As important and urgent as the work of racial equity organizational development is, there is not a dearth of funders to support it. This makes the investments of the REACH initiative both rare and necessary. The RE practitioners in the cohort advocate not only a deeper investment by funders in the REACH initiative but also an expansion of investments by the broader philanthropic community. Some practitioners also state that funders are an integral part of this racial equity landscape, not just supporters on the sidelines. Just as importantly, both practitioners and clients believe that funders, whether new or existing, should have a realistic understanding of what this work looks like because it often challenges conventional philanthropic assumptions about program design, outcomes, and sustainability.
People often think of this work as surgical and time-limited. But wellness—for a person or for an organization—is about deeper transformation that takes both time and scaffolded conversations. As Cynthia Silva Parker at Interaction Institute for Social Change says, “There are a lot of times when folks think what they need is a training. And what they really need is a disciplined facilitated process…It’s not just a ‘come teach us what race equity is and then voila, magic presto, we’re a different organization.” Anouska Bhattacharyya at YWCA Boston says she wouldn’t even conduct a requested training “before we’ve had some discovery conversations. We need to understand where leadership is at. We need to understand how frontline workers are feeling. Folks are looking for a gold medal at the end of the race, rather than realizing it’s a journey. Let’s go further down the iceberg. Let’s not just see what’s manifesting above the surface. Let’s look at patterns and behaviors.” This work is not easily logic-modeled into going from increasing knowledge to modifying behavior. Melissa Meiris at Stepping Stone Consulting says, “If leaders are expected to help their organization rethink governance, rethink supervision, rewrite their HR policy handbook, and change compensation framework, all those things, to be more alignment with racial justice values, then that is a massive project and it requires a huge investment in time, funds, and a lot of energy, too.”
Meiris brings up the inner alignment that many often skirt to get to programs and strategies. This alignment as a precondition to organizational transformation often takes many vulnerable conversations that only work if they are strategically scaffolded. Sometimes these conversations occur in affinity groups by positional power, by department, and by marginalized identities. Sometimes they occur in outside cohorts with other leaders—“because some of the stuff is really difficult to do inside a toxic environment,” says Elissa Sloan Perry at Change Elemental—and the cohort participants might need support in diffusing what they have learned in their respective organization. Other times it takes individual coaching. Maybe by then, the entire staff is ready for a workshop that they now have buy-in for, or a small group is empowered to consider more concrete changes because now there is trust. Or some steps have to be retraced because there is a false start. Meiris recalls a client organization that started a racial equity committee that had a rocky beginning because “white staff didn’t do any racial self-examination, so there was no foundation or grounding.” In that case, it took another six to eight months for the committee to develop a racial equity plan for the organization. The “consulting” is dynamic, emergent, relational, and in some ways, unknowable. One comment could unravel recent progress. But J. Miakoda Taylor at Fierce Allies also believes that broken trust is an opportunity to build a deeper trust. Or as Sloan Perry says, “We still have bad days where sometimes we show up poorly with each other. Hopefully, we know how to recover from that a little faster each time than we used to, and be in loving accountability with it, so that we don’t get stuck.”
Over and over again, RE practitioners tell us that this work takes time because it is relational, not transactional. Taylor says, “One of the biggest obstacles to this work is what I refer to as capitalist time. People want this to be quick. They want it to be over with. They want it to be a one-off because capitalist culture tells us that good things are quick and easy. They’re done, check, check. But this work is not linear. It’s iterative. It flies in the face of all things capitalist, linear, dichotomous, and in all the ways that we’re conventionally trained.”
Bhattacharyya agrees, “It’s not something that you can fix in a few years. Even if you do, you have to keep at it. Three years after the murder of George Floyd, some organizations are like, well, we tried that DEI stuff for three years. We got as far as we could, and now we’re on to the next thing. But I think of racial equity and gender equity just like you would with your software and tech platforms. Just because you upgraded all of your laptops five years ago, you’re not going to say, well, we don’t need to do that again. We need to update our software. We have to make sure we’re all using the platforms in the same way, that the language means the same to all of us, especially when new folks join us.”
