Capacity building typically focuses on individual leaders or organizations. Another liberatory practice in RE organizational development takes capacity building more broadly to the movement ecosystem level. Many RE practitioners convene and cultivate networks and cohorts of leaders from different issue areas, and sometimes from across different regions as well. These “communities of practice” decrease isolations among movement leaders, facilitate peer learning, allow them to imagine different (often intersectional) possibilities, and give them the courage to experiment with these possibilities in their home organizations.
RE practitioners occupy a unique role in designing, organizing, and facilitating these cohorts and networks for field and movement building purposes. They are the ones who provide tools and support systems that encourage learning and collaboration across organizations. They also work in different ecosystems and so have a balcony view of the issues, trends, gaps, challenges, and opportunities and are positioned to be movement weavers, cross-systems communicators, and seed planters for collective change.
Networks address some of the limitations of the nonprofit industrial complex at the organizational level discussed in an earlier part of the report. Especially for people in organizations that are fraught with tensions, networks are, says Elissa Sloan Perry at Change Elemental, “an opportunity to build trusted space where folks can actually practice and make mistakes and work through them where there aren’t reporting relationships, where there isn’t history in the same way as when you’re working in an organizational context. So there’s opportunity and space for greater risk-taking. There’s an opportunity for greater self-transformation outside of the organizational context than within it, because our kryptonite, our weak points, are often things that our organizational culture or systems depend on.”
Networks are often a place for collective healing, especially for BIPOC leaders. Vanessa Bird, at the Center for Diversity in the Environment, says, “Indigenous, Black, and people of color working in the environmental movement, from communities that are at the frontline of climate justice, are burning out from the white supremacy culture in their organizations. These folks are asking for a space for community care, a place to do that healing work together.”
Maro Guevara at CompassPoint explains further, “I think the value of CompassPoint is our ability to bring folks together, convening folks and building community…designing spaces for people to learn together. That’s what we hear back from a lot of folks. This gave them a space to break out of isolation and to see a different way of being modeled in front of them, to think about leadership differently. They saw how facilitators who disagreed in the moment supported each other and pivoted into shared leadership. This way of holding space and dialectically figuring things out in the moment is a very different kind of learning, different, for example from depositing a bunch of skills on people, and different than trying to “skill up” and assimilate them to a very narrow idea of what a professional is. Instead, it’s saying, there’s a lot of gifts and wisdom here, and what we need to do is change organizational structure to reflect the gifts and wisdom that people bring to the table.”
For the movement ecosystem, some networks support leaders in aligning their political analysis and strategies across issue areas. As Lisa Weiner-Mahfuz at RoadMap Consulting says, “If you see capacity building as rooted in building collective political power, then we need to help organizations stay networked and interdependent and work through what I call the big, architectural, and strategic issues of our time. Our opposition is deadly. Our lives are at stake…We are in a time of growing fascism and authoritarianism. The more siloed organizations and movement leaders and ecosystems are, the harder it is for us to build collective political power.” To her, capacity-building work is not neutral. She adds, “I don’t think we get to do capacity building without an analysis of our opposition.”
Many RE practitioners—in and outside of the REACH cohort—gather leaders not just to sharpen and align their political analysis and strategies, but also, in Weiner-Mahfuz’s words, ask the difficult questions like “What are we building to scale, and what tools do we need in these times?” RE practitioners support these types of networks, like the Global Grassroots Justice Alliance (GGJ) and Nature Connection Network in previous case studies and the Women’s Democracy Lab in the case study in this section. For GGJ, the ecosystem is both international and intersectional. Mark Liu explains, “Grassroots Global Justice is made up of over 60 primarily frontline grassroots-based building organizations in the US. It was mainly created to connect grassroots movement groups on the ground in the US with international social movements to share learnings and create and move strategy together. We’ve been involved at different levels around the intersection of demilitarization, climate justice, and feminist economy. We are now in the stages of putting out a vision for a regenerative economy that we’re trying to build towards.” In cases like GGJ, networks enrich the movement ecosystem by, in the words of Elissa Sloan Perry, “allowing for the opportunity to dig into the complexity of intersectionality, and seeing our organizations in relationships with other organizations, from different issue areas.”
The network is the strategy.
Dee Washington, Circle Forward
Networks can also diffuse innovations in the sector. Practitioners also cited examples where cohort participants have taken tools and processes, like collective governance and generative conflict mediation, back to their home organizations. In return, these networks are often spaces where RE practitioners receive feedback from real-world applications that they can use to sharpen their tools and approaches. Mala Nagarajan at Vega Mala Consulting has been convening a group of clients that she had helped to integrate her compensation framework. She explains, “The initial reason for the community of practice was to introduce how much the framework had changed. Compared with what we implemented in earlier iterations, we were wrestling with and engaging with much more complex, radical, and reparative compensation factors. And so we wanted to bring all the other organizations together to say, hey, here’s the newest stuff that we’re doing so that you can consider whether it makes sense for your organization. They also had a chance to share the pain points of transition, learn how other organizations were addressing new system challenges, and request tools that would help them improve their compensation system across the whole employee lifecycle. And I could then help build some tools and materials around that to support them.”
Some RE practitioners in the REACH cohort add that these practitioner-facilitated cohorts also ensure respectful and responsible sharing of knowledge. Without proper guidance, some organizations may hastily adapt these liberatory tools outside of networks without honoring the lineages from which they come, to the point of co-opting or culturally misappropriating them or even diluting their usefulness. For example, the researchers for this project have wanted to focus on healing justice as a topic for liberatory practices. We were reminded that the healing justice concept, with its lineages from the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective, should not be conflated with self-care or the right to comfort (or the right to be free from discomfort). Another practitioner cautions, “Our understanding from Cara Page and other leaders in developing the healing justice framework, is that the nonprofit organizational model itself is at odds with healing justice. It is important for us that healing justice be used with the greatest rigor and integrity, and not used loosely as a way to talk about the importance of healing in anti-racist organizational change.” When organized by practitioners that have deep knowledge of these practices, networks can better ensure this and other liberatory tools be implemented across the field “with the greatest rigor and integrity.”
Communities of practice can have impact on individual, organizational, and movement levels. RE practitioners in the REACH cohort have shared many instances of people taking what they’ve learned from these networks and implementing more equitable practices in their home organizations and starting new collaborations between unexpected allies. Network members have also banded together to influence funders and public agencies for more responsive policies and practices. But because these networks are relational and emergent, these stories of transformation are “unknowable” in advance.
To Dee Washington at Circle Forward, “the network is the strategy.” She gives the following analogy: “Many people who approach this work believe they are creating a garden. Some funders prefer gardens and have little patience for ecosystems. As a result, nonprofits often find themselves trapped in a cycle. They must grow a garden and capture a visually appealing image for the funder. However, what they are actually building is an ecosystem, which can be messy and challenging. It can resemble more of a jungle with vibrant micro-systems embedded within it that help the overall system flourish.”
As the case study in this section shows, RE practitioners with this liberatory practice are not short-term fixers that go away once harms are repaired or infrastructure is put into place. They are, as Weiner-Mahfuz says, “the glue…that brings the analysis with the set of issues they’re facing and really think through how they can reinvent and deepen themselves in order to be ready for the opposition that we’re contending now and the future…We bring an organizer’s mind to it.” They are long-term builders that are a permanent part of the movement ecosystems.