Tag Archives: nonprofit quarterly

Dams and mining have long been controversial environmental matters that span continents. Recently, the US has seen an uptick in mining protests concerning labor rights and Indigenous ancestral lands. Dams have also come under scrutiny. Environmental advocates have successfully pushed for their removal in some areas, citing the destructive impact dams have on salmon migration paths and water quality degradation. As of last year, 66 dams have been removed across the US. And countries within the Amazon Basin, like Ecuador, are following suit.

The Amazon Basin spans Ecuador, Brazil, Peru, Guyana, Colombia, Bolivia, Suriname, French Guiana, and Venezuela, with myriad Indigenous and local communities depending on it for temperature regulation, drinking water, food, shelter, building materials, and transportation. Though known as the lungs of the Earth, the Amazon Basin’s ability to absorb and sequester over one billion tons of carbon emissions is falling due to rapid deforestation in Brazil. Today, the Amazon absorbs 30 percent less carbon than it did in the 1990s. And in Ecuador, the Amazon’s biodiversity is threatened by mining projects and damming that continues to exploit natural resources. Activists in Tena, Ecuador, have been coming together to speak out against these projects in ongoing protests.

The Amazon’s size and crucial role in the global climate crisis can be hard to conceptualize. But for those who have been there, it is clear that this place is its own entity—alive, vibrant, and worth fighting to protect.

The Ecuadorian Amazon and the Impacts of Mining

Just over half of Ecuador is covered by native forests—74 percent of which are within the Amazon region. This region is commonly referred to as “el Oriente” (which translates to “the East” in English) and is home to 14 different Indigenous communities whose daily lives are supported by its natural resources. They face a changing climate fueled by local challenges of deforestation, mining, and damming.

In recent years, the growth of legal and illegal mining activities has caused conflict with local and Indigenous communities over water contamination and land rights. This kind of resource extraction has led to mercury pollution and the dumping of toxic byproducts into nearby rivers. For example, in Napo, in the northeastern part of the country bordering Peru, roughly 90 percent of the rivers tested displayed toxicity. This is largely due to the increase in illegal gold mining, which has been a major cause of the dangerous water contamination.

The destruction has long been on Diego Robles’ radar. Robles is a local white-water kayaker, community member, and owner of an eco-hostel in Tena, Ecuador. “Water is the base of everything. Without water, we die. Out of all the natural resources for me, water is the main thing to protect,” says Robles in a recent video interview. Robles teaches kayaking to tourists and local children and hopes that the children will one day take on the role of river guardians.

The Impacts of Dams in the Ecuadorian Amazon

Dams concern conservationists, scientists, and locals alike because they contribute to the loss of biodiversity, disruption to river connectivity, ecosystem fragmentation, and deforestation.

Robles frequently traverses rivers in and outside of Tena and has witnessed the change due to damming in parts of the river that are not accessible to the general public by car or foot. He was the first to descend the Upper Pusuno River and, through kayaking expeditions, was able to document the evolution of destruction in the area. We often hear about the Amazon River as a single entity, but the Amazon has over a thousand tributaries, 17 of which are longer than one thousand miles. It takes people like Robles constantly monitoring in order to track the many harms to the river areas.

Newer hydroelectric dams are also adding to the Amazon’s degradation. Jorge Cedi, an ecologist who has been studying the Napo River since 2007, argues that because the Napo River is one of the largest Andean tributaries of the Amazon, altering its hydrological connectivity would negatively affect one of the most critical river systems in the basin, as well as many of the ecosystems downstream.

These dams concern conservationists, scientists, and locals alike because they contribute to the loss of biodiversity, disruption to river connectivity, ecosystem fragmentation, and deforestation.

Ecuadorians Are Fighting to Protect Their Rivers

In January of 2023, activists organized a multiday protest just outside of Tena, Ecuador, in support of protecting the Pusuno River that lies west of the Napo River. Each day protesters spoke out against the harm caused by the dams in their area, built by Constructora Villacreces Andrade, an Ecuadorian construction company. “We’re not here asking for money. Really, we’re asking for life,” said Robles. When CVA originally started to plan its hydroelectric dam operations, the company made many promises to the community about how they would directly benefit. Instead, community members have been left without access to their land, a lack of clean drinking water, destroyed riverbeds, and disrupted aquatic ecosystems.

Robles reported that CVA representatives allegedly drugged an Indigenous elder who doesn’t write or speak Spanish to obtain copies of his fingerprints to sign off on documents that released land ownership rights to CVA for damming purposes. This is what sparked the protests. With this action, community members were hoping to get the rights to their land back from CVA, which would, in turn, give them access to drinking water again. “It’s crazy because they are asking for permission to enter their own land,” commented Robles.

The protests died down for a period as the locals worked to come to an agreement with CVA, but they recently picked back up in April 2023 when no formal agreements were reached. Despite all the efforts to protect the water, the future doesn’t look bright for Amazonian rivers in Ecuador. Several parks and reserves have been created to protect precious ecosystems, but it’s not enough. It is often difficult to protect Indigenous lands outside of government-identified parks, especially when going up against companies with deep financial backing.

