Author Archives for Christian Clansky
Our reach into communities is literally hands-on — with some 1.5 million nonprofit organizations helping to feed, nurture, support, provide disaster relief, foster civic engagement, encourage economic growth, and other supportive services for millions of residents in communities across the country. At this critical time when COVID-19 continues to take and threaten the lives of so many – particularly those disproportionately affected – community trust is critical to our work to help meet the urgent need of getting vaccines to communities that need them most. Yet, trust in the nonprofit sector is declining, a trend we can ill-afford when trust between nonprofits and our communities is everything.
During our first Upswell Pop-Up of 2021, we focused on the vital intersection of trust and racial equity, and what we must do to repair some of our deepest divides. We explored how nonprofits, philanthropy, and community-organizations can build trust; how our words and voices can be a pathway to individual and collective healing; how academia and communities can work together to strengthen trust and advance strategies to ensure children thrive; and how we must align discussions about workplace wellness, organizational development, and equity work to strengthen trust bonds that are key to equitable growth – even in the midst of the pandemic.
Trust, COVID-19, and the Role of Civil Society
COVID-19 vaccine production and distribution are speeding up, but much work remains to build the trust required to ensure the vaccine is accessible and taken, particularly in communities of color where distrust is high due to a history of medical harm.
Speakers:
- Utibe R. Essien, MD, MPH, Assistant Professor of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine
- Dr. Rami Nashashibi, Founder and Executive Director, Inner-City Muslim Action Network (IMAN)
- Kristina Gawrgy, Chief Communications and Community Building Officer, Independent Sector
Key Takeaways:
- Lack of trust and hesitancy about the vaccine is reasonable due to a history and legacy of the past, and what continues to happen today.
- Trust and trustworthiness have nuanced distinctions. Where does faith play a role in the intersection of faith and medicine?
- What will happen in the next couple of years? How invested are we in health systems and in sustaining health equity? We have to look beyond the pandemic.
Using Poetry as Self-Care
In this interactive workshop, members of Street Poets, Inc. helped participants explore how to use words and voices to create a direct pathway to individual and collective healing.
Speakers:
- Alyesha Wise, Director of Program Development, Street Poets, Inc.
- Matthew ‘Cuban’ Hernandez, Director of Juvenile Programming, Street Poets, Inc
- Francisco ‘BusStop Prophet’ Escamilla, Director of School and Community Programs, Street Poets Inc.
Key Takeaways:
- Being heard is a key element to being healed.
- Poetry is medicine and the world needs more medicine.
- Trust your instincts and power in your younger voice. The more people practice trust, the easier it is to take off our masks and step into community with trust.
Building Bridges Where There Were Barriers
Using The Pittsburgh Study as a case example, community members and academic researchers shared how they collaborated to build trust and advance strategies that ensure children and youth can thrive as we recover, and how organizations can replicate these strategies.
Speakers:
- Dr. Jamil Bey, Founder and President, UrbanKind Institute
- Felicia Savage Friedman, Founder and CEO, YogaRoots On Location, LLC
- Dr. Liz Miller, Professor of Pediatrics, Public Health, and Clinical and Translational Science, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine
- Shallegra Moye, Founder and Executive Director, Brilliantly Blessed Community Health and Wellness
Key Takeaways:
- What’s important to note about The Pittsburgh Study is that we do research with the community and not on the community.
- How do we build trust when there are still being barriers being put up? How do we shift this narrative of competition? There’s enough food for everyone. We just need to share in that.
- We can’t have thriving children without thriving parents, We can’t have thriving parents without thriving economic structures. We can’t have thriving economics without thriving structural systems.
Laying Foundations of Trust
Organizations must end siloed conversations and initiatives and interweave wellness and equity into strategy, policy, and culture work. This session reflects on organizations that are centering safety and cultural humility through a trauma-informed resilience-oriented approach, even in the midst of the pandemic.
Speakers:
- Nkem Ndefo, Founder and President, Lumos Transforms
- Traci Bivens-Davis, MA, Intervention Trainer
- Tina Binda, MA, LMFT, Administrator, TEAMMATES
Key Takeaways:
- There is siloing of diversity, equity, and inclusion work – or justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion work – from wellness work and organizational development – as if they were separate work.
