Rebeca Velázquez-Publes, Brigham Consulting [Starting at 07:18]: Thank you. Thank you to the team for being a great support in this space. And we are so, so excited to be here with you all this eve, what time is it? 3:39. I’m on Eastern time. So we’re over here. We are so excited to be here with you and we are going to start our time together by introducing some housekeeping rules.

Oftentimes you come into space with one another and we don’t talk about, you know, if we were in real space, we’d be like, hey, the bathrooms are over there. And don’t forget that, you know,  you can get a snack over here. And for us, and as we move into this virtual space, we think it’s also important to bring some of those housekeeping rules and ideas into this space.

So first, we want you to take care of yourself. We want you to listen to your body. We know that this is going to be a little bit of a long session, so please stand up should you need to stand up, turn your camera off, and do a little jumping jack. If you need to do a jumping jack, please do.

We want you to also mute yourself so we can eliminate some of that background noise that we might be hearing. If you’re going to take a break, no worries. If you need to step away, please just drop a little BRB, be right back, in the chat, so we don’t miss you if we need to call on you or if we want to have a different conversation or invite you into a conversation.

Please keep your video on as much as possible. I know it’s kind of difficult to be looking at the screen of this, you know, for this long period, but we invite you to do that because it’s a way for us to connect. Relationships are important. And so we just want to invite you in, into keeping your video on as long as possible.

We want you to make space for your families. We know that you’re inviting us into your space wherever you might be. And you know, your fur animals. If I was at my house, if I was in my home, my daughter would run up, she would wave to all of you, give me a little kiss and we’d keep it moving. We believe in centering our humanity in this work, and you allow us into your space.

We want to honor that as well. So thank you. If you have something to write with, take notes with, if you do it in a little chat or you use a, I don’t know, Google Keep or however you take your notes, just have that there. We want to be thinking and reflecting on thoughts and things that might stand out to you.

If we say something or talk about something that makes you feel a certain way, why might you feel a little tension, or what might give you energy or excitement? Take some time to check in with your body. I know that feels really like, not webinar language, but yes, please check in with your body because this is a really important conversation and we want to make sure that you are honoring what’s happening.

Next, we’re going to talk a little bit about our objectives and objectives that we have for today. So, today we’re going to talk a little bit about how you understand racism and its manifestations.  We think it’s very, very important that we understand conceptual racism and its manifestations in self and how we organize our efforts.

And for this group, Organize Your Giving Circles, we want to talk about why we need a racial equity lens in our giving circles, the importance of that. And also, we’re going to be talking and providing some tools to develop an equity imperative for yourself as an individual and for your giving circle.

So we are excited to be able to share what we’ve learned, and what we’ve experienced. Thank you. Our work. This is, like Kelsey alluded to, like this has been Nadia and I’s work for, you know, 20 years. Sometimes when someone says that, I was like, dang, I’ve been in this for 20 years. Ah, but we have! And we are excited to share our passion with you all today.

Sometimes we open with this poem by Micky Scottbey Jones, and why we feel this is important because oftentimes we talk about creating safe spaces and we know as women of color that there are not many opportunities for us to have safe spaces. So we offer a different position and that is a brave space.

So I’m going to read this very quickly and talk about it just for a moment when we’re done.

“Together we will create brave space
Because there is no such thing as “safe space” –
We exist in the real world
We all carry scars and we all have caused wounds.
In this space, we seek to turn down the volume of the outside world
We amplify voices that fight to be heard elsewhere,
We call each other to more truth and love
We have the right to start somewhere and continue to grow.
We have the responsibility to examine what we think we know.
We will not be perfect.
This space will not be perfect.
It will not always be what we wish it to be
But, it will be our brave space together,
And we will work on it side by side.”

– Micky Scottbey Jones

We offer this because for us, and this work, when we’re centering racial equity, oftentimes, people can get in their feelings, it can be emotional, there could be a lot of things that are tied to it. Maybe it’s whiteness. Maybe it’s trauma that’s associated with being a woman of color. We want to be able to position ourselves to have this conversation in a way that acknowledges our humanity and creates a space of belonging for us.

And we can’t always center the safety of some over those who experience everyday  microaggressions or other dehumanizing experiences as part of their human experience. So we’re going to dig in. We’re going to create this space together that’s going to honor all of our humanity. And we’re going to have some tension. We might feel some stuff. Me and Nadia might poke a nerve.

Like when you go get that root canal. Never had one, but I hear that that’s painful. Like a little poke, a little nerve there. And that’s okay. Write that down. Because that’s some of the work, that is the growth spot, that is an opportunity. So with that, I want to provide a virtual high five to my colleague, my homie, and my sister, Nadia, and she is going to take it away.

Nadia Brigham, Brigham Consulting: Thank you all so much. Good afternoon. My name is Nadia Brigham, and I appreciate that I’m enjoying seeing all the places that you are representing. Where are you from is so important, right? And I, you know, I’m purposefully saying where are you from, because that is a colloquialism in my community.