“I think it is difficult to fight or debate with a large entity such as a hydroelectric company. The Indigenous community is often alone; they feel intimidated by them,” says architect and artist Michelle Ayala, who attended the protests. She believes that the Indigenous community needs a strong entity that can represent their best interests and work directly with companies such as CVA, to be able to reach mediation or dialogue with proposals that benefit the entire community.

Aside from protesting, other efforts have been made to protect the river. Ayala has been tapping into her art to support these Indigenous conservation efforts by creating illustrations, logos, and banners to help protesters gain visibility. Ayala and other activists are looking for a foundation that can finance the design and execution of a landscaping, ecological, and conservation tourism plan. This project aims to protect the Pusuno River and the environment and will conserve protected areas and biological diversity through sustainable alternatives to generate work for communities.

Hope for a Brighter Future

Late last year, Indigenous groups started negotiations with President Guillermo Lasso for effective environmental protection measures for the Amazon; their efforts are ongoing, and provide some hope for larger-scale intervention.

For Robles, 100 hectares of the land (approximately 247 acres) surrounding his eco-hostel is now up for sale and has caught the eye of a large mining company. He reported seeing company representatives walking the perimeter of the land. If they can purchase the surrounding land, mining will commence all around him.

But Robles imagines a brighter future for this part of the Amazon and wants to purchase the land himself—transforming 90 hectares (approximately 222 acres) into a protected wildlife area. The remaining 10 hectares would be turned into a space where he can continue his nature-focused mutual aid work. There, he plans on creating a garden and hosting sustainable building workshops. Robles’ plan would put some power back in the hands of Indigenous folks and locals to continue to protect their forests and rivers, and to care for a life source for themselves—and for the world.

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

This past Mother’s Day, a group of activists, most of them women, gathered outside the Alameda Courthouse in Oakland, Ca. to “call attention to the harm of mass incarceration on generations of Black women, families, and communities,” according to a press release by the California nonprofit Essie Justice Group, which organized the rally.

“The justice group is a loving and powerful community of women with incarcerated loved ones,” describes Essie Justice Group founder and executive director Gina Clayton-Johnson. 

“We are the mothers and sisters, daughters, wives, girlfriends, grandmothers of people who are behind bars. We’re black-led, black-centered, multicultural organizers that believe that a black feminist future in which we end mass incarceration is to everyone’s benefit. And so we are fighting on multiple levels for that reality.”

“The justice group is a loving and powerful community of women with incarcerated loved ones.”

The Oakland event was part of the “#FreeBlackMamas” annual National Bailout Campaign by the National Bail Out Collective, which coordinates “Mama’s Day Bail Outs,” for Black women incarcerated in pre-trial detention around the country, and of which the Essie Justice Group is a founding member. 

The Essie Justice Group has bailed out over a dozen California women at the cost of a whopping $1.9 million—money the group raises itself through large and small donations, and recoups once a case is resolved, allowing them to fund the next bailout. (The National Bail Out campaign has bailed out more than 400 women incarcerated across the country.) 

It’s a model that very intentionally cuts out the usual profiteers of the bail system: bail bondsmen.

But providing bail for incarcerated women is just one facet of the group’s work in advocating for the rights, well-being, and dignity of the women it serves and who comprise its membership.

Building Sisterhood

The Essie Justice Group’s work is centered around a nine-week “Healing to Advocacy” program, in which a cohort of women come together to share their stories, support one another, and explore how their own experiences could inform a shift to action.

One in four American women have a family member in prison, says Clayton-Johnson—and the figure is a staggering nearly one in two for Black women, according to one 2015 study. 

“Women are the reentry system of this country,” says Clayton-Johnson. “When someone comes home from jail or prison, it is a woman who is there on the other end: receiving them into a home, providing food, providing emotional support, being on the front line of an anxiety attack or moments of insecurity; editing resumes, driving people to their court dates, taking time off work. You know, it is women who are doing all of this work.”

“The unifying feature of this experience for so many was just this incredibly, incredibly harmful isolation.”

And yet it is by the very nature of that (unpaid) work, says Clayton-Johnson, that many women with incarcerated loved ones find themselves isolated and without support. 

“There’s a lot of different kinds of circumstances. But what we found was the unifying feature of this experience for so many was just this incredibly, incredibly harmful isolation,” says Clayton-Johnson. “There’s this awful impact of mass incarceration that looks like mass isolation,”—not just for inmates but especially for the women on the outside who love them.

The Healing to Advocacy program is focused on breaking that isolation by bringing women together into a community of sisterhood, advocacy, and action. 

“Building power looks like multiple things,” says Clayton-Johnson, including that “it looks like building power within an individual…and it also looks like interpersonal power. That, if you are having a bad day, I can step in and support you, and vice-versa.” 

Participants in the group’s nine-week Healing to Justice program join a cohort of women touched deeply, and often very painfully, by incarceration. 

