Through our work with nonprofit organizations, grantmakers, movement networks and other partners in the field, we have had the opportunity to work collaboratively with people deeply engaged in these efforts toward positive change. Through these partnerships, we are getting increasingly clear that both deep and wide-scale change is found in the interconnected practices that weave together a set of five elements.

Continuous and synchronous attention to these elements is foundational to being in “right relationship” with change—to advancing transformation toward love, dignity and justice.

The Interdependent and Interconnected Practices of the Elements

We first shared approaches and practices for embracing these elements through a series of articles published in the Nonprofit Quarterly where we looked at each element separately.

On their own, these elements are essential components of advancing transformative justice. However, the real power comes from approaches that draw on the interconnectedness and interdependence of these elements. When intentionally engaged together, they comprise a liberating context with deep equity at the core.

“The interplay of the elements is more than five fingers; it is one hand.” – Lupe Poblano

Lupe Poblano, codirector of CompassPoint—a leadership development and capacity building resource for the nonprofit sector and a longstanding partner of MAG—has done a deep dive into the five elements and has been exploring their interconnections. He points out that “the interplay of the elements is more than five fingers; it is one hand.”

This hand—a miracle of veins, nerves, bones and skin—hand in hand with others is what is needed to create a more equitable, just and sustainable world—to indeed live liberation.

Attending to the relationships between these elements, these fingers of one hand, looks different for different practitioners, but there are some important themes emerging from these efforts, ones that can help us all deepen our interconnected practices.

As our current political climate, the accessibility and prevalence of media, and the work of many people are making violence and injustice from the systemic to the interpersonal more visible and known, shifts are taking place within the various spheres of the justice ecosystem moving the whole ecosystem toward a practice of deep equity.

Deep equity is a cultural revolution, one that encompasses honoring differences; recognizing the impact our identities and positions have on our individual and collective experiences; focusing on relationships and whole beings with multiple identities; addressing trauma and healing; and eliminating systemic disparities.

Embracing deep equity is not a simple process, even for leaders, organizations, and networks that have engaged in focused equity work for some time and that have taken steps to make space for and nourish the leadership of people of color. Lupe Poblano acknowledges that both he and CompassPoint still wrestle with the destructive habits of white dominant culture. “Habits such as paternalism and a sense of urgency have historically socialized all of us to make decisions without including those most impacted. When we put process over people, we make bad decisions.”

The proud son of Mexican immigrants, Lupe, along with his team, is focused on the principles of liberation as an antidote to these habits, practices such as collective, intentional breathing. “Every time we pause and breathe together, we are doing deep equity work,” he says. “We need to create time to heal ourselves and build one another up. These are liberatory practices. They are essential to developing another way of being.”

Cibonay Cordova, consultant for the California Consortium for Urban Indian Health and member of the Network Weaver Learning Lab identifies early social training in white dominant culture norms. “We are told from a young age that transactional relationships are the most valuable. Those are the ones that make the most money. But when making decisions that have broad impact,” she says, “you need to hold multiple perspectives and [be able to] call on a number of people. This is really hard for some folks.” A woman and a mother of Native (Cazan Guamares/Yaqui) and Chicana descent, Cibonay focuses her efforts on supporting changes that are enduring by engaging multiple sources of “knowing.”  This requires being rooted in deep equity. “And deep equity,” she says, “comes from having the humility to say we don’t know and can’t know everything.”

For Pia Infante, a queer, first generation Filipina and co-executive director of The Whitman Institute—a philanthropic institution based in San Francisco—complex systems change requires centering those most impacted by unequal structures and systems. “When looking at environmental, political, and economic destruction,” she says, “it is clear that the brunt of its impact is on black and brown women.” But black and brown women are rarely at the center of grantmaking efforts.

In a post reflecting on the 2018 Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO) Conference, Pia outlines many uncomfortable truths about philanthropy’s complicity in maintaining structural and economic racism at the same time that it strives to advance systems change efforts to addresses today’s most intractable problems.

