What does leadership for the 21st century look like?
+ upcoming conferences + the Linda Lindas revive political punk for racial justice
The theme of today’s issue of The Platypus is leadership. Dominant paradigms emphasize qualities like charisma and individualism. But many emerging leaders stress other qualities, like accountability and embeddedness in community. The long-running debate about who gets to lead and whose leadership is valued — in society and in the social-change sector — is accelerating, pushed farther by the Movement for Black Lives. This issue collects pieces that speak to these questions and contradictions.
First, a few events:
The American Prospect is holding a half-day conference, “Organizing for Social and Political Empowerment,” on May 26th from 1-5 pm ET, which will include organizers and academics like Heather Booth, Ernesto Cortes, Maurice Mitchell, Hahrie Han, and Deepak. (And that’s just the first panel!)
Leading urbanist Cassim Shepard will be doing a talk entitled “Storytelling for Citymaking” at CUNY’s School of Labor and Urban Studies on June 2 from 12:00 – 1:30 pm ET. “Urban change relies on strategic storytelling. Before designers, planners, advocates, and policymakers can intervene in urban space, they must learn the tools to observe and interpret urban dynamics and to build compelling narratives that reframe existing conditions.”
On May 20th the National Partnership for New Americans hosted a fascinating discussion, “Our Vision of a Just Immigration System,” about the past, present, and future of the immigrant rights movement and social justice. It features Nicole Melaku, Marielena Hincapie, Angelica Salas, and Deepak.
The Leadership We Need
Gara LaMarche and Deepak have a new op-ed in the Chronicle of Philanthropy: “Foundations, the Solution to Our Democracy Deficit Lies in Plain Sight.” The article quotes some of the most effective people working in social change today including Cristina Jimenez, Maurice Mitchell, Darlene Nipper, and Nse Ufot. The full op-ed is pasted at the end, but here’s an excerpt:
The United States faces massive linked crises of spiraling economic inequality, structural racism, climate change, and authoritarian threats to democracy. One indispensable solution to these crises lies in plain view: the huge wave of emerging leaders, largely people of color and women, who have become active in social movements in recent years and brought fresh ideas and energy to these challenges. As Cristina Jimenez, co-founder of United We Dream, the youth-led immigrant-rights network put it in a public conversation with Deepak about leadership: “They’re the ones in the best position to come up with the solutions for the change we need to see and the breakthroughs that the country needs to see.”
Supporting these leaders to pursue vocations in social change and to take positions of power in society is an urgent priority. To figure out how to do that, we worked with a group of diverse movement leaders over the better part of the last year to explore the creation of a new Leadership Center for Democracy and Social Justice at the City University of New York. A team of researchers at CUNY talked to hundreds of leaders at all stages of their careers. We mapped the leadership-development ecosystems on the left and right.
What we learned is that conservative investments in leadership have outpaced and dwarfed progressive ones for decades. Our research uncovered a number of large organizations with big budgets that provide entry into right-wing movements and activism and support a spectrum of volunteer and professional leaders inside and outside government. Just one of their organizations, the Leadership Institute, has an annual budget of $24 million and has trained more than 200,000 people. It offers not only training programs but also career services, professional advice, and continuing learning and workshop opportunities for its members. . . .
Importantly, our research also found differences in method, not just scale. Conservative programs stay with leaders over many years, not just for one training or intensive leadership experience — providing career services, mentorship, fellowships, and robust social networks. And they don’t just offer management coaching — they train people on world views and how to acquire and wield power. The motto of the right-wing Leadership Institute is compelling: “You owe it to your philosophy to learn how to win.”
For more about this research, check out the interview with Gara and Deepak in “The Social Justice Talent Boom,” an episode of the podcast “Fund the People,” hosted by Rusty Stahl.
Check out this foundational report by the Building Movement Project: Race to Lead Revisited: Obstacles and Opportunities in Addressing the Nonprofit Racial Leadership Gap.
Race to Lead Revisited confirms findings in the original report that people of color have similar leadership qualifications as white respondents, and more people of color aspire to become nonprofit leaders than their white counterparts. The report also shows that despite the growing attention paid to diversity, equity, and inclusion in nonprofit organizations, there are entrenched disparities that privilege white people and white-led organizations in the nonprofit sector. The third major finding from the report shows that extensive DEI efforts across the sector appear to have increased awareness of race and racism, but have not yet translated into significant change or more equity in how people of color experience their organizations or the nonprofit sector.
