Deborah Harris, D.Y. Harris Consulting Inc. [Starting at 03:23]: Thank you so much. Thank you Kelsey, and welcome everyone. I’m so excited to be doing this webinar with Philanthropy Together and seeing so many new faces.

When I heard about the concept of giving circles, it was fairly new to me, but  from what Kelsey was explaining, it’s very exciting as well because it’s putting a new spin or a different lens on how philanthropy can change systematically,  for the better. That really includes the community voice, and strategizes with the community.

And so it’s really exciting. A lot of my work these days talks about alternative giving methods, like moving away from harmful constructs that have been built through philanthropy to really get down to the notes and nuts and bolts of what’s needed now in philanthropy. And so just learning more about the giving circles has been really awesome.

And so today I’m coming from you from the lens of an organizer of a coach, of a mentor, a leadership development coach that has worked both here in the States and internationally. And so the work I have done can be applied to your giving circles because it’s all about people it’s about people over product where we want to actually see change actually happen, where we’re not just about writing a check, but we’re actually about seeing what happens and seeing that investment grow and actually including people in building power within themselves and seeing that manifests outside of themselves.

So today’s agenda, and I want you all to know right now, I love conversations. Like, I love when people interact. I want to hear from you. I want to know what you’re thinking. I want you to hear what you’re thinking because a lot of times when we say things out loud, we get a check in ourselves like, oh wait, I didn’t know that’s how I really felt about a thing. And then our community can learn from one another.

So feel free to either popcorn your ideas in the chat or speak out loud when we have open discussions about things. Definitely interact with me here. But today’s agenda: It’s about outreach, the movement versus the moment and knowing the difference, which is really, really, really important.

Accomplishing the mission through adversity. Adversity is going to always happen. But one thing for sure that I’ve learned, you don’t fall into nonprofit work by accident. It’s kind of like at some point you make a judgment call that you’re going to give your life to helping other people. And so once you understand your internal mission, your internal mission must move on despite whatever is happening, because you understand that what you have to give to marginalized communities and needs can’t stop just because it’s raining, just because it’s snowing. How do you move through those circumstances where it looks like, “Oh, now I gotta stop”?

We’re also going to talk about outreach. What does it mean to have transactional outreach versus transformational outreach? And also, we’re going to take a look at some of the work I did through 2020, that a lot of people were bewildered by, but excited about because they didn’t understand how I got so much work done during the height of the pandemic.

Also, we’re going to discuss what it looks like to build your own model of transformation inside of your giving circles.

So the moment versus the movement and knowing the difference in organizing community outreach and in fundraising, it’s important to understand the type of impact you want to have and how to sustain it for years and generations to come. And this is something that I asked my mentees. This is something that I’m currently working on with Black women in Illinois before we actually can gain power and manifest our power appropriately and our positions of influence.

We actually gotta know why we’re there. Why did we pick it up and dismantle it? Why did we choose this position? Why did we choose this giving circle? Why do we choose this outlet to be? How we give back, how we shift culture, how we shift language, how we shift helping marginalized communities. So getting grounded and understanding the type of impact you want to have is really important to then understand and have foresight into where you want to go.

So that’s super important. What marginalized communities need are people that understand that liberation is a long game. We didn’t get to this mess overnight. We’re not going to get out of it overnight. So coming to the table with those cornerstone nuts and bolts are really important. Temporary bandaid solutions should always be evaluated and measured against the big picture.

Now I put that in there talking about temporary bandaid solutions. Because of this landscape of philanthropy, of organizing, of social justice, of helping marginalized communities, there’s always moments of storm. There’s always moments of rapid response. You have to be a chameleon. So I get it that sometimes you just gotta slap some resin on there, or a bandaid or some duct tape to make sure it doesn’t fall apart in the meantime while you actually wait to go to Lowe’s to get the parts that you need.

I get that. But we must also be aware that that temporary solution isn’t going to help us really cross the finish line in getting marginalized communities what they really need. And so as you’re developing or moving through or growing your giving circles, like having a really clear understanding of what your tool belt needs to be filled with is really, really important to make sure that you’re not just there for a snapshot, but you understand how you contribute to the big picture when it comes to giving.

When organizing or doing community outreach or fundraising, and this is something Kelsey said that you all have been learning about already getting grounded in your why. So like I said earlier, why did you decide to start a giving circle? Why are you determining why it needs to grow?

So what is your reason for choosing the community you want to give to and for how long? So getting grounded in this definitely helps you move even when you’re faced with adversity. Like I said, even when it’s snowing, even when it’s raining, even when the house is on fire because you’re grounded in why you do this work, then your giving circle is grounded in why you do this work.

