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From the time I started in philanthropy, I have been on a mission to drive more resources (financial and non-financial) to grassroots organizations led by those most impacted by injustices.

Groups like Grantmakers for Southern Progress (GSP), Neighborhood Funders Group and the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) are making it clear that the South and rural communities are areas most in need of these resources.

NCRP and GSP’s recent As the South Grows: So Grows the Nation report makes the case for funding these areas in a way that many funders can understand.

It states, “Between 2011 and 2015, foundations nationwide invested 56 cents per person in the South for every dollar per person they invested nationally. And they provided 30 cents per person for structural change work in the South for every dollar per person nationally.”

The South is underfunded, and structural change work in the region is drastically underfunded.

Working at a foundation committed to social justice and equity, the question is not should we fund these areas, but instead how should we fund these areas.

In our three decades of work at Common Counsel Foundation, we have found that the key to sustainable change and success is trust.

Our grant partners over the years have been at the forefront of every social movement imaginable, and it is because we trust them to do their work.

The key lesson for philanthropy – particularly in funding the South – is that trust needs to be a two-way street.

Funders need to trust that grant partners are doing meaningful work, and grant partners need to trust that funders are being accountable and advocating on their behalf.

This is even more vital in the South, where communities have experienced chronic disinvestment. Funders need to learn from the past and build foundations centered on trust.

When I want to understand what this means in practice, I think back to one of my first in-person conversations at Common Counsel Foundation.

I was tagging along with a co-worker during a visit with a grant partner up for renewal. From the start, it was clear that there was a lot of trust on both sides of the table.

Towards the end of the conversation, one of the last questions my co-worker asked was, “Do you want us to put you through for renewal?”

At the time, I thought that was a bold question, putting the fate of this grant in the hands of someone who had a vested interest in saying yes.

The grant partner said, “You know, we are good. There are a lot of other up-and-coming groups out there that have more of a need for those funds.”

I was blown away. In thinking about the interaction, the answer itself did not shock me. The shock came from the level of trust and authentic relationship that allowed that type of response to even be an option.

That grant partner could easily have said, “yes, put us through for renewal” and we would have done that. The trust was centered around a belief that one organization cannot undo centuries of harm, but needs other partners in the struggle.

This is a conversation I think back to regularly.

At Common Counsel Foundation, we are trying to build up the case to drive more structural change dollars to the South. During that process, the biggest growth edge has been finding the right philanthropic and grassroots partners with which to walk together.

More importantly, it has been developing trusting relationships rooted in a shared understanding of the scale of the issues, instead of merely a financial exchange of resources.

We have learned a lot during this process. As a national foundation trying to prioritize the South and rural communities in our grantmaking, I wanted to share some key tips on how to develop trusting relationships:

1. Admit that you do not know everything – Often, foundation staff are hired for content or field expertise. However, it is impossible for one person to know everything. To build trusting relationships, you need to be vulnerable. You need to admit that you do not have all the answers or all the knowledge.

2. Embrace discomfort and disagreements – It is okay for there to be disagreements about strategy and understanding. In fact, it is healthy and expected. To have that spark a trusting relationship, the key is having a mindset of embracing that discomfort. In any relationship, there is going to be a level of conflict. It is important to address those feelings in a way in which all sides feel safe and heard.

3. Believe the lived experiences of those on the ground – Philanthropy’s default is to only believe and trust experiences that are backed up by data and research. Academic data and research can sometimes be helpful, but often supplants the lived experiences of directed impacted communities. When we hear the lived experiences of people directly impacted by the issues we seek to address, trust that their experiences are authentic and equally as valuable as non-academic data and research.

4. Do not dangle money at the outset – There is an inherent power dynamic in a funder-nonprofit relationship. For example, philanthropic staff have an easier time getting conversations with grassroots leaders (and other funders) because there is the potential for funding or financial resources. The challenge is to minimize that power. Be upfront that you want to develop a relationship to learn, and that learning will likely not lead to funding dollars. Once money is off the table, you can minimize the power imbalance and build a trusting relationship from the start.

As the saying goes, you need to move at the speed of trust. Change does not happen overnight, and grantmaking practices need to reflect that.

It is our responsibility as funders to fund over the long-term to support grant partners that can fight for structural changes. In the South – and throughout the country – the path towards social justice starts with trust. 

Allistair Mallillin is a program officer at the Common Counsel Foundation.

Recent headlines have been filled with stories of families that are separated at the border and asylum-seekers who are treated like criminals.

For weeks, organizations have been in rapid-response mode, sending people to the border to capture real stories, provide legal counsel and rally in support of the countless lives that hang in an uncertain balance.

Our movement’s leaders are tired, but more committed than ever.

This moment has been critical for the public to understand the plight of immigrant families who come here seeking nothing more than safety, hoping the American dream is still alive.

The national attention has opened people’s eyes and stirred new empathy. However, for those of us who have been working in this space for years, none of this is new.

The current administration’s “zero tolerance” policy gave rise to a level of cruelty that we hoped was just a painful part of our history that we had learned from.

The truth is anti-immigrant sentiment did not begin with Trump. All he has done is fan the flames and exploit an existing undercurrent of fear and blame that has long percolated below our country’s surface.

Some argue that the solution to all of this is simply to elect new leaders, or perhaps to pass new policies.

Traditionally, in our movement, these strategies are what we look to for a long-term fix. But, in this moment of reckoning, it’s time for us to fully embrace that they haven’t led to the transformative shifts that we’ve needed.

So here we are.

The world is looking to the southern border, watching children abducted from their parents.

Everybody is rushing to take action. Everybody is scrambling in this urgent moment to stop the bleeding and make sure that we end the practice of family separation and child detention.

With the eyes of the world focused on immigrants, these media moments are critical. They are the moments that make people care.

But the truth is: We cannot subsist in perpetuity under a rapid response mindset. There has to be a larger aim.

When we scramble to stop the bleeding, it has to be with the knowing that there is something more coming: a real cure; a healing that will make it so that we will not have to keep scrambling forever.

