Tag Archives: nonprofit quarterly

It’s time to recognize magical thinking as a liberatory leadership style.

This edition of the Nonprofit Quarterly magazine explores where we are going vis-à-vis race and power—the edge, in terms of articulating vision, building for a transformative civic infrastructure, and creating new lines of flight.

I assumed the role of President and Editor in Chief in January of this year. I am honored to have the opportunity to build on the work of founding Editor in Chief Ruth McCambridge, who, in 1999, launched what is now a multimedia platform with this very magazine. I am excited to create the NPQ you’ve been telling us you need at this moment—one that leads the way in restructuring knowledge creation in the field.

Cyndi Suarez

President and Editor in Chief, NPQ

In this issue:

Becoming Sovereign

“For edge leaders creating viable futures, it is critical to not only understand but also know how to build personal sovereignty. This involves not only the ability to protect one’s boundaries but also making transparent and crossing them. How does one do that?”

by Cyndi Suarez

Vision in Leadership

“‘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.’”

by Danielle Coates-Connor

How to Be an Antiracist Supervisor. Start with Changing What You Call Yourself.

“What if we did the exact opposite of what being a supervisor was created to do? What if we not only abandoned the term altogether but intentionally centered the well-being of our people first?”

by Kim-Monique Johnson

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

“Social justice and food and art can intersect in a way that is so powerful and compelling,” Jocelyn Jackson says. “It really invites people to step into their power.”

The founder of JUSTUS Kitchen and co-founder of People’s Kitchen Collective regularly gathers people together for community meals. By bringing together artists and chefs, they memorialize historic moments such as the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the Great Migration of African Americans from the South in the early twentieth century, and Donald Trump’s so-called Muslim ban of 2017.

“We are gathering our people together to not only acknowledge the horror of this real specific place, but to also reclaim it as a purposeful celebration of our survival and how our ancestors sacrificed so much to get us here,” Jackson explains. “We are empowered by their sacrifice to go to the streets and to create that call to action of continuing a legacy that is about liberation, that is about collective care, that is about unapologetically being audacious in our personal and community expressions for that freedom.”

In our latest Tiny Spark podcast, Jackson details her artistic process to create beautiful tablescapes which mark difficult events, like her work “Fixed Price Menu,” which was created in honor of cafeteria worker Philando Castile, who was killed by a police officer in 2016. As a recent recipient of a $100,000 unrestricted funds fellowship from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, Jackson discusses how artists can be better supported by organizations and says there’s a need to move beyond transactional relationships. She also shares how her time in Mali with the Peace Corps “surrounded by Black people” changed her life.

“Being in a place where your own identity is centralized, celebrated, uplifted, amplified, simply by its existence,” she explains. “I wish it for everyone to be able to have this kind of experience of returning home, to really get to the heart of why we do what we do in the world.”

Cover Image: Jocelyn Jackson. Photo Credit: Molly DeCoudreaux

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:

• Jocelyn Jackson, “The People’s Kitchen Collective Is Feeding a Movement by Putting People First,” Eater, June 5, 2020.
• Jocelyn Jackson, “If You Want to Experience Liberation, Black Women Must Be at the Table,” Eater, July 10, 2020.
• Keyaira Boone, “Jocelyn Jackson Explores How Community Could Have Saved Philando Castile In Partnership With Ava Duvernay’s Leap Initiative,” Essence, April 7, 2021.
• Deana Haggag & Shelley Trott, “Artists Are Facing Unprecedented Hardship. To Help Them, Philanthropists Must Change the Way They Work—by Working Together,” Artnet, March 29, 2021.
• Abigail Bereola, “The People’s Kitchen Collective Is Bringing Activism to the Table,” Bon Appetit, June 19, 2018.
• On Twitter: Jocelyn Jackson and People’s Kitchen Collective

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

In law school, I was trained to spot issues within fact patterns. In simplest terms, one’s grasp of the relevant law was ascertained by the degree to which one could read a set of facts and determine the applicable case law. Being able to exactingly cite the specific holding in a specific case, including the year, by the specific judge along with their rationale won one the highest grade.

