At the beginning of December, Anne Price resigned as president of a California racial-justice nonprofit. She had become increasingly frustrated by her low pay and was deeply upset by what she says were instances of racist behavior by board members. She didn’t know what to expect when she spoke out publicly about her treatment.
“I had a real moment of just complete nervousness,” Price says. “It does take courage. It’s not easy, but nothing is going to come easily if you want to really put an issue like this on the table.”
The program staff at the Insight Center for Community and Economic Development resigned in solidarity with Price, and things have worked out far better than any of them could have expected. Today Price and Jhumpa Bhattacharya, former vice president of programs at the Insight Center, are unveiling the new organization they have started: the Maven Collaborative. The new nonprofit will build on their Insight Center work to reduce the racial wealth gap by focusing on Black women. The new group has raised $2 million, a figure that includes grants that have been approved at the staff level and are awaiting approval from foundation boards. That’s enough money to hire all of their former Insight Center colleagues — six staff members and two fellows.
“It’s really great to be able to be in an organization that is going to allow Anne and myself to just do our dream work,” Bhattacharya says. “It’s a privilege. It’s not an opportunity that everyone gets. I feel very grateful.”
The Insight Center staff left in December over concerns that the board did not support the staff’s work and because they so valued Price’s leadership. But Price never felt valued by the board. She had been paid far less than her predecessor since her hiring in 2017, despite stabilizing the group’s finances and winning new support, including a multimillion grant from Pivotal Ventures, founded by Melinda French Gates. Requests for raises were largely ignored by the board. Price, who is Black, says the board chair, Beatriz Stotzer, who is a Latina, asked her to “take that Black stuff off the website” and told other staff the website looked too Black. The relationship became so toxic that Price asked for a mediator. Price said that Stotzer, who had been the board chair for a decade, was working against her efforts to address the economic inequities faced by Black women.
“It was really clear the role that outsized power can play and how it can be so detrimental to an organization,” Price says. “I think that Insight is severely damaged by this. It was completely unnecessary.”
Price says that after she tendered her resignation, the board did not contact her about the transition to an interim director until days before she was set to leave. It locked her out of her computer. The program employees who resigned were similarly locked out of their computers, and it took several days for the Insight Center to send letters to the staff members letting them know that they had been placed on administrative leave and would be dismissed at the end of December, Bhattacharya says. The employees had offered to work on a contract basis to complete grant-funded work. The center declined to give them contracts.
“When I was out of a job, it was very stressful,” Bhattacharya says.
In an email to the Chronicle, the Insight Center’s interim president, Michael Browning, wrote that the organization does not comment on personnel matters and it plans to continue its work on racial justice and gender equity. Board chair Stotzer referred the Chronicle to Browning’s statement.
‘A Vote of Confidence’
In January, Price and Bhattacharya began to discuss what they were going to do next. They wanted to continue what they had been doing at the Insight Center — working to improve the economic well-being of Black women as a way to improve economic equity for all. They plan to achieve that through research, advocacy, and challenging racist and sexist narratives about economic disparities. When Price and Bhattacharya approached grant makers who had heard about the problems at Insight Center, they were overwhelmed by the concern and interest.
“I heard nothing but really positive things from funders, people who felt that [speaking out] was the right thing to do,” Price says. “I was so deeply humbled by the support I received and the commitment that I receive from funders.”
The first to provide funding for Maven was Michael McAfee, CEO of PolicyLink, a research and advocacy group focused on economic equity. He and Price have known each other for much of their professional careers, and McAfee was appalled at how she was treated at Insight Center.
“You don’t treat Black women this way. You don’t treat any executive this way. It’s just absolutely unacceptable,” he says. He was also angry that Price faced opposition to her efforts to address the problems of Black women at Insight Center. He says that he didn’t need to know the details of Price and Bhattacharya’s next venture, that he was happy to support whatever they were planning. PolicyLink made a $200,000 grant to the group.
