The Black community finds ways to restore dignity: A Q&A with Garnesha Ezediaro, Bloomberg Philanthropies

Garnesha Ezediaro leads Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Greenwood Initiative, an effort to accelerate the pace of wealth accumulation for Black individuals and families and address systemic underinvestment in Black communities.

Ezediaro has worked across the public, private, and philanthropic sectors to design, direct, and scale mission-focused programs, brands, and content that inspire change. She previously served as a senior program officer for the Government Innovation program at Bloomberg Philanthropies and also led global leadership development programs at Verizon Media, delivering training and targeted development programs for over 12,000 employees. Prior to that, she was the communications director for New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu and director of marketing at Brick City Development Corporation in Newark, New Jersey, under the leadership of former mayor Cory Booker.

Philanthropy News Digest asked Ezediaro about the long-lasting effects racism and violence have had on the Black community’s ability to achieve generational wealth and its impact on Black philanthropy, how Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Greenwood Initiative seeks to address racial wealth inequities, the initiative’s mission of reducing wealth disparities in Black communities, its investments and plans for future funding, Ezediaro’s role in the decision-making process, her background working in government innovation and communications and marketing for the mayors of two large urban cities, and her experiences discussing economic mobility for the Black workforce and closing wealth gaps.

Philanthropy News Digest: The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre that occurred in the neighborhood of Greenwood, once known as “Black Wall Street,” took hundreds of lives and stymied the growth of wealth proliferation in the Black community. What impact do you think it also had on Black philanthropy?

Garnesha Ezediaro: Throughout U.S. history, deep-seated racism and violence have shown up and disrupted thriving Black communities. A horrific event like the Tulsa Race Massacre not only immediately robs a neighborhood of life but simultaneously seizes invaluable community assets. In order to recover from such tragedy and to respond to the persisting inequity in housing, health care, education, and employment, Black communities donate their time, talent, and treasures. From places of worship to community groups to local giving circles, we have seen the Black community consistently find ways to restore dignity within their communities and to give to a range of causes and organizations. According to a report from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Black households give 25 percent more of their income annually than white households, and nearly two-thirds of African American households donate to organizations and causes, and their contributions total $11 billion each year....

Read the full Q&A with Garnesha Ezediaro, Greenwood Initiative lead at Bloomberg Philanthropies.

Wage inequity is 'a dream deferred': A commentary by Kyra Kyles

One of my favorite poems of all time is Langston Hughes’ “Harlem,” better known by the compelling question it posits: “What happens to a dream deferred?”

Far too many in the BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) community can answer that question from personal experience due to a pipeline of privilege that favors white workers. People of color, particularly those from Black and Latine communities, are locked out of desired careers by a toxic mix of systemic racism and bias; comparative lack of generational wealth; and sparse access to corporate sponsors. This is certainly true in for-profit companies, especially in fields including finance, television and film, technology, music, and journalism. Sadly, it is also a pervasive issue for nonprofit organizations, even though social good and positive impact is at the very center of our missions.

I have no doubt that my colleagues in the nonprofit community want to improve, rather than echo hollow vows to increase diversity and retain BIPOC team members, but no anti-bias training, career fair, or positive intention can trump equitable payment for employees who hail from communities of color. This is critical at every level, from interns up, and it must be a competitive wage....

Read the full commentary by Kyra Kyles, CEO of YR Media.

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Recruiting and retaining employees with skills-based volunteering: A commentary by Tessa Vithayathil

The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred an unprecedented shift within the U.S. workforce. No industry or sector has escaped as a record number of people have left their jobs in what’s been called the “Great Resignation.” Perhaps you have witnessed this exodus among your colleagues or been part of it yourself.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of “voluntary quits” reached 4.5 million in March 2022, continuing the record highs posted during 2021, which closed out its last two months with an astonishing combined total of almost 9 million workers leaving their jobs. National Economic Council deputy director Bharat Ramamurti has pointed out that people are using this opportunity to change their employment situations for the better. Perhaps the Great Resignation would be better termed the “Great Upgrade.”

One of the top reasons so many people are changing jobs is they’re seeking more purpose and advancement in their careers. Professionals are putting more emphasis on the meaning of their work and pursuing opportunities to further develop their skills....

Read the full commentary by Tessa Vithayathil, the director of programs at Common Impact.

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'Hidden obstacles' to behavior change: A commentary by Alice Ng

Organizations of all kinds often aim to change people’s behavior by offering incentives or warning of negative consequences. Foundations, governments, and NGOs often rely on lessons learned from programmatic reports or interventions that worked in similar circumstances. But these approaches may fail to address factors that are preventing behavior change in a particular community or situation.

As a result, traditional grantmaking processes and nonprofit strategies sometimes fail to get the results we want because we don’t understand the motivations of the people we’re trying to engage well enough—that is, we don’t see the hidden obstacles. To accelerate progress on addressing big problems, we need to identify the barriers to behavior change before launching or funding a program and committing to a theory of change....

