Power Moves in the South

If you follow NCRP’s work closely, you’ve probably interacted with two of our newest initiatives: Power Moves and As the South Grows.

What do these works have to do with each other? They are part of the same story – one that’s all about power.

In As the South Grows, a joint initiative with Grantmakers for Southern Progress (GSP), we explored the power of Southern communities and we outlined ways funders can begin questioning the ramifications of their own power and privilege in the process. Power and privilege are also central themes in NCRP’s new toolkit, Power Moves: Your essential philanthropy assessment guide for equity and justice.

Equity and justice have increasingly been at the center of discussions in the philanthropic sector, and this guide offers funders who care about equity and justice a detailed set of tools, plans and resources to address how power and privilege manifest within their institutions and in their grantmaking.

How Funders Can Build, Wield and Share Power with the South

As the South Grows and Power Moves are complementary resources.

Funders using Power Moves will find additional nuance about Southern grantmaking through firsthand testimony and shocking grantmaking disparities in the As the South Grows series. They can explore wielding power in the “organizing philanthropy” tip sheet in the capstone As the South Grows report, So Grows the Nation.

Likewise, a funder motivated by As the South Grows to fund equitably in the South will find a broad orientation to power, an internal planning guide and consultant offerings with Power Moves.

To highlight the connections, below is a sampling of As the South Grows recommendations that fit neatly within the Power Moves assessment’s three dimensions of power: building, wielding and sharing power.

Building Power

• Embrace the discomfort. Building power to advance equity requires striving to understand the complicated and, at times, painful history of the South by funding Southern-led power-building strategies like advocacy, organizing and civic engagement.
• Disaggregate your data. The data and research will show realities in Southern communities: Who is disproportionately affected by inequity and injustice, and who benefits from the status quo. Use the data to inform grantmaking strategies.
• Re-evaluate your institution’s processes and requirements to allow for different definitions of capacity, success and risk. Remember that privilege does not equal capacity. Grantmaking to advance greater equity and justice begins with understanding the different types of assets and measures of success.

Sharing Power

• Spend time and resources identifying existing infrastructure. Prioritizing building trust and relationships in Southern communities, will lead to the right people and information. Partner and engage the community; don’t just observe and extract information.
• Change expectations about what signs of nonprofit capacity look like. Signs of capacity may be hard to find by design because of the ways Southern state power has targeted dissent.
• Trust that the people closest to injustice, inequity and the work required to correct them are best at that work. Actively seek input from disenfranchised Southern communities in grantmaking decisions and hire Southern leaders. Building power begins with having a staff and board with lived experience in the communities they aim to serve.

Wielding Power

• Assess the stakes of inaction. Funders understandably want to do their research on how and where to invest their resources. But spending too much time prioritizing research over taking action is costly for communities that face far greater risks every day, particularly those on the front lines of power disparities in the South.
• Understand the privilege that comes with your position and your identity. Funders have an opportunity to leverage their personal and institutional privilege and power to enable higher quality Southern investment. Serve as conveners, advocates and collaborators with grant partners and other grantmakers.
• Organize philanthropic peers. Learn and co-strategize with peers who are moving their institution towards greater investment in Southern structural change grantmaking.

Steps to take now

Equitable grantmaking is not possible without shifting power back to communities, especially ones that experience inequities and injustice every day.

Whether you fund in the South or not, the region offers valuable lessons for doing this well in the face of deeply entrenched power imbalances.

Here are some steps you can take to start building, sharing and wielding power in your institutions and communities now:

• Read our latest As the South Grows report, including tips for organizing within philanthropy.
• Download the Power Moves toolkit.
• Catch up on the first Power Moves webinar on how power and equity are connected, and tune in to our next webinar, focusing on Building Power this month.
• Want to learn how to become involved with NCRP, GSP and As the South Grows? Contact Ben Barge at bbarge@ncrp.org.
• Interested in using Power Moves at your institution? Contact the Power Moves team at powermoves@ncrp.org.

Stephanie Peng is a research and policy associate at NCRP. Follow @NCRP on Twitter.

Editor’s note: The following is a Power Moves toolkit Power in Practice example.

“The foundation has invested in civic engagement; that’s been really powerful. You’d be amazed how even the low-income community neighborhoods in Little Rock are a lot more empowered than some of the rural places where we’re working. In almost every community, they have never held a candidate forum in their lives.

“Now, in Monticello, we had 150 people show up to the last candidate forum for the mayor’s race, and they’ve become an enshrined part of the community now. In just five or six years, we’ve made that shift. Every mayoral candidate is asking the group for their endorsement, participating in a public forum about it.