In my equity consulting work, I rely heavily on that training. In fact, if you were to ask me what my consultant superpower is, I would say pattern recognition. Through surveys, listening sessions, and workshops, I seek and sift for the common stories that are being held and told—explicitly and implicitly—within an organization. Once I feel (and to be perfectly candid, it is a feeling) that the story—“only people who show up in this way can succeed here” or “this way of doing things is the problem”—has enough evidence to support its legitimacy, I share it back with the organization. At that point, the work truly begins.

Usually, at least some people in the organization already knew the story. When I ask for their reactions to the often-unpleasant DEIB^* data (or JEDI^**, or EDI^***, etc.) I am presenting (“BIPOC staff agree or strongly agree at three times the rate of their white counterparts that they can’t bring their whole self to work” for example), we invariably hear things like, “I’m not surprised.” Frequently, those voices are not senior leaders; therefore, their rendering had either been disputed or simply ignored for one reason or another prior to last summer. Maybe they didn’t have the requisite “line of sight” or they lacked the “tenure” to truly know and understand what’s going on. Another common canard: the critical voices lacked the “objectivity” to speak with authority—meaning because they have a stake or, possibly, a perceived axe to grind with management, they can’t be trusted to be truthful. As an outsider, an expert, my analysis may be an exact, albeit dressed up, duplicate of one that’s been offered for years by others, but because I am presumed (and indeed strive) to be disinterested, it is given validation.

For the past year, I have had a unique window into dozens of social justice nonprofits spread across this country (and beyond) that are all in the midst of a common social and economic inflection point. They have all been thrust into the virtual work world by COVID and rocked by a racial justice reckoning. And while I am not a trained researcher per se, I do have enough of a background as an investigative journalist to recognize the unusual opportunity for cross-organizational data collection and interpretation that this moment has presented. And what I have witnessed in hundreds of Zooms is a pattern of generational conflict manifesting in myriad ways:

• Distrust that those in formal authority roles are really committed to change
• Disbelief that the voices critical of “the way we do things around here” truly represent the people
• Despair, especially among senior leaders of color who have found themselves at odds with younger versions of themselves, showing up as feedback fatigue

Arguably, much of the discontent preceded summer 2020. Perhaps the racial justice trainings and conversations simply licensed people to put their true feelings out in the open. Be that as it may, the crux boils down to this: our organization put out anti-racist statements and held space for emotional conversation, but how is that translating to our work—both what we do and how we do it? Are we actually interrupting and dismantling white supremacy, or are we just giving lip service while feeding the systems of oppression that have harmed generations of people?

For those asking the question, the stakes couldn’t be higher. The taint of complicity weighs heavy. They chose their work to enact change, not feed into a structural paradigm that prizes norms and behaviors associated with whiteness as the sole standard of excellence.

By and large, the critics are younger, often of color, though also white allies. They are newer to the workforce and in direct service roles that power the organization’s mission. Often, they identify with the very people the organization is set up to serve. In short, they are the people closest to the work, yet they find themselves furthest from the decision-making tables that define the strategy, design the delivery model, and determine the core objectives. In my observations and interactions, the most outspoken of these are very familiar with the characteristics of white supremacy culture and anti-oppression pedagogy. And what they are feeling, seeing, and saying, is that, in their view, white supremacy abounds.

• The organization “whitens” as you get closer to the top of the organizational chart. Rather than hire from within when coveted positions open up, the organization looks externally for talent.
• Wealthy white men (some of whom might be Republicans or even Trump supporters) occupy a disproportionate share of the board seats.
• Staff performance is judged and promotions based on metrics that don’t tell the whole story of their work. Relatedly, perfectionism is celebrated while progress is ignored.
• Overwork is glorified.
• Professionalism is code for white.
• The default development strategy feels exploitative of communities of color and/or obscures the role that systemic racism plays in shaping the problems nonprofits are set up to address .

For those being questioned—the elders, we’ll call them—the onslaught of feedback feels unrelenting and unwieldy. No matter what they say or do, someone on their team is guaranteed to find fault and somehow tie it to their being out of touch. They hold, I have sensed, a tinge of resentment, likely born out of frustration with not being able to tame the cacophony of criticism. Some of these organizations, were it not for the white benefactors that their staff hold in contempt, might have buckled under the weight of the global pandemic. The leaders know this. They look at the pipeline and balance sheet every day. In April and May 2020, they were staring down the barrel of mass layoffs. That they not only survived but are thriving a year later is a feat worthy of celebration, and indeed, while their staff seem to have nothing but shade to throw, boards are heaping CEOs and EDs with praise.

