Book Group Recap: Courageous Philanthropy with Jennifer Vanica

What does Courageous Philanthropy look like?

For our December gathering of the quarterly DMV Community Book Group, that was the question of the hour, as we were joined by Jennifer Vanica, a 40-year veteran of philanthropy and community change, and author of Courageous Philanthropy: Going Public in a Closely Held World

“It is time to forge new, more courageous relationships between foundations and the communities we seek to serve,” Vanica shared. “When we no longer work to sustain our own points of view and work toward community ownership of change as accountable partners, we will discover that what endures is the fire of inspired action.”

In the late 1990s, Vanica was the CEO and President of the Jacobs Center for Neighborhood Innovation (JCNI), one of the lead organizers behind Market Creek Plaza Project in San Diego, California. The project has gained national acclaim for being one of the first neighborhood redevelopment projects in the US that was driven and owned by residents. From 1997 to 2005, more than 3,000 residents participated in teams to plan, design, build and lease the project which transformed a 20-acre industrial lot into a thriving commercial and cultural plaza. In her book, Vanica shares what she believes was key to the project’s success – mainly, a bold and intentional focus on listening and developing community ownership.

“Don’t do about me, without me,” Vanica recalled one resident sharing with her at a community meeting. “That was the mantra that drove our work.”

When asked what amenities should be included in the development project, Vanica says her organization supported residents as they went door-to-door, conducting more than 600 surveys with their fellow neighbors in four different languages. Their responses helped lay the blueprint for Market Creek Plaza – similar to the way that research initiatives like VoicesDMV have laid the foundation for The Community Foundation’s Strategic Vision and other initiatives.

Market Creek Plaza in San Diego, California includes one of the first grocery stores in the surrounding community, many minority-owned businesses, a cultural center, an open-air amphitheater, and other social amenities.

But Vanica says, for JCNI, the community involvement didn’t stop there. JCNI moved their offices to the neighborhood to be closer to residents. They met with around 200 local organizations, inviting various leaders to serve on committees for the project. They also went out of their way to include the diverse ethnic groups in the region by providing multiple translators for community meetings.

“Courage is what it takes to stand and speak,” Vanica shared. “But courage is also doing what it takes to create the space and environment to sit and listen.”

“If philanthropy has a job to act in the public interest, doesn’t it have an obligation to engage with and seek out the public interest?” Vanica asked.

“At JCNI, we consistently looked to residents to guide who was needed at the table and what kind of help would need to be provided in any given situation.”

Vanica says that the secret to success is to “protect the process” that prioritizes action and community engagement.

“If you’re going to cede decision-making control to the community, your process really matters,” Vanica shared. “Prioritizing participatory planning that is biased towards action; allowing people across different cultures to be involved and have a voice.”

Vanica explained that while the process of philanthropy ceding control of the planning process to community members seemed daunting, it ultimately led to the creation of a better project – allowing community members and developers access to untapped resources in the form of ideas and greater growth potential for the community.

For example, community members pointed out that – at the time – less than 2% of public works jobs in San Diego were awarded to minority contractors. By the end of the project, 69% of construction contracts were awarded to local minority-owned enterprises.

Community leaders share their experience working on the Market Plaza project in a video shared with the book group.

In addition, Vanica worked with a team of residents and attorneys to develop the nation’s first Community-Development Initial Public Offering – allowing residents to directly invest between $200-$10,000 in the project. As of 2009, 20% of the plaza was owned by local residents.

“As a premise of our democracy, those affected by decisions need a voice in those decisions,” Vanica explained. “And that demands that we let go of the idea that one group with power and privilege should try to stimulate social change without opening the door to the community.”

“In the foundation world, we wonder why things aren’t sustainable,” she added. “But if the assets are still sitting in our bank accounts or are only accessible through narrow parameters, it will never be sustainable. We have to be willing to let go of control.”

“We’re better together. Together, we have more endurance to face obstacles and become the most courageous versions of ourselves.”

The Community Foundation is excited to promote discussions and initiatives around innovative and courageous philanthropy that cedes power and seeds community wealth building. For more information, visit our website to learn about our Strategic Vision for Economic Justice and Together, We Prosper Campaign.