At Define American, we believe that cure is to fundamentally improve our cultural attitudes towards the movement of human beings from one place to another.

We do this by harnessing the power of stories and embedding those narratives strategically into forms of media, primarily news and entertainment media.

A recent poll found that the TV news station someone watches is a stronger predictor of their feelings about immigrants than their partisan political affiliation.

Entertainment media is a largely untapped resource that has the power to touch millions of hearts and minds through a single television show or film.

Entertainment and pop culture often create the lens through which we see the world. We unconsciously watch the ways that people act or treat others, and they provide us with a social script for how we engage with people around us.

A 2016 study published by Josh Katz of the New York Times suggested:

“If you had to guess how strongly a place supported Donald J. Trump in the election, would you rather know how popular ‘Duck Dynasty’ is there, or how George W. Bush did there in 2000? It turns out the relationship with the TV show is stronger. That’s how closely connected politics and culture can be.”

This is what the anti-immigrant establishment has understood for so long: Shifting the culture through media is the key to changing our policies and our identity as Americans.

For decades, they have embedded a toxic and dehumanizing narrative about immigrants into our culture, because they know we can only treat people inhumanely if we don’t recognize them as fully human – as fully American.

We need funders who support immigrant freedom to understand this, too; we cannot improve the politics of immigration until we improve the cultural lens through which immigrants are seen.

Some funders see culture change as something they can invest in “eventually” once the urgent moments have passed. But the urgent moments will keep coming over and over again if we don’t start to invest in a real, transformative shift now.

As a leader of an organization that has been working to improve the cultural conversation about immigrants since 2011, I can tell you that this work is hard, and it takes a lot of time and resources, but it is critical to our movement’s ultimate success.

Rev. Ryan M. Eller is executive director of Define American. Follow @EllerRyan and @DefineAmerican on Twitter.

Photo by C Slack. Used under Creative Commons license.

As someone with longtime philanthropic interests in the South, I want to recognize the singular achievement of the As the South Grows series.

Nothing in recent memory has as accurately captured the voices of local southerners – from Appalachia to the Lowcountry – whose work is driven by a commitment to real change for some of the least represented people in the country.

Those of us who support and promote rural philanthropy often ask folks, “Have you read the As the South Grows series? If not, you need to!”

But there is a missing piece of the philanthropic story: Health care conversion foundations, also called health care legacy funders, are often the dominant funders in the South.  

These funders, born of the sale of non-profit healthcare organizations (e.g. hospitals, insurance companies, physician groups) to primarily for-profit health care groups, are often outsized funders obligated to serve rural communities.

A 2015 report from Grantmakers in Health (GIH) showed at least 75 conversion foundations in the South with assets of more than $8 billion. These numbers continue to grow, with another 20 foundations likely to come online in the South since the GIH report data was collected.

The recently announced pending sale of the nonprofit Mission Healthcare in Asheville, North Carolina, to private healthcare company Hospital Corporation of America will create a new foundation serving 18 rural and very rural North Carolina counties with assets predicted to be upwards of $1.5 billion.

With a service area that contains less than a million people, this healthcare conversion will create perhaps the largest foundation in the country on a per capita basis – and one that will serve some very poor Appalachian counties.

So, with all the financial mass and promise of healthcare conversion foundations, why are they not more prominently featured in As the South Grows? How do their investments reflect the focus on grassroots advocacy, poverty and structural change that As the South Grows describes and promotes?

The answer is: They don’t. At least, not as a whole.

There are notable exceptions in the region, including Danville Regional Foundation (Danville, Virginia), the Mary Black Foundation (Spartanburg, South Carolina), Allegany Franciscan Ministries (Palm Harbor, Florida), The Greater Clark Foundation (Winchester, Kentucky) and others.

However, the bulk of conversion foundations in the South are punching well below their weight class when it comes to funding structural change.

Like too many of their peers across the philanthropic spectrum, they hesitate to invest deeply in the kind of on-the-ground advocacy, difficult conversations and paradigm shifts that are necessary to dismantle systems and structures that perpetuate inequity and poverty in the region.

The reasons for their hesitancy aren’t mysterious. Some are still dedicated exclusively to supporting health care services for the poor, per their origins and regulatory environments.

Many have moved to a social determinants of health frame, which looks upstream from health care to the causes of poor health outcomes, such as poverty, education quality, poor nutrition, homelessness and many other social factors. These funders invest in early childhood, food access, built environments and more to improve social conditions.

Support for local advocacy and grassroots system-led change is a natural extension of social determinants work. Unfortunately, too many health conversion funders are content to bide by only the old tried-and-true mechanisms of philanthropy, making passive grants to traditional nonprofits that only respond to the effects of social determinants rather than addressing the causes.

The other barriers that hold Southern conversion foundations back from making a positive dent in the South’s current systems and structures are the same as for philanthropy in general: lack of experience; no peer group to lean on; an aversion to risk taking; and the inability to readily measure the value of investments in advocacy.

(The cynical might add that many of Southern conversion foundations are led by board and staff who represent the same traditional leadership that has nurtured and reinforced historic power structures. While that may be true in some cases, I don’t believe that’s representative of the majority.)

What will create a change? Conversation. I encourage other Southern-based funders that have successfully moved beyond these roadblocks to intentionally pursue conversations with conversion foundations.

Show them your good work; engage in board-member-to-board-member conversation; train them on how to measure advocacy success and vet grassroots grantees.

Staff at successful foundations should go to conferences and meetings, and share the tactical ways that conversions funders can dip their toes in the grassroots advocacy funding pool.

And every grantmaker association in the region should provide at least one annual training on the mechanics of making good grassroots advocacy grants.

Most importantly, philanthropic work on social determinants of health and underlying systems change in our region must be based in the Southern experience and the unique history of conversion foundations.

While NCRP and others have rightly decried the lack of investment in the South by national funders, this is a battle that is only going to be won by leadership from within our own ranks.

The world of Southern conversion foundations is only just hitting its stride. Support for advocacy and grassroots systems change is the obvious next step.

