S2 Episode 9: Part 2: The Racist Roots of NonProfits & Philanthropy LIVE with Christina Shimizu6/9/2021
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Episode Summary By popular demand, Christina Shimizu is back as a guest for Part 2 of The Racist Roots of Nonprofits & Philanthropy, LIVE at the Washington Nonprofits conference! “How on Earth can we solve the issues our communities face if we can't first acknowledge that there is a problem?” On this, the last episode of Season 2, Michelle and Christina go deeper with the recent history of how some of our ethos in philanthropy came to be, why philanthropy is built on deep injustices and a little about community centric fundraising. Remember...if we don’t examine how these things came to be, we can never hope to reimagine them, improve them or do better, to benefit the communities we are trying to serve.
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Episode Summary In this episode, Michelle speaks with Kishshana Palmer, the Let’s Take This Offline podcast, The Rooted Collaborative and Kishshana + Co about living well to lead well, performative alllyship, authenticity, financial fortitude and her new podcast! Please join us for this rich conversation!
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Episode Summary “In this moment, people are committing to be reparationist and committing to reparations as a spiritual practice. At the same time, this is one of the most vibrant moments for the discussion of reparations, and I've never seen the proliferation of more reparations organizations, and that's wonderful.” In this episode, Michelle speaks with Dr. David Ragland, Director of the Grassroots Reparations Campaign, about what reparations really is, police violence, inequity, complicity how to create cultures of truth telling. We go deep. Join us!
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Episode Summary Billionaires in America are changing the landscape of philanthropy. Journalist Teddy Schleifer of Vox’s Recode Daily podcast, joins Michelle to talk about what billionaires are doing with their money, the debate about Donor Advised Funds, and large scale philanthropy. “One thing society might not appreciate is how much those entities [large East Coast Foundations] are going to seem like small potatoes. The amount of money being made in Silicon Valley and is theoretically going to be deployed to the charitable sector...is enormous.”
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Episode Summary “A lot of us, white women, are coming to our work with some deep martyrdom as the motivator. And this equation of ‘my worth is dependent on how helpful I am…’ well, helping is just the sunny-side of control.” We're on spring break! And since so many new listeners have joined us lately, we’re going to air our most popular episode from Season 1: White Women as Gatekeepers, featuring Fleur Larsen! With white women as the primary demographic of the nonprofit workforce, this episode begins addressing white women in their role as gatekeepers. In this episode, Fleur Larsen, a DEI consultant and a white woman, talks with Michelle to answer questions like: Why are there so many white DEI consultants making money off of racism? What does gatekeeping look like? How do you know you are gatekeeping and what should you do when you are called out? How do you call out a gatekeeper?
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Episode Summary With her podcast, Fare of the Free Child, a Ted Talk, 10 books out and an entire network devoted to the unschooling community, hundreds of thousands of people have been tuning in to Akilah Richards’ body of work. In this episode, Michelle talks with Akilah about how we can decolonize ourselves, centering community and unschooling, which Akilah defines as “...shedding the programming and habits that resulted from other people's agency over your time, body, thoughts or actions [and] designing and practicing beliefs that align with your desire to thrive, be happy and succeed...” This celebrated speaker, and organizer has just published her latest book, Raising Free People: Unschooling as Liberation and Healing Work. Tune in - you don’t want to miss this conversation.
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Episode Summary There have been so many problematic practices we’ve used in nonprofit communications...so how do we start thinking about communications, differently? Well, in this episode, Michelle talks with Sarah Durham founder of Big Duck, a New York-based nonprofit communications firm, podcaster with The Smart Communications podcast and author of two books including Brandraising and The Nonprofit Communications Engine! We talk about the difference between communications, marketing and branding, how Americans are terrible at research, unnecessary urgency as a characteristic of white supremacy in communications, and what we can start doing differently today!
