New season, new opportunities to explore power and equity

Additional case studies, articles, reports and other tools will support your exploration of the role of power in advancing equity.  

Over the past several months, NCRP has engaged more than 1,600 people through downloads, learning groups, webinars and blog posts regarding our new self-assessment toolkit, Power Moves.

Now that the weather is changing and leaves are starting to fall, we’re sharing another set of resources that are invaluable as you continue, or just begin, your Power Moves journey. 

As we’ve brought Power Moves into the philanthropic community, we have also lifted up other resources in the field that relate to sharing, wielding and building power.

We were not the first ones to conceive that leveraging power is essential for social change, and we believe it is an important value to acknowledge other work in the field that came before and after us as we strive to collectively shift philanthropic practices.  

Here you can find an array of tools that are relevant to Power Moves, including some of my favorite new entries:

• “Deciding Together: Shifting Power and Resources through Participatory Grantmaking” by Jen Bokoff and Cynthia Gibson is designed for funders looking at how to engage the communities they serve. This guide covers why it is import to share decision making power and how to practice inclusive grantmaking.

• “Awake to Woke to Work: Building a Race Equity Culture” is a new toolkit produced by Equity in the Center that is a great complement to Power Moves. The guide outlines 7 levers of power to move organizations to be more racially equitable, including managers, communities, board of directors, learning environment, organizational culture, data and senior leaders. “Awake to Woke to Work” gives foundations and nonprofits a roadmap to identify where they are and where they need to go to create a more equitable workplace.

• “Unicorns Unite” is a colorful book by Jessamyn Shams-Lau, Jane Leu and Vu Le that captures the pitfalls and potential for relationships between nonprofits and foundations. The book uncovers the roots of a lot of the dysfunction in the social sector and gives concrete ways that nonprofits and foundations can create healthier relationships.

• “The Path to Liberation – how to walk the talk of equity rather than white supremacy in philanthropy” by Jennifer Near is part of “Liberate Philanthropy,” a blog series curated by Justice Funders. The blog series promotes philanthropic practices that redistribute wealth, democratize power and shift economic control to marginalized communities. Near discusses her own story, shares a Just Transition framework for philanthropy and gives readers 4 tangible strategies to liberate philanthropy.

If you know of a resource that supports funders to build, share and wield power that we should add, email me at ryoung@ncrp.org.

Reed Young is events and webinars intern at NCRP. He supports the Power Moves team, including its webinars, peer learning groups and outreach. Follow @NCRP on Twitter.