And because of that, you will always find a new way to move. There won’t be anything that can stop you and making sure that your relationship to marginalized communities and your relationship to giving doesn’t stop even though it seems like everything should be telling you to.

And so we’re going to talk about that. How do you accomplish the mission of your giving circle during adversity?  We saw a lot of this during 2020. A lot of us were used to being outside. A lot of us were used to meeting, possibly meeting with the communities that we’ve decided to give to, that we’ve decided to do outreach to.

And so I wanted to talk to you about how the work happened here in Chicago with my organization. I ran both a C3 and a C4. So the C3 is your basic nonprofit organization, whatever. We had programs to support housing, education, police reform, things like that. We also had a C4 that worked mainly on issue campaigns and elections, political education, civic education and things like that.

But once the pandemic hit, a lot of people shut down a lot of foundations even, well, how are the organizations going to get the work done? And so I had to quickly pivot and look at our mission as an organization and say, how do we still get the work done? Not just because I need to fill out a grant report, but because communities on the south and west side depended on me.

Depending on my organization to meet with them, to teach them, to give to them, to include them in whatever solutions we were trying to come up with, to support moving housing agendas forward, education agendas forward. And so I had to get crafty, super crafty. And so we’re going to talk about what it looks like to diversify your lens of execution as a giving circle.

Some of you may already have strategic plans, some of you may not. Some of you may want to get more creative with how you diversify your partnerships to increase your giving or to have more, diverse voices and how giving should be structured. Then we’re going to look at how we brought in the community, how Action Now did it, and how that lended us to being able to reach a large part of Cook County during the height of the pandemic.

So knowing the difference, transactional outreach, donor engagement and donor-centric, no development of community leaders. Honestly, to be quite honest, that has been the norm in organizing for a long time, and that’s something that I was not taught. I was brought up in organizing on the west coast in Las Vegas, and when I started there, we were all about knocking on people’s doors and spending time with them year round.

Not just when it was for an issue campaign, not just when we needed a vote, not just when we needed them to show up for a march, but we engaged with them on a regular basis. And so transactional outreach for a long time in organizing and even in foundational work and philanthropy was, I’m going to give you this check and you’re going to deliver these metrics.

When you look at the history of philanthropy, they don’t give people that are from historically impacted communities space to say, this is how we actually need help, or these are the areas that we can actually utilize these funds. And it’s very, “I’m going to tell you to do this” and “this is what I need from you.”

And so it’s like when I was a child and it was like, “You’re supposed to be seen at the dinner table and not heard. I give you food, you eat it, and you go to bed. You’re not allowed to tell me that you don’t like this or it upset your stomach.” And so generally speaking, philanthropy and organizing had been operating in that way where we were not letting in the people that were most impacted by social injustices to the table.

And so it was really about keeping power all in one place and not really spreading it out. Transformational outreach, however, involves direct engagement of the community. So for example, mutual aid groups also involve genuine relationships and support with community members. So your success is my success, not the other way around.

And “how can we support your vision?”, not “This is the vision we have got with the program.” And so transformational outreach was really about solidarity. So with Action Now, generally speaking, we worked on the south and west side of Chicago here. Mainly in the Black communities. And the organization before I got there really only visited the community when it was an election season and people needed to get voted in and we needed to do all the things and get people registered or there was an issue campaign like Fight For 15 or something like that.

And we needed people to sign petitions or show up to City Hall or show up to Springfield. But there wasn’t a lot of engagement with organizations that actually did work in those communities every single day. Whether it was with gun violence, whether it was with food insecurity, whether it was with educational injustices.

The organization I worked with only showed up when we needed something. And so when that is the norm, when someone is only knocking at your door because they need something, your organization becomes a salesperson. Who wants to talk to a salesperson at their door? Nobody, because I already know you don’t really care about what’s happening inside of my home.

You don’t really care about how much time I may or may not have. You don’t really care about my kids screaming in the background or how you can make this more accessible to me if the information you have is really all that important. So at the height of the pandemic, I really decided to pivot.

And this was like January, February, and I was like, hold on. What if I take the model that I was raised with in Las Vegas, right? And we started knocking on doors, leaving slips, having just community meetings on a regular basis without asking for anything. And there was plenty going on at that time. We were in the height of an election season. There were still tons of community issues happening, right?

But I was like, if I want the community to trust us, then I have to do something different. I have to teach my leadership how to do something different. And so we started having mutual aid groups. We started inviting the community out. I started building partnerships with social welfare organizations in the community, something that our nonprofit had never done before.