Allen Smart spent more than two decades in leadership roles with rural funders in the Southeastern U.S. before launching RuralwoRx, a national consultancy aimed at increasing and improving rural philanthropy across the country. Follow @NCRP and #AstheSouthGrows on Twitter.

Any Southern organizer knows the feeling of being assessed by funding criteria developed in the sterile conditions of a foundation boardroom.

It’s not unlike the feeling of being in the cramped quarters of a doctor’s office, assessing what you can and can’t disclose as a provider runs through a list of questions that have little to do with who you truly are and what’s going on with your body.

This clinical diagnostic process manages to be invasive and alienating; so too does grantmaking that misses the mark.

But I’ve also experienced the opposite. My family gets care from a family practice doctor who breaks script enough to create a human connection, addresses the additional stresses that a queer Southern family shoulders and treats each of us as whole people.

I’ve seen the same with some funders who, in both word and deed, approach the South – and the lives of Southerners – with care, commitment and grantmaking practices that speak to the distinct features of our region.

The difference isn’t just a palpable shift in how interactions feel; it actually makes for better outcomes.

As the South Grows: So Grows the Nation, a new report from National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy and Grantmakers for Southern Progress, interrogates an idea I’ve heard countless Southern organizers and strategists obsess over: Imagine what would be possible if funding was done differently in the South.

Above all, what I hear in this report is an invitation for funders to become new kinds of practitioners: More vessel, less gatekeeper; more situational, less linear; more relational, less transactional.

And with this, to let go of the power that comes with money and trust that the world will be better for it.

In the South, there is nothing abstract about the times we are living through. The forces of white supremacy and Christian nationalism are exerting themselves at every level of Southern politics. Our state legislatures are labs to test draconian policies (like Mississippi’s HB 1523, the nation’s most extreme anti-LGBTQ law) that are then introduced at the federal level.

As always in the South, many things are true at once: Resistance is also alive and well here. Across the region, you see incredible examples of creative, innovative programming and intersectional rapid response organizing.

The report takes a deep dive on models of funding that work in the South, including engaging history, race, gender and class in grantmaking practices.

In this spirit, I want to lift up four practices I’ve experienced from funding practitioners that have been gamechangers in our work with them:

1. Stay curious. Ask questions like:

  • What does your community need?
  • What does your community dream of?
  • Why did you approach this issue that way?

Questions like these invite people to speak more authentically about their communities and work rather than responding in the dialect of grantspeak. When we speak authentically about what matters to us, it’s a lot easier to get clear on what matters and to be honest about what’s working and not.   

2. Figure out how to move money quickly.

In 2018, we are working on sending people to Mars and can isolate strands of the human genome, things we once thought impossible.

It is entirely possible to move money quickly. And it’s necessary if we are to respond adequately to the chaos and danger of this political moment.

Recently, a funder told me that they had money sitting in an account and the greenlight to disburse it, but couldn’t figure out how.

It became clear that the real issue was that this foundation wasn’t ready to trust organizers with rapid response funding.

3. Have faith. And if you don’t, be willing to ask why.

Listening to people on the ground, trusting their leadership and moving money so they can do the work: That’s trust-based grantmaking, but it’s also a spiritual practice rooted in relationship, a faith in the unseen and a readiness to move mountains to create the beloved community.

If you’re not there yet, what would it take for you to trust like this? Are there war stories about grant funds being misused? Of course, but there also are war stories about funders exploiting the work of grantees.

We either get stuck in these old patterns and stories or create new ones.

4. Build space for revision into grantmaking and reporting practices.

Will some of our projects fail in their initial inception? Definitely. Every work of significance – innovations in medical treatment, breakthroughs in impact litigation – emerged from a long trail of iterations, failed attempts and revisions.

Be a thought partner as we learn, offer specific feedback, share other models with us and build reporting documents that ask us to learn and revise rather than spin stories of unbridled success.

Consider multi-year funding that includes time and space for reflection and revision, rather than one-year project specific grants that operate on a binary model of success and failure.

The recommendations in So Grows the Nation echo what I hear from the most interesting voices in other sectors these days. At the border, attorneys are practicing “community lawyering” to represent parents and children who have been separated. Clergy stepped down from the pulpit to act as “movement chaplains” in Charlottesville, Virginia, last year.

Perhaps this is part of how we will build the world anew: By casting aside the old vocational habits that entrench us in broken systems of power and control and instead honing the skills that 21st century America requires of us.

Rev. Jasmine Beach-Ferrara is a minister in the United Church of Christ and the executive director of the Campaign for Southern Equality, a non-profit that works for full LGBTQ equality – both legal and lived – across the South. Follow @jbeachferrara and @SouthernEqual on Twitter.

Editor’s note: To read in this post in Spanish, please click here. Para leer este artículo en español, haz clic aquí.

We’ve gotten overwhelmed. Constant catastrophic news, from climate change to national politics, has given us thick skin: We don’t feel as much anymore. We can easily disconnect ourselves from the pain that our friends, neighbors and even family members are feeling and continue with our lives as if it’s nothing.  

Yet while we put our heads under the sand, things are happening right under our nose. Raids on immigrants with and without papers have escalated, and the “Zero Tolerance” policy announced by Attorney General Jeff Sessions on April 6 further criminalizes the undocumented, ensuring that those who cross the border seeking asylum face criminal charges. These decisions are having devastating effects.

Between April 19 and June 15 almost 2,000 children were separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. The government does not have enough places to house these children and has had to use tents for the expansion.  

Although the president signed an executive order on June 20 that supposedly stops family separation, the reality is quite different. In fact, the order maintains the criminalization of immigrants and asylum seekers and seeks to detain them indefinitely. There is also no plan to reunite the children who have been kidnapped by our government with their parents.

To be a child of immigrant parents or an immigrant child in the U.S. in this political time is a tragedy. Fears, insecurities and nightmares limit the dreams and aspirations they can have.

In the first week of April, ICE agents in Tennessee broke a record by arresting 97 people at work simply for being Latino: Some of those arrested were here legally or were citizens. The next day more than 500 children didn’t arrive at school.