- Leaders must educate themselves about what they bring unintentionally to bias.
- You can’t just slide equity into culture change training. It has to be intentional.
In a week, 18 people senselessly lost their lives by gun violence in Atlanta and Boulder, and those are just the ones that made national news. As we collectively wrestle with the ways we can address and end white supremacy, misogyny, gun violence, hate, and the countless other social ills that plague us, we also recognize that many of us are in a much different place than a year ago. A year of loss and a global pandemic has illustrated the depths of our interconnectedness and has shifted how we see ourselves in the midst of our society’s greatest challenges. As leaders of nonprofits and foundations and community-based organizations, we want to do good. That’s in our missions and what we strive to do collectively as a sector. But are we? How do we know?
These kinds of questions and how to wrestle with them are part of this Independent Sector community. It is why we make community building such a crucial element of our work — because we are not going to reach the other side of this unless we get there together. It is why, when we were faced with the pandemic early last year, we shifted our Upswell engagement model to engage with you all virtually. In the past, we focused on the city where we’d host our summit in the fall. Los Angeles, Chicago, and then Pittsburgh were our place-based focal points. In 2020, we realized that bringing community to each of you, likely in your homes, was what we needed to do.
While vaccine rates may eventually get to a point where in-person events are a possibility at the end of this year, we are committing to keeping our entire program virtual to continue to connect people from all parts of our country. Our first opportunity to do that will be March 30 with a Upswell Pop-Up focused on trust, leadership, and racial equity. When we planned the event, we had no way of knowing that we’d be bringing our community together in the wake of two mass shootings, but know that what is happening in our nation will always be the backdrop to what we discuss and how we work to heal, care for one another, and build a healthy and just nation for the months and years to come. We also heard from you in your participation last year that people desired even more connection. So this year we are introducing several opportunities to go even deeper on the topics we explore in the Pop-Ups — from what was addressed to what perspective might be missing — in a way that deeply connects you all with one another. Stay tuned for more on that.
While we may feel weary of the troubles we face as a country, I am optimistic that if any sector of the United States is going to do something about it, it is the one from which we do our work. Civil society leaders and organizations have always helped this country face a new dawn, and we will do it together again.
Thanks for your partnership.
The pandemic has limited our ability to travel, gather, and form new relationships – at least in traditional ways.
But we know that building authentic connections with people outside of your current network remains a necessary and powerful part of personal and professional development.
So, are you ready to virtually further your leadership practice with other next-generation leaders? Or do you know someone who is?
We invite you to consider Independent Sector’s NGen Fellows program, part of the American Express Leadership Academy, as the next step in that development journey. For over a decade, the program has served exceptional social sector leaders, age 40 and under, to rapidly advance their leadership skills. This year’s fully virtual experience will accelerate your work through innovative peer learning.
The deadline to apply is midnight on Sunday, March 21, 2021.
Questions? Shoot us an email at ngenfellows@independentsector.org and we’ll be in touch.
It was somewhat ironic that for most of 2020, as many of us were isolated away from friends and family, Independent Sector’s staff and leadership focused intently on the concepts of belonging and community. But perhaps it was just the right time for us to take this journey toward deeper understanding of our own communities, since it is when you are without something that you realize just how much you need it.
As we have articulated in the past, one way we hold true to our goal of achieving a more robust, healthy, and equitable sector is through our ability to build community among individuals and organizations. To gain insight on how we might enhance our efforts toward this goal, we partnered with Pittsburgh-based Urban Kind Institute and Dr. Jamil Bey to measure the sense of community that existed without our network. We surveyed and interviewed leaders at IS member organizations, IS staff and Board members, people who have participated in one of our leadership programs, and people who have attended our Upswell events. We learned a great deal about how you view your sense of belonging to Independent Sector, and what more we could be doing to create a space and place that provides membership, influence, the integration and fulfillment of needs, and a shared emotional connection – all elements of a strong sense of community.
