We, the Nonprofit Institutions: Transformation for Liberation

(Illustration by Diana Ejaita)

A nation where everyone can flourish as full participants in democracy and society: This is the future that is both necessary and within our reach, when we take collective responsibility for creating it.

In this series thus far, our colleagues have explored what this future requires of each of us, and what it could begin to look like for governments. But what about the nonprofit sector? Such a foundational change will require a concurrent shift in nonprofit institutions, which have evolved alongside the government and market-based economy in the United States. To play their part, many of these institutions will need to embrace their own transformation. Nonprofits will need to build from a past rooted in charity and move toward a model of liberation—a future where our laws, regulations, customs, and institutions are structured so all people can thrive.

This is a complex proposition for the nonprofit sector because the ecosystem represents a decentralized and diverse set of organizations with various missions and operating models, from grassroots organizations to large legacy institutions, and many in between. We appreciate both the fact that diversity and pluralism is a strength of the sector and that this strength has not yet been fully realized in service of helping all people flourish.

We recognize the critical role that organizations like ours—larger, established institutions that have a commitment to advance racial and economic equity, as well as the philanthropic institutions that support them—should play in shifting the sector so all can thrive. For PolicyLink, the task is not to be perfect, but to be always working towards perfection, living into our own journey of self-renewal. And as part of our accountability to our peers and sector, we as leaders of PolicyLink are humbly sharing insights from this journey to advance liberation.

In this article, we will describe PolicyLink’s relationship with love and accountability, which begins with the 100 million people in this nation who live below 200 percent of the federal poverty level. This requires us to also be accountable to our colleagues, our partners in the equity movement, and to anyone who joins us to win on equity. If you want to be part of designing an equitable nation and you share our accountability to the 100 million economically insecure people in the country, we are accountable to you.

Aiming for Liberation

In a liberated future, we imagine that all people can live where they want, love who we want, and be able to take advantage of opportunities to flourish.

But liberation is not just a destination. It also represents the actions we take to bring this imagination into reality. As a nonprofit sector, the first crucial step toward accelerating our progress toward this future is aiming for it.

Charity has long been rooted in achieving an important, but different, aim: to serve needs not being met by the government and to ameliorate the effects of unbridled markets. Rising to that challenge, many nonprofits have continued to successfully serve the basic needs of many.

At the same time, we can expand our ambitions as a sector that serves some to become one that advances a nation that serves all. This work begins with setting liberation as the goal. Aiming for liberation for all involves not stopping at charity but pushing further to address the barriers that hold enduring inequities in place. It also means shifting from single-issue or single-group goals to a definition of success that encompasses true flourishing for all 100 million people. This requires simultaneously engaging in targeted work while holding all as the ultimate goal, since—in the words of Dr. King, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”

This is not easy work. As PolicyLink has oriented our work in service of this future, we have worked to free ourselves from old patterns and called ourselves to a deeper understanding of the structures and mindsets that hold problems in place generation after generation.

Accountability has been the essential element to achieving results at the scale of liberation for all, with multiple points of application. As we will detail here, accountability relates to results (Did we achieve what we set out to achieve?) and to process (Who did we lift up and partner with, and how did we show up?).

Accountability to Our Staff

In the previous article in this series, PolicyLink president Michael McAfee described how building a nation where “We, the People” finally means all people relies on embodying a radical love of all people: acknowledging the inherent dignity and worth of every person, and acting in service of their flourishing.

We aim to manifest this kind of love in our internal operations—in how we set goals, how we build teams, and how we treat our staff. The long-haul work of liberation requires us to move away from a norm of being stretched thin and burned out, particularly for organizations based in and led by communities of color. We must hold ourselves accountable for ensuring people can stay in the work—retaining their wisdom and humanity. This is an especially tall order amidst a daily onslaught against democracy and everyone’s thriving. Still, it is necessary.

At PolicyLink, this includes periodic reset weeks when the entire staff can rest, reset, and restore. It also includes unlimited paid time off, paying 100% of staff medical insurance benefits, and matching 401(k) contributions as wealth-building opportunities for our employees. While still a work in progress, PolicyLink is beginning to normalize staff participation in the development of internal policies, from contracting protocols to IT solutions. Staff is pushing us to codify love and accountability in our operating systems.

Donors play an important role in establishing this norm and expectation, by appropriately supporting “overhead” (where much of this kind of support resides) and ensuring organizations led by people of color get the resources they are too often denied because of systemic biases.

It is important to note that throughout our organization, deep accountability to one another lives in relationship with maximum accountability to the 100 million people we are responsible for serving. Staff well-being cannot come at the expense of the disinherited and dispossessed in our nation. Constantly finding and refinding this balance is not easy. We struggle, we navigate, and we do so imperfectly. Through it all, it remains our responsibility to hold. Because the existing and emerging threats to the 100 million economically insecure people of our nation—and the opportunities that each day brings to create a different reality—never call a timeout. We can’t either.

Accountability to the 100 Million

A few years ago, we posed a question to ourselves: Does Policylink still deserve to exist? Could we create meaningful and improved conditions for the 100 million? To answer yes, we needed to be an institution ready to work in service of everyone’s thriving.

