Month: May 2021

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The Problem of Othering: Towards Inclusiveness and Belonging By Powell and Menendian

About

The problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of “othering.” In a world beset by seemingly intractable and overwhelming challenges, virtually every global, national, and regional conflict is wrapped within or organized around one or more dimension of group-based difference. Othering undergirds territorial disputes, sectarian violence, military conflict, the spread of disease, hunger and food insecurity, and even climate change.

Link to Article

Defined: Othering

“We define “othering” as a set of dynamics, processes, and structures that engender marginality and persistent inequality across any of the full range of human differences based on group identities. Dimensions of othering include, but are not limited to, religion, sex, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status (class), disability, sexual orientation, and skin tone. Although the axes of difference that undergird these expressions of othering vary considerably and are deeply contextual, they contain a similar set of underlying dynamics.”

1. Demagoguery and Power

On the ‘Southern Strategy’ pushed by Republican political strategists: “The idea of stoking anxiety, resentment, or fear of the “other” is not a new electoral strategy in American politics. Appeals to nativism, racism, and xenophobia are evident in almost every period of American history…. [However,] Political strategies informed by “othering” are hardly unique to the United States or even democracies.”

On Demagoguery: “Aristotle and other ancient Greeks warned of “demagogues”—leaders who used rhetoric to incite fear for political gain. Many autocratic and authoritarian leaders stoke nationalism or resentment or fears of the “other” to prop up or reinforce their own support. Such demagoguery usually involves more than mere appeals to latent fear or prejudice in the population. Demagogues actively inculcate and organize that fear into a political force. Where prejudice was latent, it is being activated; where it is absent, it is being fostered.”

2. The Mechanics of Othering

Notes

3. Expanding the Circle of Human Concern

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Weekly Round-Up | Generational Differences, Othering, and Collective Liberation

Every week I create a round-up of my favorite reads and listens over the last 7 days.

Extremely light week this week as I was completely swamped with work!

  • Article: Generational Differences in Racial Equity Work→
    “Leaders and staff have to be able to talk to one another. Elders hold valuable earned knowledge and wisdom. They know the terrain. Younger workers have fresh minds and hearts. They see old problems with new eyes. Both are necessary for addressing our biggest problems. The key is being able to sit in space with one another without turning away, shutting down, or blowing up. That can only really happen once trust has been established. And trust is born out of truth-telling.”
  • Interview: The Catalyst Project; from a place of love→ Strong recommendation to read. Clear articulation around collective liberation.
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Generational Differences in Racial Equity Work by Dax-Devlon Ross

About

Leaders and staff have to be able to talk to one another. Elders hold valuable earned knowledge and wisdom. They know the terrain. Younger workers have fresh minds and hearts. They see old problems with new eyes. Both are necessary for addressing our biggest problems. The key is being able to sit in space with one another without turning away, shutting down, or blowing up. That can only really happen once trust has been established. And trust is born out of truth-telling.

Link to Article

“Are we actually interrupting and dismantling white supremacy, or are we just giving lip service while feeding the systems of oppression that have harmed generations of people?“

By and large, the critics [of organizations & leadership] are younger, often of color, though also white allies. They are newer to the workforce and in direct service roles that power the organization’s mission. Often, they identify with the very people the organization is set up to serve. In short, they are the people closest to the work, yet they find themselves furthest from the decision-making tables that define the strategy, design the delivery model, and determine the core objectives.

Critiques include:

  • The organization “whitens” as you get closer to the top of the organizational chart. Rather than hire from within when coveted positions open up, the organization looks externally for talent.
  • Wealthy white men (some of whom might be Republicans or even Trump supporters) occupy a disproportionate share of the board seats.
  • Staff performance is judged and promotions based on metrics that don’t tell the whole story of their work. Relatedly, perfectionism is celebrated while progress is ignored.
  • Overwork is glorified.
  • Professionalism is code for white.
  • The default development strategy feels exploitative of communities of color and/or obscures the role that systemic racism plays in shaping the problems nonprofits are set up to address .

The people leading nonprofits today were molded and shaped, promoted and rewarded within a social and political context that was fixated on procuring accountability through metrics.