“The very first thing that happens is that a woman who may not even know or have thought about the words ‘mass incarceration,’ but has lived the impacts of that every single day, comes into a space where all of a sudden she is able to tell her story to a group of people who she does not know but very quickly become like sisters to her,” says Clayton-Johnson.

“For many women, the storytelling component of what it is that we do is the very beginning of the journey towards advocacy. It is trusting a group of people with what is happening in your life, but it is also it is also an opportunity for you to listen to what other people share in terms of your own experience and to be able to start to go from ‘I’ to ‘we.’”

In graduating from the program, participants are asked to take a pledge—“The pledge is twofold: to break the isolation of myself and other sisters; and also to break the invisibility, which is both the healing and the advocacy.”

Graduates are then invited to become Essie Justice Group members and participate in the group’s advocacy—and many do.  

From Power to Action

If the Essie Justice Group’s work begins with healing, it culminates in action. 

Clayton-Johnson cites the example of Amber, a member whose own journey with the Essie Justice Group began after they bailed her out of jail.

“Women with incarcerated loved ones, who stood outside that jail for hours and hours waiting for her to come out, brought her into their literal and physical embrace and have been going to court dates with her,” says Clayton-Johnson. 

Meanwhile, Amber, who graduated from the Healing to Advocacy program last year, was elected to help run the group’s campaign team and has been advocating for the depopulation of the Lynwood women’s jail near Los Angeles and has been a featured speaker at related actions.

“Just this past Mother’s Day, she was back at Lynwood jail, but this time not as an incarcerated person but as a member of Essie Justice Group coming in to bail out another Black woman,” notes Clayton-Johnson. 

The group was instrumental in organizing support for Imani Turner, a Georgia woman charged with murder after killing her husband in what supporters said was self-defense when her husband threatened Turner and her children at gunpoint. A Georgia magistrate ruled in Turner’s favor, finding the prosecution lacked sufficient evidence for the murder charge.

Sitting beside Turner in the courthouse for the ruling were women mobilized by the Essie Justice Group. 

Still, the favorable outcome doesn’t mean the work of healing is done, says Clayton-Johnson.

“What’s real is that that’s not the end for somebody, right? That’s not the end for a community that has experienced harm and trauma and loss. It’s the beginning of hopefully a whole lot of healing work.”

It’s that healing work that has empowered the Essie Justice Group to build community and, through community, political power. 

“Building power looks like multiple things,” says Clayton-Johnson. “It looks like building power within an individual, reconnecting somebody with their sense of self-worth and value, reminding that they are loved and part and a needed part of a community that’s counting on them and that believes in them. And it also looks like interpersonal power. That like if you are having a bad day, I can step in and support you and we can vice versa.”

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

Cooperatives are great. We need them—especially worker-owned ones, which allow us to own the means of production and make decisions for ourselves. Hopefully, they also allow us to feel less alienated from one another, from our labor, and from sustaining our lives and livelihoods. 

Yet might worker cooperatives deepen their effectiveness by using a relational, ecological framework to inform how they are organized and make decisions? At a time marked by a growing climate crisis, this is not a trivial question.

Nor is the answer to this question obvious. After all, a worker co-op operates in the interests of its worker-owners, which may—or may not—include a prioritization of ecological concerns. 

The Limits of Cooperative Principles 

While cooperative principles can be widely found in African and Indigenous societies, many cooperatives find grounding in the principles that emerged from what is said to be the first modern cooperative originating in Rochdale, England, in 1844. From there, a group of representatives from different countries came together to develop the International Cooperative Alliance—holding discussions, developing key principles, and making connections toward an international cooperative movement. 

Even though cooperatives are often deemed as inherently “good,” they are hardly exempt from power dynamics and relational tensions.

In 1995, the ICA fine-tuned the cooperative principles. Despite that now being nearly 30 years ago, these principles continue to inform the values of worker-owned cooperatives today and are pasted on websites and walls of cooperatives across the world. These principles are: 

1. Voluntary and Open Membership 

2. Democratic Member Control

3. Member Economic Participation

4. Autonomy and Independence

5. Education, Training, and Information

6. Cooperation among Cooperatives

7. Concern for Community 

All great things. And even better, in 2016, ICA refined and retooled them once again, creating helpful guidance notes parsing out how each of these principles should manifest in practice. This is a necessary addendum given that even though cooperatives are often deemed as inherently “good,” they are hardly exempt from power dynamics and relational tensions. These internal relational tensions make sense, considering that most of us have been socialized into a capitalist society that encourages people to act as individuals who compete against one another. We have not had much practice cooperating. 

Cooperatives in an Ecological Context 

Actual cooperation takes much more than just paying lip service to saying that we are cooperating, saying that we are concerned with community, or that we value open membership. The guidance notes get specific about what these principles mean and look like in practice. Yet, even after reading both the cooperative principles and the much more extensive guidance notes, I am left wondering if we might deepen our cooperative work by using a relational, ecological framework to inform how we organize our cooperatives and how we make decisions. 

