Tyeshia Wilson [Starting at 03:33]: Y’all, today we’re going to have a conversation, it’s workshopp-y, and so I invite you all to come off screen because it’s just a few of us here today. So my name is Tyeshia Wilson.

I serve as the Director of Engagement here at Philanthropy Together, but I am also a giving circle member and leader like you all. I’m a part of HERitage Giving Fund. We are a group of Black women who collectively pool our resources together to fund some amazing organizations throughout North Texas. And our Founder is here today! Akilah, go ahead and introduce yourself.

Akilah S. Wallace: Good afternoon, everyone, and season’s greetings. So, I’m Akilah. I’m so glad to be here, I’m grateful to  be able to serve in a variety of capacities that is deeply rooted in connecting resources and people to the greatest needs within society.

My day job is to serve as the Vice President of Development for a high impact educational nonprofit called Big Thought, based in Dallas, but also in this capacity I’m grateful to join my Co-Chair Elect Tyeshia Wilson as the Founder, Co-Founder, and Chair of HERitage Giving Fund.

HERitage is a Black women’s giving circle that we founded in 2017, that has over 50 members. Collectively since then, we have raised and granted out over $100,000, to about 13 different nonprofits that are led by and predominantly serving Black women and/or girls. I’m just excited about continuing this dialogue with my co-conspirator and colleague in this work and look forward to hearing from all of you as well.

Tyeshia Wilson: I love that. Yes, we like to get in a little good trouble, and we’re going to have a great conversation today. But before we get started, we have a quick poll. Kelsey is going to launch a poll. We just want to get a temperature check on who’s in the room so that we can better adjust our conversation with where you all are for this experience today.

So just take a couple of minutes or a minute to just take that poll: Where are you coming from, what’s the racial makeup of your giving group or your circle, and how many people do you all have? We’re at almost, what, 60 members, Akilah? With HERitage. Y’all know we are a Black women’s group and we’re based in Texas, and so that’s our truth and we want to know yours!

This is interesting where everyone is from! We have folks everywhere! We’ve got some international folks in here, that’s awesome. Here’s our agenda for today.

We’re going to try to the best of our ability with the time that we have – one good short hour – and lots of information to share with you all. We want to hear from you too, so we’re going to jump right into it.

This is Part 2 of a conversation, so I want to quickly do a recap of our last session, and then we’re going to jump smack into the workshop piece. We’ll spend the bulk of our time together in that space, and then if we have enough time I’m hoping to – fingers crossed! – we can get to some specific questions that you all have. If not then, I promise me and Akilah will be right here, so hang around and you can ask us your questions.

Okay, alrighty, so as Akilah said, I just want to again, just lift up HERitage. These are our sisters, we do, like many of you all, a lot of investing in some amazing organizations. But our impact is felt even beyond the financial gift. We do a lot of beyond the dollar work.

And we live to lean into the experiences of our members. Akilah and I, we’re passionate about that and that’s why we are leading this session today.

So a recap of our first session: we talked a lot, a lot about lived experiences and specifically what that means. And so here’s the definition of that: lived experience describes the expertise that comes from a person’s past or present experiences; this level of expertise is on a variety of issues and provides context to a given issue. People with lived experience are also called context experts.

You all will have heard that. But more importantly, lived experience really makes individuals, we know, so much more equipped to understand the unique challenges of the communities that we’re serving, especially when they’re from the community. For us, by us, right? It’s that kind of motto.

At HERitage, centering our members’ voices and their experiences into this work for good, is super important for us to stay equitable and to continue to grow and learn and to thrive, more importantly. It matters! Lived experiences matter a lot, and a lot of that is because this work and what we’re all doing, it goes beyond. It gives us a real on the ground knowledge of what’s going on, and so these people with lived experiences can give us some perspectives and insights.

We otherwise just wouldn’t know, unless they had a seat at the table, and we heard from them. Only someone who has truly been through experience knows what it’s like to go through it. So what better way to bring in the voice of the community than from those that are living it and that are in it every day?

And so in this movement for good, while we’re all really seeking to address issues in our community, it’s even more important for us to understand current challenges from the people that are there, people who can help us to kind of find some solutions towards this lasting change, that we all are seeking.

