REACH Cohort Member: CompassPoint

CompassPoint, a REACH cohort partner, is committed to helping social justice leaders, nonprofit organizations, and movements realize their full power through leadership development, coaching, peer networks, consulting, and research and publication. According to Project Director Steve Lew, in the mid-2000s, CompassPoint was offering cultural competence training and consulting for the nonprofit sector. Lew says, “The turning point was when one of our funders wanted us to do work in supporting cultural competency within those organizations, but said, why don’t you use some of the resources for your own cultural competency work within CompassPoint? And that led to a very focused effort to start assessing ourselves, to really think about our own gaps and fissures—whether it was equity around race, gender, or class.” This turning point resulted, in the following decades, a more explicit racial justice commitment and approach to policies, practices, staff and board composition, and finally external programmatic work.

Credit: CompassPoint

“Black people contributed to that [at CompassPoint and elsewhere],” says Liz Derias, Co-Executive Director, in reference to the racial justice lens. As a leader with a long history in organizing in Black movement spaces, she explains, “All of us in some ways have been really catalyzed by the murders of Black people across the United States, as media attention was starting to be placed all the way back in 2012, with Trayvon Martin. And then we started to see Tamir Rice and Mike Brown garner media attention. And we see that catalyst happen with funders and donors, at least over the last three years, with the murder of George Floyd and the racial reckoning that brought people out into the streets in the summer of 2020. But there had been decades and decades of community work and organizing work that’s snowballed to the media acknowledgment to really hone in on Black Lives Matter as a movement. I think that really catalyzed a lot of organizations and a lot of people to shift their priorities. People were coming in already to organizations with a level of politics that they were not able to fully express. Many organizations started to shift not just their commitment to racial justice, but in particular their commitment to Black leadership.”

That shift at CompassPoint was not comfortable or straightforward, and it required a lot of what Communications Director Maro Guevara describes as “generative tension” that leads to a shared analysis and language about race. For instance, after much discussion with staff, CompassPoint moved away from the decades-old framework of “cultural competence” to one of racial justice, as Derias says, specifically “with a pro-Black center.”

Credit: CompassPoint

She explains, “In the last two years, we’ve been digging into what it means to a pro-Black organization, not just one who’s fighting anti-Blackness. We don’t use terms like anti-Blackness or espouse DEI, even though I know that’s the popular framework that people have stepped into. We’re not interested in diversity, equity, and inclusion that still centers white supremacy, patriarchy, and ableism. We’re interested in building power with Black people at the center. We focus on the agency of Black people to build power, and then the agency that all of us have as multiracial folks to build power for Black communities.”

These shifts had real implications on the working conditions at CompassPoint. For example, Guevara cites experiments in shared leadership (“Black leadership in particular”), in normalizing conversations that are explicitly rooted in racial equity, and in promotion and compensation that is centered in racial justice, which resulted in “different kinds of untapped creativity and programming flourishing”—especially, Derias adds, prioritizing Black leaders and programming like the BLACK Equity Intensive that was launched in 2021, with support from the REACH Fund.

In its first year, CompassPoint received 150 applications to the BLACK Equity Intensive, a cohort-based program for Black leaders to focus on pro-Blackness (“centering the brilliance, gifts, ideas, and wisdom of Black leaders”). In response, CompassPoint expanded their initial capacity of 18 leaders to 27. The demand was instructive for the organization. Derias says, “We were able to gather a lot of information from the 150 [applicants] about what they saw as their needs in the field, for their individual leadership. We’re still carrying that information with us. As part of our work now, we launched a community listening project to hear from Black leaders across the country in order to forge a path forward.” One insight Derias learned from this experience so far was the need to support Black leadership at a time when they were moving into executive and leadership positions, with the often unrealistic expectations to quickly transform organizations by undoing the long history of being “white-led and white-bred.” ¹