Now moving into 2021, we have also accelerated our work to further understand how we, as a community, define the health of our organizations and sector we all operate in. Through a set of focus groups held in February, we gathered leaders from across the spectrum of organizations that make up our sector and asked them questions about the health of nonprofits in the following areas: financial resources, human capital, governance and trust, and public policy and advocacy. To the individuals who participated and gave us your time and perspectives, thank you. Leaders helped us understand more about how we could use data to set benchmarks for the sector’s success in these areas, and opened up questions about our sector’s ability to become more equitable and ultimately achieve justice for the communities we serve. The feedback was expansive, rich, and varied. We are grateful for your time and perspective, and we are positive that because of your engagement, our next report and additional resources that come out of this effort will better serve you, your missions, and your communities.
So, how do both our sense of community and the health of the organizations and sector we make up fit together in our work moving forward? Well, we hope one major way will be through our Upswell events this year. In addition to our annual summit, which we will hold, again virtually, on October 20-22, we will also hold four Upswell Pop-Ups events throughout the year where we will take a deeper dive into the elements of our sector’s health. At a high level, our goal is to help one another achieve health and racial justice within our organizations, sector, and country, and in collaboration with the communities we serve. We will have the tough conversations about where we are and where we need to be; we will focus on the implications on COVID-19 in everything we do; and we will always aim toward this vision of building a healthier and more equitable world together.
You will get more information on this later this week, and we are excited to tell you more not just about Upswell, but also about the many other ways Independent Sector will be building a sense of community while driving our collective work forward through this year and beyond.
It’s important work. It’s necessary work. And we won’t achieve it unless we do it together.
Despite recent calls for unity, we are at a moment in our nation where competing visions for our future are in constant tension.
Rather than unity, I’ve been wondering if we shouldn’t aim for inclusion instead.
For our United States to be successful, we need a well-functioning democracy that meaningfully addresses the needs of a diverse people who experience varying levels of harm or injustice from the systems we inhabit.
But democracy goes beyond diversity of views, beliefs, and convictions. Successful democracies require diverse stakeholders to engage each other in good faith and together chart a path forward – a common path that serves all equally and leads to a future where we all can thrive. Democracy requires both the inclusion and the healthy tension that still exists in difference.
Over the last 30 years, compromise and collective policy formulation have given way to a “winner takes all approach” to how our “democracy” operates. What I’ve found so disheartening is how the “winners” and “losers” make sense of their current circumstances, and how those circumstances feed ever-increasing polarization.
In a recent article in Science Magazine, I discovered a particularly compelling diagnosis of our current cultural and political moment. The piece, written by 17 social scientists, asserts that we find ourselves in a time of “political sectarianism,” consisting of three core ingredients:
- Othering
- Aversion
- Moralization
Othering is the tendency to view the opposing side as essentially different or alien to oneself; aversion is the tendency to dislike and distrust the opposing side; and moralization is the tendency to view the opposing side as morally wrong.
The combination of these three factors has caused the American system, in which we all live, a great deal of harm. And because of the increased sectarianism among us, the hope for some baseline level of inclusion, necessary to make our democracy function, seems out of reach.
For the most part, we are leaders stewarding nonpartisan missions toward creating a healthier and more equitable nation. But we cannot ignore the environment we all live in. Our ability to advocate for real change over time, build deep relationships and strong community, and realize our sector’s full impact is being held hostage by this growing sectarianism.
I want to offer less of a call to action today and more of a deep reflection that we consider this in our daily actions and decisions.
Are we othering when we should be including? Are we sowing more distrust in our relationships rather than finding common ground? Are we looking for the good in the other side, even when it’s hard to hear or see?
The authors offer some avenues for intervention: correcting faulty perceptions of the “other side,” altering the way social media works to spread disinformation, and creating incentives for political leaders to behave different.
But I’m curious what you think.
I want to hear from you on this and understand your thoughts on the roles your organizations and civil society, as a whole, can play in turning the tide. Feel free to email me at danc@independentsector.org.
Independent Sector is in conversations with the Biden-Harris Transition Team on behalf of the nonprofit and philanthropic community about sector needs. In discussions, the Biden-Harris team asked Independent Sector for information about the challenges nonprofits continue to face and specific ways federal policymakers can help the sector serve hundreds of millions of people in communities nationwide during this challenging time.
