I have been noticing how quiet I am here. Yes, I am busy. But I also have a lot on my mind, a lot that would be helped by talking through it, writing through it, grappling intensely with all that is going on.
Yet I’m facing a lot of fear about not getting it “right” if I try to write things out here. Particularly around processing so much of the insights, epiphanies, and challenges brewing in me as a result of my participation in the Anne Braden Anti-Racist Training Program. I’m noting here how silence can be a detour in my struggle to be a white anti-racist. I catch myself thinking, “I’ll wait until I have it sorted out, then I’ll write about the insights, not the messy internal process that got me there.” I’m much more comfortable projecting an idealized image of myself as someone who has it together, a leader, the person to come to with questions and concerns because I’ve got it figured out.
But I don’t have it figured out. I moved to San Francisco this February because I had reached the limits of what I knew, and I wanted to learn from others. From my work in an anti-violence nonprofit organization, I had reached the capacity of what I could do within the organization.
As part of the Progressive Leaders Fellowship, I had time to think through what I most needed to experience next and create a plan for how I would develop that aspect of my leadership.
I hope for a future without racism, violence, gender bias, homophobia, and hatred. To create that future, we need to rebuild our social movements of the 1960s and 70s. These days in the US, we rely too heavily on social justice non-profits to do the work of ending oppression.
We need to rethink the roles that social justice non-profits play in creating or limiting social change:
- How does a business model for non-profits take us away from building social movements?
- How do narrow missions keep us from working across issues for social change?
- How do current non-profit structures contribute to staff burnout that ultimately drains away our best people?
We need to reform social justice non-profits back toward their roots in social movements, while at the same time we seek other structures outside the non-profit realm that contribute to rebuilding our movements. The specifics of this vision aren’t yet clear to me, in part because they need to be built collaboratively, based on the experiences of many people working to end oppression. The immediate needs are spaces to build a larger vision for how nonprofits and other organizing structures support ending oppression.
In re-reading this vision, I am excited that my move to San Francisco has allowed for exactly this. The Anne Braden Program is helping me root deeply in the history of U.S. social justice movements, and see my work as part of this larger, longer-term vision.
Yet, I’m also experiencing some dissonance with my blog title being focused on “nonprofits” – as I think more and more about movements and not nonprofit organizations, I feel limited by this scope. So much so, that this morning I contemplated a blog name change – perhaps to “Rooting Movement” or something similar that would allude to the broader basis in social movements that I am shifting toward.
Yet as I contemplate this shift (which may or may not happen) – I also remember that I am speaking to people who are based in nonprofits, people who feel frustrated with the limits of their organizational structure, people seeking the broader container that social movements bring to our work. And that remaining with a nonprofit-centric name will continue to allow me to be connected with people seeking information about nonprofits.
For now, I make these two commitments:
1. I will write and press “publish” even when my thinking still feels messy and incomplete. As a mentor reminded me last week, “You might try worrying less about your coherence. Even when you think you aren’t speaking clearly, I am understanding you.”
2. I will allow myself latitude with what I publish here under the name “Rooting Nonprofits.” I will give myself more space to write at the intersection of personal and political, and more space to write about larger social movements and not only about work within the four walls of a nonprofit organization.