Where are you from? Where are your folk from? So I appreciate you all sharing that. I want to say thank you to Philanthropy Together for inviting us into this space and for you all for showing up and wanting to have this conversation with us. Beca is indeed my sister and we do this work,  because we want to lead this world better.

We want to influence it in the direction of more sacred humanity. And so, we count it a blessing and a joy that you all have come to share with us today. I want to ask you this question because I read some research that most, to the tune of about 60%, of giving circles are identity-based giving circles.

So I wanted to know, is that true for the folk who are here? So how many of you are participating? You can just respond in the chat. How many of you are participating in an identity-based giving circle? So I saw someone talking about woman. So you’re focused on women. Latina giving circle. Keep them coming. Asian American women.

Okay, they’re coming quickly. A lot of women focused. White folks focused on reparations. All right now. That’s good. Black leaders in the community. Nice. Women and children, women, Black women. This is awesome. So most of you, many of you, I should say, are focused on identity-based giving circles.

So that says a couple of things to me. It says that either you all want to hone in on a particular community to focus your work, or it could say, I guess I should say, it leaves me with some wonders. Either you want to hone in on a particular slice of the community, or there’s something to be discussed about what is being left undone by traditional philanthropy.

I’m a philanthropist. I spent most of my career at the Kellogg Foundation, focused on advancing racial equity. So I understand philanthropy’s, and big philanthropy’s, ins and outs, and how it gives. And so this is very, very helpful to see how you guys are giving. So I want to be able, as we get started, to kind of give some frameworks for this conversation, in terms of what we’re solving for.

So often when we enter this conversation about racial equity, what tends to happen is the notion of racism and its manifestations and how it shows up in the self, in your teams, in your circles, in organizations or companies, often that’s conveniently left out. We want to do racial equity, but we don’t want to talk about racism because it’s too painful, right?

Efforts typically focus on what we want to do about it rather than interrogating what it is. And how is it, how does it function, and what is its purpose? And so we begin, we try to begin our conversations and it’s very heady so I’m warning you now it’s heady. So if you have to kind of process, I’m going to try to go as quickly as possible, write down questions that may come up for you and we can try to allow space at the end to kind of talk through those.

But it is very heady. It’s theoretical. And then we’ll try to land the plane to make it day to day. Okay. So we begin our conversation with a set of brain frameworks so that we can try to solve the racism, right, for the opposite, so that we can try to advance racial equity and belonging.

And we also start here because we believe that unless and until you’re able to examine the purpose and the function of racism, the solutions that you develop, they may be ill-fitting, off-kilter, disproportionate, inappropriate, mismatched, inefficient, and ineffective. Because you’re not landing on what it is we’re supposed to be solving for.

So we’re going to offer a couple of frameworks. But before we do that, I’m going to bounce it back to Beca, because as she was stating, these conversations bring with them tension. And so we want to share with you a framework in terms of how we hold tension.

Rebeca Velázquez-Publes: So, I love frameworks. I’m super nerdy about this, and I’m proud of it. But frameworks make sense to me. I’m a visual learner, so when I’m able to see things, that makes sense, it resonates with me. And the first time that I saw the productive tension model, I was like, yes, this right here, this makes sense.

And so we offer the productive tension model because oftentimes people don’t want to talk about tension. They don’t want to hold it. They don’t want to talk about it. It, you know, they call it, you know, when we call it the elephant in the room and people talk around it, like, ooh, you don’t like somebody’s haircut or whatever it might be.

And we offer that there is a way that we can hold tension, be productive, be creative, and repair at the same time. And so oftentimes we feel it’s very like either/or, and we offer that it is not either. When we are posed with a problem, we often go to it, and we’re trained and primed and conditioned to go to solve it.

What you’ll see is on the top where we’re talking about ideating, focusing on what we want to create, focus on what we want to solve, focus on what we want to imagine or what we want to be the generative piece of it. And what we offer is that there are corresponding things that need to occur as well.

We need to talk about our ideas and what we might be creating and what emotions might be tied to that for people that might be part of the process, might be end users, might be a recipient of the awards that you are making as giving circles. We don’t often focus on what we want to change, we focus on what we want to create.

And so these tensions often are going at the same time. And so what we want to offer is  that there is a way to hold both, and that there is a way to repair harm while creating something new. A lot of times we want to go to solving for racial equity within our organization, but we’re not. We don’t even take the first step to honor the harm that has been done in this process. And so, what we offer is that not only is there a way to reimagine not only philanthropy but so many systems and processes throughout our world, but we cannot do that in isolation, cannot do that without attending to the human emotion, the harm that has been done.

And so today when we’re talking through, as we move, we want to hold this as, it’s kind of like a mirror to say, hey, you know what? There’s going to be tension and that’s okay. Where are we on this model? Where’s my tension point right now? I’m jumping to wanting to create.

