Marsha Morgan: Good afternoon everyone. Welcome. We are so glad to have you join us today. As everyone is getting settled in, please let us know your name, where you are located, the name of your giving circle, and one thing that you’re grateful for today.

Sara Lomelin: I think it’s a great time to get started. Welcome everyone. We’re extremely happy to have all of you here with us today. My name is Sara Lomelin. I’m the Executive Director of Philanthropy Together. We have a packed session, so we just want to get started. This is the first Racial Equity Community of Practice and it has been put together by Philanthropy Together and by the Community Investment Network.

At Philanthropy Together, we’re on a mission to diversify and democratize philanthropy by starting more giving circles and helping existing giving circles thrive. And I’m going to pass that to Marsha to say hi.

Marsha Morgan: Hi, I am Marsha Morgan, chair of the Community Investment Network. CIN was started in 2004. We inspire, connect, and strengthen African-American and communities of color to leverage their collective resources to create the change that they want to see. And now I’ll turn it back over to Sara.

Sara Lomelin: Thank you, Marsha. Welcome to our six-month Racial Equity Community of Practice. There are four main components to our community of practice.

The first two are our monthly gatherings. Today is the first one! We will alternate between webinars, 90 minutes Zooms like this one, with presentations, sharing of frameworks, and big ideas. Guest speakers, Q&As, and prompting reflection questions that you can take back to your giving circles.

And then we’ll have the open forum meetings, which will be in a normal Zoom setting. So we will be able to see your beautiful faces, where we can all be on video. Join the smaller breakout rooms and have time for more connected discussion and personal reflection. And then we will be posting tons of resources and tools on our forum, which Isis will walk you through at the end of today’s session, you should have received an invitation to join the forum.

And this is yours. This is a community of practice and we will make it as strong as we want. So thank you to those of you who have already joined the forum. You are already posting and sharing.

So this is perfect. That is exactly what we want to do. I just want to I was just looking at the familiar names, and I’m so excited to have all of you here. But you know, to start, I want to show you today’s community by the numbers. We have four countries, the US of course, Canada, Australia, and Brazil. We have 130 participants and we have 72 giving circles, and it has a little asterisk there, because I know some of you call yourselves chapters, affiliates, SVPs, groups. So just for our community of practice, we will call everyone giving circles to make it easier. But we cannot wait to see all of you next time at our open forum.

I feel extremely humbled to be surrounded by all of you. Thank you for showing up today with your full self and being ready to be vulnerable, to learn, and to share. Some giving circles that are experts in this work have joined this community of practice to be supportive of giving circles that are just starting on this journey.

So thank you. Thank you so much for all of you. We also have a good mix of newly formed giving circles and more established giving circles. So for those of you that are just starting this work kudos for starting on the right track, and starting your work based on equity. And for those of you that have been in existence for many years, I deeply respect and I admire you, your willingness to improve, your practices to maybe change some of those processes that you have and act in a more equitable way.

So now I’m just here to show you a few things that some of you said about why you are joining this community of practice. We all want to learn and to share. And now I’m going to pass it to Marsha Morgan, to get us started. Thank you so much.

Marsha Morgan: Thank you, Sara. So, as I mentioned earlier, I’m Marsha Morgan with the Community Investment Network. And so as Sara has already mentioned, we all are coming to this work from various places and the beauty of today is that we all can embark on a learning journey where we can embed racial equity within our giving circles.

So with all learning journeys, there has to be a starting point. And so today we are discussing how we can embed a culture of racial equity within our giving circles. And so we will also discuss how that in turn can be embedded in our grant-making as well as how we can grow our impact in our local communities by leveraging our influence.

So as we think of the culture of our giving circles, to be effective in racial equity work, we have to evaluate what our culture is to gather a baseline. So culture is the shared list of assumptions, values, and beliefs of our giving circles. This shapes how we organize ourselves, and how we show up in our communities.

It also dictates how we engage in our communities. And so, if you think about the culture, it also means that we’re looking at how we interact with one another’s members. How, when, and where we meet, the tone at the top, that’s established by our leadership and the principles that guide our work. So culture not only impacts the internal fabric of our giving circles, it also extends to how we show up in the world.

How we work in our communities is an extension of the culture that we’ve established with one another. And so the way we communicate when we use social media, the way we market ourselves to the world, and our print materials, on our website, infographics, and brochures, even the events that we host, that is all tied to our circles’ culture.

And so as we embark on this journey, we are so grateful that we have some experts here today to lend their voices to how we can embed racial equity work within our giving circle. So we have a very highly esteemed panel of people here to help us. And so first you see Natasha Harrison is already here with us.