Click here to watch a full recording of the December 2023 DMV Community Book Group! For more information about the DMV Community Book Group, visit our website!

Book Group Recap: Collective Courage with Dr. Jessica Gordon-Nembhard

Dr. Gordon-Nembhard defines a Cooperative for the DMV Community Book Group

Our quarterly DMV Community Book Group dove into the world of Cooperative Economics with Dr. Jessica Gordon-Nembhard, Professor at City University of New York and author of the book Collective Courage: The History of African American Economic Thought and Practice. The discussion was attended by a wide range of community partners including representatives from cooperatives across DC, Maryland, and Virginia.

“Cooperative economics is the origin of our economic system,” Dr. Gordon-Nembhard explained. “It’s a concept has played a vital role in nearly every population in human history – especially amongst African Americans and other people of color.”

Cooperatives have long played a significant role in African American communities within the Greater Washington region – one which Dr. Gordon-Nembhard is intimately familiar with. A long-time DC resident, Dr. Gordon-Nembhard is an active member of Organizing Neighborhood Equity (ONE) DC and is active in campaigns to establish cooperative housing in DC.

Dr. Gordon-Nembhard spent years researching the history and impact of African American economic cooperatives across the region and the country – documenting more than 160 legally incorporated African American-owned cooperatives from mid-1800s to 2013.

“As African Americans, we started using coops for survival – but overtime we were able to position them to control our own communities, both politically and economically.”

Dr. Gordon-Nembhard outlines the four different types of Economic Cooperatives.

Dr. Gordon-Nembhard explained how the Black Cooperative movement helped African American communities overcome challenging times including economic recessions in the 1880s and 1930s, as well as ongoing economic racial discrimination. She pointed out that the Black Cooperative Movement paralleled – and at times overlapped with the Long Civil Rights Movement, involving Civil Rights icons from across the spectrum such as Ella Jo Baker, W.E.B. DuBois, and the Black Panthers.

“Some people think that to close the racial wealth gap, we just need more wealthy people of color, so the wealth gap will close, based on numbers alone,” Dr. Gordon-Nembhard shared. “I’m more interested in ending poverty – creating stable, lasting systems that enable us to all be prosperous.”

“That’s what cooperative economics are about – creating collective enterprises that not only impact individual lives, but that systematically change how we think about getting out of poverty.”

When asked about the future of the cooperative movement, Dr. Gordon-Nembhard pointed to the growing number of cooperatives over the past few years. For example, the DC region has one of the highest concentrations of housing coops in the US (second only to New York).

“Figure out what’s the need that a cooperative could solve and then take time to study out what kind of cooperative could work for your community.”

“Start where the people are,” she said. “Rather than scaling something big from the top down, start small with something people can get behind – a community playground or food coop and build from there.”

“Once you get people working together – maximizing the skills that each individual has and brings to the table – then you can move onto something bigger.”

Click here to watch a full recording of the March 2023 DMV Community Book Group!

The Next Step in our Journey with the DMV Book Group

Dear Book Group Family,

Thank you for those of you who have been a part of the Greater Washington Community Foundation’s book group over the last year. 

As a group, much of our time and attention has been focused on socializing ourselves about the ways that racism, economics, politics, and policy making have played out in American history and created the disparities we see in our society. We have done so with the expectation that we could all align around a shared understanding about the racial and economic choices, histories, policies, and impacts that perpetuate the disparities we see in our society—the racial wealth gap in particular. 

To this end, please allow me to offer a draft perspective that we will test, revise, and eventually hold together:

In our book group, we have learned how racism and our prevailing political and economic systems were born and raised together.  We have seen how they are mutually reinforcing structures that have instigated profound harm in the lives of Indigenous and Black peoples, and other people of color. 

While these groups have suffered the most, we all suffer as long as these systems remain unchallenged and unchecked. We believe that the racial and economic justice that so many of us seek will only come by transforming BOTH the hearts, minds and behaviors of individuals AND the interlocking systems that govern our lives and well-being.