Address your performance metrics. The very notion of quantitative measurement as the gold standard of managing and motivating employees is rooted in capitalist industrialism, the focus of which was mass production by any means, including the exploitation of labor. If you call yourself an anti-racist organization, figure out what’s worth measuring and let the other stuff go.

Clarify decision rights. Let people know which decisions are on the table and which are not and why. A solution: let people know when and how they will be included in decisions as well as who has ultimate decision rights. Also, consider letting people know if they are being included for input gathering purposes only, and let them decide if they want to play that role.

Purity can be its own form of perfectionism. We can’t ask everyone else to see our nuances but not allow for the nuances in others. If you find yourself finding fault with every choice the leader makes, check in with yourself. Are you holding this person to an exacting standard that no one can attain? To advance in any field, one has to be able to work within imperfect systems. Give people the grace and space you would want to be imperfect.

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Catalyst Project: From a Place of Love

About

“How do we organize large numbers of white people to work for the liberation of all people that directly challenges the divide-and-rule strategy of white supremacy?” One of the key responses Catalyst has to this question is the need to develop anti-racist leadership in white communities rooted in collective liberation politics and guided by strategy based in love.

Link to Content

Catalyst believes the change that is needed involves challenging patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy along with all other systems of oppression. Therefore, for us, anti-racism necessarily means working against all forms of domination and working towards collective liberation.

Catalyst’s vision and work are based in need and desire. The need is material: racism needs to end for any and all of us to survive. Racism enables economic exploitation that drives down wages and drives up the cost of living, healthcare, education, and the basic needs that more and more people are unable to meet. Racism erodes safety and health for the people of color it targets, and then works on the rest of us. Racism causes environmental crises that impact communities of color first and worst, and are changing life as we know it for all of us.

Our work is also based on the desire for all of us to live into our full humanity. White supremacy locks up, deports, shoots, and impoverishes millions of people of color. We’re losing epic numbers of people and the brilliance, talents, and potential they’re not getting to nourish. Racism deforms the humanity of white people, by enlisting our participation in violence and by distorting our ability to understand ourselves and people of color outside of a lens of superiority and inferiority. We long for a different world, where people of color are not on guard in a daily war against their full participation in society. We ache for a world where we aren’t conscripted into being foot soldiers for the wars of the 1 percent, at home or abroad.

—

White people are taught to understand racism just as prejudice, and to overlook the institutional power behind it. We work with groups to deepen their analysis of institutional racism, and to locate ourselves both in history and the current realities of racism

On Intersectionality:

…The idea that all systems of oppression are intertwined and depend on each other, and thus must be addressed in a holistic, interrelated way in theory and practice, in our hearts and in the streets;

Intersectionality complicates how we understand relationships of power and what’s needed to transform them, and helps us understand that we can’t organize people around one part of themselves and ask them to check the rest of their lives at the door.

Collective Liberation

Collective liberation challenges divide-and-control tactics by emphasizing how our fate is bound up with each other. With collective liberation as our goal, we seek to create a society where everyone has access to human rights, food, dignified work, housing, education, and health care. It means that “no one is free when others are oppressed,” and it means recognizing that oppression strips all of us of our humanity, keeping us disconnected and alienated from each other and the planet. Within a collective liberation vision, white people work to end racism not for or on behalf of the interests of people of color, but because our lives and humanity depend on the eradication of racism as well. We do this work in service of a liberated world where the 1 percent don’t fight each other for crumbs, where people, including white people, no longer ally ourselves with ruling-class elites who don’t have our interests in mind.

Collective liberation is a vision to move towards and a practice to help get us there. Love is crucial to a practice of collective liberation because it involves extending ourselves for someone else’s growth. As opposed to the traditional concept of solidarity, which can involve a rational calculus of interest between groups of people, love allows for an expansive generosity of spirit that opens the space for mutual transformation.

Feminism

move away from the past mistakes of white feminists who pushed for equal access to the power of white men as opposed to organizing for systemic transformation

Like many white anti-racists, we’ve made mistakes around applying intersectionality to our work; in some cases we organized white people as if they were a homogeneous
group, with identical relationships to institutional power and access to resources.