If co-op members were to do this, one key question that would arise is: How does one define a “member”? If we accept the Indigenous wisdom that we are deeply relational and interdependent with one another, then the practice of being open to “members” must include the living beings and natural systems that make cooperatives possible. 

Indigenous scholar and ecologist Robin Kimmerer has a visual that can help us more fully see this. One model of the world, where humans are at the top of a pyramid, is juxtaposed against an image that sees all of life in a circle of interdependence where no being is at the top. An ecological and relational framework for worker-owned co-ops would situate the natural world—the soil, the fungi, the bacteria, the plants, the sun, the winds—in collective conversation with the human “members” of the cooperative to make truly collective decisions. 

A Dispute about Tomatoes 

Let me paint a picture of how a co-op might practically act on these ideas. 

I am currently a member of the worker-owned cooperative farm, Riquezas del Campo, based in Hatfield, MA, on Nipmuc and Pocumtuc lands, near Northampton. During the summer of 2021, the rains poured down. Our swampy land, once the bottom of glacial Lake Hitchcock, had water pooling in puddles all along the squash field and at the edges where the land slopes down a bit, where a crawdad-like being miraculously appeared one day, as if wading along in a creek. It was late July, and we were a bit behind on tying up our tomatoes. They were already in the ground but growing taller and taller and needed somebody to help their bodies move higher and higher, instead of wider and bushier. 

One gloomy Monday evening, members of Riquezas sat around the wash station discussing which method was best for tying up the tomatoes. Our field manager, a lifelong farmer from Costa Rica, had already begun installing an elaborate post and wire system that he uses at his homestead in Williamsburg, MA. This system requires submerging posts two to three feet into the earth, with three to four posts per row, and then running a wire from post to post that can be tightened. The tomatoes are tied from their bodies to the wire and as the tomato plants get heavier, the wire can be tightened at the ends of the posts, giving the tomatoes a bit of a face and body lift. 

An option that other members of the farm were vouching for, having worked on many farms in the valley that used this method, was putting stakes in the ground every six to eight feet—a lighter and less deep method that required less physical labor. Then twine is run at multiple levels through the stakes and the tomatoes are woven within and held up as they grow with another layer of twine added when needed. 

The conversation that evening went back and forth among co-op members, with varying tension in our voices and bodies. “The stakes are cheaper, but they will not last as long as the posts,” said one member. Another countered, “The posts require more upfront labor but are more durable in the long run.” A third member noted that “the posts require physical and tractor labor which only one or two people are actually capable of. If we use the stakes, more people can get working on the tomatoes.” 

This meeting was not the first or the last time we would talk about how to tie up the tomatoes. That summer, we ended up doing the posts, since our field manager knew this system. Other co-op members consented to this, but consent was grudging.

As the rains poured down for weeks, farms across the region saw crop yields greatly diminish due to the warm and wet conditions. Our farm was not spared. And our thoughtful attempt to decide what was best for the tomatoes was suddenly out of our control. The tomato posts that were two feet into the ground kept being raised up—the bottom of the Glacial Lake turning back into its original state of 15,000 years ago. The land was pushing the tomato posts up and out, telling us this year we would not get many tomatoes at all. The land was chiming in with its input on the decision too. 

Humbled, weeks later, we began to realize, “Oh, the land is a member of this co-op, what would it think about this decision? Would it want stakes or posts this year?” We forgot to listen to the land when making our consensual decision. 

Our cooperation as human-members could be more caring, more real, more grounded, when we leave our human-centric egos at the door. 

What would our co-op have done differently had we slowed down to listen to the land? We might have crouched down to smell, taste, and touch the land—using our senses and intuition to communicate, since the land doesn’t speak human languages. It would have taken more time, the sort of time that is passed down from knowing land and weather patterns for generations. Perhaps we would have had to feel the wind and consider predicted weather patterns for the season. We would have had to notice that because our land is at the bottom of a glacial lake, given the heavy rains, it would likely be too swampy to hold either stakes or posts that year. Had we been more attuned to our environment, we might have realized that if tomatoes that year were to grow at all, they might have to be bushy, and there would be fewer tomatoes to harvest. 

Cooperatives and the Rights of Nature

Having been involved with various collective and cooperative projects over the past 15 years, the actual work of cooperating, which is the whole idea of a cooperative, is often muddy, sticky, muddled with varying ideas, opinions, and individual histories that have shaped us as humans who act and think in different yet overlapping ways. 

Beyond just stating co-ops are good, it is important to recognize these challenges when considering how good co-ops might function. This raises many questions, such as: What is the structure? How are decisions made? How are relations among the members cultivated? How do we learn to love and trust one another despite our differences? 

This moment at Riquezas—where the land was communicating with us, but we were not listening—got me wondering how our cooperation as human members could be more caring, more real, more grounded, when we leave our human-centric egos at the door and welcome the natural world around us in as members too, because they are. Without them, we wouldn’t be alive at all. 

