All too often, we get trained in patience and in waiting. Like, we wait to meet that funder who gets us or we wait for the results of a grant application we spent hours and hours on or we wait for businesses and corporations to reprioritize their sponsorship spending.
But what if we didn’t wait? This is what this week’s two essays explore.
This week, we have essays from two really awesome recurring CCF content creators, April and Yolie! They both tackle the different ways in which certain norms continue to permeate through our organizations and our sectors, often impeding progress. It’s not often as simple as dreaming it and then doing it. There are always complications along the way …
Wow, we can’t believe it’s already July. (Summer, please slow down!) We hope that you are finding time to get some rest and relaxation during these slower work months.
This week, Nicole Hall details out an amazing account of how Autostraddle, a community and digital publication by and for queer women, made it through a pandemic during a time when so many online publications have shut down. The way they did it kinda went against a lot of “conventional” wisdom. Like, they opened their financial books and really were super transparent with their donors and in their communication throughout all of their fundraisers — and we’re not used to such transparency, so it’s so cool to read about how successful it was when they did this.
We’re writing to you from the thick of a delirious heatwave in Seattle, so we’re gonna be efficient about this before we fully melt into a sweat puddle. This week, we have two essays that made us rethink almost everything we thought we knew about journalism standards and also all of the things we assumed about Pride month. Thank you so much to Elisa and Carlos for the education.
Hope you’re having a good day and that you can see the sunshine from where you’re at. The weather has been a bit mercurial in Seattle, and today is a cloudy day (but the sun is supposed to come out later in the week!)
The theme of this week’s content in CCF is about the roots of philanthropy. Both pieces deal with the idea of “stolen” or co-opted history and take the position that we must understand the past in order to reclaim and reimagine a more equitable future in our sector.
We’re really excited about this week’s CCF Hub pieces because they are both really fun (and educational) reads. We have two essays that broke format in new and creative ways. There’s a super honest and real series of “confessionals” from Black women nonprofit professionals, and we also have a multimedia post that is a collaboration with teens.
So often in our work, we rely on tactics. We talk about the tools we need to do our jobs. We talk about the training we need to do more work. We talk about the gaps and the holes that we need to plug up (and put band-aids on).
However, we hope the pieces we’re sharing with you this week serve as a reminder to not just orient ourselves at subsiding and surviving — but demand that we are given the space and opportunities to thrive. The pieces this week push us to imagine how we might take all of the beautiful talents and gifts BIPOCs in this sector already have — and just create huge growth and impact and fulfillment just through healthier conditions.
Hope your week is off to a good start! Today, we have an essay that makes a really good case against something many of us have long known isn’t that great: the 40-hour work week — as well as the latest installment of our Data Says infographic series, which surveyed BIPOC fundraisers.
This week, the two pieces we’d like to share both touch on the very justifiable desire that people of color and people who have been historically and traditionally disenfranchised have — the desire to be heard and to be seen and to have our experiences and perspectives be valued and understood instead of denied and silenced.
This week in the CCF Hub, we have two essays that touch on the waning interest in antiracism work from white folx in power in our sector.