If you listen to the ‘conventional wisdom’ for business leaders, you’d probably be inclined to build an organization by first identifying its ‘unique selling points’ and then treating your niche as protected territory. To secure and sustain financial stability, leaders are encouraged to ‘worship their turf’ by focusing on what’s needed to keep their own grass luscious and green, even as the ecosystem they operate in is struggling. In fact, a struggling ecosystem is treated as a welcome opportunity for financial growth through territorial expansion or monopolizing the space, demonstrating the need for solidarity leadership.

This is ‘wisdom’ that gave rise to philanthropy as a byproduct of the excessive wealth accumulation made possible by centuries of colonialism, racialized capitalism, and neoliberalism.

In our first roles as leaders of philanthropic institutions, our feminist politics told us that there is another way to get the best for this world. Yet, we’d also been taught the myth that competition is an inherently good thing, because it drives us to be more strategic in using the resources we gain access to in a system that’s based on scarcity.

Those years were filled with many hard lessons, realizations, and enduring questions as we each unlearned behaviors that come hand-in-hand with competition and learned new ways of embracing the collective abundance we try to practice today with solidarity leadership. The uncertainty and rapid change in the current context makes these lessons even more meaningful.

Lesson 1: Stand Strong as Forests with Solidarity Leadership

When the three of us first met, we were working in funding institutions that many would have positioned as rivals, because both supported the activism of girls and young women. Both institutions were gaining profile during a time of plenty, enjoying the fruits of tireless advocates of girls and young people’s leadership, participatory practices, and expanding global women’s rights. In this context, we were also able to adopt new forms of leadership, with the aim to prove that an ethic of care was more impactful than an ethos of competition.

Read the full article about solidarity leadership by Devi Leiper O’Malley, Ruby Johnson, and Swatee Deepak at The Center for Effective Philanthropy.