Why don’t we just ground ourselves a little bit in our current reality and what needs to be changed. I always say that the green part is fun. That’s the space where you get to tick off things and check your to-do boxes. Below is where you have to check in with yourself, check with your colleagues, and check with your community, to think about how you’re approaching the work.

Anything you want to add there, Nadia?

Nadia Brigham: Yeah, so I would just say that oftentimes we think about some of this work as like, you know, throwing the baby away with the bathwater, right? Like, oftentimes people feel that tension, like, do we have to throw the baby? And what we say to that is never throw babies.

That’s just, in general, not a good thing to do. We certainly don’t want to say and aren’t suggesting that there aren’t good components, righteous components in systems and structures that we currently have. But where there is a need for transformation, where there is a need for naming and interrogating, we want to take the opportunity.

We know that there’s much need. We want to take the opportunity to do that. And we raise again, there might be points in this conversation where you’re going to be feeling that like, well, what am I supposed to do that doesn’t feel good. I don’t like this interrogation.

Pay attention to your body. Hold it, right? The current reality is filled with these tensions, but also leaves space for something generative to happen because we’ve never had a world, a country without racism. Just never, because it’s so baked into how we do things. But if we’re ever going to truly get to racial equity, we have to have that imaginative space.

So I want to share with you a framework that we hold. We’re going to dig into it. This is that heady part that I was telling you about, and I’m going to move your faces over here. So now I can’t see you anymore. Okay. And I’d like to do it quickly. The purpose of this model is that the next two slides are easily a four-hour workshop in and of themselves, but I don’t have that. So I’m going to give you the best of what I have in about five minutes on these two slides.

Okay. This is what we call the “Global Racialization & White Supremacy Framework.” We start here because we need to understand what it is that we’re going after. What is that journey?

Well, how do we name it and those structures and the ideology that support them, especially in this time and space where racism is on trial and misinformed and misdiagnosed, misunderstood critical race theory is on trial. And we must understand what we’re up against.

This is a model that was adapted from Michelle Christian, who looked at a global framework, geographically global. And what we do is we take more of an all-encompassing global framework for the United States. And we’ve added a couple of components as well, and what we believe is true.

Racism and racialization are the very DNA of our country and it has its inception in colonization, enslavement, patriarchy, and racial neoliberalism, and it has a purpose and a function. Now we have, we’re dripping in and have dipped ourselves, bathed ourselves in racial ideology so much so that we just believe that it’s about bad hearts.

And if people would just change their hearts and be kind, then we would be done with racism. And that’s why we could certainly use more kindness in the world today. But there’s also a structure that’s at play that dictates why we need a particular ideology. And that structure has its basis in the economy.

One of the examples I use is the economy sort of dictates how we move, what choices we make. Think about us being in a global pandemic, and then moving a couple of months ago, moving right back into work, opening back up, sending our children back to school, and developing a discourse around why that was necessary.

This is not an issue of whether or not we are where we are politically. In as much as it is understanding the structures that make our country work, the economy is a huge structure that pushes our country in a particular way. And that economic structure is supported by the state and some, in some ways, is sort of cloaked in democracy.

So our values of democracy around happiness, the pursuit of happiness and justice and so forth, are just espoused democratic values. And they, the state, are responsible for the important policies to support the driving force of our country, which is our economy.

And then you have corresponding institutions that act as agents in maintaining and sustaining the economic forces that keep our country moving forward. So let’s just take something like minimum wage. Employers say, the economy, employers, capitalists, however, you want to deem that, they say, we don’t want to pay $15 an hour for folks. We think that we ought to be able to pay, depending on where you are in the country, $6.50 or $9.65.

What sort of ideology then do you have to create to support that? What kind of discourse, what narrative? And this is where the ideology comes from. The narrative, the discourse piece is the culture, or, I’m sorry, the racist ideology is the cultural force that seems to soften what can be unpalatable if we’re only looking at the economy.

It’s how, because we’re socialized to be that way, we end up not even questioning some of our country’s espoused values. So for instance, we don’t question the work week. It’s five days, eight hours a day. It’s over half the week, half of the day of each day on average people give to work and we don’t question it.

And the discourse that we are socialized with is we ought to fight for or we ought to be striving for work-life balance, which is an impossibility because of the structure, but we don’t question it.  And we don’t question it because it’s normal. It’s been normalized. Then you have this idea of representation and representation is about voice presence, decision-making power in a room, or the ownership of the room.

And then you have relationships, how people are in relationships or not isolated from one another. And when you look at all of this together, one important thing, well, the big headline around a racial frame is its ability and its intention, its purpose, to disconnect and divide.

Disconnect and divide white people from Black, indigenous, Asian, and Latinx people, disconnect and divide people of color from one another, disconnect and divide white people from poor white people or other white people, disconnect and divide us from the earth, the sun, the moon, water. Disconnect and divide us from our very selves, which is probably one of the most egregious examples.