She is going to help us ground ourselves now and understand what that grounding has to be, for us to center our giving circles around racial equity work. Natasha will lead us in understanding more about how we can even start that conversation within our giving circles. And so next we’ll hear from Lisa McGill, who will briefly share a high-level overview of the steps that can be used to frame our racial equity work, and really how that connects us to the culture, how that connects to the culture of our giving circle.

And we’re going to see this in action. We are going to learn from Christina Gorczynski, who has this experience of what it takes to embed this work within a giving circle. And she’s going to share the lessons she’s learned, especially as it relates to culture. Now before we move on, I want to share a few more things with you about how you can engage in today’s webinar.

Please remember that we are recording today’s webinar, so you will have an opportunity to review it after today. If you have a colleague who was not able to join, please feel free to share the link with them afterward. Also, please be mindful that everyone is in a listen-only mode, but we do want you to share your thoughts and comments with us. So if you hear something that inspires you or, or is something new, please use the chat panel to share that with others. If you think of a question at any point during today’s webinar, please place it in the Q&A box.

We are going to have some dedicated time towards the end to address those questions. And we also ask that you keep in mind that what we’re sharing today is not the gospel, meaning that as we embark on this journey, we believe that this is how you can get started. But we also know that there are a lot of other options that will help you learn and grow in this work.

You have to be mindful of what will work best for you in your giving circle. However, we want you to know that we are not saying this is the only way, but we want you to listen with an open mind and an open heart to aid you and learn how you can make your work and your community more effective.

And so with that, it gives me great pleasure to introduce Natasha Harrison to you. Natasha is a highly sought-after consultant specializing in racial equity and justice, community engagement, philanthropy, and leadership engagement. She is the founder of CommunityBuild Ventures which utilizes her expertise in building communities and community-led initiatives.

Natasha’s based in Atlanta. She’s a lover of music, dance, and her family, so please just join me in welcoming Natasha as she takes us on the journey.

Natasha Harrison: Thank you so much, Marsha. I appreciate that kind introduction. I want to first just send a gratitude for Philanthropy Together, creating this platform that we all are enjoying right now.

I’m enjoying the forum. I also want to send high praise to the Community Investment Network. They have been my, I would say, my teacher for the past 10 years along my philanthropy journey, being a part of a giving circle and founding one. So I just want to send some gratitude and love and some energy towards Philanthropy Together and Community Investment Network.

So how I want to ground us and share is something that CommunityBuild Ventures, anytime that we work with a group, we ground in what we call brave space building. We have pulled together a process to help organizations lean in more deeply into conversations that center on racial equity. And we say “brave space” because conversations around race, racism and justice can be very uncomfortable. In a society, we often don’t talk about these terms or really, wrestle with that conflict that comes up when we talk about race and racial equity.

And so this is an opportunity for us to lean in more deeply and to learn more about being uncomfortable. And so I just want to share the framework, the six-step process. So one of the things that we’ve all just experienced in the beginning today is gratitude. And so in this process, we always open some ground by exploring our feelings, gratitude, and intentions.

And so gratitude just helps to create a bond among our team together, to operate from a place of curiosity, empathy, and trust. If I am sharing with you what I am grateful for today, intentions just really help us to, allow us to focus on who we are at this moment and to recognize what our values are and how we want to live our values at this moment.

Just how you want to show what you know, and again, it gives you purpose, inspiration, and motivation. The third thing is exploring feelings. This helps us just to connect, with each other as human beings, in our humanness of just saying, this is how I’m feeling at this moment right now, whatever it is.

And we always offer ways to express their feelings through a feelings wheel, when we do that. Because sometimes because we aren’t often asked how we feel, it’s hard to tap into those emotions. So providing a resource, like a feelings wheel from Dr. Gloria Wilcox is very helpful in that process.

The next key piece of brave space building is assumptions. How we’re using assumptions is very different from that definition of assumptions. What we’re saying is we’re going to take some statements as facts and they’re called out for us as participants in that space, we can fully show up, willing to not only see each other’s potential for growth but also our own.

And so one of the assumptions that we use, that we use the first assumption is that “everyone has learned -isms.” Never ask if it is present, ask how it is showing up at this moment? And again, the assumptions are called out for us to grow, for our growth potential, and for the others around us.

The fifth part of the brave space building is community agreements. This is a framework for how we’re going to work together. We always, at CommunityBuild Ventures, have six main agreements, and then we ask participants in that space, what else they need to show up in this space.

The last piece is shared language. This is common terms and language so that we better understand terms like race and racial equity and white supremacy or white dominant culture norms. This is a living document for groups to think about what are those key terms we need to make sure that we have a common language around them. And then also how have our values and the ways that we think about these terms changed?

