Tag Archives: nonprofit quarterly

Space

It was either 2013 or 2014. I don’t remember the year as precisely as I do the moment. And honestly, I don’t even remember the poem. It’s the act of the poem that I recall viscerally.

I was several years into being an executive director and we were, as an organization, trying to find our footing on a path to centering race equity and justice in our work. I sensed at the board level anxieties about the pace of change, about alienating longtime stakeholders, about what financial resources would or would not be around the bend. It was the first board meeting of a newly elected board chair. We gathered around the conference table, each of us trying to find our second wind at 5:00 p.m., and he said, “Before we begin, I’d like to read a poem.”

In choosing to read a poem as his first leadership act as a board chair, he declared that the board space would be one driven as much by the heart as by the mind. He declared it a space of meaning-making, not merely decision-making. As an executive director, it said to me, “I am going to help you. You can count on this space being useful to the organization’s journey.”

Adam Zeman, a cognitive neurologist at the University of Exeter, did a small study that compared brain activity in response to types of language. “When the team specifically compared poetry to prose, they found evidence that poetry activates brain regions associated with introspection—such as the posterior cingulate cortex and medial temporal lobes.” So many of the spaces we create in organizational life are prose rather than poetry, aren’t they?

Poetry, even the simple act of someone reading a poem that means something to them to start a meeting, can shift a space in powerful ways, conveying that people are invited to engage emotionally and creatively. And we need shifted spaces to have the conversations we have never had.

Ah, not to be cut off,
not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars.
The inner—what is it?
if not intensified by the sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming.¹

—Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell

Surrender

So much of what’s difficult about leadership concerns knowing. I should know what to do. I do know what to do, but others can’t yet see it. I think I know what to do, but perhaps I am missing something crucial. Regardless of what I “know,” we need to arrive at knowing collectively. And on it goes. As leaders, our relationship to knowing is at a permanent boil. We must get very comfortable moving forward while still finding out.

The sublime thing about reading a poem is to surrender to the possibility of not knowing. As I read a poem for the first time, I may find an immediate affinity, or I may find myself immediately adrift. I may break through to an understanding in two or three reads of it, or it may take 30 or 40 to hear even reliable hints of what I am actually being told. With some poems, I decide that I am never going to know; with others, I fall in love without ever fully making sense of them entirely.

But the surrender of reading poetry, like that of exercising leadership, is anything but powerless. However implausibly, it actually fortifies our relationship to self and to those we touch. There is great power in a seeker’s surrender.

Poetry is not resting on the given,
but a questing towards what might otherwise be.²

­—Adrienne Rich

Syntax

As leaders, we arrange incessantly. We arrange ideas. We arrange teams. We arrange resources. We arrange partnerships. Arranging and rearranging to get closer to a vision, we pay compulsive attention to organizational syntax.

Reading poetry strengthens our observation and appreciation for what goes where. Bliss comes in noticing each word’s selection and placement, even as we register the words’ cumulative effect. This is a remarkable parallel to the day-to-day design leaders do. We pursue elegance and amplification through, and on behalf of, all of an organization’s elements.

But there is a caution here too. Where we put things certainly matters, but perhaps less than the care and the delight we take in picking them up. Putting them in play. In motion. Even the most intentional syntax is, after all, a means to a mysterious, unknowable end.

Let the end come
as the best parts of living have come
unsought and undeserved
inconvenient³

—Rita Dove

Notes

1. “Ah, not to be cut off,” by Rainer Maria Rilke, as cited in Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness by Jon Kabat-Zinn, p. 339.
2. As quoted by Maggie Doherty in “The Long Awakening of Adrienne Rich,” The New Yorker, November 23, 2020.
3. From Dove’s poem “Last Words,” The New Yorker, January 18, 2021.

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

“Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.”—James Baldwin

Take a breath. Go ahead. Take a deep breath.

It has now been a full revolution for us around the sun as the reflections and lamentations of this pandemic year are shared and grieved. How are we making sense of this last year?

As the pandemic shut down the United States a year ago, and a racial justice movement engulfed the nation and the globe, we began to engage in conversations about community. On why cultivating community is important. On how we see or fail to see one another in community. On the ways in which community can be intensely local and yet national. On what it means to disagree and be cared for in community.

