New Insights Posted

Check out the latest inerview with social justice worker, Ana Marie Argilagos.  In this four part series she shares her insights as a national foundation program officer working with people from the Southwest Border and Native communities.

Enlighten Up! Can yoga transform your life?

Enlighten Up is a film by Kate, a professional film documentarien, who is also a yoga practitioner. She selects a man, Nick, who has never practiced yoga and follows him on a 6 month trek across the world as he, and she, search out the answers to the questions: Can yoga transform your life? Can you reach enlightenment through yoga? As you can imagine, the experience is as powerful for Nick as it is for Kate. I highly recommend viewing Enlighten Up. http://enlightenupthefilm.com/

Why is this movie relevant for social change workers?

This movie is relevant to social change workers for a number of reasons but one particular element of the movie stood out for me; the relationship between Kate, the film maker, and Nick, the "subject" of the film. For me, their relationship was similar to the one that can be found between a social change worker/activist and the community with which they work.

Early on in the film it becomes apparent that the questions about yoga and enlightenment / yoga and transformation are questions that Kate, more than Nick, needs answered for herself. Nick is adventurous and good spirited about genuinely trying to answer the question for himself...but he wants to do it in his own way, which is about "facts", really his own way of "knowing".

Kate, on the other hand, seemed to want the questions answered in a certain way--this way was different from Nick's way. Kate's impatience towards Nick's approach increasingly shows itself as the film progresses. At some point, Kate tells Nick that she does not think he is "taking this serious" and it made me wonder...

• When we work with community do we develop impatience or become disappointed when they 'don't come to' answers/actions like we want, but instead, how they want, and how does that impact our relationship with community?
• How and how often are we listening for the questions that the community wants answered instead of the questions we want answered?
• How might we rely on community to do "the work" to find answers to the enduring questions in life that we want answered, instead of doing the work ourselves?

At some point, Nick reveals, to one of the many gurus he meets, an utterly common quandary..."sometimes, I don't trust myself to find my true self"...I was so endeared when he made this statement because he showed such vulnerability and courage in his admission. At that moment, for me, his revelation about not trusting himself surpassed the question about if yoga could transform ones life and landed on a more enduring phenomenon about what it means to be human. At the end of the film, Kate talks about her own revelations about pursuing her initial questions and sharing some of her own lessons and this made me want to see more of her work.

Take a gander, I thought it was well worth the time.

Award Winning Dissertation: Dr. Gutierrez extends the life and mission of her scholarship by offering her work through her dissertation blogs.

Earlier this year, Raquel was awarded the Innovative ETD Award from the National Networked Digital library of Theses and Dissertations Award for media-enhanced dissertation and the Outstanding Scholarship Award, from the Ohio Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Association.

Excerpts from her Award Statement
I confess. I am a practitioner at heart. As such, it is makes perfect sense that my dissertation be a product that is practical, usable, and timely. In part, the long-standing disconnect between practitioners and academics motivated me to pursue a PhD. I firmly believe that academics and practitioners of social change can equally benefit from each other’s life-experience and knowledge. More importantly, I think there is a unique and exciting opportunity to create valuable and useful ideas for realizing inclusive social change through the cross fertilization between these two groups.

Critical Social Moments Require Innovation
In an effort to make my dissertation align with key changes occurring in contemporary social change work, I wanted to promote the concept of open source technology and take advantage of it ability share knowledge and connect people. In addition, previous scholars in my PhD program had developed innovative means of using their dissertations and I too wanted to be part of that legacy. The approach I finally chose is what the Founder of the Fiscal Policy Institute, Mark Friedman, calls a “low cost or no cost” solution; in this case, the free technology known as “blogger”. Initially, I intended to use a blog site, www.22ndCenturyLeadership.blogspot.com, I had started before my dissertation research. The goal of this initial blog site shares information that demonstrates it is possible to practice alignment between the values of social justice and the acts that realize social justice by exploring the transformation of language, ways of thinking, and individual and organizational practices.

Somewhere in the process of planning my dissertation research, I realized the advantage of a blog site solely dedicated to sharing the interviews, overall findings of my dissertation, and to generate dialogue between readers on the topic of life-affirming leadership. I conveniently blocked out the fact that I had only made one or two entries on my initial blog site due to the stress associated with maintaining a quality blog site, which requires constant attention. Thus, my commitment to making my dissertation a conduit for an ongoing opportunity for discussion lead me to overlook the anxiety that came with the stewardship of my first blog site and the “Voices” blog site was created. While on the Voices blog site, www.22ndCenturyLeadershipVoices.blogspot.com, readers can watch videos of social justice workers discussing their experiences with transforming the culture of social justice work and what they have learned as social change leader. In an effort to develop a relationship between the two blog sites, when a reader clicks into one blog site they are able to easily access the sister blog through a designated link.