So I’ll tell you a real example that happened to me last night because the notion of work is racialized. I’m sitting at my desk. I’ve been working nine hours. I feel my stomach growling, but I’m disconnected from myself because I feel the pressure of getting anything done. So I say, I’ll just, I’ll eat later.

Then I was like, pause Nadia. Because even though I’m a practitioner, we are in it at the same time that we’re trying to change it. Right? Which is hard. I was like, pause. I quit. I don’t even know what has to be done yet, but I’m stopping. I’m going to make dinner. I’m going to sit and talk with my daughter.

I’m going to do all the things that make me human and allow me to reconnect with myself. And Beca and I have been on this quest about like, really balancing work. Right? Do I have to give half of it, like I have 17 identities, but I have to give one identity half of my time? The math doesn’t add up.

I want to offer a tool, which you’ll get with the deck, that when you find yourselves in your giving circles, where does philanthropy live in the giving circle structure? I’m going to go back quickly. It lives here in the economy because philanthropy is the overflow of capitalists.

And there are a set of state requirements around IRS rules, 5% of your corpus, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you have institutions. I’m not sure if you guys would consider yourselves or your giving circles institutions, but you have an organization that will begin to take shape by which you will put together.

Some may have regulations depending on where you are, about how you can give and what you can give and what the rules are and the regulations and the IRS and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you’ll put those into play and they’ll come out in terms of eligibility requirements and who we’re going to give to and why are we going to give to them and how do we understand that problem and why do those people need help.

And so we’re constantly rolling through this structure on a day-to-day basis, dealing with everything that we do, whether you’re choosing what you’re going to eat, where you’re going to live, where you’re going to send your kids, who’s going to cut your hair, where you’re going to go to the restaurant, all of those things are determined by a structure.

So, when you’re sitting in your giving circles, which one is more important, structure or ideology? And it’s certainly too big of an elephant to kind of take on yourself, but the encouragement is not to try to take it all on yourself, but to be conscious of it. Right? This is that productive tension.

Oh my gosh, we are not, you know, we are not where we want to be. But the current reality is this is what it is. And you don’t have to throw away the baby with the bathwater. But initially, the encouragement is to be conscious of it.

So this is a tool that asks you a set of questions that provokes you to think about what decisions am I making and how are they attending to or perpetuating existing racialized structures or ideology. Be aware of them, interrogate them, and see how they’re at play with one another.

And so whether you’re thinking about forming the giving circle or program, policy, relationships, engagement strategy. Even if you’re thinking about how you are in a relationship with yourself or with others or others in different groups. This is a helpful tool so that we’re not doing the veneer of racial equity work, but we’re thinking deeply about strategy development and relationships so that we can sustain non-racialized outcomes.

All right, we’re going to lay it, we’re going to come down to altitude, just a little bit of an altitude. Okay. Because that structure leads us to white supremacy culture and white dominant culture, which spans across both structure and ideology. White supremacy culture, even though it’s explained using culture, as an ideology, has structural components in that policies are always in the direction of the comfort and the promotion and advancement of white people.

So you might have heard this as Tema Okun and Kenneth Jones’s 14 characteristics. They lay out where they conceptualize the day-to-day function of racism as a white supremacy culture. The Partners for Collaborative Change define it as white dominant culture. And what they say is that it’s explicit to subtle ways that the norms, preferences, and fears of white European-descended people overwhelmingly shape how we organize our work and institutions, how we see ourselves and others.

And how we interact with one another over time and make decisions. There’s a British theorist named David Gilborn, and he often says it’s the everyday mundaneness of white supremacy culture. The everyday occurrence. It’s not sheets and burning crosses only, because it is, but it’s not that only.

It is the everyday mundaneness of what it means to operate in this country. And lest you be fooled, people of color can play out white supremacy culture in masterful ways as well. Time for you to weigh in. What’s resonating with you?

Beca and Nadia took a few minutes for discussion with the audience. Discussion questions included:

• What is resonating with you?

• What do you want to learn more about?

• How do we make the structure ideology framework useful? How do we get our members to understand the rationale or logic of it?

• Since we’ve always been a racist country, how do we know what racial equity should look like?

Rebeca Velázquez-Publes: So as we’re changing altitudes, we know that we’ve been kind of up here talking about the systems and their manifestations, and we wanted to kind of bring it down and have a conversation about how you now can start to practice some of these things that we’re offering, like practice the opposite, right, as I was talking about earlier, of what we were doing with these things.

And for us, we want to offer you the why. Like, why should giving circles use this racial equity lens? And we’ve broken it down into these four circles, because it fosters transformation, uncovers patterns of inequity, focuses on root causes, and is relevant for all. And I’m going to talk a little bit more about each of those.