“We’ve trained a corps of people to develop their own platform about what they want – before they talk to anybody else. Now they’re thinking, ‘Well, okay, we need to start developing our own people to run for office.’ It’s all part of this development process of building, and I think the foundation has really enabled us to have the patient presence in those communities to build the leaders’ analysis to do that strategy.” – Stakeholder of Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation

WRF has thoughtfully embraced a number of successful strategies to make a difference for Arkansans over the last decade, including coalition-building, research, advocacy, convening, mission investing and systems change grantmaking. Embedded in these mutually supporting activities is the through line of community empowerment and agency.

In addition to Monticello and Little Rock is the story of the Gould Citizens Advisory Council. Over several years, with training and coaching from the Arkansas Public Policy Panel, the frustrated residents in this small town of 2,500 learned how to overcome apathy, organize their neighbors, demand accountability from local elected officials and develop their own leadership, eventually unseating five incumbents and bringing the town out of bankruptcy.

WRF’s president and CEO Sherece West-Scantlebury and staff approach their relationships with stakeholders by first asking one important question: “How can we help people come together, build consensus and take action?” What is unique and not easily done is to know when to lead, when to work side by side and when to follow, along with when to speak up, when to listen and when to lift up the voices of those most often ignored. WRF is adept at walking this fine line.

Lisa Ranghelli is senior director of assessment and special projects at NCRP and primary author of Power Moves. Follow @NCRP and @lisa_rang on Twitter, and join the conversation using #PowerMovesEquity! Read more case examples here.

Editor’s note: The following is a Power Moves toolkit Power in Practice example.

“Over the last three months, we’ve made more than $6 million in grants to organizations working to both advance and defend wellness in California. For us, this has been an extraordinary experience of collective action. Our staff quickly organized to assess and respond to needs in the community; our board worked with us to accelerate our grantmaking process to address the most urgent needs; and our grantees across the state have swiftly engaged, providing critical services and advocating for change. I’m truly proud of the Cal Wellness team, but it’s our grantees who are the true heroes in the work we do together.” – Judy Belk, CEO, California Wellness Foundation (April 2017)

Tina Eshaghpour, director of organizational learning and evaluation at The California Wellness Foundation, noted that the foundation decided to revamp its internal procedures to enable it to disburse grants more quickly after the 2016 election. “We took cues from our grantees and implemented some new processes to expedite making core operating support grants to advance and defend wellness,” said Eshaghpour in an interview. “These times demand responsiveness and creativity, so our board approved new tools to enable us to move funding out the door more quickly.”  

She also observed that, previously, the foundation had developed a shared understanding of equity internally, which created the conditions for the foundation to be bold in both its grantmaking and leadership stance in response to the new political environment, such as issuing public statements challenging some of the president’s executive orders.

Lisa Ranghelli is senior director of assessment and special projects at NCRP and primary author of Power Moves. Follow @NCRP and @lisa_rang on Twitter, and join the conversation using #PowerMovesEquity! Read more case examples here.

Editor’s note: This blog post is the fifth in a series of guest features on NCRP’s exciting new resource, Power Moves: Your essential philanthropy assessment guide for equity and justice.

Listen, read, take in the news, look around every day and you will hear and see what it means to live in this country as a Black or Brown person. You will read about systemic oppressions, differential treatments, impacts of racism, being “othered” and lives lost too soon. Every day.

It was by looking and learning that The Colorado Trust changed its focus to achieving health equity, which, as we have since learned, can’t be accomplished without addressing root causes with solutions that directly benefit the people experiencing the most inequities in a community or place.

We launched three initiatives: the Health Equity Learning Series, Health Equity Advocacy and Community Partnerships.

The learning series is as much for us as it is for relating narrative and research about impacts of inequity, unequal power and race.

The advocacy work is driven by a cohort of 18 diverse organizations that are working together to change policies and laws that maintain inequitable and oppressive systems.

Community Partnerships builds power to achieve health equity using a place-based and resident-driven approach. Teams of residents in communities across Colorado research and name the root causes and solutions they need funded.

Long-term funding goes directly to the resident team through a fiscal sponsor that we partner them with and also cover the fees.

In several of the communities, residents have uncovered lack of social cohesion, social disintegration and loss of culture as core root causes of inequities.

They are also focused on systemic inequities where unequal practices and policies are generational: the local economy, housing, education and environment, to name a few.

Health and race equity are inseparable. Living Cities notes that if we aim to address racial inequity, we must understand it in terms of power.