Many communities are facing this crisis head-on. NCRP nonprofit members including the Tennessee Immigrant & Refugee Rights Coalition, United We Dream, Define American, GALEO, Southeast Immigrant Rights Network, Virginia Coalition for Immigrant Rights, Hispanic Interest Coalition of Alabama and Inner City Muslim Action Network are fighting right now so that the vision of immigrants and their communities can be realized.

But the vast majority of the philanthropic sector has not invested in this urgent work. Between 2011 and 2015, 1 percent of all money granted by the 1000 largest U.S. foundations was intended to benefit immigrants and refugees – and only half of 1 percent was granted for strategies like civic participation that build immigrants’ and refugees’ power*.

I live in the heart of an immigrant community, and the majority are Central Americans. The uncertainty is palpable on the faces of these kids. To see them waiting for the school bus, you can see their sadness, fatigue, and disinterest in life.

I know them, and when talking with them you realize that they’re aware that their parents can be deported at any time. They can’t make plans for a future with their parents because there’s no guarantee that they’ll be together the next month.

Titu, a 7-year-old neighbor of mine, told me, “My mom already told my aunt that she would be our guardian if they deport her.”

And Carlitos, 13, already knows how to read legal documents and stay vigilant about his surroundings. He’s worried that his mother drives too fast and without a seatbelt; he makes sure that the car lights work and that they follow driving laws out of fear that he’ll lose his only family in this country – his native country.

Both of these children feel disconnected from everything this great nation can offer them: They can’t imagine a life without their mothers, nor can they imagine a life outside their country.

Children also experience intimidation and verbal abuse at school, but their parents fear reporting these problems for fear of deportation. This leaves the children feeling powerless, without anyone to watch over them. Instead of being protected, many of them stay quiet and resign themselves to endure.

These families dream of a solution, a change in laws that will permit them to stay to work and to transform their lives and the lives of their children. But politics and partisanship have prevented us from coming to a common sense agreement about how to meaningfully address the ramifications of immigration.

We are ruining our future, because the generation that can help this nation achieve new goals, discover new medicines or reach another galaxy is being destroyed.

This nation owes much to immigrants; we have always been part of the history and foundation of the U.S., and we will continue to be.

The new generation will break boundaries, creeds and barriers of race and gender. We need to give them the necessary resources to get there. They have the right to dream freely about their future.

Will we wait until we lose more souls like Claudia Patricia, Gómes González and Roxana Hernández? Will we forget to dream of a better future? Of course not! We will not give up. We’ll educate ourselves, unite forces and take action.

Foundations and donors, you have a crucial part to play:

1. Listen to immigrants, respect their stories and center their vision. Remember that we are diverse, knowledgeable and already have the skills we need to win.

2. Get money out the door quickly to immigrant leaders, particularly our youth. We are fighting for our lives! We don’t have time to jump through hoops.

3. Commit for the long haul. Long-term general operating support allows us be nimble, strategic and, yes, sane. We need and deserve the capacity to think years ahead, because the roots of this tragedy will remain with us for the foreseeable future.

4. Educate yourself through attending events by groups such as Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees, which is holding a webinar about family separation at the border on Wednesday, June 27.

We are the adults. Let’s unite forces and make a future for these children. Our great-grandchildren will thank us.

Aracely Melendez is NCRP’s IT manager. Follow @NCRP on Twitter.

*Based on NCRP analysis of Foundation Center data.

Si el amor se enfría, encendamos el fuego

Ya estamos saturados. Tantas noticias de calamidades, por cuestiones climáticas o por situaciones políticas, se nos han hecho la piel gruesa: Ya no sentimos. 

Podemos desconectarnos tan fácilmente de todo el dolor que nuestros amigos, vecinos y hasta familiares están sintiendo y seguir así, como si nada. Aunque metamos la cabeza debajo de la arena, las cosas siguen pasando bajo nuestras narices. 

Las redadas de inmigrantes con o sin papeles han escalado debido a la política de “Cero Tolerancia” la cual fue anunciada por el fiscal general Jeff Sessions el 6 de abril y que criminaliza al indocumentado haciendo que las personas que crucen la frontera enfrenten cargos criminales. Esta directriz, trajo consigo efectos devastadores.

Por esta razón, entre el 19 de abril y el 22 de junio, más de 2,000 niños fueron separados de sus padres en la frontera. El gobierno no tiene suficientes lugares donde albergar a estos niños y aún han tenido que expandir los albergues de detención a través de tiendas.

Aunque el presidente firmó una orden ejecutiva el 20 de junio que supuestamente pare la separación de familias, la realidad de lo que hace es distinta. De hecho, sigue la criminalización de los inmigrantes y refugiados, y pretende retenerlos indefinitivamente. Además, no existe ningún plan para reunificar los niños ya secuestrados por el gobierno.

Ser niño de padres inmigrantes o ser un niño inmigrante en los Estados Unidos en este tiempo político es trágico. 

Miedos, inseguridades, pesadillas acorralan los sueños y aspiraciones que estos niños pudieran tener. En la primera semana de abril un operativo de ICE en Tennessee que rompió cifras históricas al arrestar a 97 personas simplemente por ser latinos, ya que algunos de los arrestados están aquí legalmente o son ciudadanos. Al siguiente día, más de 500 niños no llegaron a la escuela.

Muchas comunidades se están enfrentando a esta emergencia. De hecho, miembros de NCRP como Tennessee Immigrant & Refugee Rights Coalition, United We Dream, Define American, GALEO, Southeast Immigrant Rights Network, Virginia Coalition for Immigrant Rights, Hispanic Interest Coalition of Alabama, y Inner City Muslim Action Network luchan ahora para que los derechos humanos de los inmigrantes sean respetados.

Pero la gran mayoría del sector filantrópico no ha invertido en este trabajo urgente. Durante 2011-2015, uno por ciento del dinero concedido por las fundaciones entre las mil más grandes de los Estados Unidos,  fue dirigido  a beneficiar a los inmigrantes y refugiados – y sólo la mitad de uno por ciento del total se dedicó a estrategias como la participación cívica que aumentan el poder**.      