Andy Mott, a longtime social justice leader at Community Change and founder of the Community Learning Project (CLP) has written an exceptional and incisive book that we highly recommend: Preparing to Win: Developing Community Leaders, Organizers and Allies. Andy explains the work CLP has done to build career pathways for low-income students and students of color in social change careers through degree-granting programs at a network of colleges across the country. He also reflects on what he’s learned in a decades-long career of making change and what public policies might best support scaling. It’s a must-read for anyone interested in developing strategies to elevate the leadership of working-class people of color.
We highly recommend Stacey Abrams’s book Our Time is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America – a magnificent articulation of the challenges we face now and what grounded, accountable leadership looks like. Also, check out this episode of the Democracy in Color podcast with Steve Phillips, which asks, “Who is the next Stacey Abrams?” Steve offers profiles of seven leaders we expect to hear a lot more about in the years ahead.
In the same spirit, we also highly recommend Cecilia Munoz’s book More Than Ready: Be Strong and Be You… And Other Lessons for Women of Color on the Rise and Pramila Jayapal’s book Use the Power You Have: A Brown Woman’s Guide to Politics and Social Change.
There is a superb set of about leadership and social change in Organizing Upgrade, including “Leaders Need Peer Accountability,” by Cathy Dang-Santa Anna, formerly of CAAV Organizing Asian Communities. Here’s a sample:
To build a strong and durable left, healthy leadership and process is necessary. After 15 years working as a community organizer and five of those years as an executive director, I continue to see some leaders make the same mistakes I made – mistakes it took me years to learn how to avoid. . . .
Lastly and most importantly of all, this process for building peer accountability does not work for everyone. It is important to find the right people for the team, people who will honor the collective agreements, can center the mission, organization, and team before themselves, and will refrain from engaging in toxic behavior. I had to let people leave who weren’t honoring our shared commitments and organizing goals or only saw their own needs and not their team’s or teammates’. It required people who could self-reflect on how their actions or inactions affected their team, the membership, and the work. I know some have a hard time with this concept, but it is absolutely okay for people to leave an organization. None of building collective accountability was clean and easy: it was all very messy and sometimes I wanted to give up.
There’s also this exceptional piece by Lauren Jacobs of The Partnership for Working Families, “Measure Leaders By What They Leave Behind.” Here’s an excerpt:
Our movement is in need of greater numbers of individuals who can readily assume responsibility for the work. The leaders I most admire are those who have an incredible roster of people they have mentored. Bourgeois society teaches us that leadership is something that only has value in its scarcity. That is false. Developed left leaders know that their value is measured in what they leave behind. Have they grown new organizers, block captains, campaigners, or union leaders?
Those of us raised within liberal capitalist nations were shaped by systems that reward competition and individualism. We carry this weight with us even when engaged in struggle against those very systems. We must be willing to reflect on our past actions, accept our shortcomings, learn, and then adapt.
A fascinating example of the kind of embedded, accountable leadership that Lauren talks about is Georgia, where, over more than a decade, a group of leaders, overwhelmingly women of color, worked together to transform the state. That story is told powerfully in the podcast episode “How Georgia Turned Blue,” in which Dorian Warren and Melissa Harris-Perry interview some of the leaders mentored by Stacey Abrams who run powerhouse organizations that played a critical role in winning last year’s presidential election and two Senate runoffs.
You can watch provocative discussions about social change leadership with Nse Ufot and Cristina Jimenez here and a discussion with Maurice Mitchell and Rahna Epting here.
Dean Spade has written fascinating pieces and a book about “mutual aid,” a longtime strategy for social change that has experienced a revival during the pandemic. This review in The Nation is a good place to start.
Spade argues that we live in one of “the most atomized societies in human history, which makes our lives less secure and undermines our ability to organize together to change unjust conditions on a large scale.” It is in this context—one defined both by social isolation and dependency on toxic and hostile institutions—that Spade situates the promise of mutual aid, which he writes gives us the tools to meet “each other’s needs based in shared commitments to dignity, care, and justice.” While some imagine national politics as the primary venue for social change, Spade argues that real, lasting transformation comes from the organizing inside our communities. His book is at once a call-to-arms, a balm for all those despairing at the present and future, and a blueprint for how we might better live with one another.
Perry Bacon wrote a provocative framing piece in The Washington Post entitled “America is having a Black Renaissance. We should learn from it.”
We are in the midst of a “Black Renaissance,” to use author Ibram X. Kendi’s term, and it is good for America and long overdue. But just as important is how it happened — and how it can be a model for a more equitable and inclusive America.
