Collaboratives based in the U.S. that are working to solve for and reduce disparities in their communities are facing compounding challenges with the current chaotic sociopolitical climate, including sudden funding cuts, mass job losses, mis- and disinformation campaigns, demoralizing messaging from national leaders and those they have deputized, and vigorous attacks on both equity and democracy.
When everything seems to be coming down at once—overwhelming by intention, it feels like a tsunami of Executive Orders, department directives, and social media missives that range the spectrum from unprofessional to potentially illegal (or “extralegal”). The current context feels confounding. What do we do? What can we do?
In a candid and grounded podcast conversation that is both sobering and hopeful, Collective Impact Forum senior advisor Junious Williams talks with Erika Bernabei and Theo Miller (Equity & Results) about this current chaotic time for U.S. collective impact initiatives.
Together, they discuss:
- What it means to assess and mitigate risks right now—individually and organizationally;
- How organizations with more power or flexibility can provide cover and protect others, and how important it is to not “obey in advance.”
- The need for honest conversations amongst partners, including if you have a shared understanding around organization ethics and mission;
- The critical importance of storytelling to counter misinformation and support vulnerable communities;
- How to analyze the current context amidst overwhelming noise;
- How to identify both defensive and offensive strategies to protect and advance equity within the work. (Even if you can’t say “equity” right now at your job.)
Ways to listen: You can listen below or on your preferred podcast streaming service, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Simplecast, iHeartRadio, Amazon, and other podcast apps.
Please find a transcript of this talk further down this page.
Resources and Footnotes
- Equity & Results
- Junious Williams Consulting, LLC
- Responding to Threats and Changes Planning Tool
- Reckoning with the U.S. Election: 10 Reflections and Recommendations for Collective Impact Networks
- Core Principles to Support Anti-Racism in Collective Impact
- DEI, advocacy, and legal resources collected by Junious Williams
More on Collective Impact
- Infographic: What is Collective Impact?
- Resource List: Getting Started in Collective Impact
Music
The Intro music, entitled “Running,” was composed by Rafael Krux, and can be found here and is licensed under CC: By 4.0.
The outro music, entitled “Deliberate Thought,” was composed by Kevin Macleod. Licensed under CC: By.
Listen to Past Episodes: You can listen and subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Simplecast, iHeartRadio, Amazon, and other podcast apps.
Podcast Transcript
Welcome to the Collective Impact Forum podcast, here to share resources to support social change makers working on cross-sector collaboration.
The Collective Impact Forum is a nonprofit field-building initiative that is co-hosted in partnership by the nonprofit consulting firm FSG and the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions.
Collaboratives based in the U.S. that are working to solve for and reduce disparities in their communities are facing compounding challenges with the current chaotic sociopolitical climate. This includes sudden funding cuts, mass job losses, mis- and disinformation campaigns, demoralizing messaging from national leaders and those they have deputized, and vigorous attacks on both equity and democracy.
When everything seems to be coming down at once—overwhelming by design, it can feel challenging to know how to move forward.
In this episode, we’re honored to share a candid and grounded conversation that is both sobering and hopeful, Collective Impact Forum senior advisor Junious Williams joins Erika Bernabei and Theo Miller from Equity & Results. Long-time listeners may remember we had Junious, Erika, and Theo join us back in 2022 for a conversation on anti-racism in collective impact, and we’re delighted to have them back.
Together they discuss the current chaotic time for U.S. collective impact initiatives, including what it means to assess and mitigate risks right now—individually and organizationally, and how collaboratives can identify both defensive and offensive strategies to protect and advance equity within the work. (Even if you can’t say the word “equity” right now at your job.)
I found this a very powerful conversation, and so appreciated everything Junious, Erika, and Theo shared in what feels like an incredibly stressful time for so many folks. We’re grateful you are here for this conversation as well. Let’s tune in.
Junious Williams: Good afternoon. I’d like to welcome everyone to the podcast episode today which is titled Defending and Advancing Democracy and Equity in Collective Impact Work. I’ll say more about why we framed the title that way, but I would like to introduce my friends and colleagues, Theo Miller and Erika Bernabei, who are coprincipals of Equity & Results, a nationally recognized multiracial collectively-led learning organization rooted in advancing racial equity and liberation through institutional change. The firm specializes in supporting high-capacity organizations to accelerate antiracist impact through innovative and new forms of data use, cross-sector partnerships, and strategy design.