These elders have their own prisms through which they see and experience the world. And while they, too, acknowledge that systemic racism is real, they came up in a world in which things like white supremacy and systemic oppression were not openly discussed. Code switching and self-censoring were the norm. In order to ascend to leadership within a neoliberal nonprofit industrial complex, one figured out how to survive. Surviving meant adopting and perfecting the practices of the dominant group that was funding the work, which, increasingly, became the financial sector or its charitable byproducts. This wasn’t selling out so much as making it work. Which is to say, those who stuck around and rose in the ranks accepted that the nonprofit sector wasn’t a space for radical systems change work. These elders saw the warts but believed that the ends justified the means, that changing lives, even if it took “tainted” money, was on one hand better than the alternative and, on the other, the very essence of the progressive pragmatism that Obama would ultimately embody.

There’s much more to the story and this isn’t the forum for a history lesson, nor am I the best person to tell the story in full. What I will say is that the late nineties was already an era in which dissent was unpopular. Back then, being a young activist or someone perceived as such wasn’t a badge of distinction. The kids who challenged the World Bank and the IMF in Seattle and DC weren’t heroized. They were demonized as anarchists and dismissed as losers and whiners. Globalization and the go-go years of the dot.com era promised a 21^st-century gold rush. My own twenty-something consciousness was suffused with status hungry hip-hop celebrating the good life. Then, on the heels of a recession that is barely remembered because of the magnitude of the system shocks we’ve witnessed since, came 9/11 followed by the wars abroad. There was little appetite for, or attention given, to a broad, sustained critique of American race relations, let alone capitalism’s role in perpetuating our racial caste system. Perhaps most importantly, the platforms that would allow for borderless community building and mobilization were still in their infancy, marginal players at best peddling what were considered extreme minority viewpoints. If you lived through this period, none of what I’m saying is new for you.

Elders I work closely with rarely share this story with their younger staff. For whatever reason, they resist talking about what they endured and how they struggled to keep the promises of social justice afloat when resistance movements were at their nadir. I have a theory as to why. They forgot. Which isn’t to say that they have no memory of their youth. What they have forgotten was the context that surrounded their young adulthood. In plain English: the people leading nonprofits today were molded and shaped, promoted and rewarded within a social and political context that was fixated on procuring accountability through metrics. They came of age against a backdrop in which the Right was chipping away at the sprawling public sector that had been built by FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society. Metrics promised to reel in the bloated, wasteful public sector, which, as we know, meant nonprofits as well.

The organizations that could produce the best and most objective-appearing impact numbers won. Winning meant funding. That funding enabled survival and spurred organizational growth. That growth became a seal of success, confirmation of competence. That success generated more funding, which in turn reinforced the organizational focus, and that of nonprofit management programs, on finding and feeding more “hard” data to those financing the organization. Hungry to prove their mettle and legitimize their work, to scale the program, organizations funded randomized control trials that allegedly proved not only that their program model made a difference in the lives of their participants, but how, exactly, they did so—causation! They fed those peppy findings into a performance management dashboard (Salesforce, I’m looking at you) that purported to capture and track the key impact indicators but more often than not counted that which could be counted while ignoring everything that couldn’t (like how much time it really takes to do the job, for example). The people who were good—either by disposition or training—at the stuff that the dashboard captured were paid more, promoted, and are now the ones in charge.

This is an admittedly crude characterization, but it’s not that far afield, and anyone who’s spent any amount of time in the nonprofit sector knows it. The struggle that I see with many of the leaders I come in contact with is that they’ve done it the way they’ve done it for so long that they a) don’t remember that this push for accountability was a Trojan horse to privatize the globe and discredit public institutions, and b) legitimately can’t wrap their heads around doing things differently (innovating) and still achieving high-quality results. In other words, leaders have been conditioned into believing, against their own better judgment and common sense, that the most important aspects of mission-driven work must be quantifiable and that their highest purpose is to ensure the organization hits those numbers. When challenged, they say things like, “the model works.” They talk about the importance of model fidelity, dosage, etc. They seek to turn what was inevitably an art—working with people always is—into a science.