Over this next year we will be making an intentional pivot to volumes and published pieces inviting us to imagine compelling and concrete solutions that address the racial and economic issues keeping us all from living our highest collective potential.

We set the tone for this pivot toward solutions at our last book group when we read Solidarity Economics: Why Mutuality and Movement Matter. One of the book’s co-authors, Professor Manual Pastor joined us to offer perspectives on the book.  He invited us to reimagine an economic system built on the values and practices of mutuality—in other words an economy that moves away from competition, individualism, and winners and losers, to one that models collaboration, the human desire for community, everyone doing well.   

I’m excited to continue our journey as we discuss Collective Courage: A History of African-American Cooperative Thought and Practice. If you don’t have time to read the entire book, feel free to skim this article that includes in an interview with the author of the book—Jessica Gordon Nembhard – who will be joining us for our book group session on March 31st. You can register here. 

I hope you’ll continue to join us in the work of learning, dreaming, and taking action together.  The change we seek will take all of us.

In Solidarity,

Ronnie Galvin
Senior Fellow & Book Group Facilitator

Book Group Recap: Solidarity Economics with Dr. Manuel Pastor

Our quarterly DMV Community Book Group closed out the year with a lively discussion with Dr. Manuel Pastor, Professor of Sociology and American Studies & Ethnicity at University of Southern California and co-author of Solidarity Economics: Why Mutuality and Movements Matter.

“For 250 years now, our major economic and political institutions have rewarded those who act in self-interest over those who act out of mutuality,” Dr. Pastor explained.

“But we know that that’s not how most people operate – we know that in our own lives, communities do better when everyone feels connected.”

“This book is an attempt to move the middle – to present a common-sense perspective of why systemic change benefits everyone.”

Dr. Pastor kicked off the webinar with a reminder about language usage.

“We have been brainwashed into thinking that equity is bad for the economy,” Dr. Pastor explained. “But the reality is that it’s not ‘the economy’; it’s ‘our economy’.”

“When we talk about ‘the economy’, we make it sound like it’s an extraterrestrial force that can’t be impacted. Our economy is something that we are constantly involved with.”

“This simple language shift is incredibly important because it changes how we look at issues in our society – especially those that impact African-Americans, Latinos, and other groups that have been systematically marginalized and disenfranchised.”

Dr. Pastor quoted one of the DMV Book Club’s past reads, Heather McGhee’s book The Sum of Us, challenging participants to consider “the sum of us” instead of just “some of us” when it comes to combating racism and its consequences.

“Equity is not a ‘special-interest’ issue,” Dr. Pastor continued. “It’s not something that is only beneficial for communities of color. It’s something that can grow our economy in ways that benefit most, if not all of us.”

However, he was also realistic about the need for systemic change.

“There are still those who benefit from the current state of affairs,” Dr. Pastor explained. “Because of this, we need more social movements that can change the constellation of power.”

“These movements are critical,” he added. “Just as markets reward and teach us to pursue self-interest, movements reward and teach us to act mutually. When you become part of a movement for social change, you build bridges to other communities and help find the uncommon common ground between those groups.”

When asked how to build those bridges, Dr. Pastor highlighted the need to have real conversations with community members about what they are actually feeling.

Citing another book of his, South Central Dreams, Dr. Pastor highlighted community organizing efforts in South Los Angeles – a community which has transformed from a historically Black neighborhood into a predominantly Latinx one. The book outlines how organizers helped community members to develop a sense of place or spatial identity – as well as racial identity.

“It’s not just expressing commonality,” he said. “It’s about exploring the ways that we are ignorant of one another. It’s about creating a conversation where people can say what they are thinking – including the myths or misconceptions they have – and having a dialogue so we can work to dispel them.”

“We need to help people understand the history of their communities,” he continued. “We need them to realize that the terrain of inequalities and deprivation that they face today has been set by centuries of anti-Black racism.”

Dr. Pastor concluded the discussion responding to a question about the role that philanthropy can play in advancing the concept of Solidarity Economics.

“We need to invest in more fundamental power-building – at a community and movement level,” Dr. Pastor explained.

