations operate today—might itself soon fade into obscurity.

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

This video segment, which is two-and-a-half minutes long, is excerpted from a longer webinar originally broadcast on April 22, 2021. For the full webinar, see “Remaking the Economy: Organizing & Wealth Building in Communities of Color.”

Steve Dubb: Nonprofits and philanthropy—what role can they play in supporting the type of work that you guys do? Not just your own organizations, but groups across the country that are doing similar work.

Lorena Andrade: I think, in supporting our work, it’s also being able to see that, in our case, it’s the long-term work of building community. There is a lot of communication. There is a lot of learning from each other. It’s not always just numbers, because it takes a long time to build and to learn together, because we want it to be something that will continually provide information and practice to building community. I think that’s important as well, because we are doing two things at the same time: We’re defending from them taking from our community in the first place, or imposing things on our community, at the same time we’re trying to develop a community that is going to serve our families. But families need to be a part of that process, and that takes time.

It takes time to figure out what kind of education we would like for our kids, and what that looks like, and how we interact with that. What does a better environment look like? How do we build that, and how do we share that knowledge and turn that into a collective practice? Collective work takes a lot more patience, and a lot more time. And we’re able to produce work, and that is important to see funded, but also this is long-term community work, which is not always so flashy. It’s not always like, “Look at this new business.” Once you have the business, there is all the internal work and hidden work that it takes to make sure that it is a project that sustains and nurtures community, and that is nurtured and sustained by the community as well. To be able to have the eyes to see that work and to fund it, because that is harder work, that is the more difficult resource to get hold of, I guess.

Steve Dubb: Yes, patience—that is really important. Thanks for lifting that up.

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