. . . after the initial rise of Black Lives Matter and, even more so, after last year’s protests following the killing of George Floyd, it simply became untenable to have no or few Black people in most industries and professions. Non-Black employees joined with their Black colleagues to demand the hiring of more Black people. So companies and institutions stopped whining about supposedly bad pipelines and started looking beyond them. Businesses are recruiting Howard graduates like they long have Harvard graduates. News organizations are seeking out Black people in academia or law and publishing their work. The Democratic Party knew it would be sharply criticized if it ran two White candidates for the U.S. Senate races last year in Georgia, with its large Black population. So the party made sure Raphael Warnock was one of the candidates — even though he had never run for any office before.
Here’s the thing: None of these institutions are any worse off than before they abandoned their traditional pipelines. I think they are better off. What these institutions discovered, as education policy writer John Warner says, is that “talent is abundant.” There are tens of millions of Black people in America. There were always Black people who could do any job. There was never a pipeline problem.
Delights and Provocations
Today we have just one delight and provocation: an amazing two-minute video from the Linda Lindas that fiercely illustrates the kind of fierce leadership we need. Political punk rebooted for our times. Genius.
Foundations, the Solution to Our Democracy Deficit Lies in Plain Sight
By Deepak Bhargava and Gara LaMarche
The Chronicle of Philanthropy, May 17, 2021
The United States faces massive linked crises of spiraling economic inequality, structural racism, climate change, and authoritarian threats to democracy. One indispensable solution to these crises lies in plain view: the huge wave of emerging leaders, largely people of color and women, who have become active in social movements in recent years and brought fresh ideas and energy to these challenges. As Cristina Jimenez, co-founder of United We Dream, the youth-led immigrant-rights network put it in a public conversation with Deepak about leadership: “They’re the ones in the best position to come up with the solutions for the change we need to see and the breakthroughs that the country needs to see.”
Supporting these leaders to pursue vocations in social change and to take positions of power in society is an urgent priority. To figure out how to do that, we worked with a group of diverse movement leaders over the better part of the last year to explore the creation of a new Leadership Center for Democracy and Social Justice at the City University of New York. A team of researchers at CUNY talked to hundreds of leaders at all stages of their careers. We mapped the leadership-development ecosystems on the left and right.
What we learned is that conservative investments in leadership have outpaced and dwarfed progressive ones for decades. Our research uncovered a number of large organizations with big budgets that provide entry into right-wing movements and activism and support a spectrum of volunteer and professional leaders inside and outside government. Just one of their organizations, the Leadership Institute, has an annual budget of $24 million and has trained more than 200,000 people. It offers not only training programs but also career services, professional advice, and continuing learning and workshop opportunities for its members.
Outside this conservative bubble, at last count, U.S. foundations overall spent less than 1 percent of their budgets on leadership development. “We’re scrawny,” noted a progressive movement colleague speaking of the contrast between the infrastructure on the left and right. “We’re dealing with the effects of a 40-, 50-year right-wing assault on everything. They’ve got think tanks, conferences, training programs, etc.”
Importantly, our research also found differences in method, not just scale. Conservative programs stay with leaders over many years, not just for one training or intensive leadership experience — providing career services, mentorship, fellowships, and robust social networks. And they don’t just offer management coaching — they train people on world views and how to acquire and wield power. The motto of the right-wing Leadership Institute is compelling: “You owe it to your philosophy to learn how to win.”
To figure out how to build a robust alternative, we talked with established social-change leaders, people seeking a first job, midcareer activists, and a number of people across disciplines and issues. Some common themes from these conversations were that we need to do the following:
Create pathways for up-and-coming leaders of color, especially women. Many established leaders told stories of their own accidental landing in positions of leadership. Young people cannot see their way into the opaque world of social change. There is no clearly defined way to get a job in social justice without first volunteering, doing an internship, and then applying for a position. Most organizations do not offer pay for these opportunities, which puts them beyond the reach of many who most need them. Those who found their way in confirmed what senior leaders told us about how obscure or inaccessible the entry points are. Said one early-career interviewee: “Getting into this industry, whether it be government or social change is hard. . . . It is not necessarily about the skillset, but it is about who you know.”
Provide help to midcareer advocates so they can get through the bumpy moments and take on new challenges. After about five to seven years in social-change work, leaders may be ready for the next challenge, burning out, or entering a stage when very long work hours no longer fit into their personal lives. It’s a big leap even for successful midlevel people into management roles. People who confront entrenched power imbalances in society find it challenging to wield power skillfully themselves. Entry-level roles (as frontline organizers, say) do not always provide them with the competencies they need to move up, such as managing budgets, supervising people, and setting strategy.
Build a hub where leaders can find not only robust training opportunities, but also a hearth they can return to over the course of their careers. Social-change leaders need ways to connect with mentors, peers, continuing education, and space for reflection. Tracking and coaching people as they move from job to job over the decades will benefit all social-justice work — but those duties are beyond the capacity of any single organization.