This is actually a continuation of a conversation that we had. I went back to look almost three years ago. It was March of 2022 where I had the opportunity to have a discussion with Theo and Erika that was focused on collective impact but specifically on how to embed antiracism work in collective impact. If you’ll recall, back at that time a couple of things that happened. We were in the throes of the aftermath of the murder of George—I’m blanking on his name. The aftermath of the murder of George—
Erika Bernabei: George Floyd.
Junious Williams: Floyd. I’m sorry. And we also had just released a few months earlier our article, Revisiting the 10-year Anniversary of Collective Impact, where we had determined that the missing ingredient to a lot of the collective impact work was equity and that folks needed to center on equity. We’ve come a long way. That seems like ages ago that we were having those sorts of conversations as equity was in its descendancy. People were really beginning to believe in the centrality of equity to solving a whole range of problems in America. Obviously, we’re in a much different situation now where equity is under vigorous attacks from the right wing, from the recently elected president.
So we want to have another conversation and draw on some of the experience and insight of Erika and Theo about the current context and the current issues confronting and challenges confronting all of us as we attempt to continue to strive for equity.
So for the conversation today, I’d like to kind of focus on three things primarily but we’ll go in and out as other things happen. The first thing I want to do is to spend a little time asking both Theo and Erika about what they think is occurring and what we really need to pay attention to. This is sort of context and situation setting. There’s so much going on and so much noise that it’s really hard to determine what we should be focused on. So I’d like to spend a little time as we start talking about how you set the context and what your situation analysis is as we try to address the challenges that we face.
The second topic that I’d like us to spend some time talking about, which almost everybody I know is doing, is some level of risk analysis and assessment from a personal level to an organizational to a collaborative to even a community level. How are you seeing people and how are you advising people around this sort of risk assessment for our people, for our organizations, and for our work?
The third theme or topic I’d like to spend a little time talking about is this defensive and offensive thing. We’ve come under criticism, those of us engaged in the work, of not having mounted a sufficient defense and having no offense. I’d like us to talk a little bit about what you’ve seen that is good defensive work to protect the ground that we gained, and where you see opportunities or activities going on around putting us on the offensive about repositioning equity, and obviously, any other topics that are related to that. So that’s sort of the scope of what we’d like to do today, and I’d like to jump right in by asking you to both kind of describe how you analyze what’s going on right now with this dual assault on both democracy and equity, and also, what’s happening that concerns you most, what is just sort of background noise, how are you setting the context for understanding what’s going on, and more importantly, for focusing the activity given our limited resources to fight back on this. So, do you want to lead off on that, Theo, and then we’ll go to Erika?
Theo Miller: Sure, happy to Junious, and always great to be in conversation with you, and thank you to the Forum and thank you to all our listeners for tuning in. It was in some ways sobering to hear that it was just three years ago and yet as you said, Junious, three years ago since the murders of George Floyd and the aftermath. It seems like light years away. For us, the context is really chilling right now in many ways. Over the last week, I’ll just say, I was in Selma, Alabama. I was in East Oakland. I was in St. Paul, Minnesota, and then today, I got a call from a client who gets tremendous amounts of money from HUD and they needed to cancel an engagement. And that’s a client that’s based out of Texas. And so, we’ve seen varying manifestations of this recent assault.
Erika, my dear friend and partner, we often debate the meaning of that incredible quote, that the arc of the moral universe is long and it bends towards justice, right? That’s what Dr. King said. We debate whether or not it actually bends towards justice or not. So when I’m in these moments, just like I was in the moment before the murders of George Floyd, after the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, before COVID, after COVID, I try to take a historical look at what’s happening.
This, while the sort of unprecedented number of executive orders that’s coming out of the White House, the sort of phrenetic energy of freezing federal funds, the tremendous and palpable amount of fear that our undocumented immigrant community is experiencing, our nonprofit community, I mean this is real. This is unlike any moment that I’ve experienced in the 20, 25 years or so that I’ve been doing this work, and yet, it is still reminiscent that the arc of the moral universe is long, it’s long. It is long and it bends towards justice, and so as I’m thinking about the clients that we try to serve, the organizations that we’re in partnership with, I’m reminded that the work is actually still continuing.