For if we are talking with each other and engaging with one another, we may be able to hear and see one another, and grow personally and professionally from these conversations. Indeed, we, the authors, wish to use “community” as a way to gather educators, organizers, and activists—leaders diverse in race, faith, age, and class—and create a platform for new ideas and courageous conversations where we can build and strengthen relationships, learn together, and take action.

In our work as consultants and educators, we have often wrestled with essential questions on how to challenge and reimagine community. These questions include:

• When do we see or feel a sense of community?
• Where do we want our community to be?
• Who is in our community, and who is not?
• How do we get from here to there?

A written report by two of us (Tiell and Linden) frames this work more broadly. Last February, more than 60 educators, organizers, and activists gathered at a two-day summit that discussed steps that might be taken to rebuild connection and cultivate community. The goal of the summit was to create conditions for building relationships. This included 10 peer-led community labs over the two days. Participants self-selected which workshops to attend and had the opportunity to connect more deeply with five to 10 other educators, organizers, and activists. The executive director of a racial justice organization in Los Angeles connected with the dean of students of a nearby public university. A musicologist and philosopher from Chicago met the executive director of a family foundation in the San Francisco Bay Area. The leader of a social justice roundtable nonprofit in Washington, DC connected with a handful of potential new funders, and the three of us met the program coordinator of a similar community-building platform from the Aspen Institute. Those are but a few examples of dozens of connections generated.

This work is inspired by the realization of how siloed so many of us are, whether in philanthropy, activism, or otherwise. We’ve seen too many “solutions” that don’t challenge our thinking or the confines of our institutions. So many of us are moving outside our institutions—bypassing them, in fact—to create the change we seek. Here we begin to find the real work being done, and individuals who need each other to do transformational work are finding one another.

One of us—Kyle Beckham of Berkeley Educators for Equity and Excellence (BE3) at the University of California, Berkeley—discussed the importance of facilitating the creation of community asset maps with BE3 teacher candidates and how the process of asset mapping can provide a pathway for the (re)creation of community connections. One attendee noted that the session compelled participants “to think more deeply about who and what we center when we think about community.”

The process of community asset mapping has a history, of course. Back in the early 1990s, John (“Jody”) Kretzman and John McKnight published Building Communities from the Inside Out. Community assets, Kretzman and McKnight point out, can include many things, including:

• the skills of local residents
• the power of local associations
• the resources of public, private, and nonprofit institutions
• the physical infrastructure and space in a community
• the economic resources and potential of local places
• the local history and culture of a neighborhood

The idea, in short, is to see in community—especially low-income communities and communities of color—the source of solutions. It seems like common sense, and yet so many still start with reiterating the problems rather than identifying the community resources that might address those problems. Fortunately, over time, the idea of community asset mapping has gained more and more adherents.

As the Laundromat Project, an arts nonprofit in Brooklyn, explains on its website, “Asset mapping is a map-making methodology that allows the mapper to understand and appreciate a place through the perspectives of those who live there.” It allows the group “to empower artists and neighbors to collaboratively identify social issues and make change in their communities.” The group adds that “developing and maintaining a knowledge of various neighborhood populations, resources, hyperlocal politics, etc.” is a core part of its work of being “a place-based, grassroots arts supporter.”

For the teacher candidates of BE3 embarking on the unique challenge of training to be teachers under pandemic conditions, the process of creating asset maps of their immediate context helps to build linkages among themselves, their students, and the neighborhoods around the schools that would have otherwise never emerged. Further, the maps served as offerings candidates could bring to the schools themselves, as resources to be shared with the school community to help better meet its many needs and to chart people, places, and activities that might have otherwise gone unnoticed. One participant afterward contacted Beckham to get models to take to the school where he works to use in his community.

Building on these examples, participants were asked to imagine what resources their communities might identify through asset mapping and how the process of mapping might nudge them to see things that might otherwise go unnoticed. Participants were also challenged at the sessions to begin to make their own asset maps and bring them to future gatherings to share how others are engaged in the act of going out and finding what preserves community strength during difficult times. One learning is how to involve all members of your community, in whatever ways possible, to be as inclusive and welcoming and supportive of their needs and wants—which may be at odds with our own.

