Natasha Harrison, CommunityBuild Ventures [Starting at 04:11]: Hi. Thank you so much, Marsha. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I also want to give appreciation to Sara for lifting Breonna Taylor. All day today I have been taking deep breaths and affirming that love is all around me and that I am loved. And affirming this for my son and my daughter. So thank you so much, Sara, for lifting that as, right now, I and two other,  esteemed Black women are going to have a conversation today.

So, thank you so much, Sara. And so I want to first start with what we have learned so far, from the first webinar, which centered on culture as well as the opening for the very first community  forum that we did together.

We learned a lot about how we are embedding racial equity. And so some of the things that we heard is that folks are doing some internal and external language and visuals with taglines, creating statements, really thinking about shared beliefs, defining values, auditing their culture.

Thinking about leadership and governance, implementing DEI committees, and defining a study group to learn, and bring awareness. And then also some partnership processes, with grantees. Talking with grantees about how they can improve their grant-making process, centering race in the application and grant-making. Think about grant-making led by Black and brown people.

What we heard loud and clear from folks on how they want to improve, really centered on leadership and governance. So a lot was said about how we can learn then do, and then how we can focus, on DEI, racial equity, and racial justice as part of the DNA of our organization.

And then values and shared beliefs were secondary to just thinking about defining non-white supremacist ways of working together and working. And then the last thing that we heard loud and clear is that a lot of people want to engage with more diverse membership in their giving circles or network.

I would encourage everyone, there’s a blue dot at the bottom of the presentation to go to the community forum where there is loads of wonderful information and resources, as you begin to improve your culture. Particularly, especially around the leadership and governance piece.

So definitely check it out, I want to encourage you, but just wanted to lift how, how what we’re doing and what we want to improve. And also just encourage you to ask questions in the forum.  There are, there are all of us that’s in the forum, folks on the call as well that can answer your questions. So just want to lift that, that’s what we’ve learned about how you all are embedding and improving.

And now, I’m excited to bring my comrades, my sisters, into this space. Tracey Greene-Washington and Joy Webb. Their bios will be in the chat. You can check out their bios. And so I just want to bring them into space. Hello, Tracey. Hello, Joy.

Tracey Greene-Washington, Indigo Innovation Group & CoThinkk: Hello. Glad to be here with everyone.

Joy Webb, Circle Of Joy: I’m very glad to be here!

Natasha Harrison: I’m excited because we get to share some work that we did together under a grant from Philanthropy Together. But I do want to highlight something that we also saw in the feedback from the community forums is talking about first racial equity versus DEI.

And so we heard a lot, what we also heard, but then also saw notes from the first forum around culture. This is a blending of racial equity and DEI. And so we want to provide the difference so that it’s clear.

Racial equity is really about outcome and process. It’s about intention. It is an action. It’s a verb. It is a way of how can we create an outcome where race no longer determines someone’s socioeconomic outcome? Everyone has all the support services that they need to thrive no matter where they live. So place also is not a factor.

So, racial equity is a verb, and DEI a state, right? It’s a state. As a result of racial equity, yes, you will have more inclusiveness, you will have more diversity, you’ll have equity, right? But diversity is an output, like just representation. How many Black people, how many Asian people that hopefully are representative of the community that you have in your giving circle or network, right?

Then equity is the equality of opportunity and fairness and access, right? It’s just the state, right? And inclusion is a culture of belonging to all people. So we just wanted to make those distinctions and we are focused entirely on the racial equity side of the learning, the analysis, the movement, the outcome, and the process of thinking through that.

So it’s an action, it’s a verb. Tracey or Joy, do you have anything to add to that?

Tracey Greene-Washington: Yeah, I just wanted to say, I love this slide and I’m glad that we have it up because oftentimes there’s confusion about what DEI is versus talking about racial equity, and the reality is that you can’t get to DEI unless you’re really explicit about doing the work around racial equity. And in doing racial equity, it is being explicit about who is impacted. It’s about being able to aggregate the data to say who is disproportionately impacted from an equitable perspective, and then being able to intentionally decide how you’re going to interrupt and reimagine structural change in service to supporting grant-making and equitable outcomes in our communities across the country.