You know, I assume that people are part of giving circles because they believe in the work that’s going to be done in that giving circle. They believe in the issue or the people group, or whatever it might be that attaches you to invest your time, talent, and treasure into this giving group. And so we want to offer that you have an opportunity here to move from transaction to transformation when you center racial equity, when you have a racial equity lens.

I can’t imagine that wanting to devote your time, talent, and treasures to an initiative, you do not want to see transformative outcomes. And when we think about the transaction and we think about transformation, I think it’s important for us to understand that the way that traditional systems are set up when philanthropy and nonprofit and community are, everywhere is transaction.

I give you this for that. Grantee, I give you this grant, and you provide me the widgets. We’re just now seeing this emergence of like changing and thought around, what does it look like if we were more in partnership? We’re seeing this emergence of places like Philanthropy Together, right, to have the conversation, to change and move from this transactional space to this transformational space. And we feel as though if you’re centering racial equity, it’s going to get you there.

We also know that when you use a racial equity lens, then you’re also able to uncover patterns of inequity. Because you’re asking different questions now. You’re doing different investigations. You’re positioning yourself in a little bit of a different stance.

Thinking about it, I’m going to use COVID as an example. And I do, you know, I’ve done work in health equity. And, you know, for years, we know that there are disparities in the Black community. We understand that’s not new. But what happens is that a pandemic hits and now it uncovers this inequity because we’ve asked for specific information.

We said, hey, can you just aggregate that data? Who’s actually being harmed by COVID-19 at disproportionate rates? We knew who it was, but now we’re able to put the pressure on. When you’re able to use a racial equity lens to disaggregate things, to look and interrogate patterns, and ask this question of why, then you’re able to move towards this transformational work.

We talk about it, it focuses on the root cause. We need to focus on the root cause, you know, it’s easy for someone to generally say. I’ve been a nonprofit [leader] my entire career, that’s 20 years. Like I might look like I’m 30 but I’m 43 y’all. So, and I have heard. All of my entire career,  the most ridiculousness.

Like, oh, they don’t want a house. They don’t want a home. No! The system isn’t even allowing them to imagine a safe space to lay their head. Have we asked that question? And so we’re looking at root causes and taking away from the individual who’s already being harmed, who’s already experiencing trauma, and now we’re putting blame on the individual and we need to look down for the root cause. As a giving circle, you have an opportunity to dig in in a different way.

And then relevant for all: racial equity does not take anything away from anyone. What it does is center the humanity of everyone. It centers humanity for everyone. While it might benefit specific communities more because they’ve been disadvantaged for so long, because they’ve been harmed for so long. It doesn’t mean that other people aren’t benefiting from that as well.

And I think that is a very [common] misconception. And so we need to name that.

We believe that giving circles have a unique position right now. Philanthropy is going through this emergent state of changing even their philosophies, and the way they move, you see it happening throughout the country and the world. And what we offer is that giving circles can be a great space to incubate and to reimagine and to rethink how you do it, to question because you’re in control.

I’m getting ahead of myself because I’m going to go like, you know me, Nadia, I’m about to go. This is a great way. The tools that we’re offering and what we continue to offer are going to give you an opportunity to think about how you might reimagine the work you’re doing currently or the work you’re about to embark on.

Nadia Brigham: Beca, you reminded me of that last one, relevant for all. This mindset, of losers and winners and small pies and all this kind of stuff, it reminds me of the sidewalk carve-outs that were meant for those with disabilities, but I’m telling you, mamas with their strollers are happy that we have those carve-outs, or people riding their bikes on the sidewalk. They’re happy with those carve-outs.

And so this notion that if something is created for one person or one group of people, that there can’t be a multiplying effect for other folks, is important for us to understand, like, absolutely they can.

In the next discussion session, Nadia and Beca asked the audience to contribute to a Jamboard. The discussion questions included:

• What are ways that white supremacy culture shows up in your giving circle?

• What ways do you see to advance [a] racial equity lens in your work?

Nadia Brigham: We have a whole other framework that we use that was put out by the Dalmau Institute, but was modified by the National Equity Project called a “seventh circle model.” And it’s, you know, this notion of always focusing on the what, and this is the structure of work. When you’re at work, you check everything you feel you do.

You don’t worry about who’s not friends with you, you do the work. You don’t care about your children at home, you do the work. Right? We don’t care that you’re sick. We need you to do the work. And what gets lost is your humanity. And Beca said this earlier, we’re human beings, not human doings.

Humanity gets lost. We focus on the grant proposal. We focus on getting the checkout. We focus on the goals. We focused on how they presented. We focused on how they looked when they came in and presented. We focused on whether or not they were late. And we just forget that they’re human beings.

That’s the thing. The whole reason why we, you know, we do this. This philanthropic work is because of our love for humanity. And then what we do, the first thing we do is, we erase their humanity.

Rebeca Velázquez-Publes: We often say, you know, I heard, I was at training one time and I often say, they say you recruit for diversity, but you hire for conformity. And that, I mean, that translates to so many other spaces that we bring ourselves into.