That’s why it’s a living document and this six-step process of gratitude, intention, exploring feelings, assumptions, community agreements, and shared language, this is something that we highly recommend that you do every time that you come together as a team, as a group, as a giving circle together, your organization, so that you are intentionally connecting with each other, to hear where people are at this moment, to make sure that we’re all on the same page, with shared language, with how we’re going to show up, and that we’re very clear with assumptions.

I want to share at the bottom of the slide, so that you are aware of this, the Six Steps for Creating Authentic Conversations that Central Race is a resource that is in the forum as well in the Racial Equity Community of Practice. That resource is there for you. And so, I appreciate this time just for sharing, brave space building. It is very important that you this way of centering together.

I would also add another great practice. I know we’re in times of COVID and we are doing a lot of social distancing and video calls through Zoom, like we’re doing right now. When you have the opportunity to come together, do it in a circle so that everyone can see each other and that you position that each person, has the opportunity to share these things, their gratitude, intentions and feelings in a circle environment so that you see each other and that you’re moving around the circle, going towards the left.

And so thank you, thank you again, for this opportunity, to share this. And, I’m looking forward to feedback, and ideas, especially when we do our open-forum conversation in September and also during this call. And so with that, I have the pleasure of introducing Lisa McGill, who’s going to share the how-tos of centering racial equity culture within your giving circle.

Lisa McGill is the founder of LM Strategies Consulting, and she’s the managing director of Kemp Whitfield Incorporated. She is a thought leader on the issue of philanthropy by people of color. Who they are, what they give to, and why. Her expertise is far and wide in leadership and pipeline development, racial equity, youth-to-adult transitions, and increasing opportunities for underserved, under-resourced communities.

And again, it is my pleasure to introduce Lisa McGill.

Lisa McGill: Thank you so much, Natasha. One of the things that I do with my consultancy is that I typically work with either national foundations or community foundations, typically community foundations that are trying to establish better relationships around racial equity with communities, as well as philanthropic networks.

So whether that’s donor networks or whether those are philanthropy serving organizations, folks who are trying to lean in on the work as it relates to racial equity and racial justice. So typically when I come in people want a framework and I typically tell them there’s several frameworks out there.

You have to figure out what works for you. So what I’m going to do today is just introduce you to a couple, think of them as tools and resources for work that you can do. and then from there, you’ll have to figure out how to massage them to meet your needs. So some headlines.

So the first one I tell folks is name it. It’s okay to say racial equity. It’s okay to name racism. And you should try to be clear around, not just equity, but the equity that you’re talking about as you try to do your work. So it may be equity around LGBTQ communities. It may be racial equity, or it may be gender equity, but to be clear about your work, you have to name it.

You know, one of the things we’ll talk about is organizational culture and you have to do the internal work, and the next slide that I’ll show is not yet, we’ll talk about what that looks like. It’s really important too that you have explicit goals of eliminating racial disparities. I’ve seen so many folks think about what it means to develop a grant-making program, but they aren’t looking at the data and they aren’t thinking about what the changes are they’re trying to make in the community, and what some of those outcomes may expand opportunities. Some things we don’t think about, when you’re doing giving circles, you have control over vendors, for example. You have control over who you hire as staff and what that diversity looks like.

So you want to keep that in mind and then build power. One of the mistakes I think we’ve made, as people who sort of practice this, in previous years is that we would talk about racial equity, but we didn’t talk about racial justice and what it means to build power in communities so that they can have some self-advocacy.

The other thing is to include realistic mechanisms to attain, sustain, and expand success. And so I say realistic because it doesn’t have to be a blown-out evaluation. And then you also want to make sure that you do something where there’s some low-hanging fruit. You can do some cadence around figuring out what the next steps are, and then you can move on.

So this tool some of you may be familiar with is actually from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Seven Steps to Advancing Racial Equity. Often folks use it as a grant-making tool. But I would argue that there are some really good nuggets of information here that would be useful for you as you think about organizational culture.

So, Natasha, for example, mentioned if you’re coming together as a giving circle, you have to have a common understanding of the key concepts. You have to be clear, are you talking about racial equity? Are you talking about gender equity? What does that mean? You also have to identify and engage the right stakeholders.

How are you thinking about your grant-making? How are you communicating what the grant-making is? You know, one of the things that I’ve realized is that with giving circles, a lot of folks don’t know that you’re out there. A lot of nonprofits don’t know, and you don’t necessarily have the networks to reach thos PLC nonprofits. Examine disaggregated data, whom you give the monies to, and conduct systems analysis.

So the trick here is to think about the root causes. If you feel like you’re stuck in terms of your organizational culture and you really can’t get to racial equity, how is that giving circle started? There’s an origin story there, and that usually actually influences what’s going on. So sometimes you have to disrupt that organizational culture and think about new ways of doing business.