The language of community can be complicated, and we recognize that notions of community, depending on how they are applied, can exclude as well as include. Thoughtfully carried out, however, we believe that building bridges across difference is critically important. We believe that by building new coalitions, creating common bonds and rituals of community, and mapping our assets and needs, deeply thoughtful and creative connections, learning, and action will emerge.

Kyle Beckham is a career educator working across the K-16+ spectrum, currently focused on teacher education and preparation at Berkeley Educators for Equity and Excellence (BE3). He has a PhD from Stanford in Race, Inequality, and Language, in Education, and ten years of direct K-12 experience largely in a project-based alternative high school for students at-risk of dropping out.

Seth Linden is founder and principal of Gather Consulting, where he advises philanthropists and nonprofits at the intersections of education reform, leadership development, and community building.

Jeffrey Tiell is a cross-sector professional working at the intersection of philanthropy and place. He is the Director of NextGen Milwaukee at the Milwaukee Jewish Federation working in partnership to build the future leaders of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation and broader community.

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

Will philanthropy step up to address the gap in local news coverage as more and more communities see local papers disappear? As Tom Stites observed last month in NPQ, “A quarter of all US newspapers have failed since 2004, and the COVID-19 pandemic is only making this grim trend worse.”

There is no doubt that in recent years philanthropic support of nonprofit journalism has increased, even though it still falls short of the need. That said, the prospects for growing support seem favorable.

Within philanthropy, two primary approaches are apparent. One supports nonprofits that seed journalists within existing, often traditional for-profit media. The other approach seeks to boost nonprofit media outlets.

Among the former, one of the most tantalizing possibilities involves Report for America, a nonprofit that raises money to put reporters in the field in under-covered communities to report on under-covered stories. The grant pays half of a reporter’s salary, helps the local news organization to raise more funds, and also offers continuing training. Report for America is one of six finalists for a $100 million MacArthur Foundation grant in the foundation’s second “100&Change” competition for a “big solution to a big problem”—in this case, to bring news to news deserts.

Another example of this approach comes from the Knight Foundation, which this March opened applications for grants to support strengthening digital platforms in newsrooms, continuing last year’s initiative. Knight offers 26 grants of up to $20,000 to publishers who are looking to adopt and manage a publishing solution that can help improve their business sustainability. For instance, last year it made a grant to the 10-year-old Native News Online to improve the publication’s ability to serve readers who access the news on mobile devices.

When it comes to providing direct grants for nonprofit news organizations, the American Journalism Project (AJP), which was founded in 2018 and has assets of over $15 million according to its Form 990 filing, looms large. It was started by Texas Tribune founder John Thornton and Elizabeth Green, author and co-founder/CEO of the nonprofit Chalkbeat, a seven-year-old education sector–focused news organization. AJP is also part of a donor collaborative, along with the Ford Foundation among others, called the , which aims to increase civic engagement for communities of color by strengthening news organizations directed by BIPOC leaders.

The News Integrity Initiative at the City University of New York’s Craig Newmark Graduate School is also a member of the Racial Equity in Journalism Fund. It supports amplifying marginalized voices through news coverage, creative information sharing, and storytelling projects. It also backs groups that work toward trust and mutual respect between newsrooms and the public, including by supporting research and projects that mitigate the harm done by misinformation and manipulation.

These are but a few of the organizations that are stepping up to fill the gap left by disappearing local papers. The Institute for Nonprofit News (INN)—a network of more than 300 independent nonprofit, nonpartisan news organizations—issued a press release last month touting its members’ fundraising success. According to INN, through the NewsMatch fundraising collaborative, funders, including Knight and many others, along with individual donors and businesses, helped nonprofit newsrooms raise a record $47 million.

NewsMatch completed its latest fundraising campaign, its fifth, during the pandemic, but this did not dissuade donors. Indeed, more than 430,000 individuals made more than a million separate contributions during a challenging year, about 65 percent more than the year before.

Philanthropic organizations have been established to support getting news to the public, especially underserved communities, but philanthropy can be fickle. For this reason, it is even more significant that individuals are stepping up.