This required the organization to be aligned behind those to whom we are accountable. Understanding the reality of a nation unwilling to love Black and brown people, staff wondered, could we focus on only serving the people of color represented in this population? The question was understandable. However, the ultimate future we are aiming for is a multiracial nation in which all can participate, prosper, and reach their full potential. This meant we could not lose sight of the operative word: all. Advancing liberation would demand that we hold everyone—and the wholeness of their identities, experiences, and backgrounds—in that 100 million.

The next critical question was, how would we know we were actually contributing to that future? We began to develop a results-based accountability framework, which we also refer to as a results frame, that sets a unifying vision of what we are trying to achieve, an understanding of root causes of inequity that keep us from that vision, and how we would know if we are making progress.

Liberation is not a vague or theoretical concept, but an outcome that can be measured. As an example, our framework includes indicators on the material conditions of the 100 million people in the US living at or below 200 percent of the federal poverty level. We examine not only the number of people making up that population, but their cost burden, income, wealth, and assets. We look at whether we are supporting enabling conditions—like public opinion—to advance a flourishing multiracial democracy. To contribute to both immediate and long-term progress against these aims, each of our departments sets and tracks ambitious goals aimed at addressing root causes, driving progress across our shared indicators, and ultimately redesigning systems to work for everyone.

If an institution has not started the process of building accountability structures anchored in liberatory outcomes, it could begin with an external audit of its work coupled with staff and board conversations about the impediments to greater impact. Together, these interventions will allow the organization to better understand how it can be accountable to the communities it aims to serve.

Much of the work involved in addressing deeply rooted inequities is generational work, and organizations need to be oriented to an ambitious North Star, progress towards which almost always will be challenging to trace in the short run. The organizations and philanthropy that supports this work must break free of the cycle of three-year grant deliverables. At PolicyLink, these organizational results frames have been powerful tools to anchor and guide conversations with new and existing funders.

Accountability to Our Partners

A future of liberation is possible, and it will not be delivered by any single organization alone.

It will require accountability to the wisdom and innovation of the often excluded and overlooked communities who are most impacted by injustice. And it will require marshaling the full resources of our institutions to support them and for research, study, and strategies that adequately address this injustice.

PolicyLink’s housing justice work is illustrative of our practice here. Drawing on insights from housing justice organizers and advocates, paired with our own research, we developed a repository of projects working on housing from a reparations lens across the country, along with sketches of model legislation and practical program ideas to serve the field.

By supporting research with partners, we can wholly understand the issues and pathways for solutions—steering clear of the risks of conventional wisdom, which can mask inequities or be incorrect altogether. As an example, research by The Bridgespan Group (where Jeff is a co-founder and former managing partner) spotlighted how what had generally been thought of as “success stories” (for example, smoking cessation) often masked racial disparities when the data were disaggregated. Unless equity and a commitment to all is held firmly and deeply, we will miss dynamics that hold disparities in place.

Powerful partnerships are not exclusive to organizations with same-issue missions. Results frames can create transformational outcomes for diverse partners to align with integrity. The Bloomberg American Sustainable Cities Initiative is one example of the power of aligning towards a shared result among partners working in not-yet-connected issues areas. This partnership brings together a climate justice organization, race and policy institute, innovation delivery consultancy, and a center for government innovation with a $200 million philanthropic investment to set a bold ambition to proactively build low-carbon, resilient, and economically thriving communities.

We must also invest in the partnerships required for us to deliver the work. The notion of resource scarcity across the nonprofit sector has fostered a sense that competition is inevitable. Generational work that delivers generational change requires us to reject this notion of competition. We embrace the opportunities afforded by deep partnerships instead. At PolicyLink, we have tried to live this commitment by subgranting a significant portion of our budget toward partner organizations. Whether through investments of material resources or time and collaboration, partnerships are a necessary and catalytic means to reach the future we are after.

For Our Nation’s Thriving

Until we bring love and accountability to our internal practices, external partnerships, and the nonprofit sector more broadly, we cannot expect to realize a flourishing multiracial democracy. The internal and external work to transform our nonprofit institutions towards liberation is the work of generations.

This work calls us to struggle. Hard decisions will need to be made in the absence of a proven roadmap. The right decisions will come with consequences. Despite best efforts, missteps will happen. As we move through this work, we will need to navigate hurt feelings, damaged relationships, and dissatisfaction. Nevertheless, we must get up every day to lean into the necessary work of reckoning with whatever emerges and repairing relationships towards the transformation of ourselves and our institution. That is precisely the work of moving toward the liberated future that is ours to create.

This work may look different depending on a nonprofit’s starting point, mission, assets, and challenges. For example, transformation looks different at PolicyLink and Bridgespan. PolicyLink, as a Black-founded and -led organization, has faced barriers to capital but has also had more space and room to experiment with what equity looks like in practice because of its DNA. Bridgespan was a predominantly white organization with access to social and financial capital, but it needed to evolve significantly to become more diverse and inclusive (work that is still in progress). Both organizations are on journeys to ensure their work moves the world towards all people flourishing and the country becoming a vibrant multiracial democracy.

Nonprofit institutions evolved over the last two centuries of this country, alongside our government and economy. Out of a history of exclusion, we can build institutions that catalyze a new future—one where everyone can flourish as full participants in a thriving multiracial democracy.

Read more stories by Ashleigh Gardere & Jeff Bradach.