As I said, in Selma, working on economic development opportunities. In East Oakland, thinking about Black youth and the opportunity gap for young people age five to 20. So what I’m curious about is in the midst of all this noise and this chaos and this cataclysmic amount of pain and power grabbing that’s happening, can we be focused? Can we be persistent? Can we be clear on the impact that our work can still have? So that’s the kind of context that I’m holding in this moment.
Erika Bernabei: I’ll just add that grateful to be here with you, Junious and Theo, my friend. The truth of the matter is I think that the context is unprecedented and yet there are different types of contexts that individuals and organizations find themselves in, so I think that there is also this sometimes you can’t find the hope but you can still love and you can still do the work of collective impact out of love. And so, for at an individual level there is the context that each of us individually finds ourselves in based on our race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability, etc.
And then we find ourselves inside of an organizational context whether that is working for the federal government, in a collective impact, local government, nonprofit, etc., and then there’s the impact of the current situation on our organization, and then we find ourselves in collaboratives and there’s the impact of this current situation on that collaborative.
And I think we need to really start parsing out what does it mean at each of those levels because I do think it’s extremely overwhelming to imagine that at the same time that transgender rights are being slashed, DEI is illegal at the federal level, you see our undocumented kindred spirits in this country being absolutely targeted. You see all of the monetary slashing, all of the pieces that we are seeing every single day, it’s like how do we move inside of that context. And I think breaking it open a little more and creating a little more spaciousness inside of our individual and organizational positionality is something that I’m paying a lot of attention to right now.
The other thing I’ve noticed, Junious, is that folks are obeying in advance, right? This quote that’s going around the internet, many authors have named it. So what does it mean to not obey in advance but to actually do a contextual analysis of where we are at this moment and how we stay activated, and I think that just adding to what Theo said, we have plenty of clients who are needing to back away, and we have plenty of other collective impact groups that are just full steam ahead. So what does it mean that we see such disparity, whether it’s from a foundation, philanthropic perspective, a nonprofit perspective, or a government perspective, and we see that diversity across the groups we work with.
Junious Williams: Just a follow up for a moment more because there is so much noise in the air, what’s your take on things that we should really pay attention to that are going on versus things that are noise that, while they might be important, because as I talk to people part of the dilemma is there’s so much going on it almost causes people to withdraw, to let everything fall down. I can’t figure out where to spend my time. Do you have any sort of advice for people about how to sort out or what in terms of all of this activity that’s going on we should pay attention to and things that we might be able to at least temporarily put on a back burner?
Theo Miller: I mean, Junious, I love this question and I’m going to underscore a word that my dear friend, Erika, used which was the word overwhelm, and there was this passage going across our circles a lot a few weeks ago from the social sciences, Jennifer Walter, where she said actually that our overwhelm is the goal. That actually is the intention, right? Using chaos and crisis to push through radical changes so that we’re too disoriented to effectively resist. It’s not just politics as usual, she said. It’s a strategic exploitation of our cognitive limits.
And so I thought about this overwhelm, over the last weeks, and I, as I said, I take a kind of historical perspective on this. I think we have to think about what the ancestors were up against, what Frederick Douglass was doing, what Sojourner Truth was doing and for me I put three concentric circles together, which is the work that we do. I think about my ethic, my ethic, which is what I’m trained, my lived experience, that is my ethics, those are my principles. I think about a degree of politics and what are my politics and what are the politics that we’re seeing, and then I think about the law, what is legal. And so when I overlap the ethics, the politics, and the law, that allows me almost like a telescope to be laser focused on what I can do.