When I made the decision to make the blog sites part of my dissertation, I can honestly say I did not know what I was getting into. Not only did I lack experience on how to video, which I naively thought would be “easy enough to learn”, I had no idea how to transfer videos and sound clips; nor did I know if there was even enough storage space to store numerous interviews on the blog site. In order to finish my dissertation by the set deadline, I had to quickly overcome the learning curve, which I was able to do.

A Breath of Fresh Air: Voices Informing the Future of Nonprofits

Article Review: Next Shift: Beyond the Nonprofit Leadership Crisis

Reference: Kunreuther, F. and Corvington, P.A.. Baltimore, MD: Annie E. Casey Foundation 2007)

Context: Yes, a breath of fresh air is what this reading offers. Of course, I recognize that this gratitude all depends on the quality of air you are breathing. In my 20+ year career as a nonprofit professional, I have grown increasingly disappointed with conversations about how the sector could and is developing. My criticism stems from my interpretation that these conversations (passed on at conferences sessions, foundation monographs, scholarly journals, and main stream publicist) often lack holistic and long-term thinking. In addition, the discourse is insular. There is little cross sector material and well, let's not even get into the topic of inclusion. This is why I am so thrilled with this monograph because it addresses all of these issues and more. Furthermore, being familiar with the work of at least one of the authors and the networks with which she interacts, I am confident that these issues are coming to the forefront in a healthy way. What gives me hope is my fortune to have a network of colleagues who not only lift up these issues but are directly addressing them in their own work and organizations…in that sense I know there is a growing subculture in the nonprofit sector who is already reframing the work and leadership can be transformed (see http://22ndcenturyleadershipvoices.blogspot.com/).

Summary: The ideas presented in this monograph offers both seasoned and nascent social change workers a perspective that is finally gaining ground among progressive nonprofit leaders and philanthropic stakeholders. This monograph, one of a two edition series, offers findings from The Building Movement Project. This project “advocates for US nonprofit organizations to build strong social justice ethos into their vision and activities and to strengthen the role of nonprofit groups as sites of democratic practice." In other words, to be places where "the talk is walked" in all aspects of the work.

Kunreuther and Corvington clearly articulate how the frame of "crisis" limits how people think about and thus shape the future of nonprofits. The "crisis" to which they refer is the shift in nonprofit leadership. Engaging nonprofit workers in their 20'3, 30's, and early 40's, the authors uncover that nonprofit workers in this cohort advocate addressing "structural rather than organizational responses" (p. 6); more specifically "organizational structure, the executive position, and leadership recognition" (p. 6). In presenting the feedback from participants the author’s aptly present issues rarely spoken about across generations of nonprofit workers, such as, the rejection of younger leaders rejecting the idea of moving into nonprofit leadership positions (p.7). They fittingly describe how emergent leaders recognize the limitations of executive director positions due to demand on need for funding, the growing pressure to employ business ethics and practices within social change work, and increasing competition (p. 7). These examples are just two from the article.

As all good monographs do, we are treated to recommendations for action that are framed in a powerful and reality-check way:

Change is coming. We can call it leadership crisis or deficit. Alternatively, we can seek it as an opportunity to rethink our assumptions about leadership and structure in nonprofit organizations. The recommendations address both the broader issues and some specific ways to get started. (p.10)

Why This Article is Important: This article lifts up the possibility that in a time when there is increasing anxiety, seasoned and emergent nonprofit leaders can engage conversations that are intergenerational, inclusive, keep future generations in mind, and that welcome innovative approaches that may not have worked at other times in history or are not found to be “realistic” because they have never been tried. There are nonprofit workers at all ages that are ready and willing to step into messy conversations and practices that can restructure our sector’s organizations, broaden and deepen our impact, and welcome transformative approaches to leadership. We all know change is not easy. To transform our society we have to be willing to transform ourselves and our organizations in ways that reflect the inclusive and just society we spend our lives trying to create.

Reading Day: Four Futures of Nonprofits

I have committed myself to spend one day a week to reading articles, research, and other manuscripts that offer insight about the culture of nonprofit literature. Below is a summary and comments about one such piece.