When you’re going about centering members’ experiences, we talked about this last session. There are 5 common principles that we all need to keep in mind. I won’t go through them today, but I’ll highlight them here, these 5 guiding principles of centering lived experiences: be genuinely inclusive; highlight the strengths of the community; be open, transparent and responsive; solicit and act on feedback; and be aware of your own biases.

Some of you are probably saying, oh, this looks a little familiar – it probably is! It’s rooted in trust-based philanthropy, and some of those principles overlap with what we’re seeing about best practices, with how circles are centering the lived experiences of their members.

I’ll pass it over to Akilah so we can jump right into this workshop. But before I do that, I will say that Akilah is going to ground us in two steps. Now that we know what lived experiences are, we know why they’re important, and the principles of how we can practice to actualize them in our work, the big question is, “Well, where do we go from here? How do we start?”

HERitage has gone through this very similar process. We started with assessing where our giving circle has gone for 5 years now, and so we really have been thinking a lot about it, y’all, about how we can become even more equitable as a circle. This piece begins with an assessment that is super important. And I’m going to pass it over to Akilah who’s going to unpack it for us in our workshop now.

Akilah S. Wallace: Wonderful. Thank you Ty, for helping to center us, by giving a summary of what we talked about during our first session. Before I go into the ways that we begin to assess our giving groups, let’s take a look at the results from the poll just to get an idea of the makeup of those in the room.

Akilah and Tyeshia looked over the results of the poll, which showed that most attendees represented giving circles who primarily target their local communities. Broader reach organizations, with regional or statewide targets, were the second-largest group. The smallest group was national and international giving circles. 

The majority of the group identified the racial makeup of their collective giving groups as mostly white, followed by Black or African-American as the second-largest population. There were also some giving circles in attendance representing Latinx and Hispanic communities. 

In terms of size range, most giving circles in the poll had between 51 and 100 members. The next ranges were tied between less than 20 and 21-50 members. 

Akilah S. Wallace: It’s helpful to have this context, as we begin to think about the various aspects and indicators, for which you should be assessing, but also recognizing how some of these components can contribute to the ways in which you think about your lived experiences and how broad or more narrow or focused it may be.

So in thinking through the assessment, and first, looking at your operations, how we have defined “operations” is the process to operationalize internal practices to strengthen commitment to incorporating lived experience within the collective.

All right, let’s dig into this. Okay, so, I’ve started this giving circle or I’m looking to start it – what are some key aspects that need to be thought about?

Akilah then presented a Centering Lived Experience Assessment worksheet, in which giving circle members could score their organizations from 0 to 3:

0 = not achieved, no activity/involvement

1 = minimal achievement or involvement

2 = making progress, noteworthy achievement, or involvement

3 = fully achieved or integrated

• The giving circle leadership value lived experience and believe that incorporating lived experience in the grantmaking process is relevant and valuable. 

• A commitment to incorporating lived experience is reflected in the values, vision and/or mission statement of the giving circle. 

• People from the communities you serve are members of the giving circle.

• People with lived experience serve on the circle’s leadership team or board.

• Are you focusing on issues that correspond with member lived experiences/interests?

Akilah S. Wallace: So as you’re doing that, let’s just look at some tools that could help you to improve the ways in which you are meeting these expectations, for centering lived experiences. We’re going to drop these resources in the chat so you can have them for you records and files, for you to be able to refer to them in the future, following our recording.

For the first indicator, some tools that you can lean on are the ABFE’s responsive philanthropy in Black communities, the Empathy Map, and the ways in which you are engaging in site visits.

For our second indicator, a commitment to incorporating the lived experience in your values, vision, and mission, we’re going to connect you to navigating difficult conversations, and how that can be a process that your membership engages in to really begin to unpack: Okay, no, seriously – what do we mean by who we are? And who are we wanting to serve? And are we prepared to be in community with the group, especially if it is not representative of the majority stakeholders within your membership?