Natasha Harrison: Thank you so much, Tracey. Joy, anything else to add?

Joy Webb: I just wanted to add that, you know, a lot of times people get confused and I like that it’s here in black and white so that if there is anything that you are questioning, you can see it right here.  I think that the words get used interchangeably, especially in today’s climate. So I am excited to be able to decipher and be able to speak to them intentionally.

Natasha Harrison: Thank you. Thank you so much. And then, again, I want to lift another thing that was also glaring that we heard a lot from you all is around the learning and then doing,   and so I’ll bring Tracey in, who brought up a beautiful resource and guide.

I would call her an oracle! Ms. Barbara Love. And so turn over to Tracey too, to share her understanding of learning and doing.

Tracey Greene-Washington: So, thank you so much, Natasha. One of the things that kept coming up as Natasha was preparing and preparing us to have this conversation with you and thinking about the previous webinar was experience and the data that came out of it. And there are a couple of things that are embedded in the things that Natasha talked about: of this struggle, this principle struggle about, where do you start this work? And then being explicit versus implicit about racial equity.

And I think the last part is thinking explicitly about culture and what it means to create a racial equity culture within your grant-making and your giving circle as you move forward. And as we begin to unpack that as a group, one of the things that we wanted to highlight in this work is this understanding that to facilitate structural change, you have to be willing to go through this transformational process, and to interrupt and reimagine systems in order to find a center of racial equity.

There is this four-prong process that Barbara Love talks about that’s critical to your work going forward. The first one is that often when something happens, we have this built awareness, this new awareness, and we notice that something new is happening.

Something’s not quite right. But sometimes in this process of really moving towards structural change, we did want to move to action. Unfortunately, if we try to move to action before we are doing this work, we inadvertently perpetuate further inequities and trauma and harm and recreate the very system that we decided we wanted to interrupt.

And so in her continuum, she talks about moving from this place of acknowledgment and noticing when something is not quite right, but resisting the urge to move to action by doing this really deep analysis and deep thinking about the work as we move forward. And then moving to action, which is one of the items that’s listed, that’s not listed here that we’ll update in the slides as we move forward.

If you’re able to stay in this space of noticing, doing a deep analysis of the understanding of why this is happening, you’ll have the ability to move to strategic action that enables you to be a true ally and have accountability not only to your circle members but to the community that you’re centering in this work.

As you move forward, it will create new opportunities for you to partner, to collaborate, to build new networks and services to a broader movement to support structural change, and to be explicit about a racial equity agenda moving forward.

So I want to invite Joy into the conversation to either give additional thoughts relative to this slide or to talk about our thinking relative to the three pieces that we think are critical to support you as a giving circle in this work as we move forward.

Joy Webb: I definitely love Barbara Love. She is amazing. She has some great, great writings and I hope that all of you all will look more into her writings and her theory of change.

We did a grant earlier this year as we spoke about re-centering your giving circle on racial equity centered grant-making. We want to go through the three steps that we enjoyed.

We think that we should lift as you all think about grantmaking, and how it is impacted, how the racial equity is centered when you are grant-making, so you are intentional and purposeful in your grant-making. Thanks. So the first thing, and this, Natasha and Tracey are going to join me because you know, this was a group effort.

So we want to make sure that you examine the calls. We want you to make sure you look at your community. You clearly define what impact you want to make in the community.  and that includes some research. You have to do the work. And in doing the work, it means talking to the community.

It means examining what causes it needs to be changed or you see that needs to be changed. Maybe you cannot make a decisive effort, but the community knows what the community needs. And so when you look at it, you can envision how it would look different if you were able to do some work. And then what if you were not able to do the work, what would,how would you halt this community by not doing the things that you know you should do?

I’m going to open it to Tracey and Natasha before we go to the next one. When we examine, as we talk a little bit more about examining the causes in the community for grantmaking.

Tracey Greene-Washington: Thank you, Joy. Our giving circle co-theme was a very important part of our work. We spent a whole year looking at community issues, thinking about the type of culture that we wanted to build, where we were centering, and being explicit about racial equity in our work.