Yo vivo en el corazón de un área de inmigrantes, y la mayoría son centroamericanos. La incertidumbre se palpa en las caras de estos niños.  Al verlos esperar el autobús escolar, se puede ver su tristeza, cansancio y deslumbro de la vida. Yo les conozco y al conversar con ellos tu puedes darte cuenta de que están conscientes que sus padres podrían ser deportados en cualquier momento.  Ellos no pueden hacer planes de un futuro en el cual sus padres estarían presentes porque no hay garantía de estar juntos el próximo mes.

“Mi mami ya le dijo a mi tía que ella sería nuestra guardiana por si a ella la deporten.”  Eso me comentó Titu, una vecinita de 7 años que vive cerca de mi casa.

Carlitos, a los trece años, ya sabe cómo leer documentos legales y como estar siempre atento a lo que está sucediendo en su entorno. Él se preocupa que su madre maneje rápido y sin cinturón. Asegura que las luces del auto trabajen y que las leyes se cumplan al manejar, por miedo de perder a su única familia en este país, que es su país natal. Carlitos se siente desconectado de todo lo que esta gran nación puede otorgarle, no puede imaginarse una vida sin su madre, pero tampoco puede imaginarse una vida fuera de su país.

En la escuela local, los niños cuentan de abusos verbales e intimidación a sus padres, pero estos niños se sienten sin derechos y se han quedado sin alguien que vele por ellos porque a sus padres les da miedo ir a la escuela a preguntar o reclamar, por temor a ser deportados. 

En vez de ser protegidos, muchos callan y dejan pasar abusos.  Estas familias sueñan con una solución, un cambio en las leyes que permitiera quedarse a trabajar, lo cual transformaría las vidas de estas familias y de estos niños. Pero la política, y los poderes de partido han impedido a tener un acuerdo común de cómo tratar con las ramificaciones de emigración. 

Esta nación está en deuda con nosotros los inmigrantes; siempre hemos formado parte de la historia y de la fundación de los Estados Unidos y lo seguiremos siendo.

La nueva generación romperá fronteras, credos, y barreras de género y de raza. Tenemos que brindarles los recursos necesarios para llegar allí. Tienen derecho a soñar libremente con un futuro. 

Estamos destrozando nuestro futuro, porque la generación que pudiera llevar a esta nación a alcanzar nuevas metas, descubrir nuevas medicinas o llegar a otra galaxia, está siendo destruida.

¿Esperamos hasta que hayamos perdido más almas como Claudia Patricia, Gómes González y Roxana Hernández? ¿O nos olvidamos a un futuro mejor?

¡Claro que no! No nos daremos por vencidos. Uniremos las fuerzas, y tomaremos acción.

Fundaciones y donantes, ustedes tienen una parte crucial que jugar:

1. Escuchar a los inmigrantes, respetar sus historias, y centralizar sus visiones. Recuerde que somos diversos, conocedores y que ya tenemos las habilidades que necesitamos para ganar.

2. Otorgue disponibilidad de dinero rápidamente a líderes inmigrantes, especialmente a nuestros jóvenes. ¡Estamos luchando por nuestras vidas! No tenemos tiempo para pasar a través de obstáculos.

3. Comprometerse a largo plazo. El apoyo operativo general a largo plazo nos permite ser ágiles, estratégicos y sí, sensatos. Necesitamos y merecemos la capacidad de pensar en los próximos años, porque las raíces de esta tragedia permanecerán con nosotros en el futuro previsible.

4. Educarse asistiendo a eventos de grupos como Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees, como el webinar sobre la situación de las familias separadas en la frontera que se llevará a cabo el miércoles 27 de junio.

Somos los adultos. Unamos fuerzas, marquemos un futuro para estos niños. Nuestro bis-nietos lo agradecerán.

**Analísis de NCRP basado en el data de Foundation Center.

While working on my forthcoming book, Decolonizing Wealth (release date Oct. 16), I have been energized by the As the South Grows series. I write about communities that have been excluded from philanthropy like those featured in the reports.

Specifically, I write about communities of color, particularly in the South, from which I originate (Go Heels!).  

I’ve been inspired by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) and Grantmakers for Southern Progress (GSP), which have been working to drive more philanthropic resources to structural change in the South. 

According to As the South Grows, between 2011 and 2015, foundations nationwide invested only 56 cents per person in the South for every dollar per person invested nationally. This is unacceptable!

The newest report, So Grows the Nation, provides three steps grantmakers must take to change this inequality, the first of which is to reckon with shared history.

Good structural change grantmaking in the South requires an understanding of the complicated history of the region and well as the region’s role in our nation’s history – a history of colonization and slavery. A history that has excluded.

In Decolonizing Wealth, I write:

In their intoxicated rush to consolidate wealth, colonizers reduced the number of religions, languages, species, cultures, social systems, media channels, political systems, etc. On all scales, global to local, this homogenizing campaign – global bleaching, you could call it – made the world not just more bland and boring, but also less innovative and less resilient. Evolution and innovation arises from difference and variation, not from sameness. These are fundamental principles of life.

Yet there’s a silver lining. Those most excluded and exploited by today’s broken economy possess exactly the perspective and wisdom needed to fix it. Ironically, the separation paradigm that locked us out and made us Others actually cultivated our resilience strategies. To survive the trauma of exploitation, we always had to believe that the dominant worldview was only one option, even when it seemed ubiquitous and inevitable. This has made us masters of alternative possibilities.

For us to have carried inside ourselves the possibility or even hope of a different world is powerful all by itself.

As the South Grows reinforces the case to “understand the past in order to help shape the future, including especially the ways in which power has been distributed in our communities and the impact the distribution has had on people’s lives.”

Understanding and grappling with history is painful. For some, it’s like yanking off a Band-Aid. There may be moments of discomfort.

I invite you to sit with it, in the understanding that things have been just as uncomfortable, if not painful, for the excluded, for a very long time.

An essential step in the process of resisting the urge to exclude in our grantmaking is decolonizing our thinking. A good place to start is hearing out respectfully and with an open heart the painful stories of those who have been exploited and excluded.

