Tag: philanthropy

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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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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.”