Pia believes that it is critical to pass decision-making onto the community, but, she says, in order to do so, “grantmakers have to be brave, radical, and embodied.” Grantmakers must build relationships of trust with communities. And, in doing so, grantmakers are called on to reimagine many of their existing practices and roles.

“When you think in terms of seven generations then there is real accountability within philanthropy [required]. When we embody values of equity, trust, and accountability, our relationships and grantmaking practices look very different.” – Pia Infante

In her own work, Pia asks the philanthropic sector to take a good look at themselves in the mirror. “Wealth, whether inherited or created newly, is built on a system of inequalities where a small few [extract] profit from the work of many. Historically, the wealth of the U.S. is built on stolen lands and bodies.” If this is not acknowledged, efforts to center equity fall short.

What we need to do is acknowledge sources of wealth and their relationship to current social ills—and then transform those relationships. “When you think in terms of seven generations,” Pia says, “then there is real accountability within philanthropy [required]. When we embody values of equity, trust, and accountability, our relationships and grantmaking practices look very different.”

For example, grantmakers “living into accountability” are expanding the time horizons for investments. Thousand Currents—a foundation based in the San Francisco Bay Area that funds grassroots groups led by women, youth, and Indigenous Peoples in the Global South—has been doing just that since its founding in 1985. They provide multi-year grants of support, investing in grassroots groups that are building the cultural and political power of the communities who are most impacted by global injustices. Drawing on “grassroots brilliance” Thousand Currents funds what is most needed for the time duration that it is needed as defined by grassroots groups. As a result, Thousand Currents has been able to support organizations in building community capacity, financial resilience, and networked ecosystems to achieve meaningful impact.

“Why,” Pia asks, “is the default grant time one year? We are funding solutions to poverty, to stopping rampant deportations.” These are complex problems that developed over generations, centuries, millennia. In order to solve such problems, grantmaking efforts need to be focused on more longitudinal time commitments; this is critical to supporting more enduring solutions.

In his book, The Truth about Stories, Cherokee writer and photographer Thomas King writes, “The truth about stories is that’s all we are.” And thus the stories we tell matter a great deal. Many people and cultures across the globe are rooted in the wisdom of stories and we see this practice being brought forth more intentionally and frequently in justice work.

When speaking with Sacramento legislators about the need for clean energy in California, APEN community leaders shared stories about the health impacts of living in neighborhoods surrounding a nearby Chevron Refinery. One community member described her children struggling to breathe due to asthma. Another described the circumstances of her neighbors who were dying of cancer. “The whole room was silent; some legislators were crying,” says Amee. “Clean energy can seem so technical and political, so the space for stories isn’t always made.” But it was the community members stories—their lived experiences—that were most influential with legislators. And too, these stories enabled community members—many of whom are refugees that have fled war and upheaval in their home countries only to endure racism, discrimination and other hardships in the United States—to lift up their own resilience and be honored and witnessed in their enduring survival.

“We live out multiple truths everyday.” – Harold Steward

For Evelyn Francis, interim artistic director of Theater Offensive and a self-identified femme dyke of white Appalachian origins, centering multiple ways of knowing is core to the Theater’s ‘Out in the Neighborhood Program’ or ‘OUT’hood.’ The program was born out of the invocation of a young, queer Haitian woman who participated in the Theater’s youth program. During an afternoon rehearsal at the theater, she asked, “Why do I have to take two buses and a train to feel [comfortable with] who I am? I want to be out in my neighborhood.” The question became the fulcrum for Theater Offensive’s journey from a more traditional theater company to one rooted in community development and activism.

Moving out of formal theaters and into churches and community centers in four communities of color within the greater Boston area was just one of the shifts Theater Offensive made. They also began developing and performing their own theatrical productions, ones that drew from the work, lives and dreams of community members.

“I believe that by changing ourselves we change the world, that traveling El Mundo Zurdo path is the path of a two-way movement—a going deep into the self and an expanding out into the world, a simultaneous recreation of the self and a reconstruction of society.” – Gloria Anzaldúa

Inner transformation is a focal point for the Hidden Leaf Foundation—a family foundation based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Tara Brown, a white woman, long-time activist, and the founding and former executive director of the foundation, describes the foundation’s efforts as “supporting transformative approaches within change movements.” An essential condition for transformation, Tara says, is spaciousness, it literally, “makes space for transformation [to occur].” Tara and other members of her family have brought their individual inner work practices to their foundation work and practice together before making important philanthropic decisions.