Four Futures
by Paul Light

Summary:
This article, posted on the Nonprofit Quarterly website, offers four possible scenarios of the future of nonprofits. At the heart of this article is a topic that is rarely talked about openly among the rank and file of nonprofit workers. Who determines the fate of the nonprofit sector's approaches to social change, use of resources, and sector culture about how to approach the work. The author states:

During these troubled times, what lies in store for the nonprofit sector, and what do we need to do about it? Along with every family in America, the nonprofit sector is wondering about its future. Will we miraculously survive as we largely do today? Will we starve our organizations to the core or emerge from the current economic calamity mostly intact? Will we fight the prevailing downturn on behalf of our individual institutions and leave others to defend themselves, or instead will we join forces to shore up the sector as a whole? In the aftermath of this financial crisis, will we have real options and choices?

The answers are not yet clear, but it appears that an intensifying struggle for ownership of the sector and how it is structured, governed, and deployed is under way. When boiled down to its fundamentals, the question is whether nonprofits are “owned” by their institutional funders (governmental and philanthropic) or whether a broader community of stakeholders should make the choice about the future nonprofits pursue. The search for an answer may yet produce a struggle for the identity and soul of the sector. Traditionally the sector belongs to this country’s citizens who have exercised their right to associate through civil society, but there is, of course, pressure from those who have the resources on which the sector depends.

The author offers the four possible future scenarios as a way to answer questions he poses above. Each future scenario outlines probability, who in the nonprofit sector would benefit and who would not. The last scenario "Transformation" offers suggestions about steps that can be take to authentically transform, not just change (Bridges, 1980; Gardner, 1981, Wheatley, 2005) how the sector serves the community and the role it holds in the country. The author understands that this is a long-term process that must be inclusive, innovative, and wider in scope than just survival of a nonprofit organization.

I really appreciate the author's inclusion of how smaller nonprofits could be affected in each scenario. The realities of smaller nonprofits, though they make up the majority of the nonprofit sector, are often left out of theoretical frameworks/discussions offering solutions to how nonprofits can be more effective as agents of social change.

What This Means to Me:
As a nonprofit community we have a tremendous opportunity to transform the future of our sector; I just want to make sure that from the get go the conversation (and subsequent actions taken) include the voices of smaller nonprofits who often tend to a very specific need or part of the larger community. The inclusion of the rank and file (read as people out in the field, not just the formal leadership of an organization) in the conversation about what the transformation looks like and how it is accomplished is critical. I, for one, am reflecting how I can be an active part of the transformation scenario and how old ways of being may be prohibiting me from being part of us as a sector moving forward.

Questions:
In my own work, how am I manifesting the transformation scenario? How am I stopping it?

How can I support smaller nonprofits to be part of the larger NP sector conversation that will impact their ability to do social change work inclusively, effectively, and with integrity?

Who is having the conversation about why and how nonprofit workers need to be actively
taking care of their mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual self in order to engage in the work
in a way that demonstrates/reflects/is the social change we are working to create?

Leadership Vocabulary: 2 - What is a Social Justice Worker?

A "social justice worker" is a person who actively and intentionally works for social justice; social justice activists, social justice change agents, and social justice organizers are examples. The term social justice worker reflects a shift in my awareness and acceptance of modern activist culture and social change work, acknowledging that social justice workers hold a variety of positions and take various approaches (advocacy, organizing, fundraising, philanthropy, etc…) towards actualizing transformation that result in social justice. Unlike the words “activist”, “organizer”, and “change agent”, the term social justice worker is less likely to be misappropriated by individuals and organizations promoting change who do not work towards social justice based in human and civil rights. The concept of misappropriation of concepts between the fields that develop leadership in the for-profit and nonprofit sector is fascinating and deserves a whole dissertation on its own. In my experience, the resistance to acknowledge and address how terms are misappropriated is a challenge held by professionals from all sectors.

Leadership Vocabulary 1: What is life-affirming leadership?

Life-Affirming Leadership is a values-based approach (affirming) to leadership that respects, honors, and nurtures life. The Life-Affirming Leadership frame demonstrates the integrity between beliefs, values, and actions of individuals working for inclusive social change. Life-Affirming Leadership reflects a decision making process that takes into account the impact of those decisions on the future seven generations. Life-Affirming Leadership in social change processes reflects the aspirations for justice, peace, and healthy communities.