Decolonization is about a mind shift. But first we need to recognize the pain caused by the accumulation of wealth and how it was made on the backs of Indigenous people, slaves and low-wage workers, most of them people of color – many in the South.

We need to acknowledge the trauma. We need to re-open those wounds and grieve them and apologize for them.

When considering additional investment in the South, particularly in communities of color, understand that making a few trendy grants is not enough. It is simply token diversity.

We must go beyond representation to sharing ownership of philanthropy’s power with communities in the South – and making a commitment for full, long-term inclusion of system-change work in the region in our portfolios.  

The work of GSP and NCRP, and the steps outlined in As the South Grows, give funders an opportunity to start walking our talk about diversity and equity, acknowledging that those most excluded and exploited by today’s broken economy possess exactly the perspective and wisdom needed to fix it.

We need to build new decision-making tables rather than setting one token place at the colonial tables as an afterthought.

Finally, we need to put our money where our values are and use money to heal where people are hurting and stop more hurt from happening.

This is not a silver bullet solution. There is no quick fix for the complexity of a history that has caused separation and excision. 

The healing path to full inclusion is a process with roles for everyone involved, whether they’re rich or poor, funder or recipient, victim or perpetrator.  For those of us from the South, we’ll be excluded no more.

An enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, Edgar Villanueva is the chair of the board of Native Americans in Philanthropy, a trustee of the Andrus Family Fund, and the vice president of programs and advocacy at the Schott Foundation for Public Education. Follow @VillanuevaEdgar and @DecolonizWealth on Twitter. Decolonizing Wealth is available for preorder here.

In January 2018, I had the opportunity to visit the U.S.-Mexico border near San Diego with the grantees of The J.M. Kaplan Fund’s Innovation Prize. Among the vibrant paintings on the border fence near Tijuana, there is a mural of an upside-down U.S. flag created by a group of deported veterans to symbolize the distress of their plight.

These immigrant veterans, many of whom were honorably discharged, were deported based on convictions for crimes that occurred after their service. Like many soldiers, these deported veterans deal with post-war trauma, unemployment and other economic stressors, which often lead to their encounter with the criminal justice system. 

However, unlike U.S. citizen soldiers, their convictions lead to their deportations, a result of the harsh 1996 immigration laws that expanded mandatory detention and deportation for a vast list of crimes deemed “aggravated felonies.” These laws overhauled immigration enforcement and laid the foundation for the enormous deportation machine that now exists in this country.

The system of mass deportation depends on the punitive and racial discrimination at the heart of the criminal justice system, the foundations of which were laid during the 1980s war on drugs. The policies passed during this time perpetuated racial discrimination against African-Americans leading to the mass incarceration we know today.

This steep rise in mass incarceration during the last 40 years has greatly affected the lives of racially marginalized communities, especially Black and Latinx Americans who together constitute 59 percent of the prison population. This punitive transformation of the domestic policy has permeated the immigration enforcement system, which criminalizes the immigrant population by making their mere existence in the country “illegal.” This has gone hand-in-hand with a proliferating narrative that sees all immigrants as “others” — “criminals,” “gang-members” or “terrorists” who need to be penalized and discarded.

The immigration policies introduced by the Bush administration after 9/11 were dominated by a national security lens. This gave rise to new border security and law enforcement initiatives that increased the use of state and local law enforcement for immigration. With increased enforcement, the budget and staff of the enforcement agencies also rose dramatically, almost doubling within the next decade.

Obama’s “felons, not families” policy prioritized the deportation of undocumented immigrants with criminal histories. These policies have not only criminalized whole communities of people but have pitted them against each other. Immigrant communities have defensively tried to separate themselves from the so-called “criminal” population by exceptionalizing themselves as hard working and entrepreneurial.

Of course, an entire population of millions cannot be all “exceptional” or all “criminal.” The punitive policies and rhetoric also ignore the fact that those charged with crimes may also have families and that they are most often incarcerated because of the disproportionate racial targeting by law enforcement. Black immigrant communities, for example, make up only 7 percent of the immigrant population in the U.S., but represent 20 percent of immigrants facing deportation on criminal grounds.

Since January 2017, the Trump administration has brought an unrelenting series of policy changes, which have tremendously affected the lives of immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers. The new policies have greatly affected the foreign-born residents of the country, with the banning of majority-Muslim country nationals; with biased and escalated immigration enforcement; and the termination of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and many Temporary Protected Status programs.

The relentless anti-immigrant rhetoric coming from the Trump administration has also created a climate of xenophobia, Islamophobia and fear. More than ever, immigrants and their families across the country live in fear of being detained, deported or subject to hate crimes.

In the last decade, we have seen growing pushback against mass incarceration as well as bipartisan support for criminal justice reform. Nonetheless, we have also seen the same carceral practices reflected and replicated in the immigration space. Immigrants face growing incarceration through escalating detentions and are overrepresented in prisons and profiled by law enforcement.

The private companies profiting from mass incarceration within the criminal justice system are also profiting from detention of immigrants, and have received the boon of a congressionally mandated bed quota of 34,000 immigration detention beds on a daily basis.

In these historic and challenging times, there is a tremendous need to center our analysis of these issues within the lens of “mass criminalization” of communities of color. We have a unique opportunity to connect immigrants to growing activism around decarceration, divestment and restorative justice that challenges discriminatory policing, racial profiling and prison privatization.

Immigrant justice advocates and those leading the struggles against mass incarceration are already leading collaborations. We, as funders, also need to challenge ourselves to come out of our siloed areas and enhance our understanding of how these systems connect and affect all impacted communities. 

J.M. Kaplan Fund’s Social Justice program focuses on supporting immigrant-serving organizations and those working to transform the criminal justice system. The fund also supports organizations that serve individuals impacted by both criminal justice and the immigration enforcement systems.

It is now time to unite the goals, the learnings and the struggles that are led by and focused on those who are directly affected by the deep tentacles of systems addicted to criminalization and incarceration.