And we decided, instead of identifying specific issues, we wanted to identify specific systems that we felt like we wanted to interrupt in our work. And so for our work, we identified economic opportunity, education, health, and leadership development. We understood if we were able to identify and be able to support and build an ecosystem that changed our grant-making, that focused on and drilled down into those areas, that we have the opportunity to be explicit about how we would transform and shift those issues or those inequities in our community as we move forward.

Joy Webb: Mm-hmm. Thank you for that. Thank you. Natasha, do you want to add anything?

Natasha Harrison: No, that was perfect.

Joy Webb: As Tracey talks about doing the work, it’s really important because you cannot skip that first step. If you skip that first step and you move too quickly, you’ll find yourself going back, going back and reexamining this over and over and over again.

So we are very intentional when we say examine the causes. Do the homework, research.

Tracey Greene-Washington: But I will add though, Joy, it’s not necessarily a bad thing to go back. One of the things we talked about in our resource guide that we distributed to everyone, is that this work is very iterative and it’s not linear.

And so your ability to kind of toggle and go back and learn, really taking on this emergent process, is going to be critical as you move forward. I think that the thing that you want to be cognitive of, is that you’re being clear about who is impacted, why you’re doing the work, what are the historical practices and policies that continue to keep those issues entrenched in your community?

And as the context of community is changing, you’re continuing to examine that and service to continue to expand and evolve your giving circle sphere of influence that has an impact in your community.

Joy Webb: That’s a great point, and that goes right into engagement. Being engaged with your community. Be explicit about your statement of racial equity. So, you have to be very clear on what you are, what you’re saying, and what you’re doing. Talk to your grantees. That communication is definitely necessary, and if you don’t have that communication, things might get lost. It might get shuffled, and also they may not feel that you’re really a partner that you say you are.

So you want to make sure that you are supporting and engaging in the fact that you’ve decided to give this grant. You know, make sure that you continue to stay engaged with them as they continue to do the work or you do the work with them.

You all partner and do the work together, or you find new ways to make things happen for the community with the partners that you all have in your grant-making processes. And defining the roles of the BIPOC in the process. Who, how is this going to be engaged? How are you going to uplift this particular grantee and what will you do? What will they do? How will you all work together?

Natasha Harrison: I want to emphasize, what’s coming up for me is this process of racial equity. Right?  And feeling into the fact that some of the networks and giving circles on the call may be all white, right?

And so you’re thinking about, so how do we build this with Black, indigenous, and people of color? You may have some people there but just think about it. Really centering that first step, examining the causes and moving forward and not allowing it as you move forward. And you are intentional and being explicit.

Black, indigenous, and people of color. We have, I have seen in community-led grant making with all white folks in the fund, in the giving circle. Once the community sees it, they want to be a part of it and begin to lead alongside of these donors. So it is possible for you as a white person to begin the process of engagement, and thinking about, here’s the issue. Here’s what we know in terms of the inequities, and how we should shape our grant-making and begin the process.

So I would say don’t let that be the barrier to stop you, you can move forward. We have all learned -isms that we are learning through and so I just want to put that out there, Tracey.

Tracey Greene-Washington: The only thing I would add is in talking about engagement, oftentimes we think about engagement as external to our giving circle, when in fact engagement is both internal and external.

And so really being able to figure out from an internal perspective, how do y’all center that? And be clear about racial equity in terms of who is involved, who is a part of decision making, how are we giving folks and ensuring that folks have a voice in the process? Even examining the process from the beginning and developing it from the beginning where we baked in equity from the beginning is a critical part of this work.

I remember when we were doing the work with CoThinkk in the beginning to think about what does engagement look like for us? One of the things that we were very clear about when defining engagement, engagement is about listening to, working with, and learning from. And we have kept that front and center in terms of how we did our work going forward.

And in doing that, who are we talking about? Who are we listening to? Naming that explicitly and CoThinkk we are saying explicitly African-American and Latinx communities. Who are we working with? African-American and Latinx communities. Who are we learning from? African-American and Latinx communities.

Being that explicit is part of centering racial equity in your work. And I think for us, that’s been very valuable, particularly as we think we’ve thought about our grant-making process. We’ve used a very creative process of using video applications as a way to mitigate any barriers to folks applying for our grants.