Racism, at its core, is a tool to establish and maintain power structures that are centered on whiteness.

When we don’t talk about power and power dynamics at all levels – individual, interpersonal, institutional and systemic – we perpetuate all kinds of inequity, including health inequity.

NCRP’s Power Moves provides a timely assessment tool to understand how we are doing in building, sharing and wielding power in our work and as an organization that holds much power. Upon initial reflection on the guidelines, I found them helpful to take a pulse on where we are related to moving power:

• Building power is described as “supporting systemic change by funding civic engagement, advocacy and community organizing among marginalized communities.” We are funding under-resourced communities to build power to achieve health equity and be their own agents of change. We are funding cross-cutting approaches. We are funding for the long term. We also are building engagement, leadership, organizing and advocacy capacity across all the work to support moving power. We could be more explicit about advancing systemic equity for specific marginalized communities in our goals and strategies. We are working internally to be more responsive, trustworthy and respectful of all of our external stakeholders.
• Sharing power is described as “nurturing transparent, trusting relationships and co-creating strategies with stakeholders.” We strive to be fully responsive, inclusive and transparent in all communication. Sometimes, we miss the mark. We do invest in the success of the communities and grantees by granting long-term support. We strongly engage with and trust communities to make funding decisions. We also center narratives and stories to deeply understand lived experiences and real fears.
• Wielding power is described as “exercising public leadership beyond grant making to create equitable, catalytic change.” We convene grantees and community stakeholders, while also playing a role as supportive participant at other convening tables. We can do more with organizing and collaborating with philanthropic peers that share common concerns and with other sectors, such as government. We can do more to inform, raise awareness and advocate by using our reputation and expertise to bring visibility to critical issues and amplify the voices of the most marginalized. We can also do more to deploy non-grant financial assets creatively to advance foundation and grantee goals, and shift resources and power to underinvested communities.

Taking this pulse helps to see where we are making progress and where we must grow. My team is excited to dig in more.

Clearly, the work of power building gets more challenging as you go deeper in building, sharing and wielding power. Yet philanthropists have a unique opportunity and obligation to do so. The work may not be easy, but it is most certainly urgent.

Gwyn Barley, PhD is vice president of Community Partnerships & Grants at The Colorado Trust. Follow @NCRP and @ColoradoTrust on Twitter, and join the conversation using #PowerMovesEquity.

Download your free copy of Power Moves: My essential philanthropy assessment guide for equity and justice now.

Editor’s note: This blog post is the fourth in a series of guest features on NCRP’s exciting new resource, Power Moves: Your essential philanthropy assessment guide for equity and justice.

The toolkit builds on NCRP’s research from its innovative Philamplify initiative, which assessed a dozen foundations, including the William Penn Foundation in 2013-2014. NCRP’s history with the foundation dates back over 20 years.

In 1995-1996, at the request of the William Penn Foundation, NCRP conducted an evaluation of its responsiveness to low-income and other disenfranchised groups in the greater Philadelphia region.

To “lead by example” is a fundamental principle within philanthropy. However, the power dynamic inherent to the funder-grantee relationship can sometimes lead to a lack of self-reflection or self-discipline among funders. A funder wishing to advance a best practice may require the practice from its grantees but forgo the difficult work of implementing the practice for itself.

This can be especially true when it comes to practices that are designed to tackle issues of race, including both the racial composition of staff and leadership and also the unique barriers communities of color face in accessing the benefits of certain grant-funded programs.

Notable responses have come from across philanthropy, with headlines trumpeting restructured paradigms and transformative approaches to philanthropic giving. These efforts are inspiring, but for institutions where incremental change is the more feasible option, a different model is needed.

At the William Penn Foundation, we have leveraged existing business processes to implement incremental change.

Our approach starts with internal practices and opens up the possibilities for new dialogue with grantees and other key stakeholders, reflecting our desire to model best practices before pursuing external changes on the part of the grantee community.

Additionally, our leadership works on a consensus basis, making decisions thoughtfully and deliberately after significant consideration, which is why an incremental approach often works well for us.

The William Penn Foundation is a 73-year-old private family foundation located in Philadelphia, a city with a richness of racial diversity, but also a legacy of racial conflict and structural inequity. Our institution can proudly lay claim to a longstanding commitment to racial justice.

Over the decades our grants have included support for the early workforce development efforts of civil rights leaders Grace and Rev. Leon Sullivan, community outreach led by Black Power advocate Father Paul Washington, implementation of a $10 million Minorities in Higher Education grantmaking program, and even support for NCRP’s groundbreaking survey of racial and ethnic disparity in corporate giving.