And now these leaders find themselves facing a young, connected, and outspoken generation that is questioning the very foundations upon which their careers have been built. The up and comers believe (sometimes correctly) they have innovative ideas that should be implemented now. They are indifferent toward staid organizational hierarchies and hold in contempt traditional status markers, especially those that reinforce oppression.

So, what is to be done? A lot. On both sides of the divide. But here are some top-line observations and insights from the field.

First, the elders:

Tell the story better. Not the story of the organization’s founding myth. Tell the story of the sector. Help younger people in the sector understand your journey within the context of our larger societal journey. We didn’t just arrive at a point where too many nonprofits mirror or aspire to mirror the corporate sector. This was imposed on the sector by a combination of social and political forces that sought to mold the sector into a colony of the free market.

Address your performance metrics. The very notion of quantitative measurement as the gold standard of managing and motivating employees is rooted in capitalist industrialism, the focus of which was mass production by any means, including the exploitation of labor. If you call yourself an anti-racist organization, figure out what’s worth measuring and let the other stuff go.

Ease up on the feedback gathering. Your people have probably spent the past year telling you what’s not working and offering ideas for how to work differently. You shouldn’t need another round of feedback to shift, if that is truly the intention.

Clarify decision rights. Let people know which decisions are on the table and which are not and why. A solution: let people know when and how they will be included in decisions as well as who has ultimate decision rights. Also, consider letting people know if they are being included for input gathering purposes only, and let them decide if they want to play that role.

The pain people feel is real. In your heart you may feel that the things young people are griping about are nothing special or simply overblown. You may think, “I had to deal with worse, so what makes you so different? This is just how the world works. Get used to it.” As tempting as this feeling is, maybe what you experienced wasn’t okay and just because you endured (low pay for long hours; slights to your dignity) doesn’t mean others must accept those conditions as well or are somehow weak because they are expressing their discontent.

Be more upfront with potential employees. A young employee at a national nonprofit said in an interview that he felt “catfished” by the organization. It sold itself one way only to flip the script once he began. Organizations need to be clearer in their pitch to potential candidates. Tell folks where you are on the racial equity journey. Tell them where you are headed. Tell them where you are not headed. Just be honest so people can make an informed choice before they commit themselves to something that they may later resent.

Be more upfront with the board: Despite all that has taken place over the past year, I’ve noticed that senior leaders continue to protect their boards and donors from the internal conflicts within organizations. I chalk this up to reflex. Senior leaders are conditioned to spin. “Everything is fine. We have it all under control.” To suggest things might be otherwise (even when it is not the leader’s fault) is to invite doubt in their leadership. But an opportunity for deeper dialogue and important learning is being squandered. In a recent training I led, a board chair wondered aloud if the program staff were “ahead” of the board on racial equity issues. It was refreshing. It opened up possibilities for dialogue. We need more of this.

Even if you think you aren’t checking a box, you still might be checking a box. If you say you are open to change but persistently put up guard rails, qualifiers, conditions, or otherwise undercut any uncomfortable discussions or change efforts that would shift power, you may be checking a box.

Second, the up-and-comers:

Purity can be its own form of perfectionism. We can’t ask everyone else to see our nuances but not allow for the nuances in others. If you find yourself finding fault with every choice the leader makes, check in with yourself. Are you holding this person to an exacting standard that no one can attain? To advance in any field, one has to be able to work within imperfect systems. Give people the grace and space you would want to be imperfect.

Your nonprofit may never be as radical as you want it to be. Your organization isn’t an extension of your personal values. In mission-driven work, it’s easy to conflate one’s values with the values of the organization. You start to impute your beliefs onto the organization, finding fault whenever the organization falls short of your expectations. It’s still a business.

Know when it’s time to move on. As I’ve listened to young people express their frustrations with their organizations, I’ve wondered one thing: why stay? If you’re so unhappy with the leadership or with the way the work is done, then it’s time to go. Rather than force an organization to become what you want it to become, look elsewhere. Better yet, create the thing you want.