If you’re if realizing that we’re saying we want to serve a particular group, but many of us haven’t been personally impacted by this issue, whether in the past or currently, then you may want to look at the ways in which you’re engaging in some difficult conversations, around why it is that you’re wanting to target a group, or an issue, that no one is deeply connected to. Is it connected to, maybe, some elements of “white savior”? What is it? Is it based on some religious aspects that you’ve taken on, or some cultural aspects? Utilize these tools for that.

For this next one, I really want to go beyond just the ways in which people from the communities you serve are members of the giving circle. And as you’re building out your operations, that can also show up through your recruitment efforts. What does your messaging look like? What are you saying that may be creating some level of exclusivity, in the way at which someone may not see themselves as being welcomed into the space? As well as the ways of what you set your giving levels, and how if you really wanted to center those from the community, and them feeling that they have access and proximity to your mission and vision, then how do you align with the ways in which your giving labels may create some level of exclusion?

To say, even with that [exclusion], recognizing that it’s okay. You can say, “In our giving circle, our levels are at $500 and $1,000.” And we recognize that there may be people who cannot do that. However, we want to find ways to engage them. Create pipelines for younger or newer giving circle members. What does that look like?

So for us, we built in a way in which you may not be a member per se, however, you could be a friend and there’s still some benefits and ways in which you can still be connected to us as a friend of the HERitage Giving Fund. And then again, there’s some other tools around some local community indicator reports and census data and impact reports that can help you with some of the other indicators.

Those are some tools to assist you as you think about your operations.

Tyeshia Wilson: Can I jump in real quick here? With these resources, y’all, we have so many of them but basically for instance, with site visits, we have specific resources, but there are so many – that’s the beauty of the Internet and of technology.

And so with the Empathy Map, there are several Empathy Map examples and tool kits out there. We’re just providing the overarching resource to help you tackle the indicator that you most want to work with. So just think about that as you look at the resources, even navigating difficult conversations, you can Google that and you’ll see plenty of tools that come up about how to talk about race, and equity, and implicit biases, and things like that. I just wanted to clarify that as we move on to the next resources.

Akilah S. Wallace: Ty just touched on something that I realized I just said that could be connected to implicit bias. Also, we don’t want to make the assumption that people with lived experience or from the communities that we are wanting to serve are not able to meet this, the giving levels from which you have said. I don’t want to make the assumption that this particular community is unable to be considered for membership, and likely you don’t know who’s living in these communities.

And so it’s not until you begin to build authentic relationships and even ensure that you are intentional about how you’re connecting with them that you begin to unearth folks, who may not be on your radar, because they may not be the individuals who are part of your traditional philanthropic community.

I know in Dallas, we have a huge philanthropic community and following, but there are thousands of people who do not fall into those same spaces, who would absolutely be great candidates to be considered for membership.

All right, let’s go to pre-grantmaking, as we think about some of the indicators in your pre-grantmaking for your giving group. We’re defining this as the period within the grantmaking process where the giving circle is setting priorities, determining equity metrics, and preparing their grant cycle.

Using the same 0 to 3 scale as before, attendees scored their giving circles on the following indicators:

• Voting members spend time in the communities being served through our grantmaking to establish relationships and bridge connections.

• Funding priorities are identified with the priorities of community agencies or individuals with lived experience.

• We take time to learn the ecosystem and identify under-resourced and grassroots organizations that could be served through our grantmaking.

• We have simple and streamlined grant processes that are transparent and easy to access. 

• We engage people with lived experience in the development of our grant opportunities. 

Akilah S. Wallace: So how do these indicators, for you, for your group, in the ways in which you’re very intentional about before you create a system in process, for what your grant making will likely look like. The ways in which you say, how will this application look? Will we do videos? Will it be a paper? Will it be online, how many questions? What is the depth of the questions? Are we requiring them to fill out 10 pages?

Are you thinking about the ways in which, if the majority of the organizations that you’re targeting are working full-time, they have smaller budgets, or they don’t have development people dedicated to sit here and try to do all this extensive research to give you this really robust response.

How are you setting people up for success, while at the same time wanting to meet the mission and vision of your giving group, and not creating conflict?

For the next few minutes, Akilah and Tyeshia took questions from attendees about setting their grant levels. 