As INN notes in its press release, the mission of its 300 members is to build “a new kind of media network: nonprofit, nonpartisan, and dedicated to public service.” Where will INN’s path lead? A half-century ago, radio news, like local news today, was dominated by commercial networks. But with support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting—a nonprofit, private organization founded by Congress’ Public Broadcasting Act of 1967—National Public Radio (NPR) was formed three years later, although it took decades to become a media juggernaut. As NPQ observed back in 2018, current NPR listener numbers exceed those of broadcast television news. Could the future of local digital news likewise be nonprofit?

As NPQ writer Rob Meiksins noted last year, news organizations like the Salt Lake Tribune have been successful in shifting from commercial corporation to nonprofit. Increasingly, it seems the local corporate news model may be going the way of the dinosaurs. The challenge will be to see whether nonprofit news services or the community news co-ops Stites promotes can fill the gap, perhaps with a mix of public funding, foundation support, and generous members and donors.

We know local commercial news has shrunk rapidly in recent years. News is critical to a democracy, and it is fortunate that philanthropy has responded. But where and how should it respond? Clearly, philanthropic dollars for reporters have helped keep important local reporting work alive. Still, supporting for-profit news organizations does raise at least potential concerns. Donations should come with transparency; nonprofits are accustomed to informing their donors how their money is spent, with expenses tied to supporting the nonprofits’ programs and mission. Can commercial news corporations offer that kind of transparency?

Another question is whether philanthropic support for reporters is enough to right the commercial news ship, or might additional support be needed for the rest of the operation, such as editors and publishers, without whom reporters will not see their articles appear in either traditional or electronic print.

Nonprofit news services answer to the public and their donors, so accountability is clearer, but foundation support of nonprofit journalism poses its own challenges, since, as NPQ has noted before, foundation grants can influence coverage. This is another reason why small donor support is so important, since it diffuses influence among a broad public.

The future of local news remains decidedly uncertain. The choices philanthropy makes in response to a rapidly changing local news market could greatly influence its future form.

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

As leaders, we are naturally inclined to begin the pursuit of an important organizational goal by naming our starting place. It makes sense to us that a process roadmap should include an accurate “you are here” marker. To support us, organizational development practitioners create frameworks to use in our self-assessment. Povi-Tamu Bryant and Krystal Torres-Covarrubias recently led several hundred NPQ webinar attendees through such a framework—in this case, for locating our organizations on a six-stage continuum from exclusionary/white supremacist to equitable/anti-racist.¹ Attendees whose organizations were not yet equitable, the vast majority, wanted to locate their organizations on the continuum, presumably to discern what next steps to take in their progression.

As I took in the attendees’ reactions and questions and considered my own executive, governance, and consulting experiences with numerous nonprofit organizations pursuing deeper racial equity, I reflected upon three tensions. These tensions create challenges—not insurmountable, but critical to orient around—for leaders and consultants crafting productive processes for deepening organizational equity.

To be clear, the three tensions I’ll outline are tensions that BIPOC staff and consultants—and some white staff and consultants who centered racial equity early on in their work—have been tackling for decades. Interaction Institute for Social Change, Road Map, and Change Elemental are just three examples of practitioner groups that have developed methodologies for working with and across difference in organizations and networks. What feels different about the context today is that it’s not only social movement-identified organizations that are assessing their racial justice commitment and practices; as in the broader society, a wider breadth of civil society is undertaking this work now too. So, I add these modest reflections as an offering to leaders whose organizations are currently somewhere in the midst of the transformation process.

Tension 1: There may not be one organizational location.

Some organizations are wholly white dominant or wholly equitable, but there are so many more I suspect that are, in this moment, a rather disparate collection of people and programs and systems that locate across multiple points of a racial equity continuum. In these organizations, for instance, a race equity workshop that will be enlightening to one set of staff and board will be useless, if not insulting, to another. Even a deeper, long-term consulting engagement will have to have different ways of engaging staff at various stages of their understanding and experience with anti-racist practice. Moreover, such a process will likely need to include skills-building for communicating across these staggered developmental stages, as people’s learning paths in an organization will never entirely synch up.

This reality may call for more localized assessment of leaders, teams, individual programs, and essential organizational systems such as compensation and board recruitment. Individual people, obviously, have unique lived experiences and bring to the organization their individual knowledge base and skills sets around racial equity and blind spots. Many white staff and board members bring no proximate experience of racial injustice, for instance. Many white cisgender men in positional leadership have no proximate experience of marginalization. And organizational programs and systems will locate differently on a continuum depending on when they were conceived, who has recently led them, and from how much influence by internal and external BIPOC stakeholders they have benefited.