As mentioned earlier, think about strategy. You should measure your impacts internally too, in terms of your data collection. And then again, always evaluate and adapt your strategies over time. So you’ll see this resource later as it relates to grant making, but I love for you to think of it as a two-prong approach.

Okay, so this one is from Crossroads Anti-Racism Organizing. And actually, Crossroads is not that far from me in Madison, Illinois. It’s one of those old-school favorites as it relates to racial equity and community organizing. I’m not going to go through this entire table here, but if you look at it and try to think about where you are on the continuum and where you want to be, this gives you some good prompts.

You can turn into questions as you come together as a team with the giving network and figure out what changes and shifts we need to make. Next slide. All right, everyone is seeing this one. This is by, NCRP, and I’m going to forget what it stands for. I want to say National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy.

Did I get it right? Good, thank you. And its power moves. So we’re not going to go through all of this, but the link is here. And as you think about who you want to be as a giving circle, think about how you wield power, and how you share power. And then how do you build power? And then what needs to change internally with your culture, to make a difference and to shift what your day-to-day operations are.

Again, I’m a big person around evaluation, and when I say evaluation, it doesn’t have to be like huge metrics, but I do think you need to know what’s going on and how you’re changing internally. This again, is a crib from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, from that Seven Steps for Racial Equity.

But you’ll see in the circle you need to implement your strategy, track your results, assess your progress, and yes, as internally and then revise your strategy as necessary. So I’m going to pause there and hand it over to my colleagues and look forward to the conversation.

This is just something around “don’t reinvent the wheel.” And if you look at the actual photographs, people are trying to do all types of stuff with these wheels. It has been done. So some of the things people forget have been done like 20 years ago from ABFE and Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity.

The tools are out there, some things change, but you know, we want to encourage you to take some of these tools and use them, make them work for you. All right. I think that’s it for my slides.

Natasha Harrison: Thank you so much, Lisa, for that information. It is my pleasure to introduce Christina Gorczynski. She is the executive director of Impact Austin, which is a dynamic women’s collective giving organization. She has never walked away from a tough fight and she spent her life advocating for vulnerable communities, especially people living with disabilities and LGBTQ folks.

Christina currently serves on the city of Austin’s LGBTQ Quality of Life Commission, and again, it is my pleasure to introduce Christina Gorczynski. Hi, Christina.

Christina Gorczynski: Thank you so much for having me. I am super honored to be here, with all of y’all, and to learn from all of y’all. I am here. My role today is to talk about Impact Austin’s work on centering racial equity.

And when I start to think about where we are, we are in the advanced beginner slash competent zone, I would say. And so even just to start and acknowledge where we as an organization have done some great work with our social innovation grant, and also I’m here to learn from y’all and know, where else we have, how much more we have to learn.

So, background on Impact Austin’s Social Innovation Grant. We’re a women’s collective giving organization based in Austin, Texas. A group of between 400 and 500 women annually who contribute a thousand dollars a year to a grant pool. In 2018 Impact Austin launched our new strategic plan. That included the development of a new grant that would be developed outside of our traditional grant-making process.

And, the other big pillar in our strategic plan was on diversity, equity, and inclusion, both in our membership, within our membership and also to improve our grant making and, and make it more equitable as well. So with the strategic plan, with the launch of the strategic plan, the idea for the Social Innovation Grant, and bringing together racial equity as part of the grant, was based in doing the research, in gathering data.

And, where our committee landed was that the grant would go to fund a high-impact project or program for a collaborative in Austin of organizations working to advance equity for women and girls of color in central Texas. If you go to the next slide, I can tell you briefly about some of those, and I think I can give highlights of where some of those key cultural moments were in this process.

The new Social Innovation Grant Committee formed in the fall. And in the fall, it was just an idea about a new grant. The committee members were primarily made up of people who are brand new to Impact Austin. We had folks who were joining our organization for the first time and rather than getting involved in some of our standing committees wanted to get involved in a new committee.

So just based on that, we had a lot of new perspectives at the table and folks at the table who, who asked challenging questions of our organization, and did some research and, based on some, they did some deep dive research based on data that had been collected by the Austin Community Foundation here in Austin, their women’s fund.

They observed great discrepancies in the lived experiences of women of color in our area. It was established early on. There were stark differences here, and the committee initially said that instead of focusing on a focus area, which we had typically done, like education, health and wellbeing, community, and instead really focus on people that were being impacted by systems and identified specifically women and girls of color as the population.

The committee then recognized that now they had a topic area, or a way to narrow in. Something different about our process was a big thought leader survey of organizations run by, folks of color, women of color in central Texas, and a thought leader sub survey of folks of color who work within nonprofits who serve communities of color.