In their external grantmaking efforts, the family foundation’s focus has evolved from supporting non-profit leaders in deepening their own leadership and inner work practices to investing in organization-wide transformation through group engagements with deep practice in one or more modalities or traditions.

As Senior Program Manager for East Salinas (Alisal), Lauren uses what she calls a healing-informed, racial equity framework to guide her work with the community to influence a regional ecosystem of government, philanthropy, resident organizing and non-profits to work on systems change that centers a healing informed, racial justice practice. Lauren, the daughter of indigenous Guatemalan immigrants who were forced to flee their country in 1969 because of her father’s community organizing work fighting back land grabs by US national corporations, is driven by her late father’s culturally rooted philosophy on justice. For Lauren, achieving racial equity requires the centering of healing in order to create the conditions for accountability and collective action.

Her work in Monterey County arose out of a community response to four police officer involved shootings of people of color that occurred within a three-month span of time in 2014. The shootings catalyzed community outrage, but, notes Lauren, “community leaders recognized that rage alone wouldn’t address it.” Instead, “Building Healthy Communities partners and resident leaders came together to call for and create healing-informed systems change.”

Lauren and other community leaders asked members of city government “if [they] were willing to look in the mirror and understand how racism, and other forms of oppression, operate within systems to perpetuate inequity and injustices in the community.” Coming out of this request was the design and creation of a week-long racial healing and racial equity curriculum which brought together 50 community members (BHC leaders, community organizations) and 50 city government leaders and employees—such as law enforcement, planning, public works—local business owners, and nonprofit professionals.

Together, they developed a shared racial equity language and core concepts, deepened their understanding of how racism and white supremacy manifest in policies and budgeting priorities, and, most importantly, collectively grappled with racism, recognized its impact on their lives, and created a space for listening, healing and transformation. The curriculum was informed by local leaders and co-presented by Race Forward and the National Compadres Network. (To read more about this partnership and project, see the report: Building the We.)

“When we stop doing the healing, we stop moving. When you light the match of healing, it is unstoppable.” – Lauren Padilla-Valverde

“One thing that is really important to building community and creating systems change is developing space that builds agency and power.” – Sage Crump

This alternate time horizon for change—one the recognizes the complexity of the challenges we are facing and the need for investing in deep relationship building to ensure sustained efforts that move us toward love, dignity and justice for all—foregrounds the importance of creating leaderful ecosystems to create the conditions and a people path forward.

According to Sage Crump—program specialist for Leveraging a Network of Equity (LANE) and a queer, Black woman living in the American South who is working to strengthen arts and culture in social justice movements—“one thing that is really important to building community and creating systems change is developing space that builds agency and power.”

LANE is a collaborative program that delivers the methodology and resources to strengthen the financial and organizational health of arts organizations that are geographically isolated; led by and for people of color; and/or are rooted in small to mid-sized community-based groups.

This work is needed at the individual, organizational, network, movement and ecosystem level. Building the capacity of arts organizations alone will not ensure a thriving arts sector, especially one in which arts organizations of color flourish. So LANE is addressing the two prongs of racial oppression: racial superiority and racial inferiority. “We are working to build power individually and collectively,” Sage says. “Often we have the funder in the room as a listener and a participant. This is a way to dismantle capital as a primary source of power. What does grantmaking really take? We need for funders to come from the lens of a grantee. Equity is not just the changing of people but also the processes.”

In her book The Power Manual, Cyndi Saurez notes, “Further, one can build one’s capacity for liberatory power. It requires a commitment to living mindfully, constantly increasing one’s level of awareness, so that when one finds oneself in an interaction that positions one as powerless, one is able to perceive it, keep calm, and assert mutuality. Liberatory power helps one refrain from asserting power over others, or to do so carefully.”