Create better boundaries. Connected to the two previous points above, establish better boundaries. If you live with, date, vacation, and spend the majority of your “downtime” with your colleagues, I’m talking to you.

…

Leaders and staff have to be able to talk to one another. Elders hold valuable earned knowledge and wisdom. They know the terrain. Younger workers have fresh minds and hearts. They see old problems with new eyes. Both are necessary for addressing our biggest problems. The key is being able to sit in space with one another without turning away, shutting down, or blowing up. That can only really happen once trust has been established. And trust is born out of truth-telling.

Notes

* Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging

** Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion

*** Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion

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

As Marcos Martinez, who directs Casa Latina in Seattle, recalls, just as there was a time when homelessness in the US was rare, once, finding day laborers on US street corners was also uncommon. That changed in the 1980s and early 1990s as economic dislocation in Mexico pushed many to immigrate to the United States. In 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect, which led many Mexican farmers to migrate northward, as they were often unable to compete with low-cost, mechanized US agriculture.

In Seattle, many migrants sought jobs in the city’s maritime industry when they arrived. But “while they were waiting to get those jobs, people were kind of on the street and trying to get hired as day labor,” Martinez explains. In response, community members “started meeting with these workers…to discuss what their needs might be and how the community might be able to provide support.” Seattle’s Casa Latina, formed in 1994, was the product of those conversations. Today, it is one of over 50 centers nationally that constitute the membership of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, or NDLON. These centers are run according to popular education principles. Workers elect their own leaders, hold their own meetings, set their own wage levels, and establish reglamentos, or codes of conduct, to hold each other accountable.

These centers do not reach all day laborers; in fact, the centers still only reach a minority of those who rely on day labor to earn a living. But amid the pandemic, these centers have grown in importance. Begun as “worker centers” where laborers could come together to set wages, enforce basic labor rights, and take English as a Second Language (ESL) classes, they have evolved into multifaceted community hubs.

During the pandemic, day laborer centers have had to transform their operations. This includes everything from developing remote job dispatch operations to instituting a wide range of financial and in-kind supports. Not every day laborer is undocumented, but those who are have been denied access to federal benefits—including relief checks and unemployment insurance.

A recent New York State law makes clear just how costly this exclusion was. Passed in April 2021, the law, reports Daniel Parra for City Limits, creates an unprecedented $2.1 billion Excluded Workers’ Fund that will provide $3,200 in replacement payments for the relief checks not received to an estimated 199,000 New Yorkers, with another 92,000 expected to also receive additional unemployment payments. Based on population data from the Pew Research Center, it’s clear that similar coverage at the national level would cost over $30 billion. And even New York’s new law, Parra notes, may leave behind hundreds of thousands of undocumented workers.

Absent significant government support (other than New York’s law this spring), day laborer centers have had to raise funds to help workers pay rent and utility bills. Many also became de facto food pantries and raised funds to provide workers direct cash assistance. They also became COVID testing centers and are now often assisting with vaccine administration.

Julio Ornelas Dominguez, a day laborer in Santa Cruz, California, has been a member of the county day laborer center operated by the local nonprofit community action agency for more than a year and a half. He says the pandemic has been difficult, “but we have been able to move forward with the support of the workers’ center, honestly.”

At NPQ, we shared some stories about day laborers a year ago, as well as reporting on a national survey last summer. Here, we take a look both backward and forward—it is a story of nonprofit innovation, heartbreak, and hope for a better future.

The Pandemic Arrives

Luis Valentan himself was a day laborer for 10 years. Like many of the people in Seattle Martinez describes, Valentan immigrated to the United States in 1991. He is now a staff member at NDLON, where he serves as West Coast Regional Coordinator. Valentan outlines some of the challenges: “When we first learned about COVID, most of the information coming out was in English. It was hard to translate those words in a way our workers could understand.… It created a lot of confusion.”

Valentan adds that, “Obviously, there is no financial support. Even though they knew there was a pandemic, a virus, that was killing everyone,” day laborers had to work to pay rent and bills. “Otherwise, they would lose everything.”