I wanted to actually understand the language and the culture of the communities I was actually in so that when I was doing a grant report, it wasn’t just generic, we saw 50 people. We saw Suzy Q and Gerald, and this is what they have to say, and this is how they contributed to this campaign. And we held eight kitchen conversations in their home.

And this is how many people they discussed this social issue with. You know what I mean? So when I came to the neighborhood the next time, I became a trusted face, a trusted voice to where they knew they were included and what the solution needed to be to help their community.

And so why transformation over transactions? Like I’ve said before, liberation is a long game. It’s not something that can be changed overnight. And so understanding your role and your giving circle is really important to moving this needle that everyone’s always talking about forward. And to get people that have been historically marginalized across the finish line to a place where there is such a thing as safety and justice and joy for folks.

And so it is important to understand and apply the traits of transformational outreach because it does give you a clear understanding. It gives you a better motivation and it actually helps empower you and everyone that you’ll be networking with to grow your giving base. And so I really would like for you all to sit with me, and we’re going to bring up a jam board in a second with these following questions to help you really get into the space of, do I really understand my role in my giving circle?

And does everyone within my giving circle understand their role? So why carry you to legacy and increasing leadership development? Not a lot of people think of the word legacy when they think of nonprofit work. When they think of philanthropy, to be honest, especially as we think of it in the context of working ourselves out of a job, which is this last point, when you are really grounded in your why, when you get into this work essentially, and eventually you’re going to wake up a morning and say, I no longer want education injustice to be a thing.

I no longer want healthcare injustice to be a thing. I no longer want LGBTQIA+ injustice to be a thing. So everything that I do in this moment, in this sphere of influence that I’m in, essentially I’m going to do it so well. So hopefully I’m going to work myself out of this giving circle. So we have given so much, not just money, but of ourselves and understanding and space to communities that need it, that we have been a part of the solution to move folks out of spaces of injustice.

And so I want you to also think about how committed you are to winning? Like what does winning actually look like? These are terms that we hear all the time, willy-nilly. We hear power all the time. We hear winning all the time. But do we actually have a grasp on what it looks like manifested in real time in two years, in three years, in five years?

How are we setting up the next generation to continue to win? And what does it look like now in our lifetime to win? And that goes right into, well, do you understand the goal of your giving circle? Does everyone else understand the goal within the Giving Circle?

Next, Deborah and Kelsey opened up a Jamboard for participants to share the ways their giving circles are managing, building, or operationally thinking about their giving circles. Questions focused on the “why” of each circle, as well as the circles’ legacy: how a giving circle will continue to grow and what legacy we want our circles to leave behind.

Deborah Harris: How is your giving circle building trust and sustainable relationships with the communities you’ve chosen to give to or support or be in relationship with? And most importantly, how is your giving circle, if you’ve given this thought, building the table and your strategic plan with communities in need?

And I put that in there, specifically building the table. Because too often we talk about having a seat at the table, right? Everybody here starts that term. Seat at the table. Seat at the table. Well, that table, actually, that a lot of people want to sit at was never really meant to include marginalized communities.

And so we have to be courageous enough and whatever it is that we’re doing to be empowered enough to build our own table, to set our own standard in the work that we’re doing. And with that, include the community in that, that we have decided to give to, to support, right? That transformative work. To be courageous enough to say we’re going to do it differently.

All right, I see stuff happening on this board, so I’m going to put on my glasses and widen it. Stop pretending like I don’t need these things. My, what do we have? General support grants. Awesome. Putting grant making decisions in the hands of former grantees. I love that. And paying them for their time. Let’s get an amen here, whoever wrote that. I love it. Oh my gosh.

Having granting decisions made by leaders of color and not by the members. I love that. Social venture partners working with youth so they can be the decision makers. I love that. Centering nonprofits who have the knowledge and decentering philanthropists. I love that.

Okay, look at y’all doing the work. I love it. Someone started a youth giving circle, which is really awesome. This is awesome. I love this. Putting real money towards organizational training. Yes. You know how many people are not properly trained, especially people of color, who are not properly trained in the nonprofit sector, who are in leadership. There needs to be more training facilitations and access to that.

That’s really awesome. Kelsey, y’all have a good group here. This is – y’all doing some good stuff? Yeah, we have a pretty amazing group. I’m excited for a minute. I’m excited about all the things. Unrestricted funding goes a long way to show trust. Awesome, awesome. Can you take a snapshot of this or send it to me?

Kelsey Barowich: Absolutely. Yeah, we absolutely can. You should see some of our other jam boards. They’re pretty pretty bananas.