Assemble and teach a “canon” of social-change leadership. Today we lack a curriculum that integrates understanding of movement history and theories with the day-to-day practice of hard and soft skills, what one person we interviewed called a combination of “movement lens and organization lens.” It’s especially important for people in the early stage of their careers to be exposed in an ecumenical way to the range of approaches from insider advocacy to movement in the streets that are part of successful social-change efforts. Even if people specialize in a particular function, like policy, their orientation at the outset of their careers to other disciplines like organizing and communications will accelerate our collective impact.
Make equity, antioppression, and structural racism central to the DNA for any leadership effort. We must abandon the idea that people of color have deficits that must be addressed for them to ascend to leadership and, instead, provide the support and networks they need for their talents to find full expression. As Nse Ufot, CEO of the New Georgia Project, put it: “Give us the gavel. Give us the resources, because we can do this.”
Emphasize the importance of collective leadership. Successful social-change work requires a strong sense of accountability, an understanding of the value of service to others, and commitment to developing other leaders. This contrasts with the “rock-star leadership” model often promoted by philanthropy. Maurice Mitchell, director of the Working Families Party, said, “What’s necessary is for us to evolve to a different type of leadership that puts at the core collaboration. I don’t think it’s possible for us to do any of the big things we want to do without collaboration. None of us individually has enough power or enough strategic sensibilities or are in enough places or touch enough spaces for us to go it alone. And I think that’s actually a good thing. It means that instead of looking at your objectives in a vacuum, you think about this ecosystem that we’re trying to build.”
Make sure that leadership training is widely accessible. It must be available not only to people in paid roles in social change, but also to grassroots volunteer leaders who are the heart of movement work. What’s more, it should not be simply for front-facing program roles, but also for grooming the people who lead the operations, finance, administrative, and fundraising functions that are crucial to the success of our organizations and movements.
Pay attention to the “inner” aspects of leadership. Issues of resilience, healing, and community need to be at the center of all training.
Our conversations unfolded in a year when the country was roiled by a global pandemic, an economic crisis, potent antidemocratic insurgencies, and an overdue racial reckoning. Many organizations and their staffs were in tumult themselves. Unsurprisingly, there were tensions that surfaced in our explorations.
While there’s a widespread desire in the nonprofit world to elevate people of color, many people of color worry about tokenism and “performative” rather than substantive equity efforts, and they fear new leaders of color are too often set up to fail. Some raised concerns about organizations that were mainly looking to ensure their staffs were diverse, rather than the acknowledging the need to focus equally on transforming inequitable systems and ensuring that leaders of all racial backgrounds are equipped to do the vital work of multiracial coalition building required in these times.
Young staff members have different expectations and demands for how they can use their voice and participate in decision making. Some younger activists are questioning the hierarchical structures of many organizations, while others who have fought to move up in the workplace wonder why hierarchy is being questioned at precisely the moment when people of color are finally achieving positions of authority in some movement organizations.
Big organizations are grappling with the inadequacy of a “human resources” perspective, which tends to be technical, compliance oriented, and bureaucratic. Some are replacing or supplementing human-resources duties with tasks focused on nurturing talent and culture.
Young people of color and first-generation students are grappling with how to earn a sustainable livelihood in social change. They are deeply committed but worry about low salaries, debt, and grueling work environments. Making a living wage is a top concern for everyone. Young people and midcareer leaders told us they crave mentorship from people whose identities and experiences reflect their own. A consistent theme from young leaders especially is the need to build into leadership development an understanding of the traumas people working in social change have faced, given racism, violence, and growing inequality. They also stressed issues of inclusion for trans, nonbinary, gender nonconforming, and queer people that have not been adequately addressed by social-change leaders.
It’s time for all of us who care about social justice to take a long-term view of career development rather than a single training or immersion approach and listen to what advocates say they need most.
Darlene Nipper, CEO of the Rockwood Institute, which has consistently led the way, put the challenge well: “There is no quick fix for building robust and leaderful movements of knowledgeable leaders who are resilient and thriving. If we want lasting transformational social change in BIPOC communities and beyond, we must invest significantly and boldly in these leaders across all sectors. When we do, we will see the flourishing of our visions and a transformed democracy rather than piecemeal changes and ideological catchphrases that leave our communities and people longing for real, lasting progress towards equity, liberation, and sustainability for all.”
Deepak Bhargava is a distinguished lecturer at the School of Labor and Urban Studies at the City University of New York and co-editor of the book Immigration Matters: Visions, Strategies, and Movements for a Progressive Future.
Gara LaMarche, president of the Democracy Alliance, is a senior fellow at the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership at the City College of New York.