To ensure the best possible response, Independent Sector surveyed nonprofits about how policymakers can best help them in the next six months. Over 900 organizations completed the survey, providing confidential quantitative and qualitative feedback. We are awed by such an overwhelming response from organizations across the country. Already, insights from the survey are informing important conversations with the transition team and feeding into the work of national nonprofit advocacy coalitions.
Highlights of Findings
An initial analysis of survey responses reveals three main take-aways:
- Nonprofits are most concerned about operating while protecting the health and safety of staff members and community members. Sixty-five percent of respondents report they are concerned about how to safely continue operations amid the ongoing health crisis.
- Policymakers can help nonprofits by providing more resources for nonprofits to keep doors open, maintain staff members, and meet growing community need. Sixty-seven percent of respondents said incentivizing more charitable giving is a critical way for federal policymakers to help nonprofits.
- Subsectors and marginalized communities have unique needs that policymakers also need to address, particularly advancing policies that promote equity and fight racism.
Concerns About Health and Safety
Top Concerns Facing Nonprofits in 2021
Growing Demand for Services
Funding to Keep Doors Open
Sixty-five percent of respondents report the safe continuation or resuming operations amid the ongoing health pandemic as a top concern. Within this category, the largest number of respondents expressed significant interest in federal government support for the timely rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine and increasing the availability of Personal Protection Equipment (PPE) to communities they serve. Many organizations expressed concern for the mental health and well-being of staff members, which they linked directly to their capacity to continue operations. A few responses extended the scope of concern to include protecting staff and community members from violence. Finally, some respondents said their business model cannot accommodate social distancing, so they are concerned about reaching a threshold of community health safety that will enable them to reopen and resume operations.
Concerns About Resources
Areas the Federal Government Can Help in the Next Six Months
More Direct Relief to Individuals
Streamline Government Grants & Contracts
Cover 100% of Unemployment Insurance
Just over half of nonprofits responded that they need funding to maintain payroll and keep their doors open, but a lack of money and human resources proved to be a theme underlying the comments. It is possible the overwhelming need for resources, whether to make up for budget shortfalls or to expand operations to meet growing demand, is why three of the top four responses were about how government can focus on helping nonprofits access resources. Incentivizing charitable giving, often a critical source of flexible funds for nonprofits, ranks the highest among policies federal lawmakers can advance to help nonprofits.
Concerns of Subsectors and Marginalized Communities
Topline findings highlight concerns that span the nonprofit sector, but aggregated findings also can disguise the acute challenges of some communities. Beneath the surface of the “most popular” responses, respondents identified specific types of nonprofits and communities that require additional support. Specifically, a large proportion of respondents said policymakers need to prioritize tackling racial and economic inequality in any future COVID-19 related policies. Many respondents added that nonprofits and issues unrelated to the COVID-19 recovery still need support and attention in the next six months.
Nonprofit Leaders: In Their Own Words
Because stories and anecdotes from nonprofit members are important to the national discussion, the survey asked individuals whether they were willing to share a quote about their work and be identified. Independent Sector plans to use these quotes in the coming weeks to better tell the story of the sector. In the meantime, here is a sample of quotes that illustrate a more complete picture of respondents’ greatest concerns for the first half of 2021.
Quotes on Nonprofit Concerns in 2021
Health and Safety
“As nonprofit frontline health care providers who serve marginalized uninsured and underinsured people, our concern is the lack of a COVID vaccination response and testing effort from our government that [is] equitable as well as timely. We must include frontline workers such as America’s Free and Charitable Clinics in the conversations about getting COVID under control.” — Nicole Lamoureux, National Association of Free and Charitable Clinics
“Protecting our staff from COVID is our biggest concern. As a small nonprofit, we have spent over $1,000 in 2020 purchasing PPE [Personal Protection Equipment] for our staff. Our program serves the disabled, uninsured, underinsured, elderly, children, Veterans – literally anyone in need – by providing FREE home medical equipment (hospital beds, wheelchairs, walkers, etc.). By definition, our clients are already a high-risk population. PPE should be FREE to nonprofits and get the damn vaccine out FASTER!” — St. Louis Health Equipment Lending Program
Funding and Demand for Services
“The dramatic demand for the basic needs of daily living (food, shelter, PPE) continues to grow, not diminish. People need cash to access those essential things most of us take for granted. A new federal relief package is desperately needed as quickly as possible.” — Marcia Egbert, Greater Cleveland COVID Rapid Response Fund and Program Director, The George Gund Foundation
“YWCA’s greatest need is for the financial resources to keep the doors open so that we can continue to meet the escalating demand for emergency shelter, child care, safety from domestic violence, trauma response, job training, and other essential services that our communities rely on us to provide.” — Alejandra Y. Castillo, CEO, YWCA USA
“Increased funding for nonprofits providing job training and workforce development will be critical to our nation’s recovery. America’s workers need secure jobs that lead to economic opportunity and prosperity. Charitable nonprofits not only prepare workers for those jobs by building their skills, but by providing the additional supports they need (food, transportation, childcare, etc.). Many of those nonprofits did not receive adequate support in previous COVID-19 relief packages, yet are in dire need of funding if they are going to successfully meet the increased needs of their communities.” — Steven C. Preston, President and CEO Goodwill Industries International, Inc.
