Change Consulting Leadership in Action
We are so inspired by our VP Stephanie Ong, who, along with her partner and nine-year-old son, modeled a pathway towards authentic and sustainable safety by organizing her East Oakland neighbors to create a support network to help each other. As Stephanie wrote in a recent piece for the San Francisco Chronicle, “safety is shared. It’s cultivated in community with others, not for us to weather alone or delegate to others to solve.”
Client News
Every day, directly impacted leaders from throughout California are pushing for powerful solutions to the challenges our communities face. #HeretoLeadCA, a storytelling initiative that celebrates the leadership, power, and voice of multigenerational, AAPI, African American, Latinx, and Native American boys and men of color, relaunched this week with stories featuring three new leaders. We are proud to be a longtime partner with the California Funders for Boys and Men of Color on this campaign! For more on #HeretoLeadCA:
- Visit the Here to Lead website and read stories about how Devon Gray, Samuel Molina, and Derek Steele are creating economic opportunities in their communities
- Follow Here to Lead on social media for more about these leaders and the campaign
- Check out the video Change helped produce featuring Devon Gray
Research reveals that women and girls of color collectively receive less than 1% of all philanthropic investments, yet they are the ones pushing our communities and leaders to expand our visions of justice and equity. In celebration of the International Day of the Girl, Dr. Monique Couvson, president and CEO of Grantmakers for Girls of Color, recently contributed this piece to the Grio about how G4GC cedes and seeds power to leverage their resources to grow opportunities for leadership for girls, femmes, and gender-expansive youth of Color.
At a time when fascists are pushing policies that strip hard-earned rights away from the majority of the population, liberal philanthropists largely avoid issues that have been made “political,” preventing funders from supporting effective strategies to eradicate racism and other forms of oppression, as well as basic methods of strengthening democracy. Ludovic Blain, Executive Director, and Rebecca Hamburg, Chief Network Officer of California Donor Table, recently spoke with Philanthropy News Digest to talk about philanthropy’s underlying failure: conflating requirements to avoid partisanship with anything remotely political.
Nonprofit leadership is hard, particularly for women, and particularly for Black women and women of color who face challenges in securing the funding, resources, and support they need to achieve their mission and affect social change. A growing movement in the nonprofit sector seeks to right the historical wrong of overburdened and burnt out leadership: appointing co-CEOs. Last year, the Young Women’s Freedom Center appointed Julia Arroyo and Abigail Richards as co-executive directors. According to Julia, it was clear that “the healthiest way to do this work was to have another person inside of it.” For Julia, it’s an advantage for YWFC’s bottom line as well: “If I fall short, Abigail comes in strong…our different styles complement each other so well.” More at the Chronicle of Philanthropy.