Credit: Afro.com
A few clients share how funders or leaders who have unrealistic expectations of outcomes by specified touchpoints could make it harder to grow together. As Lisa Donahue at Nature Connection Network (NCN) says, “Working relationally is often at odds with a timeframe.” In her experience, moving too fast means someone gets left behind. Fatimah Ahmad says that the founder at DC Greens “raised serious money to invest in our [racial equity] work and that leadership buy-in does make a difference because this work is hard and expensive before you see the result.” Mark Liu at Grassroots Global Justice Alliance explains that this work sometimes requires you to do less external work (at least temporarily) in order to focus on internal dynamics. According to Liu, GGJ focused on “internal interpersonal dialogues and systems updates that would make their work more sustainable and our communication strong.” He explains, “We did what we called the slow jam. We slowed all of our external work, paused it for a couple of months, to make space to be able to deal with it. Things are going to pop off and people are going to bring things up, and you have to be able to address them. A lot of times there’s some kind of external thing we’re trying to win or push, and we push the internal conflicts aside and don’t come back to it. We were trying to reverse that kind of tendency.” Similarly, as described in their case study, NCN also suspended their flagship event so that they could focus on the racial equity transformation without perpetuating more harm by doing the same thing.
Credit: Afro.com, Amy Elting
Unrealistic expectations from funders and leaders about how involved this work is leads to under-resourcing for this work. Their impatience ends up hurting the BIPOC staff (often Black women) who have been asked to lead the transformation most. There is an urgency to change these harmful narratives. RE practitioners cite recent mainstream media proclamations of the failures of DEI initiatives and state legislations banning the teaching of critical race theory as evidence of backlash. Some also predict that the Supreme Court’s decision to outlaw affirmative action, even if strictly in the context of higher education admission, will have a chilling effect on nonprofits, especially those that receive public funding, to implement any race-conscious practices in human resources. As Cynthia Silva Parker at IISC says, “There’s a public discourse that is undermining the work we’re trying to do. This is actually very predictable. Systems resist change. So when there’s a surge in one direction, there’s gonna be a response to it. We’ve got to keep at it. John Lewis said something beautiful about freedom, that it is not some plateau that we climb up to and we get to rest. It is a continual process that every generation has to be engaged in to keep it, to maintain it, to advance it. There’s a generation now of activists who are saying, look, we know it’s a long haul. We gotta do this with joy. We got to do this in a way that we’re not tearing our bodies apart and tearing each other apart.”
The backlash, to practitioners like SIlva Parker, is not a sign of failure, but an indication that their work is substantively challenging the status quo. But RE practitioners also worry that funders might lose heart and decide to “chase the next thing” when this is the moment to increase their investment and not pull back. These practitioners envision a movement ecosystem that includes philanthropy as an essential and long-term partner. To do this, RE practitioners believe philanthropic foundations need to go through their own self-examination. “They need to see their part in the rupture,” says Elissa Sloan Perry at Change Elemental. “They need to be ready to see the realness of the wound they have inflicted, or inflicted by the same system of extraction that created them.” Tanya Pluth at the Center for Diversity and the Environment says, “There is a distorted sense of what accountability looks like and where it needs to be targeted.” Derias says, “I would challenge the expectation that organizations are going to shift in one or two years. These are organizations that have been under-resourced and understaffed, for years, if not decades, of non-investment. And then being asked to shift so many things within a short amount of time? It’s not how organizational change happens. It’s a narrative that gets fueled by the ways funders fund, which is not multi-year contracts, not general operation support. It’s the idea that these organizations are now going to magically transform both themselves and the field, and it’s just not true.” Some see recent developments like the Decolonizing Wealth Project or Trust-Based Philanthropy as positive steps in the right direction.