To dig deeper into ecological and relational frameworks, we can obviously turn to Indigenous communities that have long operated in this fashion. This Indigenous way of cooperating and knowing the world was erased by settlers who installed a capitalist system of development and forced us all into wage labor informed by yet another pyramid, with rich humans at the top, and the poor working humans at the bottom.

More recently, Western science is catching up to this wisdom, now “proving” that humans are part of an interdependent web of life necessary for collective survival. Yet, the logic of separation fueled by elite White men who settled in these lands still pervades in even the most radical of world-building spaces. 

For example, the cooperative principles were written from a Westernized human-centric worldview. If we want cooperatives to function toward the wellbeing of all life on the planet, then we need to rethink how those principles are written, and, more importantly, how they are practiced and embodied. This requires disrupting common attachments to continually putting humans at the top of a hierarchy. 

I am taking some cues here from the Rights of Nature movement, where communities are fighting and succeeding across the globe in making sure that nature has the same rights as humans—nature, that is, conceived as a living and breathing entity that supports all life in an ecosystem necessary to our collective survival. Much of this movement is geared toward ensuring nature has legal rights within state legislation, to stave off the destruction that results from mining, damming, and other projects that reject the aliveness of the earth for corporate profit. 

But if you believe as I do that social mores matter as much as or more than laws, then it is important to expand this way of thinking, knowing, and being beyond legislation. What if co-op members considered nature as a member that had a say in our consensus-based decision-making process? How do we learn to listen to the living kin who are, indeed, many of the most important members of the co-op? 

This is quite easy to imagine on a cooperative farm, where the land speaks loudly. But how might cooperatives learn to include land and other living beings as members if you are running a cooperative not so intensely in relation with “land” or “nature”? 

A cooperative coffee shop is certainly still housed on land with histories and the coffee the customer drinks is connected to many natural beings. A co-op grocery store is housed on land with histories whose products and materials come from natural beings. In both cases, perhaps meetings would take place on the land the buildings are housed on; the land beneath your feet could be smelled, tasted, touched; histories and entanglements with other beings could be noticed, named, and brought into the space. Deciding on which products to purchase or sell and from whom or how might account for our entangled relations. For example, does it make sense to purchase coffee beans that have to get shipped across the country in a tractor trailer to get to your door? Perhaps it’s better to stay closer to home? How do you know? 

Tracing these worlds requires more than just naming whose Native land you are on or saying hello to the tree on your way into the building. Knowing the natural world requires slowing down, learning to listen beyond human language, taking the time to learn about deep histories and entanglements, and decentering human narratives. 

Not easy work, as capitalism forces people to rush, ignore, speak over, erase, and center our individual selves. So, how to truly practice doing this remains a critical question to ponder when seeking to advance a more just economy and a just ecological transition.

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

The Black Economic Council of Massachusetts, better known as BECMA, represents Black-owned businesses across the state. The group has an unusual origin story. Not too many organizations trace their origins to a Federal Reserve study, but, then again, the study in question was no ordinary report.  

Published in 2015 and titled The Color of Wealth, the findings of the report commissioned by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston were striking. The study found that in the Greater Boston region, home to more than half of the state’s population, the median wealth of a White household was $247,500, compared to $8 for a Black household. Nicole Obi, CEO of BECMA, notes that in response, “A group of Black business leaders decided to form this organization to address the issues they saw facing this community, which was really preventing the accumulation of wealth.”

The challenge BECMA faced was further illustrated by a 2017 Boston Globe series on local racism, authored by the paper’s famed Spotlight investigative reporting team. The seven-part series began: “Google the phrase ‘Most racist city,’ and Boston pops up more than any other place, time and time again.” The Globe writers further observed that “unfinished business on race is everywhere.”

In the Greater Boston region, the median wealth of a White household was $247,500, compared to $8 for a Black household.Obi, who worked as a businesswoman herself before coming to BECMA in 2020, says her experience corroborates this. As part of her career, Obi ran a consulting firm. “And I had clients like Johnson & Johnson, Volvo, Becton Dickinson, and Commerce Bank. But one thing that had always stuck with me was that in the seven years I was running my own company and doing all this interesting great work, I only had one Boston-based client, and that was a Black woman who hired me. So, when I went to work, I had to get on an airplane out of this town.”

Challenges of Rapid Growth

BECMA may have been founded in 2015, but, for its first five years it remained small. Obi noted that when she first joined BECMA in the summer of 2020 to help with operations, there was really only one full-time staff person, founding executive director Segun Idowu (who left at the end of 2021 to join the administration of newly elected Mayor Michelle Wu). By the time Obi became CEO in January 2022, there were six staff. Today, that number has increased to 16 people. Clearly, BECMA has benefitted from both the energy unleashed by the protests that followed the murder of George Floyd in 2020. It was only afterward that BECMA began to receive significant philanthropic support. This included $1.5 million from a range of Boston sources, a $750,000 grant awarded by the Rockefeller Foundation, and a $1.5 million grant from the Boston-based Barr Foundation.