The great CEO of PolicyLink, a friend of ours, Michael McAfee, once said, “Theo, Theo, Theo, there is joy in getting clear about your contribution.” So I think to Erika’s point we’ve got to take a little bit of a moment of pause. She said spaciousness. We’ve got to use almost like a microscope or a telescope. For me, it’s the intersection of my ethics, my politics, and what is legal, and then to try to get crystal clear on how we might act, how we might act in collaboration with each other. Because to be clear, there is a lot happening that is neither ethical nor legal. It’s 100 percent political, but if we can somehow kind of sift through the noise, and I’m excited. Even today, Junious, I’m hearing a bunch of lawyers are getting activated, a bunch of constitutional, like this is a long battle here, but if we can get clear on our contribution, if we pause for a second, be patient and for me, it’s like actually taking a moment to articulate what are those principles that bring you to this work, what is your ethic. And your politics, who are you in community with, that you’re organizing with, that you’re doing this work, and then don’t forget that this is a nation supposedly of laws and we do actually have a difference.
There is a bright line between what is permissive and what is not, and what we’ve seen coming out of the federal government, particularly under this administration, is a lot of activities that are patently illegal. They’re just not constitutional. So to Erika’s point, we don’t want to obey things that are illegal in advance. We don’t want to acquiesce. We don’t want to succumb to this sort of dominant power over. We want to pause for a moment and get clear because some folks are really experiencing some harm, before we react and before we kind of design what our next approach is.
Erika Bernabei: And I’ll just add to my friend, Theo the lawyer, because I love that you brought the law in there. That sometimes the only thing we can do is listen to those who are most impacted and orient toward what’s going on for them. And that doesn’t sound like hyper strategic, but it actually is because the truth of the matter is in the work that Theo and I do with our organization, Equity & Results, when we sit in a room and ask folks to analyze the root causes of what’s going on in their community to get to systems change, they’re super clear.
So the question becomes between the ethics, politics, and legal aspects of who we are as organizations and individuals, and the actual lived situations on the ground for folks of color in particular, what we find is the location of sort of our discernment in a way, who we are and if who we are is to be of service and to fight and to fight for liberation and to fight for the collective, then listening to the deep-seated needs at a structural level of what folks on the ground are telling us they need is critical at this moment.
So I’ll just say sometimes I think this is a moment where they say the local is primary. A lot of times we are staying at a national level or sort of a macro level of our analysis and of what we are fearing, but at the local level when we’re in Selma or we’re in Rochester, New York, or we’re in fill in the blank, the local still has a lot of power and a lot of clarity around what’s needed. And so that’s another piece of the puzzle.
Theo Miller: I love that, E, and to me, if I can follow up on that, it’s like the local keeps us rooted. Being in proximity to those who are most impacted keeps us grounded and I think many of us on this podcast have been public servants before. We’ve worked in government, and what I was reminded of today is that not withstanding the absolute chaos that we’re witnessing, the sort of unraveling of so many of our democratic institutions, government still does not move super swiftly. You actually cannot totally unravel the federal government. You can’t deploy trillions of dollars in 30 days. And so that gives me a little bit of like tactical courage to be in community and to be in partnership to like let’s actually get clear on what it is that we want to do.
But Junious, I want to throw this question back to you because you’re a mentor and you’re a leader in this work and like you digest this stuff. We get emails from you. You’re on all the text threads and the email threads and like you too, I want to get some wisdom. I’m not just coming to give on this podcast. Like how do you discern what to listen to? How do you in the midst of the overwhelm, how are you staying clear in your priorities?
Junious Williams: It’s been really tough because after I got out of my post-election depression I had to disconnect for a while. So I’m just sort of getting back up to speed on all the mischief that’s going on. But there are a couple of things and what you both have said resonates with me about first getting clarity on who we should be protecting, right.
I think I mentioned to you I was in a conversation recently and people were talking about how do we protect our work, and it occurred to me that that’s the wrong orientation. It’s not protecting the work. The work is an instrumentality to try to effect change and help to improve outcomes for the people that we care about. It’s about people. And so I start with this sort of who do we need and what, to some extent, but what follows we, who we need to protect. And certainly it’s the most vulnerable people. We know who they are. They’re people of color. They’re all the targets that all of the mischief that the right is creating right now and we need to make sure that we’re protecting them.
Part of that is direct, but part of that is what organizations and institutions who are connected to those communities and those people do we need to protect because as you’re saying, those who are in closest proximity to serving and supporting the people who are the intended beneficiaries, they need to be able to survive. As an intermediary or as a consultant we’re a little removed and if they’re not strong and connected to the folks and listening, as Erika said, to what the pain points are because this is such—it’s such new territory for us all and they are so crazy because, and I like your point about the law, this is totally extralegal and it’s intentionally that. So we need to be very mindful that we’ve got to stay in connection with people because we don’t know how this is landing organizationally and so forth.