At the same time, jobs dried up quickly. The drop was most severe for domestic workers, as few homeowners were willing to hire people to come inside their homes. Gloria Guzmán had worked as a housecleaner through the Santa Cruz center for four years. But amid the pandemic, even with an 18-month-old child, Guzmán and her family moved to Watsonville to work in the fields for seven months. “There wasn’t any work anywhere else,” she says.

Ornela Dominguez recalls that he had thought he might replace day laborer earnings by delivering food. But while delivering for one customer, he was told to drop the bag of food “on the floor, as if I were a zombie.” He did as demanded, even though he knew the health benefits of doing so were nil because he had already touched the items before when packing them. Rather than face demeaning comments, he opted to stop making deliveries and went “a month without work.”

Retooling Operations

Before the pandemic, day laborers had had a high level of in-person interaction among themselves and with the centers. With COVID-19, this had to change—and quickly. In Seattle, Martinez explains, “Normally, we would open at 6:30 am. By 7 am, we would have 50 or 60 workers in our dispatch center waiting for jobs. Of course, with COVID, you can’t do that. The people who run our worker center, they organized the workers into teams of maybe 10 or 12 people. Each team has a leader. They started having regular weekly meetings with the team leaders to keep everyone up to speed with what’s happening, how things are developing, and it was also a good way to stay in touch with everyone.”

Also critical in retooling was getting a handle on community needs. In Santa Cruz, Paola Fernandez, once a dayworker herself who now works as a dispatcher for the center, explains, “When everything began to shut down, we started a list of the resources that were available through the Community Action Program. That was the first step. Then we began to look for resources…such as distributing food every week. Then we began to look at the need for transportation. Many lacked the money for gas.”

Ultimately, one of the functions of the center became distributing cards for gas to workers who needed them, every Saturday from 10 am to 2 pm.

Another major challenge was training workers and staff on how to communicate remotely. Nancy Torres, who is director of the Pasadena Community Job Center, notes that she had to do individualized trainings for workers on how to use their devices to communicate. “It was a little bit challenging. Many of the workers are not familiar with the technology. It takes up a lot of time and volunteer work,” she says.

From Emergency Chaos to Sustained Support

Maria Rodriguez-Castillo, who directs the day workers’ center program in Santa Cruz, observes that the first few months, from March to June especially, were marked by great uncertainty. “There were two or three months of chaos, I think. We were in a state of emergency. We were not prepared to offer virtual services.” Training day laborers to use services like Zoom, she explains, required a lot of one-on-one training, even as center staff also had to train themselves. Now, a year in, operations have reached a rhythm, even though times remain hard, with groups of 30 workers or more now carrying out their regular worker assembly meetings via Zoom, as well as enrolling in virtual ESL classes. “We are all more established virtually,” Rodriguez-Castillo notes.

Another part of the centers’ work has been to distribute money and support for basic needs. Backed by philanthropy through NDLON, there have been four rounds of cash distribution. At Santa Cruz, this worked out to $100 per person per round. The center also served as a hub for the distribution of one-time payments of $500 from the state of California. And there were other forms of assistance for gas, rent, utilities, and food.

Still, there is no doubt that resources were limited. Sometimes, day laborers triaged among themselves. Ornela Dominguez notes that, “With the cards, I don’t always ask for them. We are many.” For example, if he took a card the prior month, he wouldn’t take one the following month. “I dare to be honest,” he says.

Because many day laborers are undocumented, maintaining confidentiality in the distribution of aid is critical. Rodriguez-Castillo emphasizes that the center is “low barrier. We don’t ask for identification of anyone.” In Seattle, Martinez decided the best way to maintain confidentiality was to literally disburse cash. “There were days when I would go in there and walk out with $90,000 under my arm,” he says. “We would divide it up and put it into envelopes,” with families getting between $200 and $400 each.

Health and Solidarity

Another function of the centers was to help members avoid the virus, including helping distribute masks. Nonetheless, the economic necessity driving day laborers meant sheltering in place was not possible, and many of the workers did contract COVID. In Pasadena, Torres relates, “I was looking at my list of families that we have helped. I started asking how many had got infected by COVID. It was amazing: out of 134, 94 had gotten already COVID. These are low-income families. These are the people who were excluded. It is hard. A lot of them do not qualify under certain criteria to get the vaccine.”

