While a lot of capacity building—racial equity or otherwise—focuses on individual leaders or organizations, RE practitioners express their commitment to the broader movement ecosystem or field building. As J. Miakoda Taylor at Fierce Allies says, “My consulting priority is equity and justice, not individuals and organizations.” More than one practitioner has said that one outcome of this work, especially with organizations that are not genuine about changing the power dynamics to be more equitable, is that “the best people of color, now that they’ve tasted what speaking truth to power feels like, will leave.” To them, that is a “positive outcome” or “a step towards liberation.” Many of these practitioners work with cohorts or networks of leaders and organizations to cultivate relationships, share knowledge and ideas, diffuse learning, and scale innovations in the field. If changing an organization takes a long time, building a field is an even more gradual process.

Ecosystem thinking means not only relationships among nonprofit leaders but also RE practitioners as well. As the practitioners and clients have shown throughout this report, RE practitioners (and funders) are integral to the ecosystem, not bystanders. Clients consider them thought partners, capacity builders, facilitators of difficult conversations, spiritual advisors, and more. In fact, in some of the communities of practice that these RE practitioners are building, the boundaries between practitioners and clients are blurred. Many of the clients become co-facilitators, experimenters, and even consultants to other groups. The REACH Fund uniquely supports some of these communities of practices by RE practitioners, at a time when many other funders have not adopted this ecosystem lens. Like Mala Nagarajan says, “[REACH] basically gave us breathing room from the heavy demand of client projects to be able to expand the capacity building field by training other consultants and to create tools to support independent changemakers and practitioners in shifting their compensation to center racial equity.”

Lisa Weiner-Mahfuz at RoadMap Consulting suggests different revenue generation models to reflect this ecosystem thinking: “If you’re going to do holistic capacity building, you have to fund both the progressive, radical, BIPOC-led intermediaries that are doing this work and their clients to do deep, long-term sustainable capacity building work…And you have to fund intermediaries to collaborate.” Weiner-Mahfuz lists a “back office for multiple intermediaries” as an example of building a streamlined collaboration. Taylor also suggests a more collaborative (and less competitive) way to fund this work by giving cohort members some decision-making on how to move collectively. They say, “We could be doing really radical work if we could interact with each other in a much more meaningful and intimate way.”

Other RE practitioners in the REACH cohort echo the need for a community of practice among themselves at this moment. Some see a “deep bench” of liberatory practices, most of which draw from decades of racial justice lineages and have iterated with each political condition, that can benefit from some mapping and collective sensemaking. Also, as the demands for racial equity consulting swell, many consultants enter the field without a progressive racial justice analysis. This “mainstreaming” has led to the diluting of some liberatory practices, like the conflation of self-care or protection from discomfort with healing justice, says one practitioner. Thinking of the history of cultural misappropriation, Taylor says, “These tools are powerful if they’re used well. But if people just start hacking them, and picking and choosing the aspects of what they want, it waters down the tool, which is dangerous to both the tool and the lineage from which it comes.”

Recent media coverage about the ineffectiveness of DEI initiatives, for instance, says Silva Parker, has to do with the one-off approach (like sensitivity training) that is antithetical to the way all of the RE practitioners in the REACH cohort work. She says, “Those of us who practice this day in and day out have been saying that for 40 years. You [media] haven’t said anything new or helpful. We agree that those approaches aren’t helpful, and we need you and your readers to focus on and invest in what’s really needed to make and sustain change at the personal, interpersonal, and institutional levels.” Oversimplified criticisms like this could hamper and discredit genuine racial equity efforts. As the field continues to grow, it becomes imperative for those at the forefront in this field to be supported in articulating the tenets and approaches to this work.