But that’s really a good segue into the thing that I wanted to talk about next which is, and Erika started in this, and I alluded to it earlier. This is a little mind boggling and the sort of risk analysis and risk assessment really is so multidimensional. I need to do it as an individual. So what’s my risk tolerance? What am I willing to do? Where are my lines in the sand that I’m not willing to let the right cross? So that’s a bunch of individual stuff. Obviously, my organization, what are the organizational things? What are our bottom lines? What are things that we are not willing to give up and are willing to go down for?
And it’s even more complicated when you’re doing collaboratives because you’ve got to establish as an organization and as an individual how far am I willing to go when I see people in full retreat from the things that principally I believe in, how much can I retreat with them even if we think it’s strategic? And then there’s a broader thing about what’s happening on the ground in the communities that are affected. And one of the points that you made, Theo, that I agree with is that on some level it’s indicative of how dispersed authority is in America no matter what the commands were, there’s certain work that’s going on as you say in Selma or East Oakland that’s somewhat impervious to that because it’s absent federal funds and it’s in a bubble environment where we’re still permitted to pursue equity with vigor.
So I’d like, if we could, do a little talk about what kind of risk analysis and assessment you’re thinking that people need to be doing and who are the people that we need to protect, and are there practices or work that we need to protect in order to actually protect the individuals who are beneficiaries. So let me throw it open for either of you to start off this part of the conversation.
Theo Miller: I love it. I love it, risk and protection. E, you want to take it? We’ll tango. I’ll follow you.
Erika Bernabei: Sure. This is a really tricky question, Junious, and I love it. A lot of times when we do work people are thinking about risk as a very narrow definition and usually it’s based on fear. And so I just want to say that in this context when you ask the questions about risk tolerance at the individual or at the organizational level I think folks have to start to parse out at the organizational sort of cultural level as well as at their sort of financial level, at their sort of all sorts of aspects of the organizational composition like are they defining risk as something that they’re just really afraid of versus something that’s real.
What do I mean by that? So if you think about the work that we all do rooted in this concept of collective impact and a lot of times organizations there can be large intermediary organizations or philanthropic organizations that are doing a risk analysis based on legal risk or just sort of hedging bets versus the kind of risks that small, nonprofits, community-based organizations may be afraid of taking for either for fear of retaliation, sometimes they can go under. There have been death threats against some of our colleagues in various parts of the country. In small organizations, right, without legal counsel, without big endowments, without anything.
So as we think about this concept of risk and inside of collective impact, I do think we need to start to parse out what’s real versus what’s constructed. And I think nobody here is saying anybody should take risks, to lose jobs or to close organizations. That’s not the kind of risk we’re talking about. But I do think we need to start with some real conversations about how we define risk, the root causes of risk, and our perception of risk, and then again, in service of what. Are we willing to take a risk in service of people versus not take a risk in service of the sort of sustaining of an organization?
And I do think that sometimes when we work in the collective and you have like the big well-funded somewhat protected organizations out front, inside of a collective impact, there is the ability to protect some of the smaller organizations that are also a part of that collaborative who do need more protection at this moment and who do continue to be in closest proximity to the folks on the ground as well as persistent.
So, Theo, I’m want to pass it to you to hear a little bit about what you’re thinking and then happy to keep tangoing.
Theo Miller: I love to see it and I guess when I think about this question about risk, when I think about this question of who we serve, who we are to protect, and indeed, all of us are—we’re consultants. We’re intermediaries. I’m not at the food pantry in my professional hours. I’m not doing tutoring work in my professional hours so I’m not directly in proximity but I’m reminded of at least a couple things here, Erika and Junious. I’m reminded of the first administration with this administration and the efforts to have blanket travel bans, the efforts to ban books, the efforts to ban what folks perceived as critical race theory, all of which failed flat because there was no evidence. There was no actual basis in reality to a lot of these political and extralegal events, and so for a lot of the work that we do for Equity & Results and for a lot of the folks who do this work whether you call it DEI or don’t call it DEI is that we begin with an acknowledgement and understanding of what is happening on the ground.