Racism and Equity
“The events of 2020 have highlighted the deep-seated inequities that exist in all our systems in this country, especially for BIPOC communities – education, income, law enforcement, health, infrastructure, labor, immigration, and democratic processes. If we are to move forward as a country, these all need to be addressed with the greatest urgency possible.” — Angela Reyes, Executive Director and Founder, Detroit Hispanic Development Corporation
“Native American communities have historically been disenfranchised, marginalized, and excluded from the federal programs that are legally required to ensure education, health, and well-being. Please be Native Aware, and do not leave our communities behind.” — Joshua Arce, JD (PBPN), President and CEO, Partnership With Native Americans (PWNA)
“Focusing on policies to root out structural racism and begin [the] process of building a more equitable opportunity for our poor and disadvantaged community. That includes providing broadband, connections, and devices to close the digital divide.” — Arnold F. Fege, President, Public Advocacy for Kids
“[Our nonprofit] serves a mostly rural and conservative area, providing LGBTQ+ people and their families with support and advocacy. We are the only organization doing this work in our area and we fear for our future to continue this work due to a confluence of issues: increased hatred, under-resourced rural areas, Michigan’s unamended civil rights and hate crimes acts, and a frightening lack of understanding on equitable distribution of support for organizations serving marginalized populations. We need support now!” — Anonymous respondent
Nonprofit Operations and Infrastructure
“Nonprofit leaders and funders are focused on short-term responses to the current emergency. They are doing precious little to ensure the nonprofits are prepared to deal with future crises, and they are not investing in organizational resilience.” — Dennis R. Young, Chair, Research Advisory Network, National Center on Nonprofit Enterprise
“COVID-19 has had a devastating impact on communities across the country. To respond and recover, they will need tens of millions of volunteers and a cross-sector digital infrastructure to more effectively mobilize and connect them at scale.” — Greg Baldwin, CEO, VolunteerMatch
Leadership
“My biggest concern is unifying the USA around our common humanity. Without it, half of Americans will feel disenfranchised.” — Angela Williamson, General Manager, Northern Kentucky Symphony
“Convincing elected officials that solving systemic problems with short-term thinking and postage stamp-size investments is not the way to [ensure] long-term systemic solutions.” — Frank Knott, Founder and Chairman, Innovation Works, Inc.
Mission-Specific Issues
“Receiving permission to rehearse/perform as an ensemble in public. Without an audience, we die.” — Jirina Ribbens, Executive Director, Ice Theatre of New York, Inc.
“I am very concerned that the need to make rapid changes in order to confront global climate change may take a back seat in 2021 given the seeming imperative to prioritize basic human needs. However, the urgency of the climate crisis demands that we all think creatively about how to increase the revenue available to address both of these problems simultaneously.” — Brenda L. Smith, Executive Director, Nine Mile Run Watershed Association
“Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.” – James Baldwin
The violence and rage that gripped the United States Capitol Building and the nation on January 6 stunned me. My horror has only grown as more videos and photos have been released in the week since. People wore pro-Holocaust and racist t-shirts, erected a cross, installed a gallows with a noose near Capitol grounds, called Black police officers the n-word, and carried plastic restraints in a plan to take hostages. One insurrectionist even admitted to wanting to shoot the Speaker of the House in the head on live TV.