Nadia Brigham: Someone replied, “the majority of members deciding on which grants are funded are white.” I was in a conversation about a business deal. Last week, and we were talking about, you know, three different businesses coming together working on a project, a new entity, and one of the people said well we have to choose one of us to have 51% ownership.

And I was like, well, why? Well, because if we ever get in a logjam or we have a disagreement, we need somebody to be able to have the deciding vote. And while that’s the norm, that’s how things are done, when you’re pushing against what is and you’re trying to create a new reality, then everything’s in question.

So it’s like, is there anywhere, is there any other way to break a tie than to give most of the power to one person to do it? Are there other frames, or decision making models that you might be able to create so that power is distributed?

Rebeca Velázquez-Publes: You know, when you told me that too, Nadia, my offer was like in the community all the time. We just have a consensus. In my, in your relationships at home, you have consensus. Like, do you want pizza from here or here? I don’t know. Let’s figure it out. And you come to a consensus. When you’re in a deep relationship with people, you can come to a consensus.

Nadia Brigham: We’re going to share with you, I think that’s going to come in your packet of materials, the 14 characteristics. Perfectionism is one of them, which is like perfectionism, one way of doing things. This false dichotomy, like, it’s either this or that. There are like five other things that it could be!

Rebeca Velázquez-Publes: And there might be things that we are, you know, we haven’t imagined yet. Someone, we were talking earlier in the conversation around like, Nadia and I talk about liberation all the time. And we don’t know what it always feels like to belong somewhere. We don’t know what it feels like to have that. And so we have to start using our imagination to reimagine what it would be like, because if not, we’re going to stay stuck in where we are.

Nadia Brigham: Last thing I’ll say, and then we’re going to move to the next Jamboard, if you all haven’t done that already. Someone responded, “Acting as if BIPOC-led organizations are equally effective, so we just give indiscriminately without having measures of success.”

Now, let me just tell you something about this system of racism of ours. Black and brown people are not inoculated. No vaccination kept us from internalizing white supremacy, in two ways. Internalizing it to take on the thoughts of inferiority because of white supremacy, or the thoughts of internalizing what it means to operate in that space so that when I get power, and come into leadership positions, as Paulo Freire would say, I master the tools of oppression against the people who look like me.

Right? Oftentimes people of color are looked at as if we are inoculated. “Well, let’s just give that person, let’s just let this brown person do the racial equity work because certainly they understand.” It’s like no, we all are hit by the system. We are doing work at the same time that we’re trying to influence the work in the field.

This is good stuff, and we’ll make sure you have this because these are things that if these are coming up across your different circles. Perhaps as a community of practice, you might begin to think about what are some solutions. What are you trying? What are you trying? Here’s what’s coming up for us to begin to push the field.

As Beca said, you know, giving circles can be on the cutting edge of the change that philanthropy is going through. And the change that it needs to go through. So we went to three more. We go to the second question. What are the opportunities?

“Practicing as many aspects of trust-based philanthropy as we can.” “Short applications, quick decisions, no reporting,” “helping beyond the check.” Ooh, that sounds revolutionary. I love it.

Rebeca Velázquez-Publes: I love it. I’ve been in a nonprofit for a lot of years. Y’all like, that’s like, yep. I love it.

Nadia Brigham: “Let’s talk about what we’re solving first. It’s impossible to deny racism.” Yeah. In the current strategic planning process, we have a client that wants us to do this. It’s an organization. We’re in the middle of this right now. They want us to do a strategic planning process for them, but they wanted to do it differently by centering racial equity and centering community voice.

And so that means if we’re going to do things in a different way, it’s going to look different from what you’re used to. When we gave them back the product, they were like, yeah, but what are, where are the boxes and the matrices, and give us the steps because we’re not used to it.

And that’s the part that we have to practice. This is a practice. Like we’re working with them to say, remember what you asked us for and remember why that plan that you sat on your shelf isn’t working for you. Let’s figure out how to do this differently.

“Inviting people to the table from the communities that we serve, or knocking on our door and seeing if they’ll let you in.” “Go where they are.”

Rebeca Velázquez-Publes: Some of you are doing our work for us, here!

Nadia Brigham: “Lead with values, not processes.” “Do your homework before acting.” It’s like, why can’t the kids read? Because their parents don’t value education.

Rebeca Velázquez-Publes: Hard side-eye there.

Nadia Brigham: I had a grantee at one point who thought the kids needed alarm clocks and that was the problem for why they weren’t making it to school on time. It’s like, all right, is that because the parents told you that? Like, who told you that?

Rebeca Velázquez-Publes: “Unrestricted funding,” yes! You can dream of some other liberation. You can dream with the unrestricted grant. Yeah, you can dream up some new things and shake it up a little bit and not be afraid.

So, we want to offer some major moves so we don’t have enough time to get into all these and we would if we could.