“We have [to have] the right culture and the right focus on developing our people, or else I think it’s unlikely that we’ll be able to sustain ourselves.”

Obi, who had not worked in the nonprofit sector before coming to BECMA, says that her business experience helped her manage the rapid growth. As Obi put it, “We can’t do the work that we need to do without having the resources. I’m new to the nonprofit space. The model is so different. In a venture-backed space, the venture capitalist is funding the team. The ideas come and go, maybe you have to make a pivot, but you’re able to do that because you have a good team.” By contrast, Obi contended, “In the nonprofit space, people fund programs, but they don’t fund the teams that need to deliver those programs. I find that odd.” 

At BECMA, growing the team quickly, Obi said, was imperative, “so we can do what we need to do.” She concedes, however, that fast growth creates a challenge to build and maintain an organizational culture. “That takes extra care and intentionality,” she noted. For this reason, BECMA created the role of chief of people and culture. “That is a C-level role here at BECMA that we have the right culture and the right focus on developing our people, or else I think it’s unlikely that we’ll be able to sustain ourselves.”

BECMA engages in a range of activities, including hosting an annual business expo, advocacy on behalf of Black businesses at the state and local level, and technical assistance. Some of the group’s most innovative work, as detailed below, has taken place around procurement policy.  

Taking On a New Approach to Procurement

A key focus area for BECMA has been to create better procurement opportunities for Black-owned businesses. In the field, such efforts usually go by the name “supplier diversity.” According to Obi, the way that supplier diversity has traditionally been done over past decade focuses on getting supplier firms certified as being owned by people of color and then seeking contracts from buyers. But certification has routinely failed to lead to contracts. “And we have abysmal results to show for it,” she added.

So, what is BECMA’s strategy? As Obi explained, the idea is to work with procurement officers and be narrow and targeted in where work is focused rather than seek to change procurement policy as a whole. An initial pilot program was developed in four Boston-area suburbs of Brookline, Newton, Somerville, and Malden. The core idea is to get the chief procurement officers to identify their needs. Once that is done, then BECMA can help identify businesses from within its extensive membership that can meet those needs.  

The BECMA pilot put the onus on chief procurement officers to do two things: “1) set the demand for what they are actually willing to buy; and 2) remove the barriers that have prevented them from realizing their goals.” Obi elaborated that BECMA is not seeking to have Black-owned businesses gain contracts in all business areas. Rather, the idea is to start with agreement and clarity with institutional buyers over where there is willingness to open contracts to Black-owned businesses. With that clarity and commitment, BECMA can then work with member businesses to fulfill that demand. 

Obi added that even with something that might seem clear enough, like paving streets, specificity is critical. “Are you talking about paving a state route like Route 9, or are you talking sidewalks or bike paths and municipal lots?”

“So, that was the work we did with the buyers,” Obi said. BECMA then worked with other area groups to put together “binders of organizations” that illustrate the capacity of BECMA business members to meet institutional purchasing demand. Among BECMA’s partners were the local food business incubator Commonwealth Kitchen, Amplify Latinx, the Foundation for Business Equity, Browning the Green Space, and the LGBT Chamber of Commerce. 

Already, the effort has expanded beyond the original four municipalities. “It’s bigger than municipalities. We have anchor institutions like colleges. We have private companies. We have included other municipalities, like the city of Boston now.” 

A Strategy to Reduce the Racial Wealth Gap

BECMA’s formation was in response to the region’s gaping racial wealth gap. Achieving the broader movement goal of closing the racial wealth gap, of course, requires the work of a movement—not just individual organizations. But what is BECMA’s approach?

BECMA focuses on four areas. These are: 1) access to capital, 2) assistance with procurement (as discussed above), 3) support for Black business ownership by “focusing on business equity and the ownership stake that the business owners have in these firms,” and 4) placement—finding positions for more Black people in the skilled workforce and in decision-making roles on government boards and commissions. 

BECMA seeks to be strategic in another sense—namely, to help Black businesses gain a foothold in growing sectors of the economy. To date, BECMA has held three electric vehicle “kickstarter” events. As Obi explains, the idea is to take “some of these existing business owners who are very good at running their businesses, but they are not doing it in a high-growth industry. The EV charging industry is poised to take off. There are federal and state mandates. There is a lot of money. And it is highly fragmented. This is a space that we want our business owners in.

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

Rural America is far more diverse than how it is portrayed in media and popular culture. This article is the second in the series Eradicating Rural Poverty: The Power of Cooperation. Coproduced by Partners for Rural Transformation, a coalition of six regional community development financial institutions, and NPQ, authors highlight efforts to address multi-generational poverty in Appalachia, the rural West, Indian Country, South Texas, and the Mississippi Delta.

At its core, policy is about the allocation of resources. Far too often, policy decisions influencing the flow of resources fall short in meeting the needs of low-resource rural people and places.