And with all that input came up to determine that there were some gaps in funding for smaller grassroots organizations, organizations led by folks of color, and then also, in funding. So first, the first round was getting a ton of data and input from community leaders. Our committee worked together to develop the grant application and did invitations and had folks attend an online info session. We had 18 applicants. That first round, they presented to all of our members at the town hall, and the recipient of the grant for the first year was the Innocence Initiative.

That is a typo. It should be $110,000 instead of $510,000, in that first grant. And I can tell you more about the Innocence Initiative in just a moment. The big difference is I think for Impact Austin, and when we were thinking about it, I can tell you again some of the cultural moments that came up.

The big difference from Impact Austin’s standard grant-making process was this intentional community outreach that we got for input, that we as an organization did in the strategic planning, development, and rollout. We got a lot of feedback from the community, with folks who are willing to come forward and share their feedback about our process having too many barriers and the process itself being too rigorous and dissuading people from participating, or from applying places in our process where folks didn’t advance to the next round.

That folks sometimes are brave enough or have that moment where they can give that feedback. But we needed to go and proactively get input from the community, into our process and put ourselves out there in that vulnerable place like that. We also introduced, and this is part of the culture shift that happened, I would say, in our strategic plan, we emphasize the desire and the need to recruit more members with more diverse backgrounds.

What I think we had not considered, and I think now in thinking about doing this work, would be that bringing all these new voices and perspectives to the table was not just going to be, that was going to be the end. Instead, it was bringing a bunch of folks to the table who pointed out that there were issues with and rethinking what we needed to do about our framework altogether.

While a lot of our grants, the direct recipients of our grants may be organizations that work with folks of color, we had never named out race and gender as being specific barriers to equity. And this was, that was a big shift for us. So that’s a big difference in our sort of standard grant-making process.

We also introduced the concept of collaboration, like actually having a collaborative requirement. So just as we are, as a collective giving organization. We always encourage nonprofits to work together and encourage collaboration, but we named it out as a requirement, which allowed organizations that may, not necessarily go and apply for a $110,000 grant to work together with other organizations.

Part of it’s just that inherent value that we have about more people working together is better and will yield a better result. But it’s also knowing that the problems, race, racism, and misogyny are really big problems to solve and it will take multiple organizations and multiple players working on it.

So emphasizing the collaborative requirement we also went through and with feedback streamlined our process and reduced the questions and barriers in our application process. Part of taking down the process is we started by removing the LOI phase of our grant application.

We went from I think two dozen questions to six questions. We also, which is now, I mean, it’s very standard now, but we did a virtual info session, which was a big deal for us last year, for folks who are wanting to attend proactively again get nonprofits to come and apply.

And here’s the biggest cultural moment. So we had a big culture moment when we did all that research externally about our community when it comes to race and gender. but we also did, and I didn’t include this, but it’s a sort of big system, big Impact Austin organization changes. We started collecting demographic data on our members as well.

So as part of our member form, including a question about race and age, and to get a baseline understanding of where we are as an organization with regards to diversity. So that’s one cultural moment. The other is this implicit bias training that I list out here as part of the grant-making process. We had internal trainers within Impact Austin who did training on implicit bias for anyone who was going to be a grant reviewer for the social foundation grant, specifically on race and gender bias.

And that training has now been extended out. Our board has now done that same training, and then now it’s been baked into our, our main grant-making process. So in talking about bias and then the others are some sort of procedural, I put them in here just to let you know how many processes we had in place that once we started to peel back at some of our processes, it opened the door for an incredible group of organizations who received the Impact Austin Grant.

So we used to do, like a big luncheon, that people would have to take time, like our grantees to take time off and our community partners. To come to these finalist luncheons instead. We did stuff by email. We did a lot remotely and virtually, and we did our big presentation at our town hall, which was our event that we did in the fall.

So on the next slide, I can tell you a little bit about what I’m talking about, talking explicitly about bias in Grant Revere’s We Will Yield, which is the incredible selection of the Innocence Initiative. That’s our Social Innovation Grant community partner. It’s made up of five organizations that are based here in central Texas. All of which were working with women and girls of color. Now specifically working together on a project they developed for this Impact Austin Grant. And I have, hold on, I have to pull up my notes about the Innocence Initiative because I put together a couple of quick things to let y’all know.

And I can post a link in the chat to the big article. They got a big article written up in Austin Women Magazine about the project. But just to give background quickly and then move on, the Innocence Initiative is going to fight the adultification bias that girls of color face, specifically that Black girls are perceived as being less vulnerable and less innocent.

And the organization, the collaborative is specifically working on educating on racial adultification bias with defense attorneys, with advocates, guardians, judges, folks where girls may come involved, or come in contact with the juvenile justice system. The organization, they’re taking some real, the collaborative’s taking some cool approaches using art and a public awareness campaign. Talking about bias with our grant reviewers yielded a fantastic project around eliminating bias.