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Episode Summary “...it's really hard to promote the history of Black people and not address the inequities being experienced by Black people…it just felt disingenuous to not find a way to bring these things together.” Nneka Allen joins Michelle, to talk about her essay in the newly released book Collecting Courage for which she is co-author and co-editor. In this episode, Nneka shares the deep and meaningful work of saving one of the Underground Railroad sites - the Nazary AME Church (part of the Amherstburg Freedom Museum) learning her ancestors were leaders in that movement, and the failure of a Board of Directors, to center the current-day struggles of their community. We talk about aligning ourselves with the demands of love, forgiveness, the power of storytelling, and attachment styles!
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Episode Summary The UK has had a foundational influence in building the problematic philanthropic and nonprofit sectors (Third Sector) in the US and other countries, which is why we are so happy to go straight to the source! Host Michelle Muri talks with Andy King and Tom DeFraine of UK podcast Fixing Fundraising! From topics like Captain Tom and the injustice of fundraising for government programs that should be funded by taxation, Brexit, the political nature of any nonprofit, dog whistles, the role of patronage in the UK, Prince Andrew’s fall from patronage, Prince Williams, a brief word about drones and fireworks, to the terrible practices the UK is adopting from the US...we promise you’ll chuckle or even laugh out loud! Yes, even in a pandemic.
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Episode Summary “...the processes we’ve used in evaluation are perpetuating a lot of the harms we thought we were helping with…” “we’re all using data problematically!” In this season finale, Michelle talks with Anna Rebecca Lopez and Vu Le about how the traditional ways that data has been collected and used can be harmful - causing misrepresentation, oppression and erasure. Anna Rebecca shares her personal journey with deep academic cred as a data nerd and disruptor and the three talk about what questions we must ask to truly center our communities.
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Episode Summary “...as activists...we really need to undertake our own healing as a way of transforming society. If we try to transform society from the level of consciousness that’s still traumatized and it’s reactive, then we are recreating the same patterns that have oppressed us.” In this episode, Michelle talks with Victoria Santos, a deep healer, community organizer, and brilliant facilitator who shares her self-healing journey after trauma and burnout. Listen as she shares wisdom around what we need to release and practice to serve a better society.
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Episode Summary “Faulty.” “Problematic.” “Racist.” In this episode, we talk about why these terms are now regularly used to describe the foundations that the nonprofit and philanthropic systems were built upon. Guest Christina Shimizu, a co-founder of Community-Centric Fundraising, briefly explores the relatively recent history of how these systems came to be, why they are built on deep injustices and how philanthropy and nonprofits are actually a political and economic system. Unpack all of this with us! If we don’t examine how these things came to be, we can never hope to reimagine them, improve them or do better, to benefit the communities we are trying to serve.
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Episode Summary “...while we know that systemic racism is real and we know that funders aren’t really supporting and investing in brown and black communities, when you see the data, it's staggering. And it's amazing to me how complacent we can get sometimes, even in our advocacy.” Community foundations are supposed to serve their communities! But many community foundations use the same donor-centrism philosophies that our nonprofits do, centering white communities and wealth. In this episode, Heather Infantry, a fundraiser, executive director and organizer, tells us the story of how she called out her local community foundation and started a huge transformational shift in her community of Atlanta, Georgia.
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Episode Summary In this episode, we’re dipping into the world of kink, and BDSM - and specifically consent. With so much awful news, subjugation, disaster, political oppression and disempowerment, it is easy to brush past some of the day-to-day tools we can use to regain power. In this episode, we explore the framework of consent, applied beyond the kink world, with kink-trainer and activist L.T. We’ll talk about boundary setting, renegotiation, clear communication, power dynamics in npos and more. So buckle up and get ready for juicy, beautiful content. “..we know we have a culture that is at best, murky around consent. None of us has ever lived in a consent culture, so we don’t know what to model it after, so we are all building this together.”
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Episode Summary From tokenism to using community as unpaid consultants, from structural oppression to...more gatekeeping, and identity-based privilege, former City Councilman turned DEI consultant, Chuck Warpehoski, talks with Michelle about the common and -tired- ways in which institutions perform or attempt to work with the community and common pitfalls. Chuck also shares personal stories of mistakes he’s made while working to serve the community as a white man. |