But on top of that, as a part of our grant-making process, even though we have allies at the table and allies meaning institutional partners, folks that are not of color, folks who represent other diverse sectors at our table, along with African-American and Latinx leaders, there is a cohort of leaders that are only leaders of color who make the final decision making relative to our grant-making process.

That doesn’t mean that everyone doesn’t participate, but the final decision is held, advocated, and solidified by an only people of color caucus as we move forward.

Joy Webb: Thank you very much. And then as Tracey says about the engagement, it also is being unapologetic about how you feel and how you want to proceed. You know, I don’t want you all to feel as though there’s something wrong about being explicit, about how you feel about racial equity, and how you’re going to proceed with your grantees. You’re being intentional. And that is something that is very important, especially at this time.

Tracey Greene-Washington: Can I say one more thing, Joy?

Joy Webb: You can! I appreciate it.

Tracey Greene-Washington: One of the things I just want to highlight to Joy’s point is that there may be some trepidation about people leading with a racial equity lens in terms of your giving circle and who you may be perceived that you’re leaving out or who may no longer be your partners.

I remember when CoThinkk first started and people were saying, well, I can’t believe you’re being real explicit, that this is a giving circle led by people governing, in particular, African-American and Latinx leaders. Are you afraid that it’s going to alienate people?

My response to those individuals is, if we are being explicit about who is most impacted, and we’re positioning them based upon values and best practices around racial equity to be the leaders of this work, what is your discomfort around that? And if you have discomfort, how do you lean into that? And that this may not be the space that you want to be in to be able to do the work.

And we understand if you have to be our board of partners and toggle out of the space, but we’re really clear that this space has to be held in this way to really facilitate the type of transformational change that we need for our community.

Natasha Harrison: Yes. Yes. And that’s so important. You’re holding space for this. We all have to hold space. Black people, Black, indigenous, people of color, and white people. We got to hold the space. Thank you so much for that, Tracey. That resonated so much with me.

Joy Webb: Thank you. Okay, I think we can go to the next slide because we could talk about that forever. We can talk about that forever. The next thing is the proposal development and decision-making process.

So when you’re thinking about it, recentering your giving circle for racial equity in your grant-making process, what is the support that you’re going to do?

You know, how are we going to have that? We’re going to do multi-year, we’re going to do operations, we’re going to do part of a time, talent, treasure, a situation where maybe it’s more of a talent that is given to the organization. Then also defining the quality and the merit. You know, what is the value? What’s the value added? And define a decision-making process with the community.

We don’t want you to be in a bubble and think you know everything. We want you to be intentional about listening to your community, and that might mean that you bring some people into the community that are not part of your circle to hear their voices.

You might need to have that as a reference. You definitely need to listen to the organizations that you’re looking at for grant-making, but you know, maybe some outside resources that are part of the community here, can also engage and help you with that proposal development and decision-making process because, we know what we know, but what we don’t know are the things that we can learn.

As a learning practice, it makes sense for the giving circle to learn from the community because once again, the community knows what the community needs.

Yeah. I’m going to let Natasha and Tracey add to this.

Natasha Harrison: The first thing that comes up for me as someone who worked at a foundation and started a giving circle, a lot of my job, I realized the energy was around that we don’t trust people.

Right? So a lot of, I mean, at the core of what people ask for, it’s about trust, and even for small amounts of money. Sometimes we ask the most outrageous things. And so what does it look like if we trust the people that are coming to us, who are already doing the work, who maybe are not or have not started a project, but are very committed to their community?

What does it look like if I center trust? What questions would I ask? What would I think of as a quality or merit base? Right. And maybe not even those words, but just lets us know that they are rooted, in what we have explicitly said. They’re rooted or they’re trying to get there, and maybe we can help them, but I think that’s the biggest thing I felt the most. Most of my time was reviewing things that I didn’t even understand. Financial documents. I don’t have a degree in accounting. I don’t know, but we ask those things as if people don’t know how to manage money, and especially in Black, indigenous, and people of color, that they don’t know what to do with their money, hence why they are in the situation they’re in. That’s the mentality we have to reprogram.