Over the decades, our grant strategies and guidelines evolved to address the symptoms of Philadelphia’s declining population and urban decay.

Solutions for the root causes of racial phenomena like white flight felt beyond the capabilities of our grantmaking and fell outside our core strategies.

We moved away from racially explicit language toward a broader focus on “low-income,” “disinvested” and “underserved” populations.

As a consequence, a number of our stakeholders perceived a change in institutional priorities, as documented in NCRP’s Philamplify assessment of our foundation in 2014. Specifically, stakeholders shared their concerns with the de-emphasis of racial equity. As one participant observed:

“I haven’t heard [equity] be a part of the William Penn Foundation conversation. In terms of promoting equity, I don’t see it as a priority for giving. Some of the projects they fund do have equity goals. I don’t think they challenge themselves to forge new partnerships to bring in new populations, new perspectives, to embrace diversity in all its meanings.”

In the context of a national conversation on racial injustice, these observations made it clear that we faced an important opportunity to reinvigorate our strategies and clarify our decades-long commitment to racial equity.

And with the renaissance of Philadelphia’s downtown now largely accomplished, we are able to shift our focus toward more equitable, community-based reinvestment.

These changes are part of the essential and ongoing work of strategy refinement, and involve everything from a renewed focus on inclusive community engagement processes in our funding for public spaces, to the prioritization of under-represented communities of color in our funding for outdoor access.

The Philamplify assessment also raised the importance of minimizing disruption and projecting stability in both internal operations and external grantmaking. With this in mind, staff and leadership leveraged existing, internal business practices to introduce important changes in how we address racial equity.

For example, facing a number of open positions, a few motivated staff engaged with human resources and foundation leadership to develop a hiring statement that explicitly values racial diversity and shares our aspirations for an inclusive workplace and our goals for racial equity.

Integrating this statement into our website and position descriptions helps ensure that applicants see and reflect these same values.

In a parallel process, the foundation board’s Governance Committee also made diversity one of its priorities in the recruitment of new public board members to ensure the board’s public membership better reflects the racial diversity of the communities we serve. 

The foundation also now has an internal Racial Equity Working Group, which started organically as a self-organized group of staff working on racial equity-related projects, meeting regularly on an informal basis to share learning and leverage one another’s efforts.

Already the group has used this forum to source ideas for everything from staff training needs to new grantmaking opportunities.

In recognition of its importance as an on-going resource to the foundation, the activities and responsibilities of the working group have been memorialized in a charter using a process modeled on our board committees.

The process of developing a formal working group charter helped to codify institutional values and expectations around racial equity and raise the visibility of this important work across the organization.

Under the auspices of the Racial Equity Working Group, we also collected and published our diversity data as part of a larger, voluntary data transparency initiative implemented through GuideStar.  

GuideStar has long been essential to our core business processes. Staff responsible for maintaining our profile were able to add the collection of our diversity data to the regular update process.

This new component required additional conversations at the leadership level, but associating the effort with familiar practices helped smooth the way. With our data published, we are in position to share our experience and encourage others to follow suit.

With these incremental changes to our own recruitment, hiring and data sharing, we are better equipped to work with our grantees to undertake similar practices.

Considering that William Penn Foundation funding underwrites almost 100 local nonprofit hiring decisions every year, our aspirations fall nothing short of partnering with grantees to help shape the future of an entire sector.

Dramatic gestures can be inspiring, but empty gestures help no one. At the William Penn Foundation, we found our sweet spot by building momentum from the ground up and by introducing new practices from the inside out.

Crafting a diversity statement, pulling together a working group and publishing your demographic data are three great first steps.

We have learned that our strongest strategies come from our greatest experience. It is our expectation that the learning we gain from these incremental and pilot efforts will be harvested to inform the future refinement of our grantmaking goals and strategies, and the improvement of our own business practices.

For our family foundation and others like us, these incremental approaches can result in practices that are more internally sustainable and position our institutions to impact the field in meaningful and lasting ways.

Nathan Boon is program officer with the William Penn Foundation. Follow @WilliamPennFdn and @NCRP on Twitter, and join the conversation using #PowerMovesEquity.

Download your free copy of Power Moves: My essential philanthropy assessment guide for equity and justice now. To request a copy of The William Penn Foundation and the Disenfranchised, 1992-1994 evaluation cited in the editor’s note, please email Caitlin Duffy at cduffy@ncrp.org.

Image by Pedro Ribeiro Simões. Used under Creative Commons license.