In Seattle, Martinez says 15 percent of day laborers had contracted COVID and adds that this estimate was made a while ago. An up-to-date estimate would be higher. In Santa Cruz, both of the interviewed day laborers said they had contracted the virus. Ornelas Dominguez says that “I had COVID at the beginning of the year. It was a difficult three weeks.” Guzmán got COVID in March. For her part, Guzmán credits friends and family for seeing her through. “We are in a moment,” she observes, where “we each have to help each other out.”

Martinez emphasizes that this ethic of mutual aid is central to day laborer culture. The workers, he notes, “rely on each other. One thing the workers have done here at Casa Latina is create a mutual aid fund, a self-insurance pool, in which workers contribute a few dollars a week. If they are ever injured, they can draw at least few hundred dollars.… It’s not a huge amount, but it’s a fund the workers have put together.”

Toward a Future Vision

The pandemic may be subsiding, at least in the United States, but it has hardly ended. In Pasadena, for instance, Torres notes that, “We are still working partially virtually and partially in-person. In-person is for the staff, but members are not yet allowed to come to the center.” But planning for a post-pandemic future is under way.

Torres believes that some of the learnings of the pandemic year are likely to continue. For instance, ESL classes by Zoom will likely still take place to reach those who cannot attend in person. And she is heartened by the greater coordination among community agencies that has developed amid the pandemic.

The food pantry service is likely to continue too. One thing that the Pasadena center learned, Torres relates, is the importance of purchasing produce that day laborers are familiar with. In March, she notes, the center distributed 500 food baskets. “We do the distribution three times a month,” she adds.

In Santa Cruz, Rodriguez-Castillo looks forward to reopening. The day workers’ center, she notes, “is a community. We all miss it so much.… This day worker community is very important, especially for the day worker whose family is not here. The opportunity for leadership development is also very important.” Fernandez adds that the reopening can be an opportunity to “strengthen the day laborer community.”

In Seattle, Casa Latina is gearing up to open a second location in South King County that is closer to where most day laborers live. “By opening a new location, we give workers another option where they don’t have to travel as far to hook up with jobs,” Martinez explains.

Nationally, NDLON, the organization that links the different centers, is still seeking to raise a $62.5 million fund, called Pa’Lante! (Forward!), to provide greater long-term support. Distributed among over 50 organizations across five years, the Fund would offer each center roughly $200,000 a year to both sustain and expand operations. In Seattle, Martinez indicates that two priorities are to support the operations of the soon-to-open South King County center and “to create a position that coordinates and leads our policy work.” In Santa Cruz, Rodriguez-Castillo emphasizes that added support would enable the center to offer more skill-building courses, and help it reach more people, thereby reducing dependency on hailing jobs at street corners or home improvement store lots. In Pasadena, Torres notes that she runs a one-person shop. “It would be amazing to have an extra hand. It would make a huge difference.”

In Santa Cruz alone, over the past eight years, the center has served 791 people. Ornelas Dominguez notes that at the center, “I have learned a lot, I have received significant support, and I am very grateful.” He adds that the training the center offers has helped many of his fellow day laborers move up. “Many have benefitted from being here,” he notes, and now work in air-conditioned places where they “earn a good salary.” Guzmán was more guarded, but also offered an optimistic outlook. “We don’t know what the future will bring,” she observes. “But I believe there will come good things, improvement for all, with more jobs and more hope for everyone.”

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

In NPQ’s latest Remaking the Economy webinar, Lorena Andrade of La Mujer Obrera of El Paso, Texas; Pamela Standing of the Minnesota Indigenous Business Alliance; and Ellen Vera of Co-op Cincy outlined some of the joys and challenges inherent in economy building in low-income, BIPOC communities. We’ve made the hour-long webinar freely available—and I encourage you to watch it. Here, I share a few highlights, both to whet your viewing appetite and because what these community leaders say merits attention.