Public funding programs often include conditions that exceed the capabilities of high-poverty areas, such as requiring matching funds that these areas do not have. Philanthropy often relies on large, national intermediaries that lack local knowledge and relationships. The private sector tends to prioritize investing in their backyards, as evidenced by banks that follow the path carved by the Community Reinvestment Act, a path tied to their physical network of branches—even as rural communities have borne the brunt of branch closures.

Nearly nine out of 10 the nation’s persistent poverty counties are rural, and they face chronic underinvestment.A different approach that centers community voice is sorely needed.

Community development financial institutions play an important role in elevating community voice. Often, CDFIs anchored in rural communities, with demonstrated track records of investing in rural persistent poverty areas, are the difference between a good idea that remains floating in the air, and tangible, system-changing outcomes. Achieving this requires that these CDFIs have adequate and patient resources needed to innovate and invest in rural people and strengthen rural infrastructure.

Outlining Key Investment Gaps in Rural America

Nearly nine out of 10 of the nation’s persistent poverty counties are rural, and they face chronic underinvestment by government, philanthropy, and the private sector. Moreover, research by sociologists Linda Lobao and Paige Kelly has documented the common lack of “governmental capacity” in rural areas. Roughly one-third of rural counties reported the presence of an economic professional who could identify and write grants for local government. In contrast, over half of all urban counties had either an economic development professional or a community planner on staff. And, as noted earlier in this series, philanthropic investment in rural America grossly trails national averages. Chronic underinvestment in poor rural communities can also be seen in both the corporate and public sectors.

Private Sector Underinvestment: Banks play a vital role in providing and attracting private capital for economic and community development. However, an analysis conducted by the Federal Reserve found that over 40 percent of rural counties lost bank branches from 2012 to 2017. Notably, in rural counties that suffer from the most acute loss of branches, residents had lower incomes, lower levels of education, and were more likely to be Black than in other rural counties.

Federal Shortfall: The Federal Reserve’s findings about banks carry weight for rural communities due to the strong link between the presence of bank branches and federal Community Reinvestment Act requirements. CRA requires that banks lend, invest, and provide financial services to people and communities proximate to their branches. Unfortunately, in the absence of bank branches and corresponding CRA requirements, rural communities are disproportionately starved of capital.

Developing Policy

In addition to the deep disparity in public and philanthropic investment between urban areas and poor rural areas, too often, when investments are made in rural communities, they occur in a vacuum. Frequently, those who design public and private investments lack a clear understanding of the challenges rural persistent poverty communities and communities of color face in simply accessing funds, let alone implementing programs and wading through cumbersome administrative requirements.

The solution is not a hard one, but it does require planning ahead. It requires listening and honoring those with the knowledge, relationships, and skills to guide investments and programs to success. People who live and work in these communities are an all-too-often untapped but invaluable resource.

As Lobao and Kelly found, small businesses, local governments, and nonprofits often lack the capacity and expertise to complete and submit lengthy, technical funding or assistance applications. And as was the case when the Paycheck Protection Program first launched during the pandemic, the funding often runs out before they can apply for it—claimed by those with more resources and usually less need.

The Partners for Rural Transformation coalition of CDFIs seeks to translate “rural” for policymakers so that our communities have a direct say in the crafting of federal policy. This means addressing the complex challenges and opportunities in rural communities and communities of color, especially those experiencing persistent poverty—and advocating on their behalf.

Navigating Policy: Advancing Rural Interests amid a Pandemic

Programs that provide investments often fail because they are created at the 10,000-foot level, which excludes the wisdom and expertise of local organizations that do the work. Federal policy, which is often implemented through state governments, adds layers of complication. Each state has its own priorities, politics, and processes, and states have broad discretion in how to distribute funds.

In short, it is critical for legislators to include existing networks—those that are already familiar with both individual state intricacies and community needs—in the policymaking process. But this does not happen without community pressure. The rollout of the Paycheck Protection Program, one of the largest economic relief programs implemented during the COVID-19 economic shutdown period, illustrates these challenges—as well as the way CDFIs responded to these challenges.

As readers will recall, uncertainty reigned in the early days of the pandemic as shelter-in-place orders impacted small businesses and millions faced unemployment. When federal aid did come in the form of PPP forgivable loans (effectively grants), it soon became apparent that the funds would not be distributed equitably. Rural communities, especially those that experience persistent poverty, often lack banking services and the existing relationships that enabled well-heeled urban businesses to secure PPP loans more quickly, leaving out smaller rural businesses that needed assistance. And initially, CDFIs were not included in the program.

The CDFIs in our coalition used our collective voice to ensure the CDFIs that serve rural and persistent poverty communities could issue PPP loans. The Small Business Administration pilot loan program gave CDFIs access to distribute PPP loans and lines of credit. Three PRT members—HOPE Credit Union, Rural Community Assistance Corporation, and Communities Unlimited—collectively deployed over $160 million in capital through more than 5,600 PPP loans. This helped preserve more than 17,000 jobs.

Leveraging Philanthropy

A major impediment for rural reinvestment involves the onerous requirements imposed by state governments to access federal funds.