Organizing from a Place of Love

Traditional models of white anti-racist organizing have a sharp focus on what we are
organizing against. Organizing from a place of love means trying to practice and embody
what we are organizing towards.

On Leadership

….Social movements need leadership to win, leaders who can support more and more people to bring vision, strategy, and organizing skills to our struggle.

Leadership is always present, and when it’s informal, dynamics of entitlement often shape who steps into leadership positions, irrelevant of their experience or suitability for the role

For many of us who were politicized in anti-authoritarian political circles, we have
been schooled in the idea that “we don’t have leaders” and that we don’t need them. We
have been taught to see leadership as inherently hierarchical, and that in order to resist
hierarchy, we need to see our groups as flat and equal, with no leaders. There are several limitations to this culture of “leaderlessness.” First, it makes invisible the leadership that
does exist in our organizations, and the differences in political experience that are actually
a strength and a resource. Second, when we can’t talk about leadership, there’s less space for us to talk about real power differences in our organizations. For example, in male-dominated groups, we’ve had the experience of men using the pretext of “we are all equal here” to avoid being confronted about sexism. “ird, if we aren’t willing to recognize leadership where it exists in positive ways in our organizations and movements, then we are not able to develop a practice of leadership development that supports more people to build their skills and capacity to contribute meaningfully to political struggles.

a key responsibility and quality of leaders is developing more leaders

Key Lessons

  1. Help people locate their stake in the struggle for collective liberation.
    We need white people to make lifelong commitments to anti-racism, not based on feelings of pity or charity for people of color, within the colonial models we’ve been offered of condescension and “the white man’s burden,” with its toxic and genocidal history. These commitments must be based on a longing in our bones, in the depths of our hearts, for a world that meets all of our needs
  2. This work is complex and messy.
    People of color do not have a unified set of demands for white people to line up behind. People of color span the political spectrum, and are not all advancing a liberatory agenda. And among people of color who are organizing for collective liberation, there is still no united banner. White activists need to take the best of what solidarity organizing offers, which is its challenge to internalized white superiority and emphasis on seeking and supporting the leadership of organizers of color with whom you have important political alignment. Not that you have to agree on everything—that is where it’s crucial to develop our own political compass in order to be able to navigate complicated realities of work on the ground. “at also necessitates building actual working relationships. “rough joint struggle, we forge relationships, trust, and dialogue. Sometimes as white people we want to come into an organizing situation and offer our critique and challenge before we’ve gotten our hands dirty doing some actual work. “at’s another function of privilege—deciding that our best role is to sit on the sidelines and critique everything that doesn’t meet our standards, rather than getting in there and offering our labor and skills.
  3. Work with white people while staying grounded in multiracial organizing.
    Who is going to work with white people on issues of racism if not other white people? . Organizing white people to collective action for justice cannot happen in isolation from the guidance and needs of people of color. Real change is going to take multiracial coalitions, and in order for that to happen, we need more white people who are ready to side with justice and see the deep connections they have with communities of color.
  4. Anti-racist organizing is transformative organizing
    It calls upon white people to transform ourselves, to make a lifetime commitment to healing from the ways racism takes us out of alignment with humanity. It challenges us to take collective action, to bring more white people into taking active responsibility to end institutional racism. Transformative organizing refers to the dynamic interplay of change on the individual and institutional levels—how as individuals, we are healed and transformed and grow through the process of transforming how we structure society.

Transformative vs Transactional Organizing

Transformative organizing offers a different model than the common “transactional” style of organizing, which suggests that we organize simply as a means towards a very specific short-term end—the idea that a campaign is built solely towards winning a particular concession. Transformative organizing refers to the dynamic interplay of change on the individual and institutional levels—how as individuals we grow, heal, and change through the process of transforming society. It’s transformative to offer our lives and hearts to the work of collective liberation. In the struggle, we come to find community in deep ways, sometimes after we’ve lost some relationships because of our political principles. It is profoundly powerful to know, deep down, what side we are on, to know where and with whom our interests lie, and to build the future together.

