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As nonprofit leaders grapple with increasingly dire threats to their funding and missions, it’s more important than ever to understand what it takes to lead resilient organizations and run winning advocacy campaigns.
For a look at what ingredients are most important, we hear from Vanessa Priya Daniel, who interviewed 45 social-justice leaders for her new book, Unrig the Game: What Women of Color Can Teach Everyone About Winning.
Daniel combines her extensive research for the book with her own experiences as an organizer and as a funder. She founded the Groundswell Fund, a 501(c)(3), and Groundswell Action Fund, a 501(c)(4), which together have distributed more than $100 million to over 200 organizations led by women of color and transgender people.
In a conversation with Stacy Palmer, CEO of the Chronicle, Daniel says her interviews led her to see that the leaders most likely to bring about real change possess three traits she calls superpowers.
The three superpowers of successful leaders, says Daniel, are the ability to:
Advance bold ideas and policy. Incremental solutions don’t add up to enough to solve the tremendous challenges of today and tomorrow. She says it’s better to start off with an audacious goal: Even if you have to take a few steps backward along the way, you’ll still achieve a major victory.
Prioritize generosity. Daniel says an “ethos of rising by lifting others” is what makes the women she interviewed successful.
Approach challenges with a 360 degree vision. Make sure that you’re thinking about all the overlapping challenges that have forged today’s social problems because there’s never just one cause of anything that’s complex and worth solving. What’s more, taking the broad view allows leaders to build bigger coalitions than they could with a narrow agenda.
Daniel also offers advice about what funders can do to ensure leaders, especially women leaders of color, have the resources they need to make a difference, why she hopes more funders will finance grassroots organizations, and how to defuse the tensions that can erupt when staff members sense racial or gender bias.
And she issues a call to action to funders as nonprofits face a growing number of policy threats. “We are a field that is often plagued by timidity, and this sense of risk aversion is challenging for us even on a good day,” she says. The question funders should ask always, she says, is “What is the risk of not doing it?”
To read more about Daniel, see these Chronicle articles:
To see more about ways nonprofits and philanthropy can support female leaders of color, see these Chronicle articles:
And for more leadership insights, turn to our special report, Leadership at the Crossroads.
Nonprofits Now: Leading Today is produced by Emily Haynes and Reasonable Volume, with editorial direction from Margie Fleming Glennon and support from Kyle Johnson.