Natasha Harrison: Thank you. Thank you both Lisa and Christina. I’m excited for the next phase of our conversation, to tackle some key questions. I will share in terms of housekeeping. After we have our discussion, there will be a moment to get questions from folks who are listening in on this conversation, to share questions that they have so that we may answer them in real time.

But also, please note that for any questions that you have, we are building up an FAQ for this conversation so that we can continue to answer any questions that you have. And all of these will be placed in the Racial Equity Community of Practice forum for you to review later on.

With that said, Lisa and Christina, to get started in this conversation, just at ground zero, what are your recommendations as a starting point, for embedding racial equity into your culture? Whoever wants to go first.

Lisa McGill: So I took myself off mute first, so I’ll go ahead.

Natasha Harrison: Thank you, Lisa. Good looking out.

Lisa McGill: One of the things that, when I go in, I try to have conversations with folks. Typically there’s fear around doing it, so there’s good intention, but people feel fearful of saying the wrong thing or going about it the wrong way and all those different things.

And so one of the things that I typically say is, none of us are perfect. All of us sort of have issues around understanding equity and sometimes blind spots, I may have blind spots around gender equity, although I feel competent in another way. And so if we don’t get past our fear, we are going to get anything done.

And this stuff is urgent, right? There’s the urgency of now. And so you have to kind of put that aside, and give yourself some grace to begin to have some of those sticky conversations that people typically don’t have in that space where you have to do operational stuff, like get grants out the door or figure out what your strategy is.

Sometimes that’s the biggest hurdle. so I’ll stop there.

Natasha Harrison: Thank you, Lisa.

Christina Gorczynski: I wish that we would’ve had this session like a year and a half or two years ago when we were starting this grant. I wish that my organization would’ve had a community like this to come together that y’all, that y’all have created.

So I’m glad to be part of it now. As for us, I think we are still sorting through what it will mean to shift the culture, the big picture culture within Impact Austin, that we started with this grant and that there’s been, and now it’s carried over to all of our grantmaking. Some of the changes we’ve made, but centering racial equity throughout our grant-making process is a work in progress.

I think centering racial equity even in conversations and discussions within our organization is still a work in progress. You know, we started with this project, with these concepts and ideas because a handful of us around the table were interested and passionate and did our research and went out and found a lot of really great colleagues and teammates in that work.

And we’re still working through bringing everybody along and getting everybody in the same conversation. So I’d say as far as we’re starting somewhere, we started with doing. Because I think a lot of us thought we were all on the same page and we weren’t afraid of messing up and saying the wrong thing.

And I think now we’re going back and realizing we’ve experienced some success, but it’s almost like we’ve had to go back and start to have some of these deeper conversations that we’re having now about our grant making whole.

Natasha Harrison: Thank you Christina and Lisa for that. Because what’s coming up for me? so much of our culture, the dominant culture, and I, and I’ll add our term white dominant culture that we talk about, which again, is an example of shared language that will be in the resources is that we just do and we don’t take a step back as human beings having this experience, slowing this down, which is why we have advocated brave space building.

And I love what you said, Lisa, about none of us are perfect. One of the community agreements is that we use all the time. we just aren’t articulate all the time. That’s okay. Right? That’s one of the six main community agreements that we do.

So I would say that it is very important, as you’re starting this, to create the space, the container that this will hold for us to come together, to have this conversation, to be clear on how we want to show up in this. And be very honest with internalizing what your relationship with around race and racism and what your institution is, what your relationship is around race and racism, really to take stock in that, to be reflective of that.

And that requires a lot of self-compassion and compassion and interpersonal grace with each other. So thank you all for that. And so given that, in terms of culture, what are your thoughts around a good process to begin to define and reflect your values and shared beliefs in this space too, to get started?

I don’t want to go to Lisa first because she’s not on mute. So I’ll go to Christina. She’s been very clever with the mute button. But I’m going to start with Christina just to get your thoughts reflecting on your values and shared beliefs because as you said, you all started doing and what bubbled up is maybe some values and beliefs.

Christina Gorczynski: So we, so yes, and that is something that, with the strategic plan, that same beautiful strategic plan that laid out diversity, equity, and inclusion goals and laid out innovation, also laid out some values that when it was time to start to do some of the work on the plan.

Folks that were involved in leadership with specifically folks on our DEI committee actually brought up the values that we had listed out and pointed out how some of them were white. I think white dominant would’ve been the words that they’d used. Those words they might have said, but also, implied I think one of them, which was, well again, it’s always well-intentioned, but using the word wisdom to describe a lot of the theming, wisdom to describe our members and like experienced was another one I think that was used, that there was some terminology that, I don’t know that it best explained who we are as an organization.