For us that’s data. We say data. We say what is the data telling us about the conditions that we see in communities, and in our work whether we’re looking at maternal health or we’re looking at postsecondary achievement or we’re looking at median household income or we’re looking at wealth or we’re looking at climate action and resiliency, we can see through the data that there are populations, vast populations, that are experiencing disparate impacts, that are disproportionately being screwed.
So when we take a kind of data-driven approach to this work, I’m not going to say that it makes us invulnerable to the risk of losing our jobs, of losing our resources but again it puts us on solid ground. What’s happening right now is there is such noise, there is such fear, and there has been such, to be honest, a coalescence of the wealthy class and of those with dominant power around this administration that those of us who are in the movement work, those of us who are in the working class world, those of us who are trying to do the work in Gaza, those of us who are trying to actually be in solidarity with the least of these are feeling alone, are feeling quite vulnerable.
But for me, what I do is again I have to come back to that truth, to that truth that says—Angela Davis taught me this. She says why do we assume? We should we assume that our oppressors are more powerful than they are?
So the games that the aristocracy is playing or that folks are trying to play with data and removing data are real. There are real consequences. People have lost their jobs. People are losing their jobs. Contracts are being canceled but if we take a step back and again if we remind ourselves, if we center those most proximate to the problem, I do believe that we will find that they are also most proximate to the solution, and that’s a principle of ours. That is, we try to like deconstruct what’s happening with power—now it may be true, Junious, people may not make the same amount of money that they were making during, as you called it, the ascendency of DEI and so forth but in some ways that was fool’s gold anyway, right?
The sort of corporatization of this work allowed us to think that we were somehow invulnerable from risk. This work is necessarily risky. It’s necessarily risky. This work is necessarily—because if you’re not pushing against power, you’re not pushing against anything. This is about adjusting and adapting and moving against dominant disparities that have been persistent for time.
So I guess I get encouraged a bit when I’m in company like this because it reminds me that we’re not alone and that if we focus on the data, we are on solid ground to do this work. Now it may be hurt in the near term but in the long term, again that arc of the moral universe is long and I do believe that it bends towards justice.
Junious Williams: I want to follow up on the data piece because I don’t know to what extent people who are not kind of entrenched in data work may not understand what’s going on but that there is a real concerted effort to basically pull down federal datasets, to pull down data, and I think it goes to the point that you’re making, Theo, which is they understood and are deliberately going after the data because the data as you’re indicating portray a reality even with some of the problems with the data. They still give us a picture that’s relatively unique, and coupled with the fact that don’t collect any more data on any difference and characteristics of the population, that is all very intentional and very threatening because ultimately what they’re going to do is to change the reality by saying there’s no data to prove what you’re saying about disparate impact.
On one level it’s pedestrian but on another level it’s pretty sophisticated. Show me the data, right? You keep saying these things are there and that’s why it’s really important I think for people to at least add their voices. I know everybody can’t enter a data fight right now with everything else going on but the whole idea that they’re trying to totally eliminate and distort the reality by pulling down federal datasets, by not letting people collect demographic characteristics in the federal government is all around overwhelming us in another way, overwhelming us with what you’ve been arguing all this time is not the truth and that’s why I appreciate the fact that so many groups around the country have taken it on their own to start archiving datasets and making them available but you were going to make a point too, Erika.
Erika Bernabei: Yeah. Well, I just wanted to now follow up on your point, Junious, because I think it’s really juicy. Two things. In 1900, W.E.B. Du Bois disaggregated data at the World’s Fair and put it up on these colorful posters and said racism, right? And progress actually was part of the story, and then there was racial segregation, you know, on and on, right? And so the story of understanding the quantitative and qualitative data is a story as long as time. It is something that we don’t need federal datasets to tell us and we certainly don’t need quantitative data always to tell us.
When we sit down with communities or collective impact collaboratives and we ask them the question what is the data that most matters to this community whether it’s life expectancy or housing or whatever it is and often they do have a dataset but even if they don’t, we ask them, you know, red, yellow or green, how bad, OK, or good is it? And they’ll tell us and generally speaking people in the room know the situation that is at hand and generally speaking we’re talking about a red flag issue.