Prachi Patankar joined the J.M.Kaplan Fund in 2017 as the program director for social justice. She plays an instrumental role in shaping the foundation’s grant making strategies for criminal justice reform and immigrant rights work, locally and nationally. Follow @PatankarPrachi and @TheJMKaplanFund on Twitter.

Photo by Jobs For Felons Hub. Used under Creative Commons license.

In a May 7 op-ed in USA Today, Dr. Richard Besser, president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), publicly acknowledged changes to the foundation’s annual Sports Award. This annual competitive award is intended to recognize “sports teams, athletes and community-based organizations that use sports to catalyze and sustain changes to make communities healthier places to live, learn, work and play.”

Besser said the foundation would no longer consider award applications from sports teams that denigrate American Indian people. He humbly noted that the foundation – whose mission targets health equity – never considered “the fact that the team names, mascots and misappropriation and mocking of sacred symbols like headdresses do real damage to the health of people across the country.”

Among numerous efforts, First Nations Development Institute and various partners are involved in a “Supporting Community Intellectuals in Native Communities” project. Included in the photo are Shelly Fryant, Rene Dubay and Michael Munson of Salish Kootenai College, Carnell Chosa and Regis Pecos of the Leadership Institute at Santa Fe Indian School, and Darren Kipp of The Piegan Institute. From First Nations are Michael Roberts, Raymond Foxworth, Catherine Bryan and Marsha Whiting. Photo by First Nations Development Institute.

Among numerous efforts, First Nations Development Institute and various partners are involved in a “Supporting Community Intellectuals in Native Communities” project. Included in the photo are Shelly Fryant, Rene Dubay and Michael Munson of Salish Kootenai College, Carnell Chosa and Regis Pecos of the Leadership Institute at Santa Fe Indian School, and Darren Kipp of The Piegan Institute. From First Nations are Michael Roberts, Raymond Foxworth, Catherine Bryan and Marsha Whiting. Photo by First Nations Development Institute.

This remarkable admission and the change in policy serve as a clear example of how Native American communities and their allies can influence philanthropy to change practices that may (unknowingly) harm Native people and communities. Besser and RWJF should be applauded for their willingness to listen to Native communities and act on their feedback and concerns to make change. Notwithstanding, we need to understand that this recent admission, while laudable, illustrates a symptom of a larger illness in philanthropy: patchy bids and willful reluctance to learn more about Native communities, their issues and community-led solutions.

What’s in a Name?

Besser’s op-ed came after months of organizing by Native American organizations and tribes, including the National Congress of American Indians, Center for Native American Youth, First Nations Development Institute, the Oneida Nation of New York, and with the support of other partners like Dr. Howard Stevenson, director of RWJF’s Forward Promise National Program Office at the University of Pennsylvania, Kathy Ko Chin, president and chief executive officer of the Asian & Pacific Islander American Health Forum, and many others.

These groups authored letters and attended learning sessions that helped compel RWJF to stop allowing sports teams that use racist stereotypes to apply for RWJF’s prestigious award.

Research has documented that mascots depicting Native Americans are harmful to Native people, especially children. Imagine being largely invisible in all forms of media and popular culture except for those instances in which you are depicted in stereotypical, comical or historical imagery. This is the reality for Native American children.

Research has found that this leads to all sorts of negative outcomes, including damaged self-esteem and identity, and overall diminished well-being. This growing body of research has also documented that these limited and racist representations of Native people curtail self-understanding and how Native youth see themselves fitting into contemporary society.

Similarly, scholars have found that the use of Native American mascots exacerbates cross-community conflict, creates limited understanding of Native people by the larger society and also creates hostile spaces of learning for Native children. Even professional associations like the American Psychological Association have publicly objected to the use of Native mascots for the reasons cited above (and they did this in 2005). 

Proponents of Native American mascots have cited public opinion polls showing support for their continued use, including purported surveys of Native Americans themselves. But these surveys were created in a feeble attempt to justify the continued use of these racist images, and to lamely try to refute the scientific research that demonstrates the detrimental effects these mascots have on Native children.

Ultimately, however, these efforts in no way contradict or negate the scholarly research noted above.

Understanding a Larger Illness

A recent nationally-representative survey launched under the Reclaiming Native Truth project, which is co-led by First Nations Development Institute and Echo Hawk Consulting, found that most Americans rank themselves high on their own individual familiarity of Native American history and culture, yet a majority of Americans cannot correctly answer basic true-or-false questions about Native American people.

Similarly, while most Americans professed generalized support that more should be done to help Native Americans, when it came to talking about specific kinds of support, including banning the use of Native American mascots, support significantly declined. In fact, only 39 percent of Americans said they would support such a ban.

Moreover, our survey data revealed that a majority of Americans still see Native people in stereotypical ways, including seeing them as more spiritual and closer to nature, while also holding other negative stereotypes. This includes a majority thinking that Native people get access to government benefits such as free education, or other “Indian Money” that is not available to other U.S. citizens. Alarmingly, more than half of Americans hold these opinions. These are, of course, just not true.

But it is not just the broader public that has limited (or completely wrong) knowledge about Native people and communities. In an ongoing research project funded by the Fund for Shared Insight, First Nations is working to understand how philanthropy perceives Native people and communities.

Data collected thus far (which will be detailed in a forthcoming report) highlight that philanthropy does not have much knowledge of or connections to Native people or communities. Moreover, the data highlight that many of the stereotypes the general public hold about Native people are also held by individuals who work in philanthropy.

This should not be terribly surprising given that the inputs of knowledge about Native Americans at all levels (including media, school systems, etc.) fail Native American people and communities.

Though the lack of knowledge and connection to Native people is not surprising, what has surprised us in both of these projects is that individuals are fairly open in discussing their racist, discriminatory and/or uninformed opinions of Native people (things that would not generally be tolerated when it comes to other marginalized groups).

This suggests that people are so far removed from understanding Native people, and Native people are so invisible (or irrelevant) in the lives of most Americans, we have generally become desensitized to understanding Native people and communities in contemporary society.

Moving Forward

In Besser’s op-ed, he pondered how a philanthropic institution that is focused on health equity could get something so wrong. “It’s worth asking ourselves what else we as a society are missing,” he noted.