Tracey Greene-Washington: Natasha, I loved your thoughts of talking about trust. And talking about trust-based philanthropy and understanding what those principles and practices mean. How do we center that?

And not only that, how do we walk in the way that is aligned with that? I wanted to speak to this too in terms of, around the proposal development and decision making, the types of support that, as examples of things that you can do as well, you also can create training, where you get folks prepared to apply for your application.

In CoThinkk, we have video application training that we utilize to be able to support applicants who want to apply for our work. And in the training we not only give information, but we also support folks to complete their video through the process as well. And the last piece I really wanted to focus on is because sometimes we talk about the proposal process being external, but it’s also an internal process of your giving circle’s members getting ready as well.

A great example, and I’m using CoThinkk a lot because that’s just the work that we are involved in, is that we have a three-month process that we’re actually in the middle of now, of getting CoThinkk members ready to even understand why the process is important, what they need to be doing, what they need not to be doing.

How do they interrupt these biases and assumptions in their mind as they’re watching and preparing to look at the applications and the videos? And then, thinking really clearly about what additional ways they want to use their time, talent, and treasure to support applicants as we move forward, as partners, not as grantees, but as partners in this work as we move forward.

Joy Webb: I definitely agree. And since you plug CoThinkk, I have to plug Circle of Joy. One thing that we do is we lead with our treasure and follow with our time and talent. One of the things about trust is knowing and understanding what is happening. What we do is by partnering with them, we’re in the trenches with them.

So we want to be there. We want you to know, hey, we’re here for you. What do you need us to do? We’ve already discussed it. Let’s go and do it. Don’t just talk about it. Be about it. You’ve been doing the work, we’ve seen you doing the work. Let us help you and amplify you as you continue to do the work. So that’s in the process of figuring out what your proposal process will be and how you’ll make decisions if you know you’re going to do the work.

That also helps alleviate some of the trust factors because you’re going to be there. It’s going to be that, not instant gratification, but you’ll be there to know that the work is being done because you’re doing it too. So that’s another way of looking at it.

Natasha Harrison: Yeah. And I, and as a member of Circle of Joy also, I love the fact that we just say, “Here’s your check.” Like, there’s no application. Here you go. You know, I just absolutely love that. That is definitely some powerful transformative work that is just, just awesome. “Oh, I don’t have to what?” And people and you are amazed how many organizations don’t even think that we are for real. Because they go through so many hoops.

Joy Webb: Well, I know we have to keep moving. So I’m going to go with grantee support, and we talk about being intentional about your reporting requirements, and what is needed. And offer tools and support for the grantees to center their racial equity.

And when we talk about reporting, we kind of talk about that with proposals. You know, people jump through a lot of hoops, especially brown and Black organizations, to get little money. For the most part, if I think about our communities and my ancestors, they’ve made a way out of nothing.

So they can make a dollar and build a house and feed the community and go to church and still tithe. So it is almost insensitive for you to ask me, or it could make me feel like you don’t, once again, a trust thing. If I have $500, I could imagine what could be done with that or $10,000.

And so they’ve been able to budget and factor these things in with nothing. With resources, they would be able to amplify that and make that so much more. But you know, a lot of times the reporting may not be there because they’re doing the work. You know, they may not have an accountant on staff and they may not have a fancy grant writer and operations and development officers that can go and find these grants online, because they’re doing the work and they’re trying to service the community.

So, I would think about that when you are looking at these organizations.

Tracey Greene-Washington: I would just add, too, I would even question as you’re talking about centering racial equity, do you even need a reporting mechanism? For us at CoThinkk, we don’t do a reporting mechanism.

What we do is go out and see our grantees once a year, and it’s a thank-you visit. It’s a thank you visit in terms of, thank you for inviting us into your work. How can we continue to support your work as we move forward? We do a survey because we do an evaluation of the work as a whole for our region and how the work is being transformed.

We use this participatory process called ripple effect mapping as a means to capture data to be able to document the type of impact that is happening through our seed investment in regions. But I think you should question why we need reporting, and if it’s just a little bit of money, is that overburdening someone? Is that really practicing trust philanthropy, in terms of supporting our communities as we move forward?

