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    "Hachi"Kirsten West Savali
    2/06/17 2:42pm

    Speaking my language!

    For those of us who work in the non-profit sector, this is all too true. You cannot achieve social justice without involving the very community that you are trying to help. Stakeholders need to be inclusive of the populations served. If not, the divide continues to exist and progress is not achieved.

    I see this all the time when it comes to youth-serving organizations. Inevitably, an established NPO will receive funding to go into a community of color and attempt to do some Kumbaya type shit. Of course, the results are disastrous (hey remember that Insecure episode when staff at We Got Y’All try to plan a trip for the youth? And Issa’s like just take them to the beach? well, it’s like that). And they are disastrous because you have outsiders coming in and that can be seen as threatening to communities of color. Meanwhile, you’ve got a small, community-based church (for example) that applied but was denied because they weren’t established enough or perhaps they don’t have a technical grant writer because they’re too small to afford one. That’s a lost opportunity. I see it all the time.

    I also heavily side-eye any NPO that preaches social justice but fails the cultural competency test. If your staff roster resembles We Got Y’all, you’ve got some serious diversity issues to address. If you’re working to end oppression, in all of its forms, then start by employing the oppressed. A degree in Non-profit Administration gets you jack shit in the real world when you’re trying to help a community that has been destroyed by violence, poverty and drugs. There are qualified professionals of color out there (hello, I am one of them!) but are frequently passed over for....well you know why.

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      Ugh."Hachi"
      2/06/17 2:45pm

      I had my issues with them, office-wise (story for another day), but my city’s Boys & Girls Clubs are awesome in these regards. From volunteer staff all the way up to the E-Suite, diversity and perspectives are embraced.

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      "Hachi"Ugh.
      2/06/17 2:58pm

      You know I’m taking notes of all the stories you owe me.

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    Ugh.Kirsten West Savali
    2/06/17 2:30pm

    What makes an organization serious about social justice? Show me the board members, executive staff and the grant recipients. They better look like the public school students they allegedly serve.

    This is the battle with nonprofits in general. If you want the big money, you’re looking to have the big money on your board, ideally so they’ll rope in their moneyed friends. In a given geographic area, that money is going to be concentrated in white hands. That’s the conventional model.

    Helping communities organize around their own goals is.

    This, ideally, is where I’d like to see the conventional model go. I’d rather fund something like, say, Mattapan Main Streets. They’re trying to improve upon and insulate Mattapan against violence, economic stagnation, and gentrification, and they’re made up of people who are actually IN the community.

    Bitch of it is that the nonprofit sector tends to effect change with glacial speed, and there’s a big tendency to go the “safe” route, to the detriment of efficiency.

    There’s also the issue of public perception of nonprofits, which is a digression that makes me want to throw a truck through the wall.
     

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    scalfinKirsten West Savali
    2/06/17 2:37pm

    So, basically, all interventions should include basic stakeholder analysis in logistical planning and consider following a community-based participatory intervention paradigm if what I like to call “folk beliefs” (which are incredibly common in education because people either think that they way they were taught as children is the only good way to teach or are members of some non-validated new-age cult like Montessori and in either case are quick to blame all deficits on the first thing they see even if there’s no apparent connection like an Englishman blaming Islam and cucumbers for a Turk contracting cholera) aren’t so entrenched as to overwhelm progress.

    These are incredibly basic in public health and related (by which I mean “all disciplines that use the phrase ‘intervention’”) circles, which makes me think that the big problem is that philanthropists have zero idea that there’s an entire intellectual community for this stuff. People funding education change very obviously think that the only people who know anything about the subject are teachers, the field’s equivalent to surgeons, and ignore the absolutely huge education research community. I suppose it’s somewhat similar to how there’s a Surgeon General rather than a Public Health Marshal/DrPH-in-Chief.

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    Gross1Kirsten West Savali
    2/06/17 6:53pm

    This is a great essay. I just want to add that this problem is not limited to the social justice sphere. Many many philanthropies treat their grants as though they are simply fees for service. Sure we’ll give you a $250K grant, but you have to do this work for this population and you have to reach this result, even if the work isn’t exactly in your wheelhouse and the population isn’t one you have a good relationship with yet and the result is unlikely to happen. I’m a fundraiser at a big arts organization and we are struggling through one of these right now. The foundation made no bones about the fact that it is only interested in one narrow angle of the problem our organization addresses, and its an angle we are not best positioned to address, and yet we took the money anyway. It’s really, really hard not to just take the money.

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    Uncle MaybeKirsten West Savali
    2/06/17 4:27pm

    Check out the Philadelphia African American Leadership Forum’s report:

    HOW AFRICAN-AMERICAN-LED ORGANIZATIONS DIFFER
    FROM WHITE-LED ORGANIZATIONS

    http://phillyaalf.org/

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    Ugh.Kirsten West Savali
    2/06/17 2:47pm

    Also, I think there’s a great point here regarding diversity in general. No, it isn’t so that you can have a “token” whatever on the board (alright, sometimes it is, but work with me here), it’s so you can actually have a “boots on the ground” perspective as regards constituencies that aren’t the dominant one.

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