Deborah Harris: This is really, really, really, really awesome. I’m really excited about this. Thank you everyone that has jammed on this board and added all of these wonderful things that you’re doing.

And it really shows that you’re really invested in the long game. You’re understanding not just the moment we’re in, but understanding the trajectory of the moment that we’re in, which is really, really cool. And I really appreciate this. Seeing this, it gives me hope. It really does. Gives me a lot of hope.

The next example I’m going to give is the model of transformation that I use. And I wanted to share this model with you because when I came up with this, I’ve been on the other side of the thing. I’ve been the one asking for money from foundations and from folks.

And when I presented to them how I wanted to operate, there was some concern at first because they were used to, we give you money, provide these metrics around this cycle around this election or around this issue. And I came in with, well, I don’t want to do that. You know, I want to meet with my community on the daily.

I want to have cyclical mutual aid rounds to different parts of Cook County. I want to provide rental assistance. I want to have monthly civic engagement workshops. I want to actually build relationships with the community and develop leaders in a way where it no longer feels like they’re going to be discarded at the end of the cycle.

That they’re a part of the community, they’re a part of our organization growing. So I just wanted to share how we did it. It’s a cycle that people move in and out of as we develop leaders, as we diversify our base, XYZ.

So this is an example of the work that we did. From how I brought people into the work, into the organization, how I met with them. I explained this to my funders and it was something that eventually they were really excited about because they could see how it would produce sustainability versus just going to the community for something and the community wasn’t getting anything out of it.

What we first did was we went into the community and conducted a whole new survey system. And I worked with organizations I was executive director over, they had been around for 10 and 12 years, respectively. But they hadn’t done a thorough community survey introduction.

Like, we’re at Action Now. Who are you? Like, we really, really want to know. And so I went out by myself. I wasn’t just sending people out. I went out, our members went out, my staff went out, and we literally just talked to people like, what are you struggling with today? How many people are in your household? Like, how far away is your nearest grocery store?

Do you have many kids in school? What are they complaining about? Like we really wanted to know, and since it was at the height of the pandemic, we always brought PPE, we always did a mutual aid run, so we weren’t just going there asking for their time, which a lot of people in Black and brown communities don’t have a lot of time to do because it’s about survival.

We came there supplying a resource that we knew they needed and so that really helped us build trust. And so within our conversations and our survey and needs assessment, we gave space to the community to actually voice what was really going on. And we took those surveys and said, how do we measure this against our programs? Are our programs actually doing what the community needs us to do?

That made us revamp what our programs did and the metrics we were actually capturing at that point. And so from then we started doing follow up community listening sessions. Like if people on the south and west side were saying, oh, we’re having issues with the police, or, oh, we’re having issues with food deserts or whatever.

We had community listening sessions where we either brought in a state’s attorney or we brought in educational folks. We brought in tax people, budget people that worked on different community issues. And we talked to the community about this because a lot of them weren’t educated on what’s happening, but they were experiencing what was happening to them.

And so we made sure that the two of those things met in the middle. Like, you’re experiencing injustice and this person in power has an opportunity to change it. So how do we bring both parties together to actually build a solution together? And then we put that back and look at, well, how are we actually writing policy based on this?

Like, is policy reflecting what’s actually happening in real time in the streets of Chicago on the south and west side? And so through that we started to see people regularly and we started to pick out that person [who] is always speaking up. Not just speaking up, but has a clear insight on ideas and solutions and how people are communicating.

And so we picked those people out to start building them as leaders within our organization and building sustainable relationships. From those people that we picked out, we started having kitchen table conversations. How many of you have heard of kitchen table conversations or house parties or whomever’s? Those people that we identified as leaders, we gave them space to invite people to the community listening sessions, like maybe two or three to their home to talk about issues like gun violence, to talk about food deserts, to talk about education injustices.

And we started training them and building them and really started cultivating deeper relationships with people in their communities because we’re only one organization, but more than likely somebody in a neighborhood knows 30 other people and they can reach more people than we ever could. And so we started, I guess I, I don’t know if it’s the wrong term, but we started moving ourselves out of the way to share power with them.

Does that make any sense? Like, we know we can’t be a savior over this community. This is a joint effort. Empowering those leaders on the south and west side of Chicago to know, “Hey, you have the power to talk to these people. You have the power to build relationships with your family and with your community to talk about the issues to help us write policy.”

So a lot of that started happening, and through that we started diversifying our base because other social welfare organizations started hearing about what we were doing. And so we were able to reach even more people on the south and west side because we started partnering with gun violence prevention organizations, with social welfare, with DCFs, with whomever they were, that were constantly in the community with churches, with small businesses on the south and west side of Chicago.