Yet, as stunned as I was, I know many fellow Americans, especially Black Americans, have seen this president and his most extreme followers for what they are: white supremacists. Undoubtedly, there is a straight line between President Donald Trump’s history of racist and inflammatory language and policies to the conspiracy theories and lies that led to this attempted coup. In short, the January 6 insurrection led to American carnage, the very thing that President Trump claimed he’d stop almost exactly four years ago during his inauguration.
I wrote in the wake of the November elections that as leaders in American civil society, our most precious task is to remember and focus on the everyday acts of democracy. I still firmly believe that this is the way forward. However, we cannot sweep our most painful attributes as a nation under the rug. We must face white supremacy and the hatred it fuels head on — now and always. We must face our history of political violence.
As leaders, we work within our organizations and communities in a way that affirms a set of values that we have agreed upon. I also understand that it is from that set of “American values” that our political leaders often say, “This is not who we are.” But I offer that values are meant to be revisited, reflected upon, and refined based on the desires of the community adhering to those values. I think it is time – as Americans of all creeds, religions, races, ethnicities, ability, sexual orientation, and genders – to reconsider whether we are living our values, or whether they need to change. Perhaps, we should refrain from talking about “who we are” and instead collectively work toward who we ought to be. To thrive, we must recommit every day to live up to the values we aspire to for all people, especially Black, Native, and other communities of color who so often face the brunt of harm in our nation.
One of our goals over the course of this year is to make clear which values we — as Independent Sector staff, board, members, and this broader nonprofit community — will commit to as we execute our work. As we continue to build trust within this community of changemakers to advocate for a healthy and equitable sector and country, these national conversations and our dependence on a strong, healthy, and equitable democracy are clear. Our public policy priorities, which increasingly center the outcomes of our work to address inequities that impact Black, Native, and other communities of color, as well as low-income people, will continue to be shaped by this community as we prepare for new leadership in the Administration and Congress.
As one organization, we alone cannot achieve the painstaking work of moving forward from our past – whether we are talking about last week, the last four years, or our collective and shared national history. But we are committed to working together with the charitable community to be values-driven and honest as we create a healthier and more equitable future for all people.
As we enter 2021, one word continues to circle around our collective hope and stress: health.
As a global community, I don’t think we’ve ever truly been this connected by a health crisis before. The last time we dealt with anything of this magnitude was with the 1918 flu pandemic, and certainly the lack of connection between people in different parts of the world and the slow pace of information would have made the experience unrecognizable to us today.
But in 2021, our health matters more than ever. We are facing, still, a global health crisis that, as I write, has taken the lives of more than 350,000 people in the United States and nearly 2 million worldwide. Back in the summer of 2020, the majority of U.S. adults reported their mental health had been negatively affected by the worry and stress of this pandemic. As open beds in hospitals became limited, the demand for psychiatric hospital beds has outpaced their availability. One psychologist recently described our upcoming mental health crisis as a category 4 with a category 5 crisis not far behind. Furthermore, the COVID-19 vaccination distribution has not gone as well as hoped and there is growing concern that while millions of vaccines are being produced every day, their distribution and application is falling short.
And the reality, as we should all know by now, is that the burden and the missteps will affect low-income, rural, Native, Black, Latinx, and other communities of color more than anyone else.
While one can get lost in the dread of these numbers and this reality, we must all understand that we have a role to play in recovering, rebuilding, and renewing our commitment to health and equity moving forward. As nonprofit and foundation leaders, we have the unique honor and expertise to change the course of how this plays out over the next few months and year for our own staff, communities, and the sector. Last year, Independent Sector released its first annual Health of the U.S. Nonprofit Sector report to help guide our work moving forward. The four areas of the framework – Financial Resources, Human Capital, Governance and Trust, and Public Policy and Advocacy – are meant to help us understand not only what the data tells us about our organizations and sector, but also what more we must do to improve these areas, especially as they relate to our ability to recover from COVID-19, advance racial equity, and address our climate crisis.