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Weekly Round-Up | Philanthropy, Wealth, Reparations, and Anti-Racism

Every week I create a round-up of my favorite reads and listens over the last 7 days.

I recently joined the Community-Centric Fundraising slack, and have absolutely loved pouring over resources and threads. While I consistently am reading and thinking about the power at play in the world of philanthropy and wealth, this week I dove specifically into some readings about the origins of Philanthropy.

All Week: Anti-Racism & Equity

I also recommend the book Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance by Villanueva, as an excellent primer and “provocative analysis of the dysfunctional colonial dynamics at play in philanthropy and finance.”

Still in the Works…

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Toward A New Gospel of Wealth by Darren Walker

About

Drawing inspiration from Andrew Carnegie’s original “The Gospel of Wealth,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s incisive insights on philanthropy, and writer and critic Anand Giridharadas’s probing distinction between generosity and justice, this New Gospel convenes some of the most important voices in philanthropy to ask and offer answers to a vital question: If there’s a continuum between generosity and justice, how do we push our work closer to the latter?

There is an article & book; The button links to the article.

Link to Article

Walker writes that is a tension and contradiction between “philanthropic efforts to address inequality and the structural economic realities that make it possible for foundations to exist at all.”

in 1889, Andrew Carnegie, of the Carnegie Libraries, authored a famous essay that came to be known as the “Gospel of Wealth.” It laid the foundation for modern philanthropy and led to an era of philanthropic efforts around the world.

In his essay, Carnegie argued that extreme inequality was an “unavoidable condition of the free market system and that philanthropy is one effective means of ameliorating the conditions the market produces.” Warren revisits this premise to examine what the present day realities and responsibilities are in the world of Philanthrophy.

Rethinking the Gospel of Giving

“Philanthropy is commendable,” Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, “but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary” — and beyond that: he underlying structures and systems, the roots of injustice, the causes of human suffering, and the sources of our own privilege.

A 21st-century view of inequality

“Where Carnegie might have identified illiteracy as a source of inequality, for example, we now understand that the reverse is true—or, at the very least, that a complex symbiosis is at work. We understand, in a way he did not, that social, cultural, political, and economic inequalities set in place reinforcing conditions from the very start of life—in homes, in neighborhoods, and in schools—that create cycles of poverty, illiteracy, and lack of opportunity.”

Three steps toward reducing inequality

1 – We need to open ourselves up to more critical, honest discussions about deeply rooted cultural norms and structures, including racial, gender, ethnic, and class biases.

2 – Foundations need to reject inherited, assumed, paternalist instincts—an impulse to put grantmaking rather than change making at the center of our worldview.

3 – We need to interrogate the fundamental root causes of inequality, even, and especially, when it means that we ourselves will be implicated.

“How does our work—our approach to awarding grants, our hiring and contracting policies, even our behavior toward our partners and grantees—reinforce structural inequality in our society? Why are we still necessary, and what can we do to build a world where we no longer are as necessary?“

Our obligation to capitalism

Admin Smith, author of Wealth of Nations, argued: “no society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.”

Additional Notes

“…the more excluded people are, the harder it is truly to hear them.”

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White-Focused philanthropy is on the way out. A philanthropy that unites us is taking over.

About

There are individuals being harmed by the nonprofit industrial complex. But let’s be clear; the people being harmed are certainly not the institutions and wealthy individuals for whom this system was created.

Link to Article

Philanthropy – “Love of humandkind/humanity”

The Origins of Philanthropy

Andrew Carnegies – Gospel of Wealth :  Identifies the imperative for wealthy individuals to give away their money to support the public good

“The ways in which philanthropists have accumulated and protected personal wealth have perpetuated harm,”, with many philanthropic leaders and individuals building their wealth through abusive capitalism and exploitation of the poor. Two examples include:

  • The Sackler family, notorious for philanthropy across the art world, secured their wealth through their company Purdue Pharma, “which made billions of dollars in the course of minimizing the addictive tendencies of OxyContin, while a national opioid epidemic raged for decades and killed nearly half a million people.”
  • Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, became richer during the pandemic and endowed the Bezos Earth Fund while his company employees — Amazon warehouse workers — organized against hazardous working conditions. 