These are not in sequential order. You know, sometimes you put a slide together and you’re like, hmm, that should have been a circle. We could have done this differently. This is one of those slides, everybody, but they’re all the components and they all are connected.

So I’m going to start at two and I’m going to end at one. So, these are some moves that you can do within your giving circle that really can lean in to leading with your racial equity lens. I’m sorry. I’m in a borrowed space and someone just walked by and was waving to me. You know how that is. Welcome into my space.

So, building the container. When we talk about building the container, we want you to be thinking about, what are the values, what are the values that are going to be how you make decisions? We offer that tension model up above.

Also, what values do you make decisions against? Is that aligned with our values? Oftentimes, values are like these esoteric things that go on the wall somewhere and nobody lives into them. How do you do that? That is an offering for containers and guideposts to allow you to lead the way.

And you create that as a collective, you create that together. Those are your agreements, where you are also offering that you reimagine philanthropy and giving circles. We talked about it a little bit earlier. How do you live in ways of thinking about the way that you do your work, how, I think I saw Sara put in there, it could be at the cutting edge of some of these things.

And so what does that mean? What does reimagining philanthropy and giving circles mean? How do your relationships and how do you center racial equity in that, because that will get you back to those things that we were talking about above, about the transformational versus transactional. It will be solving for root causes, it will allow you to get to the ends that you’re trying to achieve or at least make strides in that direction.

Also, introducing new ways of being. Giving circles aren’t new, right, like they’re not a new thing.  But the way that they can function. If you’re asking questions and you’re pushing to say, we want to do this differently. And you’re kind of thinking about how giving circles show up in philanthropy, that might be an opportunity for you not only to do good work in your space, for your issue, or your people group, but also to do good work for philanthropy as a whole.

And so, I’m thinking about the practice itself, the practices that you have noticed where racialized ways of being are evident and being advanced in what you’re currently doing or what others are doing around you. And just being conscious of that and understanding that systems and structures we’ve been talking about are ignored by white supremacy culture. So when we say something like urgency, why is it urgent? For who is it urgent? Is it urgent for you or is it urgent for the community? Asking those type of questions when you’re responding and building.

All this is, we’re going to take you back to the number one, and that is leading with the why. What we’re offering with all of this is an opportunity to stand up what we call an equity imperative. And we think it’s really important to focus and center your work. It is a living, breathing document that allows you to respond and to center the direction in which you’re going. And what it does is it centers racial equity.

Nadia Brigham: And we’re going to give you, this is where we’re landing this plane, on this equity imperative. And we’re going to give you a protocol to kind of help you think through it.  We start all of our work with organizations here because it’s so critically important. When we think about equity imperative, we’re not talking about something that is obligatory or mandatory.

We’re talking about essentials. Can you feel the difference in that word choice? It’s essential for the work that you’re trying to get to. And there are several different stages that we offer giving circles as they’re thinking about their work in advancing racial equity. You see, the equity imperative is like number two.

Beca mentioned earlier the guideposts for equity. These are your values or how, what are your guardrails,and then your set of actions or the strategies that you’re going to use and then how you measure that. Typically, we start with four and five. We say, here are the five things we’re going to do. Here’s how we’re going to measure that.

And nobody ever goes to one and says, what’s going on? What are we doing? What’s happening in the world? Why is this happening? What are the patterns? Who is it happening to? For how long? Where did it come from? Right?

And then say, oh, here’s where we’re drawing a line. We are doing this because – this is our why. You ever had one of those moments with, well, maybe we had different kinds of parenting styles, but my mother was the kind of mother that when she got it, when enough was enough, she was like, oh, here’s what is not going to happen.

Your why helps you to say, here’s what’s going to happen, and here’s what’s not going to happen. Because it’s not aligned with who we are, how we are, how we want to be. And so our offering is to reorder why you are forming a giving circle. How you are forming as, as a giving, how you’re moving and making your why determine what it is you’re doing.

I have an older brother, and he’s about seven years older than me. And from the time I was a little girl, he would always say to me, “When you go away and you go to college,” because he was like speaking that into my life, “when you do this or when we do that, never be moved by money. Don’t be moved by power. Be moved by purpose.”

And it drives me. Beca and I have talked about it. I have a long, deep, purpose that drives me. I’ll work for $2.25 if that’s my purpose. But what doesn’t drive me is being on certain boards or being liked. None of that stuff is about my imperative. We all have individual imperatives. And then we have when we join our imperatives, this is that inside-out work that we often talk about with racial equity work.

If you think that you are going to do racial equity work from nine to five and then go home and do, you know, whatever you do the opposite of racial equity work, your racial equity work is not going to matter much. This is inside-out work. I have to live this out in how I am. So what is your imperative as a giving circle?

