Change Learning Hub
The Change Consulting team shares tips, tricks, wisdom, and lessons learned from working with changemakers to advance racial justice.
These days, there’s no such thing as slow news. In fact, the notion of experiencing “15 minutes of fame” feels generous in a news climate and scrolling culture that feeds the newest, biggest, most sensational thing. Alexis Meisels, Senior Director of Communications – Earned Media, explains “newsjacking,” a tactic racial justice leaders can use to meet the moment by applying their talking points to trending news of the day, as well as a case study on the power of effectively inserting your frame in a crowded news cycle, in a new post for the Change blog.
Client News
Diana Hwang, Founder and Executive Director of Asian American Women’s Political Initiative (AAWPI), was included on Politico’s Recast Power List, the most powerful people on race and politics in 2022! Diana founded AAWPI in 2009 as the only group solely focused on growing the number of progressive AAPI women in political leadership. Last year, AAWPI launched a first-of-its-kind national fellowship and incubator program, activating women focused on change and giving them up to $10,000 for civic impact projects. Read more at Politico.
In the face of relentless attacks on gender-affirming health care, trans youth and trans communities, abortion access, and voting rights, Quanita Toffie, Senior Director of Groundswell Action Fund, reaffirmed the fund’s commitment to prioritizing investments in Black organizing, especially efforts led by Black women and Black transgender people, in a new piece for Philanthropy News Digest. As Quanita says, their work is necessary, genius, and humbling: “we are filled with awe for and indebted to the women, femmes, trans, and gender-expansive people of color defending our freedoms in some of the most hostile environments.”
As we close out Women’s History Month, the Rosenberg Foundation celebrates three women organizers and powerhouses who are looking to the future and reimagining criminal, legal, and economic systems to win justice and liberation for our communities. Aria Sa’id, Founder, President and Chief Strategist of The Transgender District, Shimica Gaskins, President and CEO of GRACE, and Cat Brooks, Co-Founder of Anti Police-Terror Project and Executive Director of Justice Teams Network, are fellows in Rosenberg’s Leading Edge Fund, which provides the next generation of racial justice leaders unrestricted funding and leadership development so they can pursue the vision for change that deep transformation demands. Learn more at leadingedge.rosenbergfound.org.
Black voters are disenchanted with the political process and dissatisfied in the Democratic Party. A new poll from Black to the Future Action Fund of Black people in California, Georgia, and North Carolina found that California voters experienced the biggest decline among the states in Black voters’ belief that their votes have power. And, 30% of respondents either didn’t vote Democrat or split their votes across political parties.
Ahead of the 2024 election cycle, when Black voters will certainly be asked by Democrats to go to the polls to save America, Democrats must take material action to address Black people’s priorities, or suffer the consequences of losing more support among our essential electorate. According to Ludovic Blain, Executive Director of the California Donor Table, that means that politicians in the Golden State will have to disentangle themselves from corporate interests which “are exactly contrary to Black community interests.” Read more in Justin Phillips’ piece for the San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today, and The Hill. For more findings from the most recent Black Voter Bulletin Poll produced in partnership with HIT Strategies, follow Black to the Future Action Fund on Twitter.
“Our concentrations of wealth and power…have been at the expense of those who today are on the front lines of the climate crisis: Indigenous, Black, working class and people of color communities. But we can alter this trajectory by heeding the calls of environmental justice communities and directly supporting their solutions.” Supriya Lopez Pillai, Executive Director and Board Member of the Hidden Leaf Foundation, calls peers in philanthropy to task for a lack of investment in transformative climate justice work led by these communities in a new piece for InsidePhilanthropy.
June Wilson, Executive Director of Compton Foundation, shared musings on the foundation’s spend up plan, reparations, and what lies ahead in the work for Compton Foundation’s blog. Foundations’ and philanthropy endowments, she reminds us, are “generated and multiplied from harm.” Reinvesting those gains in Black women entrepreneurs, artists, creatives and activists “is the work that must be done to heal our ideologies of supremacy, separation, and segregation.”
What We’re Reading
“The Right To Read,” a documentary film featuring FULCRUM Founder and Executive Director Kareem Weaver and produced by LeVar Burton, chronicles Kareem’s work to combat the urgent literacy culture in the U.S. Learn more about Kareem’s work and the film in this EdSource feature.