RCAC recognized early on that helping rural economies recover would take more than emergency and short-term financial assistance. Leveraging philanthropic support, during the pandemic, RCAC created the Re-Emerging Loan Fund (RELieF) program, which combines grant and loan financing—matching low-interest loans with small business coaching. (Sometimes, this approach is known as providing integrated capital, because it combines loan and grant support.)

As COVID-19 surged, one borrower from RCAC, freelance journalist Libby Leonard relocated to Hawaii, where she specialized in telling local community-centered stories. RCAC not only provided her a loan, but one-on-one business coaching sessions that enabled her to secure other work. One article she wrote about education-focused agriculture nonprofit Kahua Paʻa Mua helped open the door for that nonprofit farm to secure a $70,000 grant to fund its youth program for a year. In short, the RCAC program benefitted the community beyond the borrower. The farmer Leonard featured in her article is now receiving free mulch for life thanks to the exposure—and is looking to expand his business by launching a composting operation on one of his farms.

A Government Workaround in Alabama’s Black Belt

A major impediment for rural reinvestment involves the onerous requirements imposed by state governments to access federal funds—for example, by requiring cash-poor towns to directly finance the work they do and then file for reimbursement.

Again, the pandemic provides an illustrative example. In Alabama, the state government insisted that cities front expenditures and apply for reimbursement after purchasing personal protective equipment. As a result, the most underresourced towns—many of which were majority Black—were effectively excluded from purchasing PPE. Mayor Walter C. Porter, Sr. of Epes, AL, summed up the conundrum: “We didn’t have the cash to do it. Our total annual budget is $55,000. We have a population of less than 400. . . .We don’t have a grocery store. We don’t even have a traffic light.”

A group of state legislators and local elected officials in the Black Belt called on HOPE and the Black Belt Community Foundation in Selma, AL, to bridge the gap. In response, HOPE provided a loan to BBCF, which then gave recoverable grants to small towns for PPE. As the small towns were reimbursed, BBCF recovered the funds, and the loan from HOPE was repaid. In total, 23 communities participated in the program, drawing down nearly $1 million. The program was replicated in the Mississippi Delta, where communities were able to access another $600,000. All the grants were recovered, raising further questions about perceived “risk” and the wisdom of reimbursement requirements in the first place.

A Long-Term Investment in Rural Health

Another critical need is access to healthcare. Unfortunately, healthcare access in rural communities has been compromised by hospital closures. Again, the ability to import a diverse set of resources positions CDFIs, in many cases, to be the only source of capital available to update and preserve vital healthcare infrastructure.

Several years ago, HOPE surveyed federally qualified health centers in Mississippi and identified opportunities for expanding services and locations. The fruits of this work continue today at the Greater Meridian Health Center. GMHC is a Black-led, federally qualified health center. Incorporated in 1986, GMHC serves about 8,000 patients a year, 87 percent of whom are people of color and 94 percent of whom earn incomes below the federal poverty line. HOPE recently financed the construction of a satellite site in Macon, a small town of 2,500 residents—four out of five of whom are Black. The clinic extends access to primary care and dental services for county residents who otherwise would need to drive an hour for their healthcare.

Moving Forward

Looking ahead, policymakers, philanthropy, and the private sector all must act to create the conditions necessary for increasing rural investment. Here are some priority areas where policy can make a difference.

• Increase investment in CDFIs that support rural development: As the stories above attest, CDFIs have long track records of working with local people to bring their visions to fruition.
• Track investments: It is not enough to give resources to CDFIs. It is vital to monitor housing, small business, and community facilities investment by geography, race, and gender. In the absence of detailed data to measure community development outputs, communities cannot track progress, and the status quo will likely be perpetuated.
• Simplify requirements to draw down federal dollars: Local governments—particularly in rural persistent poverty counties—do not have the financial resources to front dollars and wait for reimbursement. While common, this practice discriminates against these communities by limiting access to essential resources needed to respond to disasters. Similarly, match requirements exclude rural communities from accessing vital infrastructure dollars to support a basic quality of life for their residents.
• Support advocacy: At the end of the day, the loans and investments provided by CDFIs are simply tools to demonstrate how the financial sector should work to meet the needs of all people. Of much more consequence is the advocacy work of CDFIs to change the systems of public and private finance that created the racial wealth gap and persistent poverty areas. While it’s notable that a CDFI helped ensure that Black Belt communities were able to purchase PPE, it should not have been necessary.

With a history of deep engagement with residents in persistent poverty communities and a track record of effective interventions, CDFIs can be powerful advocates that help to inform how public, private, and philanthropic resources are directed. Such work, however, does not fund itself. CDFIs working in persistent poverty places merit having access to reliable, meaningful philanthropic investment to support the work of systems change. And this funding should be just one aspect of a broader ecosystem of investment in low-wealth rural communities.

The people who live in the communities we serve know their needs best. Through increased investment and support for advocacy, CDFIs can continue to build the communities long sought by local people and change the conditions that make the work of CDFIs necessary in the first place.

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