I mean, as an individual, how are you bringing that collection of imperatives together towards a giving circle imperative that that is about centering racial equity, that is about centering humanity, and that drives all of your decisions, drives not only what you fund and how you fund it, but it drives your organizing structure, drives the policies, the agreements that you have amongst one another, who’s going to be in leadership, how you made that decision, all of these things.

Again, it’s important to have why as your driving force and so we’re going to pull from some of our friends about why, and why the why. And I saw some nodding heads when I was saying typically we begin with how, like, oh yeah, we should give books to the kids. All right, how are we going to do that? Well, we can ask so and so to donate some books, and then we’ll ask so and so to come and drive them, and then we’ll get some volunteers, buy them t-shirts the same color with the same slogan on the back, and then they will take the books out to the people.

All that makes us feel good, but it’s not sustainable. Now, I should have said before I started with that story that if you do books in your given circle, I’m not anti-literature, and I’m not anti-giving away books, and I’m in no way meant to offend any of the efforts that we’re doing. I care about everybody’s efforts. I’m suggesting and offering them, is there a way for us to do our work more intentionally around racial equity, and get us to some more transformative, sustainable, non-racialized ways of being?

So this is why we do our why. It’s just a reiteration of the four points that Beca mentioned earlier. Now, you know, kids tell us… They inform us about how to do this exercise. And so if you haven’t done this exercise with, I don’t know, maybe you have a giving circle. Maybe you have a sisters’ club. Maybe you have, you know, some brothers that you get with now and again. And you guys get together for a reason, and you, you know, you want to be more deep in what you’re doing. You want to be more intentional, strategic, and transformational.

But we pull very instructive examples from children. That we value. And that has been socialized out of them. So do you, does anybody have toddlers in their lives, or five or six-year-olds where they start asking “why” and like you run out of answers because like there, I don’t know why the lightning struck. Right? You just, you run out of answers for them.

It’s a very instructive process when we think about how we get to a why. So, we’re landing this plane, like we’re on the ground, y’all. If we are trying to figure out how, or what our why is, asking “why” is important. And remember that feeling when a child is asking you why. How you’re digging and you’re trying to figure out how to help them.

But I don’t want you to think about just what you feel when they’re asking you why and you’re feeling a little out of sorts. I want you to think, put yourself in the shoes of the child and their level of curiosity and determination that they have to figure out why something is the way it is.

That’s how you get to your why. Okay, so let’s give you an example quickly because I want to hear from you as we land this plane. So I’ve been messing around with this example all evening. So children can’t read, and so we ask ourselves, why? And we say, oh, okay, they have limited books, but why? Maybe it’s divestment in the neighborhood?

Yeah, but why? Policy and representation? Yeah, but why? The burden of systemic oppression? Why? Because parents are in survival mode and they don’t have the energy or the time to go and do the thing that maybe needs to be done so that they can get the family and their neighborhood’s needs met.

But what would it be if your giving circle tackled whatever issue you’re tackling. Wrestled it to the ground and began to unpack the why of things? Now, there are a million and one reasons why kids can’t read. So it doesn’t have to be this, but it’s the exercise and the practice of going through this, that gets you closer to why I am a giving circle. Why am I a part of this giving circle? Why are we a giving circle? What is it that we’re trying to accomplish?

I saw someone say, “I want to help Asian American women.” Well, what makes the positionality, situatedness, experience, cultural assets, and gifts that Asian American women have necessary of a “why”?

What’s their reason? Why do we need to hone in on them? What about many of you said women, some said Black women, right? Why? What is that unique positionality that you’re trying to get to with your giving circle that changes that experience for them, in service of them? Not in service of your giving circle, in service of them.

And that’s the exercise. So we’re going to give you a tool and a protocol that is connected to this equity imperative. That will walk you through a way of getting to your why.

So, you know, where’s your stake in the ground, on your why, and how, and why you’re doing your giving circles. Respond in the chat. Have you expressed the racial equity imperative already that drives not only your giving, but also your operations?

Yes? No? While you’re answering that, because I want to leave room and space for us to start dialogue, what’s resonating? Confirming, disconfirming, wonderings. And I should say that my colleague and I are willing, I know we’re coming up on time, but we’re willing to stay a few minutes later.

Someone said, “We’ve been impressed by the urgency, but not the why.” Let’s talk about this urgency. It’s so irrational. We all do it too. And it’s so irrational. I want to stop sharing because I want to see your faces. It’s so irrational. Because whoever can’t read, whoever’s hungry, whoever doesn’t have a job, whoever, you know, is being plagued by, you know, certain health conditions or the environment, it didn’t start today, it didn’t start yesterday

And if people were urgent, like, urgently concerned about it, not you all, but, you know, people. Some of this stuff is like hundreds of years old. Right? And then we get in this rat race, like, hurry, we have to hurry as if the sky’s going to fall. I’m not saying don’t have some pep in your step, but don’t let urgency, irrational urgency, kill what you’re trying to do.

Nadia and Beca ended the session with a live discussion with attendees.