Often, with national platforms like this one, there is a tendency to depend on national organizations or academic analysis. Certainly, those sources are important, and I include myself among those who often rely on them. But, as Andrade, Standing, and Vera make clear, sometimes there’s a gap in that mediation process. And it is worth listening for that. Below are a half-dozen snippets drawn from that webinar.

The Struggle to Be

“We were garment workers. They defined us as a garment industry. There is no longer the garment industry. They no longer need us.”

As Andrade notes, the El Paso neighborhood where La Mujer Obrera is based was a product of migration of Mexican workers to the United States to produce textiles. That industry has long disappeared, but the 6,000-member Chamizal Neighborhood persists. A community formed by multinational capital must claim community for itself.

As Andrade puts it, “As we are defending against this thing called progress defined by them, we are also celebrating that our community exists, that we have these relationships.” The group’s work—whether it is supporting social enterprise businesses, supporting community gardens, or battling to remove lead from local schools—builds on this notion.

The Role of Organizing in Economy Building

Vera, who works to develop worker co-ops both in Cincinnati and nationally, is a leading national expert on co-op development. But, as she points out, technical assistance without movement building is limiting. “In our co-ops, we are trying to create the best types of jobs that we can, and if we’re not directly connected to movements that are trying to push up the standards in those industries, there is only so much that we can do.”

Vera adds, “All our co-ops are directly connected to the labor movement. But a lot of the co-ops are also trying to address issues like food insecurity, food justice, environmental justice, and so are directly connecting with those movements. There is a movement around universal childcare. So, I would say we try to tie what we are doing around that as much as possible.”

The Nature of Work

Discussion of the nature of work often centers on automation. But Andrade offers a different take. As she puts it, “One of the things that is difficult…is to have time in our social enterprises specifically to ask questions, to rethink the way that we work. To do it collectively. So, if we have a daycare, it is about providing daycare services, but it is also about asking questions about how we redefine our relationships with our children. What is it that our children need?” Organizing to get resources for formal education in schools is part of this work. But, Andrade adds, “the spirit of our babies is our responsibility. The communities that we create around them. How do we do that as well?”

Andrade also emphasizes thinking of work not just as a place of employment, but also as space to build community. As Andrade relates, “When we are working together in our social enterprises, we are really rethinking what community looks like to us. And more importantly, we have defended a space where we can put those ideas into practice. And that we can see them as a living thing.”

Listening to How Language Lands

At NPQ, we have often written often about financial literacy—see, for example, this very useful list of resources. But Standing makes a powerful case that the term “financial literacy” itself is demeaning to supposed beneficiaries. She advises using the phrase “financial education” instead. As she explains:

I think when you say “literacy,” you’re assuming someone is not literate. That’s something that has bothered me about financial literacy, and it is usually targeted at communities that are overlooked. I feel a woman with three children who is living on a very limited income is probably more financially literate than someone who is making six figures, because they know how to put food on the table, they make sure their kids have clothes, they have a roof over their head, they pay their light bills.

Building on Community History

Standing also offers a positive story of how, amid COVID, the Native American artisan community found a usable history to help artisan businesses survive. Selling art during the pandemic, she explains, was not easy. Most artisans sold their wares at shows. But with COVID “there were no gigs. The conferences, the big art shows, the art fairs, everything just changed. We had to cancel a lot of events we had planned.”

Standing concedes there was a lot of initial resistance to going virtual, but as she notes, “Our people created intricate trade routes. They were here long before that guy named Columbus got lost.… I always say we were the first cooperators, long before the Eurocentric model came out. We were cooperating and working together. We are just creating new trade routes, but they are virtual.” The outcome, she adds, is the emergence of “a different way of doing business that will live beyond COVID. To me, it is another tool.”

Maintaining a Long-Term View

It is hardly an original insight to point out that both philanthropy and nonprofits benefit when grants last longer and have fewer strings attached. But the call for “multi-year operating support” can sound technical. Andrade describes this need differently.

As Andrade observes, “Collective work takes a lot more patience and a lot more time.” She adds, “It’s not always ‘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.”

The value of time and patience, in short, is not to be discounted. Vera, for her part, agrees: Building a democratic economy, she notes, is “not quick work.” Also critical, she adds, is the ability to be flexible: “Trusting that these communities really know what is needed…that’s really important.”

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