S3 Episode 10: The truth about cancel culture (and an alternative approach), featuring Kevin Baker3/29/2022
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Cancel culture. Disbanded groups. Severed ties. Intent vs Impact. Most of us are shit at dealing with problematic behavior - our own or others! Whether in our nonprofits, our neighborhood groups, activist communities or families - our unresolved conflicts cause damage, chaos and separation - in times where we need unity, repair and one-ness to best serve our communities. Enter Kevin Baker whose mission is to make sure people can bring their authentic cultural selves to the workplace, creating healthier, more open workspaces that better serve humans. Kevin and I talk about how a whole bunch of us really need therapy, what it means to take a relationship-first approach to workplace conflict, and why we need to ditch our desire for quick fixes and allow ample time for repair work. S3 Episode 9: The truth about unhoused folks (and harm reduction!) ft. The Sidewalk Project3/16/2022
 Listen on: Medical violence. Stigmatization. Criminalization. These are just a portion of the harms we, as nonprofits, cause the people we are supposed to serve. That’s why Soma Snakeoil and Stacey Dee created The Sidewalk Project, an organization that advocates for the dignity and rights of people living on the streets. Everyone deserves to be treated with respect, have their needs met, and receive medical care, but our unhoused neighbors are often denied even the most basic compassion and dignity. Learn about some of the shitty practices we perpetuate and how we can instead empower communities that have been systematically harmed and erased
S3 Episode 8: "How I Figured Out I Suffer From Toxic Productivity," ft. Marina Martinez-Bateman3/1/2022
S3 Episode 7: "Why honesty is my favorite form of poetry" featuring Matthew Cuban Hernandez2/16/2022
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Honesty. We crave it and we don’t get enough of it! In this episode, award winning poet, hip hop artist and teacher Matthew Cuban Hernandez of Street Poets Inc. (LA) talks with Michelle about honesty in our interpersonal relationships and in our organizations, rites of passage, structural racism and ageism in working with young people and…giving work away!
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International comedienne, performance artist, actress and elected official Kristina Wong, talks about the subversive game, the performance of her lifetime (elected office) and her journey as an accidental sweatshop overlord through her latest mutual aid project and book The Auntie Sewing Squad. Based in LA, California learn about the connection between art, organizing and radical politics.
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When community-centric fundraising launched their content hub and 10 principles, thousands of organizations and people took note - and many took action. Lea Whitehurst-Gibson and Bekah Kendrick of Virginia Community Voice talk about how they built and delivered their Courageous Fundraising Principles and how they center community in their work based in Richmond, Virginia, the former capital of the Confederacy. Learn about strategy and tactics in this story!
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TV celeb and James Beard Award-winning chef, Tomme Beevas talks about how the lynching of George Floyd - less than two miles from his restaurant, played out in the creation of Pimento Relief Services, a truly community-centered organization in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Learn about liberation in action through this inspiring story!
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How can love be a metric and what does it look like to measure that instead of fundraising goals? The Oregon food bank surprised many folks in the nonprofit community when they revealed a new concept, measuring love instead of fundraising. In this episode, Nathan Harris and Vivien Trinh of the Oregon Food Bank, describe the thinking and process around how they changed the practices of the Oregon Food Bank to center love!
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Phillip Chavira talks about why Capitalism is trash, how money is a tool for and against the movement and where we have power to make decisions that center our communities and our values.
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Episode Summary: Controversial. Polarizing. Divisive. Liz LeClair has gained a reputation for her famous call outs of both sexual assault and racism within the nonprofit world. In S3:E1, Michelle interviews this writer, fundraiser and badass who talks about calling out white fundraisers for their racism, taking responsibility for being part of the problem, and her experience speaking out about sexual harassment in the fundraising space, including cofounding the National Day of Conversation in Canada. “Every generation you either change and evolve or you become irrelevant.” You are going to love this episode. 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. |