“The thing that I was signaling, along with my colleagues at PolicyLink, is that this is a leader who has proven her work,” he says. “She’s proven her intellectual capability in the field, and she deserves to continue that work with her colleagues.”
That early support was key to attracting grants from other foundations, Bhattacharya says, because it demonstrated that grant makers valued their past work and reputations.
The San Francisco Foundation is in the process of making a multiyear grant to Maven. Price and her colleagues conducted a training session at the foundation to talk about the importance of making Blackness a central consideration in the foundation’s work in 2021, and the foundation uses Price’s Centering Blackness framework in its own work, says Judith Bell, the foundation’s chief impact officer.
“We have been positively impacted as an institution as a result of their work,” Bell says. “We have relied on them as thought partners along the way as we’ve been seeking to move towards our North Star of racial equity and economic inclusion.”
Price and Bhattacharya have a powerful partnership that has been made only deeper by their struggles at the Insight Center, Bell says. That is part of the reason the foundation is considering supporting them. “Anne bringing her brilliance is attractive,” Bell says. “Anne and Jhumpa coming together and thinking about how they will continue to push against racial and gender inequality and how they will think about it in the context of our economy is spot on in terms of our racial-equity and economic-inclusion agenda.”
The pair knew that funding wasn’t the only thing they would need. Because the new organization couldn’t become certified as a nonprofit in just a few short months, they would need a fiscal sponsor. Dorian Warren, president of Community Change, which incubates small nonprofits by helping them with back-office tasks like legal compliance and payroll, has known Price for years and has always been impressed with her leadership. He says the fact that the whole program staff left Insight Center with Price was another sign of her strength as a leader.
He was eager to help them start their group, a decision made much easier because they already had some funding lined up. “It’s a huge validation, a vote of confidence,” he says.
Striking Out on Their Own
At the Maven Collaborative, Price and Bhattacharya will be able to chart their own course — a rare opportunity in the nonprofit world.
Even though Price was the leader of the Insight Center, she says she always had to fight a reluctant board to pursue her goals. That’s not unusual for leaders of color at established groups, says PolicyLink’s McAfee. Boards are often reluctant to let leaders address the root causes of racism and inequity because those leaders present such a challenge to the status quo.
Women leaders of color are also facing high levels of burnout, says Gabrielle Wyatt, founder of the Highland Project, which named Price a Highland Leader in November, one of 15 Black women leaders selected for the honor and the $100,000 prize. She says many factors contribute to that, including the challenges of fundraising as a person of color, the conflicts that can result from replacing a founder or working with a hostile board, or navigating the toxicity of being a Black woman in society.
“We know that Black women exist at the margins in the very systems that we’re seeking to reform,” she says.
Wyatt says it’s not uncommon to see women leaders of color striking out on their own. She expects that Price’s tenacity in pursuing her vision will serve her well.
When leaders like Price and Bhattacharya start their own groups, they are in a better position to do the work as they see fit, says McAfee of PolicyLink.
“Black leaders have to have the freedom to think and do. That’s why we gave her the unrestricted investment,” he says. “We have to be able to think and do the same way white leaders are able to. Without that, you don’t get the best of us in the field.”
Employees at Maven will have the freedom and flexibility to experiment at a time when the interest in racial and gender equity is high, says Warren of Community Change. How well the group is received will also be a test for philanthropy. He says white people get money to start nonprofits all the time. Research shows that organizations run by leaders of color get far less funding than those run by white people, and groups run by Black women receive the least.
Warren wonders how much grant makers will support a vision like Price and Bhattacharya’s. “A lot of us are going to be watching to see who supports them and who doesn’t,” he says. “Where is philanthropy’s commitment in 2023, given what we’ve just lived through the last three years?”
Price and Bhattacharya are grateful for the support they have received and hopeful about the work ahead of them. “Part of it is just not being fearful that one thing that I say or do is going to get me fired,” Price says. “And part of it is having the freedom to explore those ideas and utilize this new entity as a lab for ideas and solutions to the problems that we see.”