As much as we’d love to leave 2020 behind, the effects of the pandemic, the economic crisis, racial injustice, and our environmental disasters still very much affect all of us. As such, Independent Sector will remain steadfast in our commitment to advocate for the appropriate relief and future investments for our sector and the communities we all serve. In addition, we are in active conversations with the new Administration and have a survey out now to collect your organizational needs over the next six months. With that feedback, we will develop a rapid snapshot of critical nonprofit needs to help shape policy efforts in the first 100 days of the Biden Administration and the 117th Congress.
Over the course of the next few months, you will learn more about how you and your organization can join us in our collective efforts. We remain hopeful that a healthier and more equitable future is possible, and we look forward to working with you to achieve it.
This year has called on us many times to collectively mourn. This week is another such moment as we mourn an icon and a hero. Ruth Bader Ginsburg is revered for her fight for justice and women’s rights and she made this country better for all of us. Even in dissent, she advanced the work with her powerful arguments and words, and we have much to learn from her fight. As leaders of nonprofits and foundations, what we can take away from RBG’s legacy is that even in moments where we feel like we’re on the losing side, we have to push to move systems work forward.
With the backdrop of Ginsburg’s passing this weekend, I also was reading the new book, CASTE: The Origins of Our Discontents, by Upswell headline speaker, Isabel Wilkerson. Chapter eight of the book blew me away. For those who have not read it, it discusses how German Nazis modeled their caste system after American racist laws and policies. It was a painfully powerful reminder of the role the United States played and continues to play in shaping global values and modeling how those values get codified into legal and cultural systems. Like it or not, we are one of the most powerful (and wealthy) nations in the world and what we do matters elsewhere. While necessarily focused on keeping our own house just and a place of individual and collective flourishing, we have an added responsibility to take into account that civil society leaders across the global are engaged with us and often impacted by what we do, why we do it, and how we do it. In some regards, American civil society has a global leadership role that demands we act with and because of the highest standards.
I heard this very reminder from our recent Nobel Peace Prize winner and Upswell Pop-Up speaker, Tawakkol Karman, in our discussion earlier in the month. In response to my question regarding her take on this moment of social activism in the U.S., she makes an impassioned plea to the American civil society to be aware that our fight for social justice is NOT just for our nation, but for the world. She makes clear that many, many civil society, political, and business leaders look to the U.S. to guide their efforts because of our global leadership role. “It’s a shame that America is [still] suffering from racial practices,” she said. “But there is hope that the people demonstrating will stop this.” She said protestors across the world stand in solidarity with the protestors here in the United States and that together we could all uphold human rights here and abroad. While we often understand this global leadership in economic and political terms, we, as civil society leaders, should remember that we influence not just what happens in our own communities or country, but how the value of human life is seen across the globe.
As we enter in this fall season and an election cycle unlike what we’ve seen in generations, I want us to remember that the world is watching. How we show up and do our work, how we fight for systems change even in dissent, and how we uphold the value of human dignity and worth will impact our sector, our communities, and people around the world for generations to come. Are we living up to the serious responsibility that power and influence merit? I believe we are all earnest in our efforts, but we could be doing more, and I call on all of us as leaders to consider that question right now in your staff meetings, board meetings, convenings, and virtual conferences.
As always, we stand in solidarity with you.
In an op-ed published on Medium, Dan Cardinali (Independent Sector), Marc Morial (National Urban League), James Siegal (KABOOM!) consider Building Our Nation’s Infrastructure Beyond Roads and Bridges:
“In the depths of the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration was credited with putting nearly 8.5 million Americans back to work. Today, we find ourselves in a similar moment of economic and social distress. With double-digit unemployment that could linger well into 2021, the question of a bold, national infrastructure program is top-of-mind once again as the Trump administration prepares a one trillion dollar infrastructure spending package.
This is a welcome development. But as we consider an infrastructure investment for a modern era, it is time to re-evaluate what truly constitutes “infrastructure.” In an increasingly complex world, it’s too narrow-minded to classify infrastructure as simply the world of bridges, highways, and dams. We must invest in infrastructure that strengthens our civic bonds across the country, puts people back to work, delivers equitable outcomes for communities of color and indigenous communities that have borne the brunt of this pandemic. This is ambitious and it is possible through a strong partnership between nonprofits and local governments.”
Read the full article here.