The challenges of bringing about behavior change get trickier with efforts to address systemic issues. Initially successful efforts may stall later on because they introduce new hidden obstacles. For example, research on using small-bore steps—“nudges”—to reduce carbon emissions found that while nudges may result in small improvements, they ultimately decrease support for higher-impact solutions like a carbon tax—by leading people to believe that there’s a quick and easy fix....

Read the full commentary by Alice Ng, senior advisor for fundraising at Multiplier.

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Innovate and invest in communities: A commentary by Angela F. Williams

Americans are hurting. More than one million people across our nation have died from COVID-19, a staggering and profound loss. Even as we continue to grieve, the other crises we face—rising costs of living, surging gun violence, and increasing division—can feel like a second pandemic.

The last several years have exposed deep fault lines in our society. As our problems become increasingly complex, so do their solutions. There is no silver bullet that will solve systemic problems like income inequality, hyper-polarization, or poverty. But as CEO of United Way Worldwide, the largest community-based nonprofit in the world, I believe that progress is possible. It starts by reimagining philanthropy to focus on the place where all of our global ills and solutions ultimately begin: community.

Communities are the cornerstone of society. But too often, philanthropies view local investment as a nicety that can be overlooked, instead of a necessary first step in solving global problems. Now more than ever, we cannot afford to abandon the power of local community. We need to innovate and invest in it like never before....

Read the full commentary by Angela F. Williams, CEO of United Way Worldwide.

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Closing the wealth gap: A Q&A with Denise Scott, President, Local Initiatives Support Corporation

Denise Scott has served as president of Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) since December 2021. She joined LISC in 2001 as the executive director of the organization’s New York office and served as LISC’s executive vice president for programs from 2014 through 2021. Prior to joining LISC, Scott served as a White House appointee to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and as the managing director and coordinator responsible for launching the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone Development Corporation.

Philanthropy News Digest asked Scott about settling into her new position as president of LISC, one of the nation’s largest community development financial institutions, how the organization uses its investments to work with local community and government leaders at a time of historic crisis in the housing market and major economic uncertainty, the organization’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, and Justice agenda and how it shapes the work, and how and when LISC evaluates its job as “finished” in a community.

Philanthropy News Digest: Since joining LISC in 2001, you’ve seen the organization evolve over multiple presidents’ tenures. How has the organization’s approach to housing policy advocacy changed over that time?

Denise Scott: Our approach has changed in response to market shifts. We started many years back with a focus mainly on multi-family tax credit projects, and then we evolved to a broader housing strategy that included preserving single-family housing, both occupied and vacant, with a real push to focus on home ownership—not across the entire LISC footprint, but in certain strategic markets. I’ll call out New York because that’s where I started in LISC. Over time, we came to focus on both multi-family and some single-family homes, and then we started turning our attention to issues around community resiliency.

That, of course, has tied into disasters like hurricanes. LISC’s focus on rebuilding after disasters has grown to include attention around climate and resiliency to be more proactive.

Read the full Q&A with Denise Scott, president of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation.

Solidarity fundraising, an equity-driven framework: A commentary by Jeff Wokulira Ssebaggala and Annie Lascoe

When Witness Radio in Kampala, Uganda, faced a government crackdown on groups protesting the World Bank-funded Lubigi Drainage Channel, the organization had to dedicate all its capacity to ensuring its team’s safety. This was in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, when funding was urgently needed to continue its mission—in this case, stopping a development project that could force the eviction of dozens of local families. In response, Accountability Counsel, Witness Radio’s San Francisco-based partner, provided support by making introductions to key funders, which enabled Witness Radio to secure both emergency funds and long-term support for their work.

We refer to this joint effort—through a relationship that extends beyond our substantive work together—as “solidarity fundraising.” Solidarity fundraising is the act of leveraging funding relationships for the benefit of peer and partner organizations. By making high-value introductions to aligned funders, we can apply an equity-driven framework to philanthropy, starting at the grassroots level.

Solidarity, not charity

Solidarity fundraising presents an opportunity to subvert the traditional funding model that often excludes marginalized individuals and communities. It enables those of us with greater access to capital and resources to be more effective partners to civil society organizations and frontline communities. By leveraging our connections and resources, we can build a philanthropy ecosystem based on mutual cooperation and provide better support to those who have been traditionally denied a seat at the table....

Read the full commentary by Jeff Wokulira Ssebaggala, country director of Witness Radio in Uganda, and Annie Lascoe, director of development at Accountability Counsel.