Speaking plainly, the “people” in “people-focused philanthropy” are white and wealthy. 

Darren Walker, CEO of the Ford Foundation
Towards a New Gospel of Wealth

“Philanthropy’s role is to contribute to the ‘flourishing’ of the ‘far greater part’ — to help foster a stronger safety net and a level playing field. With each generation, we should be guided by our legacy of support for social progress and human achievement in the spirit of the Green Revolution, advances in public health and human rights, social movement building, creative expression and cultural innovation, and so much more. Ultimately, this reckoning with — this reimagining of — philanthropy’s first principles and its relationship to our market system will not be easy, but this moment requires that we not go easy on ourselves. Some might see this as a problem or as pressure. To me, however, it is inseparable from our privilege — because with privilege comes responsibility. In this spirit, let us commit ourselves to proffering, and preaching, and practicing a new gospel — a gospel commensurate with our time.”

A New Philanthropy – What is Community-centric Fundraising

 “Our donors deserve the right and respect to grapple with what they are learning, unlearning, and seeing clearly for the first time. As a sector, we owe them this time and information. When we do not address how social constructs — such as race — have caused harm, our donors cannot possibly address the problem they seek to solve because they do not understand it.”

“Community-centric fundraising … is an anti-racist movement that seeks to dismantle the power-dynamics that have contributed to systemic racism and inequities, and, true to the nature of the word philanthropy, is deeply rooted in justice, equity, and love of people. “

White Supremacy Tactics in Philanthropy: include poverty tourism, tokenizing, competitive and complicated grant procedures, and other gimmicks that continue to increase the wealth of a privileged few, reinforce a wealth-as-power dynamic, and perpetuate a white savior role that is less than transformational. 

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Weekly Round-Up | Equity, Ecosomatics, and Mission-Driven Communications

Every week I create a round-up of my favorite reads and listens over the last 7 days.

Organization Spotlight

The Northwest Network of Bi, Trans, Lesbian & Gay Survivors of Abuse.
The NW Network of Bi, Trans, Lesbian and Gay Survivors of Abuse works to end violence and abuse by building loving and equitable relationships in our community and across the country.

Monday: Anti-Racism, Equity, and Organizational Development

Tuesday-Thursday: Communications & Fundraising

I have embarked on building a new multi-year strategic development plan for my current organization. A part of that process was a revisit to favorite resources on communications, including the Progressives Study Guide from Sum of Us, which I strongly recommend everyone reading–not just communications people! I also picked up two books to help me expand my thinking on Fund Development and Communication Methods.

Friday: Health / Movement / Play

Ahead of an interview, I revisited and researched readings on ecosomatics. Strengthening appreciation and connection to the places we live and play has been at the heart of my career–Parkour being an eco-somatic practice that brings together ecological consciousness with movement education, improvisation, and play. I believe it is critical to facilitate a physical and emotional connection to our natural world in order to expand our ability to empathize and take action on the larger challenges facing us as a society today.

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Olive Bieringa on the Ecosomatics Classroom

About

Interview with Olive Bieringa; The ecosomatics classroom is a roving experimental project that intertwines the fields of ecology, biology and other sciences along with dance and the somatic practice of Body-Mind Centering

Link to Article

Excerpts

“Ecosomatics is an emerging interdisciplinary field which connects embodiment practices such as dance and the healing arts with ecological consciousness. It is a dynamic approach to learning and living and a manifestation in how the moving arts can facilitate a lasting positive impact upon the natural, and the social landscape.”

  • How can we can access knowledge from other disciplines to enrich our own?
  • How can embodiment/movement play a role in how we accumulate knowledge?
  • How can our somatic knowledge expand research in other fields?
  • How can embodied and empathetic practices help us to evolve as human beings and transform our environmental consciousness?

Notes

I’ve always been drawn to the eco-somatic framework;

Strengthening appreciation and connection to the places we live and play has been at the heart of my career–Parkour being an eco-somatic practice that brings together ecological consciousness with movement education, improvisation, and play. I believe it is critical to facilitate a physical and emotional connection to our natural world in order to expand our ability to empathize and take action on the larger challenges facing us as a society today.