This, indeed, is a fundamental question we must ask ourselves. And a corollary to this is the following: How is it that in 2018, we are still complacent in subjecting Native people to deliberate mistruths and falsehoods and rendering them invisible in American society, including in philanthropy? How is it that now, when information is more readily available than at any other time in history, we continue to be content in our ignorance of Native people and communities?

While we are only beginning to unpack the mistruths and falsehoods that individuals have about Native people, invisibility of Native Americans in philanthropy is rampant. Not only is it reflected in the declining levels of annual investment going to Native communities, but it shows in the lack of representation of Native people in the philanthropic sector and the dismissal of Native people and communities in philanthropic reports often relegating them to an asterisk that often notes “not enough data” (to matter).

How do we begin to change? Naturally, this is the quintessential question and a much larger topic than this article can address. Widely-discussed practices by diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) authors and scholars – including increasing diversity among staff and boards, being willing and open to listen and learn from the communities served by foundations, and being deliberate about including DEI frameworks in organizational mission and giving policies – all serve as a starting point for change. But these practices alone will not move us beyond willful ignorance or ambivalence when it comes to Native people.

Nevertheless, this RWJF incident does provide a bright spot highlighting the power of how communities can organize across communities of color to push for change. As NCRP and others have documented, developing tools and methods to hold philanthropy accountable has been difficult.

But this single instance demonstrates that organizing and mobilizing multiple communities can be a mechanism to leverage relationships to push for change. Would RWJF have changed its practice if only Indian Country mobilized around this issue? We do not know, but we do know that leveraging other communities to support Native children did provide a broader base to effect change.  

It is my hope that Besser’s op-ed serves as a call to action to philanthropy and other sectors of society to learn more about Native people and communities. First Nations has released recommended reading lists, other Native organizations have released fact sheets, and these are all at the tip of our Googling fingertips.

Moreover, there are more Native American nonprofits than at any other point in history, and these organizations can serve as resources of knowledge if people are willing to ask, listen and learn. 

Raymond Foxworth serves as vice president of grantmaking, development and communications at First Nations Development Institute, a Native American-controlled national intermediary that supports Native American communities in reclaiming direct control of their assets. He is a citizen of the Navajo Nation and his family is from Tuba City, Arizona.

Image by Fibonacci Blue. Used under Creative Commons license.

Editor’s note: This post is part of an ongoing series of posts featuring NCRP nonprofit members.

Open Door Legal logoA risk-taking funder is a change-making funder. Those who help fledgling, but inventive, nonprofits get off the ground and into the air can markedly increase their social impact. Legal services in particular can be a strategic force multiplier for existing grantmaking programs.

The upstart Open Door Legal is one such example. Founded five years ago, this southeast San Francisco organization has seen its annual budget increase from $33,000 to $1.2 million thanks to its innovative, results-oriented work on legal representation.

What makes them so remarkable? Open Door Legal is pioneering universal access to civil representation, whereby every person who needs a lawyer can have one – regardless of ability to pay. Why? Because they’re out to show that when everyone has access to the law, poverty can be dramatically reduced.

That’s a big claim. But Open Door Legal has the receipts. The organization has won $1.9 million in direct financial returns via court awards, canceled debt and settlements – 78 percent of which benefitted individuals earning less than $15,000 per year. More than 140 evictions have been prevented, clients have been transferred to new housing and barriers to housing have been removed. All the while, Open Door Legal has lost only 2.5 percent of its cases.

There are hundreds of other heroic organizations working on legal aid across the United States. Three things distinguish Open Door Legal from the rest.

  • Universal access – They take on any kind of case: eviction, divorce, immigration or anything else, regardless of an individual’s ability to pay. In its short history, Open Door Legal has handled over 1,250 cases spread across 35 different areas of law.
  • Comprehensive services – An integrated intake process lets clients simultaneously get legal representation and access to social services through data sharing and joint case management (with a client’s permission).
  • Built to scale – A custom-built technology platform on Salesforce meticulously tracks all activities within the organization, allows for easy managing and onboarding of volunteers, and opens up a wealth of analytics to unearth ways to improve its work. This has been so successful, Salesforce invited Open Door Legal to present at its annual conference.

All told, according to their analysis, for every one dollar invested in Open Door Legal, the organization generates $21 in social returns.

There is a huge need for the services Open Door Legal provides. Nationally, 63 million Americans qualify for free civil legal assistance through federal government programs or grantees, but most Americans don’t perceive things like their wrongful eviction, domestic violence or severe debt as something a lawyer could help with, though study after study shows what a difference legal representation can make. As such, it’s distressing to see that more than half of those who do seek civil aid are turned away due to a lack of resources.  

There are no public defenders for civil cases, so the United States relies almost exclusively on private attorneys to deliver justice. In Open Door Legal’s native California, the state spends only .01 percent of gross domestic product on legal aid.

Like nearly everything else in the private sector, the presence or absence of big payouts drives decision-making. In civil cases, damages are usually calculated based on lost income potential or value of property that’s destroyed. In practice, this means the poorer the client, the better their case has to be for someone to help them; for the wealthy, the quality of their case isn’t an issue as long as the check clears.

It is imperative that an Open Door Legal is available for every community. The organization wants to open five centers around San Francisco within the next three years to increase universal access to civil aid.

Funders interested in wealth inequality, immigration, women and children, or health should give Open Door Legal a strong look. Its impact is sizeable, measurable and inspirational. With innovative information technology and a broad range of service, the path to its expansion is relatively clear.

Legal services are not commonly considered a solution for these issue areas, and for some of Open Door Legal’s backers, the organization is the only one of its kind in their portfolios. Yet these grantmakers realize, or are coming to realize, how civil legal aid can improve outcomes and more efficiently deliver results.

There are new centers to build and people to help. Funders should consider providing general operating support for Open Door Legal, and clear out any internal roadblocks preventing legal services funding. In the fight for justice, philanthropy would be hard pressed to find a better ally.

Troy Price is NCRP’s membership and fundraising intern. Follow @NCRP on Twitter.