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Review: 'Resilience That Works'

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: A longtime nonprofit manager who’s spent her entire career steeped in the inner workings of the sector becomes the head of an organization. She works tirelessly, rarely takes a vacation, successfully steers it through a difficult financial period, seemingly by force of will, and no one ever doubts that she has the organization’s best interests in mind. But within five years, she steps down and never leads another organization.

Was she not the right fit for that particular organization? Was it burnout?

I suspect that if she’d had a chance to read Resilience That Works: Eight Practices for Leadership and Life, by Marian N. Ruderman, Cathleen Clerkin, and Katya C. Fernandez, such a leader might have had a better experience and a more enduring tenure.

Written as the coronavirus began to spread around the world and published by the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL), where the authors were working at the time (Clerkin is now senior director of insights at Candid, and Fernandez is at Stanford University), the book aims to help nonprofit leaders examine their work and their approaches to work and guide them to be better able to sustain their energies....

Read the full book review by Matt Sinclair, editor of Philanthropy News Digest.

Learning from trust-based philanthropy and participatory grantmaking: A commentary by Kim Moore Bailey and Laura Rodriguez

In 2021, Justice Outside’s Rising Leaders Fellowship program brought together 20 early-career nonprofit professionals, most of them Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC), to get hands-on experience with philanthropy. Fellows had the opportunity to design a $40,000 grantmaking program and decide to whom they would award grants and how they would distribute those funds across the selected grantees. They were invited to examine all the “rules” they knew about philanthropy.

Funded by the Environmental Education Funders Collaborative (EEFC), a network for Bay Area funders, the Rising Leaders Fellowship offered an opportunity for young people—who are often on the receiving end of grants—to reimagine and have agency in grantmaking. Supported by Justice Outside, they discussed wealth disparities generated by capitalism and white supremacy culture; and how trust-based philanthropy and participatory grantmaking can be antidotes to inequities in philanthropy.

What’s more important than what they learned, however, is what they can teach us....

Read the full commentary by Kim Moore Bailey and Laura Rodriguez, president and CEO and chief program officer, respectively, of Justice Outside.

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Sustaining progressive change through community-based participatory research: A commentary by Sarah Bobrow-Williams

How many of us have spent countless days producing exacting research reports informing the most salient social issues today—only to find a box of undistributed reports in the office storage closet a year later? Even the most impactful research aimed at influencing public policy makers and other targeted audiences has a short shelf-life. By contrast, participatory action research (PAR), also known as community-based participatory research, can make a far greater, longer-term impact—especially when the intended audience for the research includes communities that are the most marginalized and affected by the issues being studied.

Many marginalized communities have long and often sensitive histories of being “researched”—being the object of the research, while the job of identifying, defining, and assessing the issues is left to outside “experts.” Regrettably, excluding instead of centering the expertise of community members who are directly impacted by the issues not only leaves them feeling used but is a missed opportunity to catalyze and sustain progressive community change on many levels.

Those of us who have worked alongside communities have witnessed the consternation and dispiritedness felt by individuals when they are placed under the microscope without being given the opportunity to define challenges as they experience them. This omission also precludes the synergy and devotion that is often generated by problem solving from multiple perspectives. Conversely, community-based participatory research offers a collective, dialogic process for expression, reflection, perspective taking, and information sharing, and, ultimately, creative solution-based action among stakeholders. This process helps form a nexus of dynamic connections and relationships that can lead to sustained change over the long term....

Read the full commentary by Sarah Bobrow-Williams, a community-based participatory research consultant for the Southern Rural Black Women’s Initiative (SRBWI).

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Review: 'Choose Abundance'

In his 1989 best-seller, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen R. Covey coined the terms “abundance mindset,” the belief in a benevolent world rich in resources, and “scarcity mindset,” the belief in a competitive world lacking in resources. Three decades on, most of us are still struggling to choose abundance over a scarcity mindset. Every day, we’re besieged with messages from a consumer culture that encourages the desire for new things and manifests the fear of not having enough. As Lynne Twist notes in her book, The Soul of Money, which Laurie Herrick considers required reading: “This mantra of not enough carries the day and becomes a kind of default setting for our thinking about everything, from the cash in our pocket to the people we love or the value of our own lives.” In this environment, can a nonprofit organization made up of complicated individuals choose abundance? Yes! In her book Choose Abundance: Powerful Fundraising for Nonprofits — A Culture of Philanthropy, Herrick, founder and president of Rainmaker Consulting, reveals step by step how nonprofit staff and their organizations can choose abundance by building a “culture of philanthropy” and reframing their attitudes toward fundraising.

What is a “culture of philanthropy”? After stating her preferred gender-neutral definition of philanthropy, “love of humankind,” Herrick explains, “A Culture of Philanthropy exists when organization-wide attitudes, actions and systems reflect an understanding, respect and responsibility for philanthropy’s role in the success of the organization.” In this culture, all stakeholders within the organization and in the larger community are engaged and active in advancing the cause through their individual strengths. Everyone has something to offer, whether financial assets, time, wisdom, experience, connections, or special skills. A culture based on deep relationships and a common goal opens the door to infinite possibilities....