“Foundations often look at their work across three progressive dimensions -- projects, policy, and power. Projects demonstrate what’s possible. Policies canonize projects and establish standard operating procedures – but it’s power that actually moves policy.”

“Movement [power] efforts aren’t just instrumental to policy change – they are fundamental to community change,” he added. “When you invest in organizing and movements, you are empowering community members to take actions in their own lives. Rather than enlisting them in a cause, you empower them to choose and advocate for the issues that make the most difference in their lives, allowing them to pivot from issue to issue in ways that make sense. THAT is what sparks lasting change.”

Click here to watch a full recording of the December 2022 DMV Community Book Club.

Our next DMV Community Book Club will be in early 2023, when we will discuss Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice by Jessica Gordan Nembhard.

Book Group Recap: Redefining Racial Wealth with Anne Price

Our quarterly DMV Community Book Group met in August for a deep dive into the insightful article “What We Get Wrong About Closing the Racial Wealth Gap.”

“Nothing tells us about economic well-being more than the racial wealth gap,” Anne Price, the first female President of the Insight Center for Community Economic Development and co-author of the article, shared to a group of thirty friends and partners of The Community Foundation.

“But before we tackle the racial wealth gap, we have to come to terms with just how little we understand it and the conflicting narratives that surround it.”

In the article, Price and her co-authors address ten commonly held myths about the racial wealth gap – conventional ideas including “greater educational attainment, harder work, better financial decisions, and other changes in habits and practices on the part of Blacks.”

The article goes on to explain that “while these steps are not necessarily undesirable, they are wholly inadequate to bridge the racial chasm in wealth.”

Price explained that one of the reasons these ideas often fall short is because they follow a narrow, individualistic approach rather than recognizing the necessity of the need for broader systemic change.

“We have taken a deeply structural problem that is hundreds of years in the making and overlaid it with very small individual solutions, based on flawed and often false narratives.”

Some of those attending the discussion were surprised by some of the narratives that Price addressed – including widely accepted narratives such as the ideas that access to higher education or homeownership can close the racial wealth gap.

“The data clearly shows that wealth creates equalized educational outcomes and opportunities for homeownership – not the other way around,” Price explained.

While tackling higher education and homeownership may help close the gap somewhat, they are not “one-size fits all” solutions. In addition, Price pointed out that both approaches are riddled with systemic obstacles – such as student debt, predatory lending and racial bias-- that policymakers and changemakers alike often overlook.

“When we talk about building Black wealth, too often we get stuck behind these blinders that limit our perspective to just four areas – education, entrepreneurship, financial literacy, & homeownership,” Price explains. “There is so much more to wealth than that.”

Ronnie Galvin, Managing Director of Community Investment for The Community Foundation, echoed Price’s assertion:  “Black people will not be able to build wealth in the same ways that White people have built wealth.  If we are serious about doing this work, we need to be willing to expand our horizons and work with Black communities to identify and adopt more innovative and systemic approaches.”

One of the approaches that Price suggested was to seek to eliminate wealth extraction. She shared several simple, short-term solutions such as advocating for the end of garnishment policies and forgiving criminal legal debt.

“We need to seek for solutions that not only put more money in people’s pockets, but also give them piece of mind,” Price added. “Because wealth is more than just financial outcomes. We need to consider the social, mental, and emotional aspects as well.”

Rather than seeking a programmatic “silver bullet” to close the racial wealth gap, Price suggested taking a step back and re-examining what wealth means. She described wealth as “allowing us to live and retire with greater dignity, freedom and peace of mind” and providing “future generations with the freedom to dream big and become all they truly can be” with a focus on being “healthy, spiritually whole and contributing.”

Price explained that wealth (and wealth building solutions) are far more complex and distinct than most people realize.

“I’m so thankful that we have this space to expand our horizons and our imagination, as a foundation,” President and CEO Tonia Wellons shared. “We do not know everything – we’ve said that from the beginning – which is why we continue to build this ‘coalition of the willing’ – people who are willing to join us on this learning journey.”