Akilah S. Wallace: So I want to just invite everyone to take a look at the tools that we are suggesting to support you for those of you who may have scored lower, net 0 to 3 range on any of the indicators that we’re suggesting for you to be taking into consideration. Again, take a look at these. We’ll drop some of these resources into chat.

Think about your site visits, authentic community engagement practices, look at some participatory grantmaking tools, as well as what Ty lifted up before, the Unconscious Implicit Bias Toolkit and some other tools. We’ll make sure that you have all of these in the follow-up email as well.

Tyeshia Wilson: One more thing: I specifically added the Philanthropy Together Resource Library. Yes, it’s a plug for us, but we have so many resources where we talk about collective decision-making and how to find those organizations. Y’all be sure to check that out.

Akilah S. Wallace: All right, let’s get into grantmaking. We’re defining grantmaking as the period within the grantmaking process where the given circle is ensuring there is a diverse applicant pool, providing necessary assistance, and developing an inclusive review board. How’s that showing up?

Using the same 0 to 3 scale as before, attendees scored their giving circles on the following indicators:

• We have an inclusive and diverse review committee that includes people with lived experience.

• We use an inclusion lens when vetting organizations to understand how potential grantees include lived experience in their processes. 

• We support indirect costs and unrestricted funding which strengthen grantee partners’ capacity to better meet community needs.

• We assess previous granting efforts to identify gaps and improve our grantmaking. 

• We support multi-year and unrestricted funds to better meet the needs of the community. 

Akilah S. Wallace: You can score this based off of your current membership makeup or who are the voting members for this particular piece. We recognize that not everyone can be there, depending on what your system is. You may not be able to get all the votes from diverse voices, but if no, then you need to reassess the date and timing [of the vote], and make it accessible so that there is inclusion.

As a nonprofit fundraiser, I mean, I understand. But sometimes it’s just so annoying when people want to dig all into the leaves, as to what they want their money to go. General operating, let’s trust the leadership, and trust them to make the decision about where that fund should go.

This is over multiple years. Look back at what you’ve done in the past and be very intentional about changes that you may need to make or improvements.

Let’s take a look at some of the tools we have for these same indicators: Philanthropy Together’s Collective Decision Making, the “Who is at your table?” exercise, equitable grantmaking, trust-based philanthropy, and grantmaking with a racial justice lens.

All right, so – post-grant beyond the dollar! You’ve already given them the money. How do you make sure that you’re still containing, you want to center lived experiences in your assessment process?

Using the same 0 to 3 scale as before, attendees scored their giving circles on the following indicators:

• We collect qualitative data centered on community voice and experience to better understand the impacts of our grants beyond the numbers.

• We offer responsive and adaptive non-monetary support.

• We hold post-grant meetings with our grantee partners to learn what can be improved and to identify gaps. 

• We are assessing our program and sourcing channels to ensure we know who is receiving the funds most often and who we need to reach.

• We support grantees after the check is distributed. 

Akilah S. Wallace: At HERitage Giving Fund, in addition to providing funding for the organizations that we’ve granted, they have been matched up with some of our members for ongoing mentorship and advisory support.

We also have a series of recordings that we did during the pandemic with our members, talking about various topics that we knew were really vital and important to Black women-led nonprofits and we went deeper with those we had already funded.

That can show up also in a way in which we are intentional about our social media, and the way that we follow our grantee organizations, and we share what they have going on in our stories and on our timelines as well.

Tyeshia Wilson: Yes, I had a question I’m curious about, Akilah. You said, “grantee partners.” How many of you all are referring to your grantees as partners? Do you all use that language ? I’m just curious.

That’s a huge piece of this, of the postgrant process. Thinking about your grantees as partners, because if you think about them as just recipients of funds, and that’s it, that’s where it’s going to stay. There is no post-grant beyond the dollar support. But when we really center the experiences of even our grantee partners with our work, that’s where all this magic happens and will happen.

When we think about other ways, once we give them that check, what else do they need? Where else can we show up throughout the year, especially if you’re granting just once a year. What are you all doing in between, throughout the year, to support them?

And so just thinking about that, if you were not considering or not using even that, language matters in this work, for sure. Your grantees, as partners, think about that and make sure you’ve jotted that down. I encourage all to think forward on that.

