Our plans to expand the CCF movement and transition leadership from us to a Global Council

By Community-Centric Fundraising

Earlier this month at CCF’s latest BIPOC Town Hall, CCF Seattle organizers announced that we are working to transition leadership to a global council, which will continue to guide the Community-Centric Fundraising movement.

We want to take this space to explain key decisions we’ve made and how we are envisioning what this rapidly-evolving movement might look like moving forward.

It’s been about nine months since Community-Centric Fundraising launched, (though the seed of CCF was planted several years before that, from conversations that many of us in the sector were having about our frustrations with the way that we fundraise.) We’ve been thrilled beyond our wildest dreams by all y’all’s responses to CCF. It’s been so resonant and incredible to connect with and learn from so many others who have experienced the same frustrations and challenges we were personally experiencing, and to see, hear, and feel how many people across the globe are committed to changing the sector for the better.

We love fundraising, fundraisers, and donors! We all got into this work because we truly believe in the power of nonprofits to help create a better world for us all. We want to keep helping create a world where people like us thrive, grow, and continue to do awesome work in the sector.

To make room for this growth …

The current leadership team will need to step aside in order to allow for the creation of a Global CCF Council, one that reflects a broad range of viewpoints, lived experiences, and geographic regions.

When we first began this work, we set out to create a movement, not an organization. As we grew this movement, we learned, over and over, how important it is to be thoughtful of how we go about growth, in order to not replicate the systems of oppression we are steeped in.

The current CCF leadership consists mostly of members in the Seattle area, and our perspectives are very much grounded in the realities and experiences of being Americans living in the Puget Sound region. The CCF movement has to be bigger than individuals. There shouldn’t be one representative voice of CCF. The success of the movement should not be contingent on the involvement of specific people.

We all know and believe that the CCF movement will be best advanced through the creation of a BIPOC-led Global CCF Council to drive the work moving forward.

Next steps

Because CCF grew so rapidly over the past nine months — and wow, we learned quick there is always so much work to do — it’s become super clear that we need to create structures to support this movement and build capacity. While we’ve been able to provide occasional small stipends to team members and pay contractors who have taken on some key tasks, the CCF leadership has been doing this work on a largely volunteer basis. Like, some team members are spending 30+ hours per week on CCF in addition to their regular full-time jobs!

All that to say that there’s a lot of work on the backend to support CCF that may not always be clear publicly — stuff like fundraising, marketing, planning events, communications, managing the Content Hub.

Right now, we are working to build infrastructure and recruit and support new leadership in the Global CCF Council. The current leadership team intends to act as a transition team and keep current operations going while we build this infrastructure and recruit new members — and then we’ll sunset when the new Global CCF Council is established.

Our goal is to fully transition to the Global CCF Council by the end of 2021.

As for the current leadership team, we are envisioning that we will continue to be a part of this work, but in different roles. Some of us may apply to join the Global CCF Council if it makes sense to, others of us will get involved with our local CCF chapters, and others will focus on implementing CCF Principles in our own organizations.

Our goal during this transition is to set up the Global CCF Council for success. We’re gonna do our very best to figure out logistics, such as delineating roles and responsibilities, creating a shared leadership and decision-making model, and fundraising to support the creation of the aforementioned infrastructure. We’re gonna pay members of the leadership team for their time and hire contractors to take on some more of the work so that the time commitment asked of those who will serve on the Global CCF Council is reasonable and not a barrier to involvement.

It’s a pretty exciting time right now. And since we don’t have it all figured out (and we shouldn’t make all of these decisions on our own anyway!), we’ll be looking to the worldwide CCF community for your input, suggestions, and feedback. We’ll definitely be providing regular updates in the coming months. At some point, we’ll send out requests for folks to get involved with the Global CCF Council.

And before we end this, we absolutely gotta say: Thank you so much for all you are contributing to this movement. It’s been an amazing ride so far. We’re excited to see how far we’re all gonna take this.