We started seeing the cycle of building community power in a way that was sustainable, that was happening year round, and not just because elections was coming up and not just because the mayor had an issue or not just because they were closing a hospital on the south side in the midst of a pandemic.

Well, we started really preparing people and building people up year round and having these conversations with them, but also providing resources to them at the same time of things that they needed, that they told us that they needed to help build trust and actually build a joint strategic plan on how to move people forward.

In this part of this webinar, I want us to get more into this. We’re definitely going to have some more conversation talking about what your model of transformation is within your giving circle. Like, what does the cycle look like? In your giving circle, from the moment you all raise the money or give the money, decide what cause you want to give to, how you can measure its impact, ensuring that your investment is sustainable?

Talking about how you uplift the most marginalized among you, which some of you gave examples of. And then how do you manifest it? What does that physical work look like? Whether you’re a foundation, because based on some of the comments you all had on the other jam board, it sounded like some of you were actually running foundations and not just giving circles, but how are you manifesting that in real time? What’s your model of transformation?

Kelsey and Deborah opened another Jamboard for participants to answer these questions, along with questions like, “What are you looking to achieve in your giving circle in the next three years?”

Deborah Harris: Loving these answers, y’all. What really helped from the new model that my organization had moved to from where we, the organization, had previously been operating, was that just within a year, like all through 2020, just within a year of my tenure there, we were able to register 260 voters, which was the most any single organization had registered.

We were able to feed a thousand people in the height of a pandemic, we’re able to help 500 families with rental assistance. We had 20 different community sessions on the south and west side of Chicago. From everything from education, to housing, to healthcare injustice, to police reform, to education of the state’s attorney’s office.

We were able to start up a youth-led internship program. And I say youth because they were in college, but you know, they’re young adults. They were able to work with high school students of their own, and through that the foundations were really able to see how we were building a cycle of sustainability to keep the work that we were doing going.

And also through 2020, we actually made 12 new partnerships. And these partnerships weren’t just in Illinois. We have partnerships in New Mexico, we have partnerships in New York that are helping with our PPE needs. They were helping with our mutual aid needs. They were helping assist with our rental assistance needs.

And so going out of the box from just going to communities when there was like an election cycle or going to communities when there was an issue campaign, or we needed people to vote on their tax in Illinois. But actually spending time with them and finding out what they really needed, and actually taking the leap to build relationships with other organizations that weren’t, not necessarily in philanthropy or necessarily in organizing.

We were able to service so many more people and see them on a regular basis and actually build up new programs that the organization had never really been able to start before. And so that’s why I really encourage you all what you all are really already doing, to always have in mind this cycle of transformation, like how you’re changing the landscape.

I honestly do believe that the giving circle concept can change how philanthropy as a whole operates. And actually builds community with and relationship with, and the solutions with,  historically marginalized folks.

What transformative elements are a part of your giving circle’s strategic plan? Do all of you have a strategic planning or giving circle? Like, how long you want to give, how much what you wanted to go to?

For the next few minutes, Deborah encouraged participants to share their stories either over video or in the chat. After that, she opened the floor for a Q&A for the rest of the session.

Kelsey Barowich: Deborah, we have five minutes left. If you had to give your, like, top three quick tips that you need to share with this group, what would they be?

Deborah Harris: Understand that your giving circle is deeply rooted in shifting culture and that’s a major responsibility. I’m proud of all of you for taking that step. I would also say get a strategic plan because it will matter, not just in the long run, but today. (Laughing.) I just have two, Kelsey. Those are the two!

Kelsey Barowich: Can I propose a third?

Deborah Harris: Propose away, Kelsey.

Kelsey Barowich: So what I heard from your presentation, particularly the last piece, was, “Don’t be afraid to experiment,” because that’s how we’re going to find the most pressing solutions to these issues. And recognizing that many of us deconstruct racism and dismantle it, we need to experiment and make sure while we’re doing that, that we’re bringing in the communities most impacted if we aren’t already a part of that community. Would you say that might be your third?

Deborah Harris: You know what, yes. I’m agreeing because it took a lot of creative, not so great people to get us here. So we have to be just as determined in our creativity to get us out of here. So yes, see what sticks.

Kelsey Barowich: All right folks, we’re going to wrap it up a little bit early, not too early, but a little bit early. Thank you all for coming. It was lovely having you.

Deborah Harris: Thank you all so much and everyone thank you. Thank you all for having me as well. Have a great weekend. You guys are awesome. I love the work you’re doing for giving circles. You guys are awesome.