Akilah S. Wallace: In that “partners” vein, I mean, when I think about our members of HERitage in that way, we get connected with the organizations that we find, because after we’re done, we’ve talked and we’ve just fallen in love with the leaders, and with their work.

How you are intentionally helping, how to drive some resources to those organizations beyond the dollar, how are you all looking within your membership and considering opportunities to serve on those nonprofits’ committees, their boards. Are you just even saying their names in a way that goes beyond just like, oh, I did this thing for them? Versus, “I really believe in their work. They are someone that you should be investing in.”

How are you creating the ways in which your giving circle or group creates leverage for the other organization?

One of our grantee partners, Viola’s House, and our dear friend Tana Simmons, they just had their gala. I went and shared about it and recognized that I didn’t know about her organization until she had applied and was awarded funding from us. This was in early 2020 that they received their funding. The pandemic was kicking off.

What was key is that she posted in the comments that, since our gift that year, their funding has increased over 150% fold. The fact that she’s able to credit our gift – which I don’t remember now but I know it was less than $20,000, probably less than $10,000 given our awards don’t go over $10,000 – that we were able to contribute that type of impact. That’s how you can see yourself with being a partner in the way that you walk along – don’t just do a hand off, write a check. You keep going.

What are the ways that you’re creating, possibly, a network of supporters and keeping them engaged?

So lastly, and again, don’t forget to reference the tools that are provided for these various indicators, I want to be mindful of the time, so with all of this, as you’re assessing how you scored in these different categories, around operations, around your pre-, during-, and post-grantmaking, you really want to make sure that you’re doing these assessments and creating an action plan.

Work the plan – integrate it within your giving groups and committees, and be really intentional about what this looks like. You’re going to need to set goals. If you score low on any of the indicators, come back and have a discussion with your membership, or just your senior team, to really say, “Hmm… We’re acknowledging that this is a growth area for us.”

But then from there, what are we going to do about it? Set a goal with a very clear deadline: Metrics are not a goal. If there aren’t any metrics by what percentage of change, or whatever the number looks like, the move from Point A to Point B might be, it can take forever to make this change. This is really important.

What we’re speaking about is relevant to the times that we live in now. We’re engaging younger folks, more diverse voices. They want to see that we are centering equity, and what we do, and that is a challenge. There’s a call to action coming from society as a whole, and you want to make sure that you’re meeting that.

So determine action steps. Think through anticipated barriers and create an approach to address those barriers. Think about, how often will you need to revisit this plan? How often do you need to be checking on how well we’re doing, or are we falling behind? If there are some of [those goals] that we just aren’t doing, we just fell off and we’ll get back to those.

But make sure that you’re continuing to assess that – whether it’s quarterly or annually, whatever that is an how it looks for you, we want to make sure that you’re being intentional about the ways you’re embedding this into your work so that ultimately, we all continue to be stronger, more intentional, strategic and equitable giving groups.

Tyeshia Wilson: This is great, Akilah. In this action plan, as you all were scoring yourselves, just really think and sit with those indicators. Applaud yourself also for those threes. If we were going through a lot of the indicators from your operations from the pre-grantmaking, the grantmaking, and even the post-grantmaking, and you had quite a bit of threes, we celebrate that!

I think this is all so important, as Akilah was saying, as part of our collective work to drive positive impact. And then where you score low, this is exactly where you would use the action plan, really digging deep about that zero you scored and thinking, “Okay, well, let’s set some goals and our next steps with that.”

For the remainder of the session, Akilah and Tyeshia opened the floor to questions from the attendees. 

Tyeshia Wilson: I know we’re at time. We’re going to let you all go, because I could stay here an extra fifteen minutes, but I’m not going to do y’all like that. I hope that all of us, and as we move forward in 2023, that we have more, that we’re able to do more just like this. When we can have these open spaces, keep sharing what we’re doing, keep sharing best practices, how we’re doing what we’re doing, and not withhold any knowledge. Because this is where we really all thrive in this collective moment for good.

Akilah and I are so appreciative of all of your time today. You could be anywhere in the world, but you’re with little ol’ us. We thank y’all, we love y’all, hope you and your families have an amazing and restful holiday season.