CCF Book Club
What is CCF Book Club?
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
For the first iteration of CCF Book Club, we are reading Vu Le’s Reimagining Nonprofits and Philanthropy: Unlocking the Full Potential of a Vital and Complex Sector. We are learning as we go with this first session, but we have a full group online discussion on Mighty Network, and we’ve separated our 150+ book clubbers into eight groups for online live sessions to discuss the book.
At the end of our three sessions, the whole group will meet with the author, Vu!
Future Sessions
Since the Pilot Session is underway, it will be at least two 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.
Register here to join future sessions of CCF Book Club.
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.