Giving Compass' Take:

• At PhilanTopic, five nonprofit leaders enlighten their peers to the necessity of solidarity and recognizing privilege in pushing for real, lasting justice.

• How are you demonstrating solidarity in your nonprofit? How can we encourage other nonprofit leaders to recognize their privilege and reshape their organizations with solidarity?

• Learn about the necessity of solidarity in the fight against the coronavirus.

We are five women of color leading five organizations deeply embedded in the nonprofit ecosystem of Detroit and southeast Michigan. With mutual intentions and hearts, we have decided to work as a collective that honors the history and resiliency of Black and Indigenous people and communities of color. Together, our work offers nonprofits the critical support needed to advance their missions. Today, we stand in recognition of the privilege and responsibility we have to speak as leaders of nonprofit support organizations.

Our work together began with a look back at the history of and policies that have shaped the nonprofit sector. The nonprofit universe contains complexities with which all of us need to grapple. Events of the past few months did not create racial and gendered inequities in philanthropic funding. Nor did they shape the failed policies and misplaced public funding priorities that necessitated the creation of nonprofits in the first place. The pandemic and the brutal killings over the last few months of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, and George Floyd have created a fierce urgency, within us and others, around the need to address the structural inequities that pervade so many of our systems.

Solutions to the challenges our communities face must come from those closest to the issues. And solidarity begins when we recognize that missions, needs, and fate of community-based nonprofits are interconnected. In the short term, we’re working together more than ever to address acute needs created by the pandemic; over the longer term we’re committed to addressing chronic needs at the systems level and leveraging our understanding of power dynamics in the sector to shape solutions that are inclusive, sustainable, and grounded in community-based structures and knowledge that already exists.

Read the full article about the necessity of solidarity at PhilanTopic