Read the full book review by Kati Neiheisel, senior liaison at Candid.

'Resiliency care' for unhoused people: A commentary by Kris Kepler

When we first met Kevin, he was living in a shelter, having struggled earlier in life, he says, with “poor decisions, procrastination, and self-loathing.” He came to the LavaMae^X’s site in Gladys Park, in the heart of Skid Row, once or twice a week to take a shower or spend time talking to our staff. This spring he finished his junior year at California State University, Dominguez Hills.

Kevin was able to turn his life around with the help of numerous nonprofits, including LavaMae^X, which provides mobile showers and other essential care services for unhoused people and teaches organizations around the world to do the same. “LavaMae^x helped me get clean when I was dirty, both inside and out,” he says. “They offered welcoming faces and clean, amazing showers when the local shelters could not consistently do so.”

Our services and Radical Hospitality approach—meeting people wherever they are with extraordinary care—gave Kevin the dignity and hope he needed to heal, find work, and return to school. His story is a perfect example of how crucial “resiliency care” delivered through ongoing relationships can be for unhoused people. There is no grantmaking category for this—we don’t see any funders focused on what to do for people on the streets who can’t access or don’t feel served by traditional services. It’s time to rethink that—particularly now, with homelessness in the United States continuing to rise....

Read the full commentary by Kris Kepler, CEO of LavaMae^X.

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The sustainable nonprofit: An opportunity to take stock and reset

By inspiring large numbers of people to take sustained action, leaders can turn a cause into a social movement with everyone working in concert to achieve a specific change. Cultural and societal norms do not shift easily, however, so painstaking efforts are required to move them incrementally to a place where the desired change can actually take place–in policy, legislation, behavior, etc. But what happens to a social movement’s supporters when progress seems slow or when they think all their efforts have been undone?

I’m thinking, of course, of two currently high-profile social movements–one aimed at protecting a woman’s right to an abortion, the other seeking additional measures to control guns–that some social movement leaders see as having experienced setbacks. Though I won’t debate the merits of any strategies or positions related specifically to these issues, we can keep them in mind as examples when discussing how social movement leaders should respond to inevitable setbacks....

Social movement leaders should view any setback as a prime opportunity to take stock and reset in certain areas to strengthen community....

Read the full column article by Derrick Feldmann, founder of the Millennial Impact Project and lead researcher at Cause & Social Influence.

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Ensuring equitable access to mental health care in communities of color: A commentary by Daniel H. Gillison, Jr.

All people deserve equitable access to quality and comprehensive mental health care. But unfortunately, some of the populations most in need of such care have historically been, and continue to be, the most underserved.

According to the Health and Human Services Office of Minority Health, Black adults in the U.S. are more likely than white adults to report persistent symptoms of emotional distress such as sadness, hopelessness, and feeling like everything is an effort. And according to one survey from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Latinx adults reported significantly higher rates of depression during the pandemic compared with other populations. Yet in 2020, only one in three Black adults with mental health conditions received treatment. And only 10 percent of Latinx people with a psychological disorder contacted a mental health specialist.

We at the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) have been reflecting on these disparities during July in honor of Bebe Moore Campbell National Minority Mental Health Awareness Month, named after a pioneering mother who strove to end stigma associated with mental illness, particularly in communities of color. But we must also commit beyond raising awareness—to taking action....

Read the full commentary by Daniel H. Gillison, Jr., CEO of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI).

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Learning environments that prioritize trust building: A commentary by Cierra Kaler-Jones and Jaime T. Koppel

In the last 20 years, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) office moved more than $1 billion in grants for school policing, hardening, and militarization. The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, passed quickly in the wake of the tragedy in Uvalde, Texas, is another effort that advances the illusion of “school safety” by increasing funding for police in schools, threat assessments, and school hardening—despite significant evidence that surveillance technologies and police presence undermine students’ trust. According to the U.S. Department of Education, millions of students attend schools where there are police officers but no counselors, nurses, psychologists, or social workers. Further, Black and brown students, LGBTQ+ students, and students with disabilities face the brunt of the harms of policing. Since investments in school policing have ballooned in recent years, many students and staff have never been in a school without police and policing infrastructure. This reinforces the myth that safety comes from police. Why keep investing in a strategy that’s never worked?

Philanthropy is too often complicit in these efforts. As a sector, we overwhelmingly invest in tidy policy wins that seem attainable within a grant cycle or two. We privilege groups with larger budgets, typically because we believe they have the greatest likelihood of “winning”....

Read the full commentary by Jaime T. Koppel and Cierra Kaler-Jones, co-director and director of storytelling at Communities for Just Schools Fund.

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