Rise Colorado is at the leading edge of a new movement of social-impact organizations. Founded by Veronica Palmer, a Teach for America alumna, RISE educates and mobilizes parents to help make the education system in Colorado’s most diverse county more equitable.
In a recent example of the group’s success, a coalition of RISE parents and other advocates pushed the Aurora School District to expand language interpretation and translation services so non-English-speaking families and their children could participate fully in education and policy making.
As Chyrise Harris, a Colorado-based director at Education Post, put it: “This is what’s possible when families step into their own power and demand an education system that works for them. And no one should be surprised by their ability to transform.”
We believe that efforts like those of RISE offer one of the most promising approaches to solving social problems. But there’s been a critical underinvestment in such efforts because top-down problem solving remains the norm in so much of philanthropy. Changing this mind-set and the practices that flow from it will demand focused effort by grant makers and nonprofit leaders to create a new norm in which we use our money, access, and power to support grassroots leaders bent on tackling the particular problems they face.
Fighting Systemic Bias
Our decades of collective experience working with social entrepreneurs and other purpose-driven leaders have taught us that to ensure significant, sustained progress, people with experience in and connections to the communities we aim to serve must play a central role in designing, leading, and sharing accountability for the programs we support. And rather than looking at these communities as deficient and in need of fixing, we need to recognize and value the people in them as critical assets in driving social change.
One glaring example of why a new mind-set and approach are sorely needed comes from data that reflect systemic bias and imbalances in the nonprofit world. Research has shown that only 10 percent of the executive leaders of nonprofit organizations and 7 percent of foundation leaders are African-American or Latino. This situation is greatly disproportionate to the combined 30 percent population of these groups in the United States, groups who also face higher levels of poverty and fewer opportunities than other Americans.
These stark figures make it clear that we are missing the insight, talents, and contributions of a critical mass of people in our charitable work, particularly people who directly experience the problems we aim to tackle and those developing the home-grown innovations that can advance the greater good. Formal and informal barriers keep these talents beyond the view of mainstream philanthropy.
Our exploration into this issue has us asking questions that go beyond philanthropy’s traditional starting point of “How can the program I’m operating or funding achieve impact?”
Now we’re adding a different set of questions: How can we lift up and activate the power of people closest to the problems we are trying to solve to achieve the highest and most sustainable impact? What are we doing to recognize, support, and take advantage of the expertise, skill, and talent of these individuals and networks? In what ways might we be imposing disproportionate burdens of proof of “value,” “readiness,” and “rigor” on leaders and others that have rarely received sufficient attention from philanthropy or government?
Building Blocks of a New Approach
Focusing on these questions led us to develop four principles for action that guide our work, from finding and selecting grantees to collaborating with them and providing essential support such as communication and advocacy tools.
Value unfamiliar excellence.
Whether you’re an investor, a longtime grant maker, or some other leader, it’s easy to fall into the trap of believing you know exactly what is needed based on experience or available data. Looking over thousands of project proposals and reading innumerable studies contributes to a sense that you can pinpoint the talent needle in the haystack.
But invariably, bias plays a central role, and we’re most comfortable with what’s familiar, confirmed, and validated by elite centers of power. We have learned that it is possible — easy, in fact — to be data-driven yet ignorant of the needs, experiences, and expertise of diverse people. We default to grant-making systems that equate familiarity with quality. We presume that familiar sets of data and other tools protect us from risk. That leaves an enormous amount of talent and promise outside of our collective lines of sight.
We have to do the work necessary to engage new partners, advisers, and networks that can broaden our view. At New Profit, we’ve methodically engaged with and learned from a wide range of new networks over the last few years, and have invested in some of these organizations, including RISE Colorado, Education Leaders of Color, the Unlocked Futures effort to cultivate leadership among people leaving prison, Camelback Ventures’s work to support social entrepreneurs from diverse backgrounds, and others.
Find ways to connect with constituents directly or indirectly.
When making decisions about what to fund or whom to collaborate with, ask key questions upfront. First, ask how organizations, projects, or partners engage with and get feedback about their work from constituents and people they seek to help. There are a few things to be alert to in the answers. It’s important to learn not just how programs provide support but also how the organizations themselves give constituents a voice and a stake in the future. You should speak directly with a program leader or an on-the-ground representative to find out how the organization views and approaches the people whose problems it is trying to help solve. The answers and information will vary, but you should come away with a sense of how authentic, consistent, and empowering these groups’ efforts are to the people being served.
In time, donors and nonprofits should expand this kind of querying even further to gain insight into the value of specific programs through direct engagement with the beneficiaries.
Don’t just share the agenda and the dialogue; share power.
It’s one thing to seek the involvement of people outside your organization by inviting them to events or to join strategic discussions, for example. But it’s another thing entirely to make people partners in driving your organization or your cause forward. There are many ways to make this a central part of your strategy, as RISE Colorado has done.
The most important first step is to form relationships with people, organizations, and networks outside your traditional circle of contacts. This entails a balancing act of sharing ideas while building trust and navigating disagreement. People familiar with “top-down” grant-making strategies will look for signs that donors are genuinely seeking a partnership. Expecting people of more diverse identities to appreciate an invitation to the table doesn’t promote that idea of partnership, nor does being intolerant of their doubts or pushing back against their frustrations.
Think about long-term collaboration, not just checking the box upfront.
It’s important to build in mechanisms for long-term engagement with the people you want to support to lead change — and their constituents. Family Independence Initiative’s adoption of this idea has been a core element of the group’s success. Like many consumer technology companies, FII provides technology platforms to low-income families and uses predictive technology to invest in programs that will help them improve their lives. The families drive the data, the conversation, and the decision-making process, while FII serves as a backbone or force multiplier.
We authors come at this issue with different backgrounds: an Ethiopian immigrant who has become a U.S. citizen, a civic leader, and an adviser to New Profit and other grassroots civic entrepreneurs; an African-American social entrepreneur, educator, artist, and longtime nonprofit executive with deep experience building and advising community-based entrepreneurs and organizations in the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean; and a white former financial-services executive with Southern roots who is now an active philanthropist.
We all feel privileged to have a chance to support and collaborate with amazing boundary-breaking social entrepreneurs. What we’ve come to understand from this is that a commitment to working with people affected by big problems expands opportunities for achieving impact to a greater degree than we ever thought possible.
You can’t create change from the top down, and philanthropy is wrong to keep thinking it can work that way.
Yordanos Eyoel is a partner at New Profit, an organization that supports social entrepreneurs, where Tulaine Montgomery is a managing partner. Jeff Walker is chairman of the organization’s board.