By Mabel Colón, Anjali Mehta, and Valerie Neumark
As the third largest employment sector, the nonprofit sector certainly has come a long way in rethinking and reshaping workplace culture in the United States, but there’s more we can do to reduce the cycles of harm.
Cumulative grief does not resolve through individual effort. It becomes more bearable in community. When we can name it together, sit with it together, and refuse to let it harden into cynicism together.
Mexican Dahlia: Ancestry in Bloom honors the parts of myself shaped by migration, silence, grief, ceremony, rupture, and return. The dahlia is not simply an emblem. It is a living bloom of memory, rooted and reaching at once.
There is no need to meme-ify your mission to chase down a million three-second views. Instead, work on cultivating an internet presence that is credible, and scannable.
Funding decisions made while we experience urgency and trauma can carry invisible ethical costs. These costs only become clear after they have reshaped our values, our communities, and us. So I ask again: How far will you go to secure the funding to make your vision of the future real?
Decolonization does not have a synonym. It is a very literal refusal and re-creation. It is not a swappable term for improving schools, societies… nor a philanthropic foundation.
…the terms “decolonization” and “decolonizing” continue to rise into the mainstream of the nonprofit sector, yet their meaning is often diluted into a soft synonym for inclusion or diversity. As if we could simply sprinkle a bit of our colour and culture onto the white walls of charities and foundations and call it liberation.
We call on these organizations, who altogether hold over $100 billion in donor-advised funds, to stop complying in advance. Compliance in advance helps authoritarianism grow.