That was one of the first things that folks on our newly formed diversity, equity, and inclusion committee came up with was, okay. Before we can go and dig into this stuff, we have to dig in on what our actual values are. And, moving away from this idea that we’re all-knowing and that organizations come to us because we know so much that we’re all on this journey together.

And so we shifted to what we believe are more in naming out inclusivity as being one of our core values. And then also naming empathy as being a core value of Impact Austin. That part of what makes our organization special is that we feel this shared sense of empathy with each other as members, but also, grounding ourselves in empathy with ourselves and with our community partners and creating a partnership.

The other was, instead of wisdom, moving to curiosity, that it’s not that we already know everything, but it’s that we have this willingness and desire to learn more and that and building. And I think part of creating that safe space within the organization is identifying that all of us, that all of us within the organization are curious.

And I think going and rather than even needing to say racial equity, by going and grounding ourselves in these core shared values, it started to shift the conversation around how we bring inclusivity into our grantmaking, how we bring empathy into our communications with our members, and how we cultivate curiosity and empathy within our members, even in our social events.

So starting with and grounding ourselves and our values is what the trainers who did the implicit bias training, they trained on these values. So rather than going in and saying like, we all have bias, let’s talk about it instead, they framed it under, we’re learning about this because these are values that Austin members share.

And we are grounded in these values, and that is why when we’re looking at grants, this is why we’re taking this approach. Thank you.

Lisa McGill: So I would offer two things. I think it is good to have some type of facilitated process, and it doesn’t have to be from a consultant, but I do think you need to go into a brave space, a shared space to think through what those values are and that sort of goes to what your common language is.

The one caveat I would give is that it may not be the executive director who needs to facilitate there. Because there may be a power dynamic. Maybe where someone in the room may not say anything because they think that whoever is on the executive team is going to decide what the values are.

The other thing I would offer is that, again, do not necessarily reinvent the wheel. There are so many examples out there of people who have gone through painstaking experiences to come up with values and principles. Collect some of those, figure out where you are situated, collect some of these options, and then go through them and figure out what works for you and what doesn’t work for you.

Sort of use them as a template so that you can take advantage of some of the work that folks have done.

Natasha Harrison: Thank you for that. I appreciate you, Christina and Lisa, just lifting, one power, but then also bringing people along the journey to help you define that is very important in that, in that process of really asking for help to find that, to create that space.

So, I appreciate that. And, so Lisa, you, you mentioned power and just the understanding of power dynamics. So we are, I’m a member of a giving circle. We grant out into the community, right? That is a semblance of power, right? And I’m working with these grantees, and these grantees are working with this community.

So there are these levels of power dynamics and even power dynamics in my giving circle from the founder to the treasurer, to the secretary, like all of that. And so, how do you begin a conversation about power and power dynamics? How, what does that feel like? What, how do we start that?

Lisa McGill: You know, one of the things that I’ve seen work is just people who have power admitting they have power and what the power dynamics are. You know, that helps a lot. Like, okay, at least you’re being honest with me, right? Then we can have a conversation because I know how I fit within this space and I’m going to challenge that power.

But it’s hard to sort of challenge it if the person who has it treats me as if it is nonexistent, you’re wrong, you’re reading into this. So I think that that’s a huge piece of it. But you have to act on knowing that you have that power. So whether it’s through, okay, I’m going to be a decent ally, or if I know that when we flip charts, we typically have the young woman who’s 23 do the charting.

We’re not going to let that happen. We’re going to have the older person who’s senior do the charting. Like really just be intentional and step back and realize what you’re doing. I mean, those are easy steps to get started.

Natasha Harrison: Thank you. Christina, anything to add, some nuggets for us?

Christina Gorczynski: I think it is, I think acknowledging and naming power and I, our board, and our organization right now are having a deeper conversation about power and balance than we were two years ago when I joined the organization. So I’d say it’s, it’s naming it. I think also it came from, and I know Becky Austin from Impact Austin, she’s the chair of grant-making and strategic partnerships and was essential in this process.

And she’s chiming in on the chat quite a bit, so, yay, Becky. Becky will tell you that the one is, like, the most pointed feedback we got was during the grant, during the Social Innovation Grant pitch presentation, where the Innocence Initiative was presenting that the community partners gave Impact Austin’s grant reviewers some really direct feedback about the racial makeup of the committee.

It was just very direct about, we were surprised. Impact Austin posted this about this grant and we’re just really straight up name the power dynamic, name the issue, like that we saw that people, that there weren’t women of color, on the committee. And that the just blunt feedback about the process being challenging and also, and so I think the committee, they created this. I think it was a good space to have that conversation, that the committee heard directly from community partners saying, we’re women of color, we lead organizations in Austin and we are having a really hard time getting our foot in the door for funding at all.