“Together we will continue to learn, discover, and refine new ways to think about the work that we get to do in philanthropy, as we center our efforts around closing the racial wealth gap.”

Click here to watch a full recording of the August 2022 DMV Community Book Club. Our next DMV Community Book Club will be in December 2022 when we will discuss ‘Solidarity Economics: Why Mutuality and Movements Matter’ by Chris Benner & Manuel Pastor.

If you would like to join our discussion, please subscribe to our monthly newsletter to receive information on how to register!

‘The Sum of Us’ Is Within Our Reach: Reflections on Book Club Convening

By Ronnie Galvin, Managing Director, Community Investment

On June 25, a cross-racial, cross-sector, cross-jurisdictional group of 30 people representing different aspects of the Greater Washington Community Foundation family convened to discuss Heather McGhee’s Book, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. This was the second meeting in a new Community Book Group experiment we launched at the beginning of this year to connect members of our community in more meaningful ways. As much as we desire to become more collectively informed as a result of reading important books together, we also intend to use the occasion to build a community of will that is aligned and ready to work on challenging issues affecting our region. 

Matters related to racial equity and the racial wealth gap are at the top of that list.

As we gathered together last Friday, people offered their reactions to the book and McGhee’s central argument: that racism has a cost that is accrued to all of us. She points out that the same system that stole land from indigenous peoples, that exploited Black people’s labor—and left us out of America’s capacity for producing prosperity—is now turning on the White working-class and middle-class. In a sense, “the chickens have come home to roost.”

Truth be told, it has always been this way. To this point, McGhee lifts up the history of drained public pools all across America (including in the North) as an example of the determination to avoid integration and to deny Black people’s access to public goods and opportunities for better health, wealth, education, and overall well-being. This practice, sanctioned by governments and underwritten by corporate power, signaled White people’s readiness to discard any public benefit that they had to share with Black people. Essentially this meant if White people couldn’t have the pool all to themselves, then nobody would have a pool.  

This posture, born of what McGhee calls the “zero-sum" paradigm, resulted in hundreds of closed pools around the country. Everyone’s quality of life was diminished as a result. This scorched earth pattern has played out well beyond the example of the drained pool. It is front and center in current day efforts that are intended to ensure more equitable public education, healthcare, housing, voting rights, employment, income, and wealth. 

A compelling through-line emerged from the perspectives of several Black book group attendees.  Each of them, in their own way, made it clear that the idea of racism costing all of us is yesterday’s news to most Black folks. They plainly articulated how they could no longer spend their energy educating White people about racism, nor invest their hopes in the possibility that White folks (as potential allies) might finally embrace this truth and move toward what McGhee calls the “solidarity dividend”—benefits that accrue to all of us if we were ever to believe that “we are all in this together.” 

There was also discussion about the durability and efficacy of multiracial coalitions as away to our collective salvation within our nation.  As we wrestled with the implications of this question, these same commentators expressed a level of suspicion and skepticism that many Black people have long held about multiracial coalitions and their ability to deliver the freedom and liberation that we have long struggled to achieve.

I hold this suspicion too—and at the same time, I am guardedly encouraged. The sentiment expressed by these Black commentators, could signal that the terms of engagement and what it means to be in solidarity with each other—perhaps in the context of the kind of multiracial coalitions that can produce equity, justice, and healing—are being redefined by the very people who have suffered the most in America’s racial caste system. The fact that this level of boldness and conviction found its way into an open forum that included nonprofit partners, philanthropic leaders, individual donors, and Community Foundation advisory board members, trustees, and staff could indicate that the “sum of us” contemplated by McGhee is within our reach.

At the end of our time together, I extended a soft invitation to the folks who convened with us. I asked them to consider joining us at the Greater Washington Community Foundation in an effort to design and establish the kind of truth, racial healing, and transformation effort that McGhee speaks about in her book. To be sure, the manner of transparency, deep listening, candor, and aspiration for something greater than we are already witnessing in our community book group could be the spark that just might catalyze such a game changing possibility for our region. 

Who’s with us? If you’d like to get involved, you can contact me at rgalvin@thecommunityfoundation.org.