By CCF
Interested in joining CCF Book Club but want to know more about it and what types of books we’re gonna read? We got you!
Imagine this: You love the Community-Centric Fundraising values and principles and want to get involved more deeply—connecting with others in the community, and learning together—but you don’t yet have a local Chapter or the time to help form one.
Or…
You’re involved with your local Chapter, but want to connect with people in different contexts and those with other ideas regarding how to actualize the principles.
So, you decide to join CCF Book Club to connect with the 150+ other CCFers reading, learning, ideating, and sharing together!
CCF Book Club provides an opportunity for CCFers to connect and come together as a community, build meaningful relationships with one another, and support mutual learning and discussion! This is a peer-led community for sharing, connection, and resources, and a place where our CCF values of equity, courage, community, integrity, and movement building can live in action.
The Pilot Session is Underway!
For the first iteration of CCF Book Club, we decided to read Vu Le’s Reimagining Nonprofits and Philanthropy: Unlocking the Full Potential of a Vital and Complex Sector. We’re learning as we go with this first session, but so far, we’ve been discussing the book on Mighty Network’s CCF Book Club channel, we’ve separated our 150+ book clubbers into eight groups, and all eight have participated in the first online live session to discuss chapters 1-5.
At the end of our three sessions, the whole group will meet with the author, Vu, to discuss the book with him!
Our next session:
It will be at least a few months before we’re ready to start our next book. But if you’re excited to get started, our next book will be The Big We: How giving circles unlock generosity, strengthen community, and make change by Hali Lee.
If you haven’t already and you want to join future sessions of the CCF Book Club, be sure to register here. If you want to specifically join us as we read The Big We, let us know here! (We’ve learned in our pilot session that wanting to join Book Club and wanting to join a session of Book Club are not the same thing, so we want to see who is joining us for the second session before we start assigning groups.)
Future sessions:
We asked everyone to share books they want to see us read in future iterations of CCF Book Club and we had some amazing answers! Because there were so many, we limited the ranked choice voting poll to recommendations that were made by at least three people in their CCF Book Club registration (after removing recommendations of books written by people who have done immense harm to marginalized communities without taking accountability and those written by white cisgender authors, as we are a movement that centers BIPOC and other marginalized experiences and thought leaders.)
What CCF Book Club is not:
CCF Book Club is not a replacement for actual action. There’s a (required reading) piece that someone in Book Club shared during our first session: “When Black people are in pain, white people just join book clubs.” In it, Tre Johnson shares:
“…when things get real — really murderous, really tragic, really violent or aggressive — my white, liberal, educated friends already know what to do. What they do is read. And talk about their reading. What they do is listen. And talk about how they listened.
“What they do is never enough. This isn’t the time to circle up with other white people and discuss black pain in the abstract; it’s the time to acknowledge and examine the pain they’ve personally caused. Black people live and die every day under the burdens of a racism more insidious than the current virus that’s also disproportionately killing us. And yet white people tend to take a slow route to meaningful activism, locked in familiar patterns, seemingly uninterested in really advancing progress…
“But those actions are fraught: Book clubs, for instance, are comfortable gatherings of friends who are unlikely to nudge one another to the places of discomfort that these books, at their best, demand.”
CCF Book Club is not “the work.” It’s a place to resource ourselves for the work that needs doing outside of Book Club.
Let us know in the comments, via email, or by carrier pigeon if you need to, what would make CCF Book Club seem more accessible or interesting to you!
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