A few weeks ago, during our 67th consecutive family dinner since the quarantine started, my 16-year-old daughter announced to the family that we needed to start cursing more. “I usually curse when I am with my friends,” she said. “But since I never see my friends anymore, we are going to have to start cursing more with each other.”
I embraced this demand, since I love to curse, and her comment was the most literal example of how our family relationships have shifted and loosened during the past four months. We have become so many different things to each other: barber, teacher, chef, cleaner, roommate, enemy, and friend, and we have let go of our traditional family hierarchy in which my husband and I set the rules, know the answers, and run the joint.
What was the point of those rules in the first place? Does it matter how gross my son’s bedroom is if it doesn’t bother him? Why do we need to sleep at night and work during the day? Do we all need to agree before one of us visits with a friend? Do we go all into the crowds at protests, or none of us? All our decisions affect each other, but none of them is clear cut. Some of this shift in roles would likely have happened as the kids got older anyway, but it has happened rapidly for us — with some painful bumps along the way, and also some fun. While I have less control over how things go, I am also doing less nagging than I have done in the last 18 years.
Something similar has happened at work — within our staff of six, we have let down some walls and are literally seeing into each other’s homes and private lives during staff meetings. With this melding of home and work, and laughing and crying together on Zoom, we are getting to know each other as fuller humans than ever before.
Grant Making in the Coronavirus Era
A series of dispatches on grant making in the coronavirus era by Lisa Pilar Cowan, vice president of the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation.
At the same time, we are individually and collectively wrestling with the issues of equity and racism and antiracism in an even more visceral way than usual. We are looking at power and decision making both internally and externally. When none of us has done this before, and no one knows the answers, all of us feel more welcome to generate ideas, start new conversations, and enter discussions that were less likely to happen when we were sitting at our separate desks adhering to our “regular” roles and job descriptions.
What Would It Take?
Organizational hierarchy isn’t helpful for deciding what feels safe, how we treat each other, or how we create and eliminate our boundaries.
I’m continuing to think about what aspects of this dynamic we want to keep and what we want to let go of as we move into the next phases. A friend who works at a foundation in California recently asked, “What would it take for us to really, really, really be partners with our grantees?” Her question has stayed with me.
In this fraught, complicated, and unique moment, we have a chance to ponder this. What would it take for our grantees to be able to trust their foundation partners deeply, for foundations to draw on the wisdom and vision of their grantee partners, and for all of us to engage as full humans who are learning together while we work to a common goal?
We have a lot of work to do to overcome the power dynamics that have been built into our roles — and part of that work is to let people who are doing the work help to structure our organizations.
Imagine if grantee partners were part of the hiring processes at foundations. Instead of “grant-making experience,” what if program officers were required to have substantial staff or board experience at nonprofits that carry out the work we support? Or had to have worked as a fundraiser? Could we recruit people to our boards who have real-world experience living through problems we’re trying to solve? What if foundation staff all had to be board members at our grantee organizations instead of being prohibited from doing so? Instead of asking grantees to tell us how they would sustain their funding after our grant support ends, what if they challenged us to say how we would sustain our commitment to the issue after we finished the grant cycle?
I hope that soon my kids will be back to cursing with their friends, and I with mine. I don’t want to continue cutting their hair any more than they want me to do so.
But I do want to hold on to this way that we have come to see and understand each other as more than “mom” or “daughter” but instead as unique, complicated individuals capable of challenging, caring for, and delighting each other.
While we are busy breaking rules in other parts of our lives, it feels like the right time to be open to experimenting with, testing, and refining. Maybe we will emerge from this time as a more equitable, effective, and joyful group of individuals and institutions.
