Bristling with nerves, the nonprofit leaders gathered in the green room of the Ford Foundation’s lush headquarters on the east side of Manhattan. After a career spent elevating the voices of others, they were about to take the stage to do the unthinkable: talk about themselves.
“I was trained and taught to put myself in the background,” said Bianca Agustin, co-director of the nonprofit United for Respect, where after decades spent advocating for the rights of working people, she is more accustomed to championing others than herself.
Yet on Monday evening, it was Agustin’s personal story — and those of four other leaders — that took center stage, the culmination of a monthslong partnership between the Ford Foundation’s $1 billion BUILD program, which aims to build nonprofit sustainability through multiyear grants and training, and the Moth, a storytelling nonprofit. The event showcased the leaders’ personal journeys into advocacy, but it also hinted at something more universal: a blueprint for how other nonprofit leaders can embrace the benefits of narrative storytelling themselves.
“Personal stories will make you feel in a way that facts and figures just can’t,” said Sarah Austin Jenness, executive producer of the Moth, which led virtual workshops plus two three-day intensives in New York City and Johannesburg, South Africa, for BUILD grantees interested in developing their personal storytelling skills.
At the Ford Foundation, a mic stand atop an ornate rug — a trademark of the Moth’s storytelling events — lent an aura of intimacy as speakers took to the stage. First among them was Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, who opened an overflow room to accommodate over 230 RSVPs. Rather than speak of his tenure leading one of the world’s largest foundations, Walker shared an exasperating moment earlier in his career, when he worked at a community development nonprofit in Harlem.
With lingering indignation, Walker recalled a time when grant makers would often come to visit and, more often than not, attempt to prescribe solutions and narratives to a community they knew little about.
For their part, the audience of nonprofit professionals and Moth aficionados snapped their fingers in approval at Walker’s words, reminded of their own parallel stories of ill-mannered funders and other nonprofit woes.
A Pivotal Moment
A key insight from the Moth’s approach is to focus on a turning point in the speaker’s life. It could be a mistaken assumption. An unexpected phone call. A pivotal moment or a memorable character. Clocking in at about 10 minutes each, every story on stage brought to life a crossroads, replete with humor, emotion, and revelation.
“Stories happen when the reality is different from what you had anticipated,” said Austin Jenness, “when there was a pattern and something breaks that pattern.”
For months, the storytellers worked one-on-one with coaches from the Moth to refine their turning points. Brigadier Siachitema chose the moment a group of women he supervised used heavy tools to pry out a rock deeply embedded at a construction site. The feat, which his male employees had struggled with for weeks to no avail, opened his eyes to widespread sexist prejudices and led directly to his current role as a lawyer for women’s land rights in South Africa.
For Beth Ramirez, it was the moment when police wrongly detained her at five months pregnant due to a series of bureaucratic mishaps involving her former employer. “That day I realized had I not had access to privileges” like fluency in English and access to a lawyer who secured her freedom, “I would have been in jail a lot longer,” said Ramirez, who now works as associate director of advancement and philanthropic partnerships at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.
Agustin’s turning point came in the summer of 2011 when an organizing campaign she’d been working on for five years at the Service Employees International Union, or SEIU, ended in a settlement instead of a collective bargaining agreement. She was crushed and considered quitting her job until a colleague encouraged her not to write off the inroads they’d made in building workers’ collective power and to “accept the complicated truth” that some things cannot be defined as a total win or loss.
That “conversation has stuck with me for decades,” said Agustin, who remained with SEIU for another decade after her colleague persuaded her to stay.
Though each personal story was unique, part of the effectiveness of each leader’s story came from the clarity of the details, like the feeling of walking into a room and realizing you’re about to hear bad news or the romantic partner ready to help dutifully talk you through a moment of professional malaise.
“The more specific the story is, the more universal it becomes,” said Victoria Dunning, senior program officer at the Ford Foundation’s BUILD program, noting that “because they bring in these beautiful details of what happened,” the audience realizes that, “Yes, I know that I’ve felt that before. I’ve been there before.”
Storytelling for Advocacy
As part of the Moth’s three-day workshops, participants learned how to transform their 10-minute Moth monologue into 60- or 90-second versions that leaders can use in board rooms, staff meetings, and conversations with donors in their everyday work lives, as well as in their positions as advocates.
“I think what this does is really connects hearts, minds, and missions together,” said Dunning, who emphasized that by getting to know nonprofit leaders and their stories, funders can also help support their work more effectively and sustainably.
“If we can support leaders and missions, and not just projects, that’s where this work gets real,” she said.
For her part, by the time Augustin took to the Moth stage, where speakers are not allowed to consult their notes, she had rehearsed her story about 100 times, adding details through prompts provided by the Moth.
The process helped her come to terms with a painful but pivotal moment in her career, she says, and become more confident talking about herself — and by extension, the issues she cares about — in the process.
In such a politically polarized time, “our stories have the power to tell universal truths, even if we don’t always agree on the details of the solution,” said Agustin. “Telling your story can be part of responsible leadership.”
As for the role of funders, Walker’s opening story alluded to another theme coursing through the audience that evening.
If philanthropy once attempted to tell other people’s stories for them or center a white savior in the narrative, then Ford’s storytellers —all of whom spoke of personal connections to the issues they care about — may hint at a new path forward.
“We need to listen,” said Walker as a grant maker. “We need to elevate and respect the very important knowledge and expertise of the places we work.”
Note: The Ford Foundation is a financial supporter of the Chronicle of Philanthropy.