So we are pretty surprised that all of you, 500 ladies of Impact Austin, are as interested as you are in this issue. And we’re appreciative. Help us, get work with us, let’s work together, but at the same time, call it out. Yeah. So I think we got a lot.

Natasha Harrison: That’s it’s so interesting. You know, I show up as a Black woman in philanthropy and working with community-led groups who are in a predominantly Black community, it’s always very weird for them to now be a decider of money, right? Really acknowledging, I can decide. So that’s also something even in people of color-led giving circles. Also, think about your relationship with power, and your relationship with money, because it shows up in different ways for folks, and even honestly, as a Black person, what shows up in my body is this understanding and perspective of enslavement and money and the economics of it all of our society.

And so that was very hard for me for a while, that I had to be reflective about, about making decisions in my community, like that felt good, but I’m making decisions for my community, right?

Just the weight of that, and the understanding of that. So it can show up in a variety of ways for people. So just understand that even if it’s diverse, even in a diverse giving circle, it’s going to show up. And, that conversation is very important like, how do we define power? Who has it and how are we going to navigate it with the roles and responsibilities that we all have as leaders?

So I do appreciate that and just want to bring that forward, that it’s still a real thing. It’s not just a white thing, right? You know, how we think about that. Like that there is some reflection, and grappling with that, that’s very important for all of us. And again, showing up as human beings. We need to show up as human beings.

The last question I want us to explore is really to gain buy-in. Like, so, hey, let’s talk about racial equity, right? And so in our giving circles, and so, just really feeling in the energy that there may be a point where you have to really, get people to buy into this notion that we need to embed racial equity in our culture and the way that we do things.

So how does one do that? How do we get buy-in from our fellow circle members in this process?

Lisa McGill: So, Christina, you’re probably the better person to answer this. I’ll give it a try. But honestly, typically when I work with folks, they know what they get when I come in, right? So they sort of know that there’s going to be a conversation around racial equity.

I’m not going to leave it outside. But if I were putting on my professional hat, I would say one of the ways to get people to really think about it is to present them with some data. So, I’m not a data wonk, right? But when you look at any outcome or indicator in terms of community health and wellbeing, housing, education, name it.

There’s always something that happens structurally as it relates to race, where people are in certain circumstances. And so when you start presenting them with that information, especially based on a community, people start to get it. Especially if you have those business-minded folks who are part of your giving circle who may not conceptualize it, they tend to get the data, especially data attached to a story.

So that’s my professional hat, but the other hand is like, we’re supposed to do this.

Christina Gorczynski: It helped with getting some buy-in. It helped to have information like data to go to and say, for example, doing buy-in about doing intentional recruiting of, from diverse communities for Impact Austin itself, it has helped for me to say more clearly that our organization does not reflect the racial diversity of our community.

Now that we have done a baseline study of our membership, that’s our organization. It was too easy I think for folks to say Impact Austin is a homogenous organization. It’s exclusively white women. Like people said, it’s all white women. And I went in and just said, well, I know that can’t be true.

Like, that’s not, it’s not a hundred percent true. That’s not all. So let’s really find the folks within our organization ourselves. By saying we’re all white, we’re erasing quite a few members that we do have. So let’s start there. So let’s actually get the information and do some research on age and race, within our organization.

The other piece about buy-in for me is that I have to meet people where they are on their journey and be so grateful that people meet me where I am on my journey. And so I think as far as buy-in goes, I had to go out of my way to say how much I too had to learn when I was talking to some of my members. I would say I would meet them where they were, but expressing that I too had to learn what it was we were learning then. It wasn’t that I just like woke up one day and had I had this understanding that we needed to center racial equity in our grantmaking, that I too had to come to this realization. So I think getting buy-in also means meeting people where they are and acknowledging, for me anyway, acknowledging my own process.

I think that was helpful to get some of our board members and some of our longtime members invested. I think I also went to folks and got allies within our organization who were longtime Impact Austin members, leaders, and got buy-in from the brass tops to help me spread the word with some of the members who weren’t as directly involved in our grant making.

So some of our members who had, were really well respected within the organization, going to them and saying, this is something we really need to take seriously. Where are you on these issues? Where are you wanting to rthink and shake up the way we’re doing our grant making?

And, I found a few folks I could get buy-in and then I encouraged them and they kinda went around to their friends and brought more people along.

Lisa McGill: I just want to add one additional thing about the buy-in. if you have a really good leader, they’re sort of getting buy-in, but they’re also pushing people at the same time, and telling people that this is something that even if it’s phased, we need to get to. It is a leadership quality to be able to do what you were saying around figuring out who your allies are, having quite frankly offline conversations with them, letting them start to be ambassadors and then you start to get some momentum around it. That’s a leadership skill.

For the rest of the session, Natasha, Lisa, and Christina fielded questions from the audience.