Given the potential degree of variation in a single organization, part of our assessment as a team of leaders trying to move an organization closer to being anti-racist might include a degree-of-harm analysis. As we scan across key leaders, teams, programs, and systems,

• Which are doing the most harm to BIPOC people?
• Which are actively holding the organization back in its progress?
• Which are communicating to stakeholders that we don’t yet understand the mandate for our own transformation?
• How can we as leaders name the anti-racist intention for the whole organizational system and methodically address organizational elements in some kind of order of their urgency?

In my practice, this is what I see committed leaders doing: co-creating with their staffs and board a shared vision of their anti-racist organization and then setting about the each-by-each work of transforming key elements. To state the painfully obvious, this transformative work is intensive, and it has to be done largely as part of, not distinct from, evolving the very work of the organization itself.

Tension 2: The board, as a body, may need to catch up from the rear.

To stay with our image of a road map and the “you are here” sticker, in some historically white-led organizations, the board as a body is materially behind the staff as a body with respect to its understanding of racial equity generally, and very importantly, of how marginalization plays out in the core programs and systems of a given organization specifically. It is just true that in many, many cases, staff are closer to both the experience and consequences of the marginalization the organization perpetuates through its day-to-day work. This greater understanding by staff can be threatening to a board of directors, especially if the board members are attached to conceptualizations of a board as the primary sensemaking and direction-setting body for the organization.

Practically, how can staff and board leaders address this divide in service of the whole organizational system progressing towards anti-racism? My experience tells me to get very pragmatic here. Boards do not educate themselves and evolve on their own. Boards and staffs do not align in good time. These outcomes require intentional and intensive organizational development work. And I dare say, per my earlier suggestion that leaders conduct a degree-of-harm analysis, the board may not be the highest impact organizational element to tackle. Then again, it very well may be. This will be an organization-by-organization analysis.

For leaders who do want to close the divide, there is, I believe, a nonnegotiable ingredient. The executive director and the board chair need a partnership of trust, including the particular capacity to discuss race and power. Even if the discussions are imbalanced in terms of personal knowledge and skill, even if they are clumsy, they have to take place. I have not seen a board evolve purposefully without an executive and a board chair working together to make it happen; this feels especially true with building anti-racist perspective and ways of being on the board. In my practice, I observe executives timing what (and how much) to do with the board around race equity to when they will have a board chair with whom they can build trust.

Tension 3: Some donors and consumers may not make the trip at all.

A third tension I observe in assessing organizational equity concerns the donors and consumers who sustain an organization financially. For many organizations, a substantial percentage of financial stakeholders—be that via earned revenue or contributed support, or both—are not in alignment with them on a race equity continuum.

Consider that “liberal” foundations, corporations, major donors, and/or frequent buyers may balk at being included in an organization’s analysis of what needs to change to accelerate progress towards an anti-racist society. Is it a leader’s responsibility to confront and educate in all of these cases? Will they risk losing financial support if they do? Can we be on an authentic organizational journey toward anti-racism and not challenge our investors? I raise this because we operate in fundamental interdependence with our payors and contributors. In some real sense, we can only move so far ahead of them and expect to sustain the relationship.

In practical terms, what I observe is that just as with staff members and board members, there are some donors and consumers who are not going to make the trip with us. As our organizations become more explicit and skillful and consistent in our progress towards anti-racism, some individuals and institutions will no longer identify as stakeholders. And this has to be okay. There will be a period, likely over years, of transforming not only our organizations, but the composition of our stakeholder communities. We need to embrace this transformation and indeed, track its progress as closely as we do our own.

Thank you to Povi-Tamu Bryant and Krystal Torres-Covarrubias for their presentation of Strengthening Your Organizational Anti-Racist Practice. These reflections were inspired by that session and their wise guidance to leaders at all levels pushing organizational change.

Note

1. Bryant and Torres-Covarrubias shared the “Crossroads Anti-Racist Organizational Continuum,” which is an adaptation of the “Multi-Cultural Organizational Development Continuum,” created by Bailey W. Jackson, Rita Hardiman, and Evangelina Holvino.

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