The agenda was designed to focus on opportunities for collective fundraising. In the spring of 2017, a group of fourteen Black directors-all of whom had leadership roles with national staff and affiliated organizations of the Faith in Action network-gathered in Dallas, Texas, for a retreat. We focus on a range of issues, including voting rights and voter engagement, immigrant justice and citizenship, and economic and criminal justice.
We also raise and regrant millions of dollars each year. Our national organization collaborates with federations by offering leadership development in the form of training and coaching, political analysis, and deep partnership in developing and executing organizing plans and strategies. Our network includes forty-five affiliated federations that are independent organizations. The Faith in Action network operates in twenty-seven states, El Salvador, Haiti, and Rwanda. Our journey includes both the lessons we are learning and many open questions.Īnd given the scale and scope of our network, it is an important story to tell. We have come a long way, but we have hardly figured it all out. 1 We were hiring more frontline staff of color, but when it came to the organization’s leadership, even five years ago this was still a white-led nonprofit, including a majority of the board of directors. By the middle of the 2010s, Faith in Action, which back then was called the PICO National Network, might have been practicing “race-conscious organizing” externally, but internally the transformation had yet to fully manifest. When I was hired, it was largely because of organizational failings in this area. These inequities often inhibit us from thriving when we’re offered opportunities we haven’t been offered in the past. Like many of our peers, we have experienced the consequences of shifting to more intentionally recruiting and hiring leadership and staff of color without fully addressing underlying systemic inequities. This challenge is hardly unique to Faith in Action. As an organization, we have grappled with the truth that systemic racism is the fundamental obstacle to our collective liberation, and when we really grappled with that truth, our whole organization had to change to reflect the aspirations we have for society. The reality is that Faith in Action, like many historically white-led organizations, has had to undergo its own internal change process so that our organizational leadership and staff teams truly reflect the communities in which we live and work. One might like to believe that an organization like ours-one that has a fifty-year track record of building power in low- income communities of color across the country-might have had a head start in this area. A large part of my responsibility is working with our leadership teams to address our internal systems and structures that have perpetuated inequities and inhibited our team from fully living into our talents and aspirations.
My current role as chief of staff requires me to think daily about how to build an organization that ensures that Black, Indigenous, and people of color-and Black women and women of color, in particular-are set up to thrive. I previously served as a management consultant and executive coach to Faith in Action’s leadership team, and came on staff to bring that expertise in-house. For nearly five years, I have worked at Faith in Action, the nation’s largest faith-based, grassroots community-organizing network. Not unique to my job or my organization, these are questions that I wrestle with every day. How do you infuse racial and gender equity throughout organizational culture and practice? How do you make it a shared responsibility rather than one person’s job?
Print “PORTRAIT OF A GIRL WITH SUNFLOWERS” BY CARLOS GÁMEZ DE FRANCISCO/ Click here to download this article as it appears in the magazine, with accompanying artwork.Įditors’ note: This article is from the Spring 2022 issue of the Nonprofit Quarterly, “Going Pro-Black: What Would a Pro-Black Sector Sound, Look, Taste, and Feel Like?”