And I think the other thing I want to speak to around the tools and supports for grantees, one of the new things that we’re doing with CoThinkk is that this year we are going to provide coaching support not only to all of our awardees of grants, but also whoever applied for a grant.

So they will have access to at least six hours of coaching and leadership coaching to support them to be bold around their work and have this place and this space for them to do their work. And so I would just encourage everyone that’s on this call and this conversation in this community to think very creatively outside of the box of how we can support communities to do the work that they already know needs to happen in communities.

Joy Webb: I definitely agree. Another thing is, one of the things that we’ve been able to do in Atlanta with our giving circle is, literally because we’ve been doing this work for over a decade now, we’ve had several grantees that may cross each other’s paths or maybe doing something in the same light with the youth, because that’s our focus area.

And so we’ve been able to offer almost like a mentor in the same field, in the same work.  Maybe both have gotten grants from us before. You can have someone who’s a little older, similar to what we do in our own giving circle network. We can leverage the relationships that we have, so we’re able to connect the dots and connect different organizations where they can work together.

That can be a tool and support for the grantees and the partnerships that you continue to make as you are very intentional about the work that you’re doing.

Natasha Harrison: Yeah, and I will say we’re doing community-led work, also thinking of my community building venture side, we all provide an electronic folder for people so they can organize.

We also do 30-minute check-ins to go over just to check in kind of a group coaching of like, “Hey, what’s pressing?” We extend it to an hour just as a monthly check-in with all grantees, to provide support. We provide templates for them, like real templates for anything beyond the grant of what they may need, especially of telling their story.

We also, in another instance, in another opportunity we were part of, we had them just send in an audio or video of their story and they’ll let that be it.

Tracey Greene-Washington: Can I add one more thing? I saw the note about the time check, and I think one of the things as we move into the Q&A that I want to leave folks understanding is that the work that we are talking about, Natasha’s talking about, Joy is talking about, and in terms of centering racial equity, is definitely explicit examples, but it’s also shifting people of color and centering people of color to see themselves as philanthropists as well.

And this space is created as an opportunity to have hard conversations. It’s space to grapple with these issues in communities, and in addition to our grantmaking, allow you to support strategic opportunities that can be leveraged going forward.

The remainder of the session went to a comprehensive Q&A with Natasha, Joy, and Tracey. Questions included:

• Can you expand on the definition of DEI vs. racial equity, especially in a giving circle composed mostly of white members? 

• What does it mean to be an ally? What am I prepared to do differently to step in as an ally, not only in this moment but as part of this movement going forward?

• Should you invite EDs of your grantees to serve on your board? What are the pros, cons, and watch-outs for that? 

• How do we get around the issue of members who give money, but then include people who may not be members to help spend it? 

Natasha Harrison: The last thing, we do have a set of questions to think about, just suggested assignments for you to think about the steps that we went through, and they are all in question form for you to be intentional and be thoughtful for each question.

The self-assessment questions were divided into categories as follows: 

Examining the Causes:

• What factors may be producing and perpetuating racial inequities associated with our issue?

• What will be our impact?

Engagement: 

• How will we get the word out to the targeted community? 

• What is our explicit message on racial equity? 

Funding Opportunities: 

• What type of support will you offer, i.e. operations, program, capacity building, research, multi-year and/or capital gift? 

• What is your definition of a “quality” racial equity centered proposal? With this in mind, what are the components of the request for proposal? 

Grantee Selection & Support:

• What is our decision-making process? Keep in mind your definition of a “quality” racial equity proposal. 

• What are our grantee reporting requirements?

• What is the support for grantee to center racial equity? 

Natasha Harrison: And with that, I want to first say thank you so much to my sisters, Joy and Tracey, and thank you so much. I love this conversation. I appreciate it so much. Good stuff. And so much to talk about. I’ll turn it over to Marsha.

Marsha Morgan: All right. So, as we prepare to wrap up, I know we had some questions to come through and so I think that one of the best things we can do is keep those questions going, and the conversation going by using our forum. So, we will address some of those questions there.

We all love giving circles, otherwise, we would not be a part of this community of practice. And so we want to share this love with others. And so Sara, I’ll have you close us out.