So this fight on data, and just to say also we believe that qualitative data, that stories, all of these things also count as data but we know that most government institutions don’t look at qualitative data in the same way they look at quantitative data so just to say people doing the work of justice and revolutionary work have always used and thought of disaggregated data as part of that practice. Artists, I mean it’s just part of our culture and I believe it will continue but I do—data may be swept away but the problem is not therefore invisible-ized because as we sit in our collective impact collectives and we stop asking the question how do our organizations survive, and we answer the questions and said how do people survive. How do we protect and advance the data moving in the right direction because those data are people. I think we find a different level of risk tolerance.
And I also want to just say that, to Theo’s point, and Theo and I like, you know, we’ve been running, co-running Equity & Results, it’s almost our tenth year, that we sometimes realize that because of our identities and where we come from and all the parts of our backgrounds, that we have different risk tolerance or we have different ways we can help groups move so I’ll just say oftentimes it’s folks that look like me. You all don’t know what I look like since this is a podcast but I’m a White cis woman in my 40s so I’ve got a lot of privilege that I can access in service of pushing folks to really assess their risk to take the data seriously and to move, and even though folks like me do not have the lived experience of experiencing structural racism, as a part of a collective impact work my help, my support around risk assessment is to say like have we lost our analysis of what the real problem is here because I think that there is a little shying away at this moment, away from that collective impact mentality back into that individually-led risk assessment which is important but then we need to come back to the collective and say OK, what does that mean for how we are in lockstep as a collective impact initiative. So I just wanted to add that in and Theo can—
Theo Miller: Yeah, because in our work, again, and this is like a practitioner moment, it allows us to focus on sometimes what we call headline measures like what the collective can be about, what the collective can focus on so even though for me I’m a cis Black man who was born and raised on the west coast and educated in New England in very privileged spaces, I too have to think about my proximity to power as I go into—and it was told even today like as you come into the South, you’ve got to step back in a certain way. You’ve got to—and so I think for those of us who are in the work, who are in the movement, to your question about data and to your question about impact, Junious, is that now is actually a time for us to get clear to do some archiving, to do some reflecting on our collective impact, to do some of the capturing of the storytelling because this attempted erasure of data, of Black lives, of indigenous lives, is getting incredibly sophisticated, right? It is not a coincidence that Elon Musk is attempting to buy an artificial intelligence and that this—all at the same time, right? And so the ways in which the right is trying to control narrative, trying to control the state, the distribution of resources, the way in which they’re trying to control the storytelling is not to be missed, and yet, and not to get too into the politics of the Super Bowl, I am reminded as the great Kendrick Lamar puts Black bodies on display in red, white and blue on Sunday in front of 170 million people, that those of us who are closest in proximity to the problem are still closest in proximity to the solution but we’ve got to be organized. We’ve got to capture our narrative. We’ve got to capture our stories, and we cannot be moved in fear by the overwhelm and by the extralegal and often illegal chaos that’s coming from the northeast.
The reality is—last thing I’ll say, I’m wearing a sweatshirt today from the Equal Justice Institute, shout out to Bryan Stevenson in Montgomery, Alabama. When I was in Montogomery, Alabama a couple weeks ago I was asking locals there, folks who’ve lived there for 60, 70 years, I’m like, wow, you’ve got this incredible museum. You’ve got Bryan Stevenson who’s done so much for those mass incarcerated, and they reminded me, they said, well, Theo, when EJI first came to Montgomery, nobody wanted them there. No one was opening doors. Even Montgomery did not want this brother to build the quote-unquote lynching museum, and now when you come to Montgomery and you see the revolution of downtown and the development and the land acquisition, now he’s got a little bit of the wind at his sails, and this is—I’m often reminded of an elder who once told me, Theo, there are three kinds of people in this world. There’s people who make things happen, there’s people who watch things happen, and there’s people who wonder what happened, and oftentimes you’re not making things happen, the wind is not at your sails.
This is insurgency and I’m reminded throughout the country of examples of folks who kept pushing in the face of steep headwinds. Now again, Junious, we are experiencing some headwinds kind of like any other in my 20 or 25 years in this and yet I’m not moved. I may make less. I may not have the same amount of clients, may not have the same amount of work but if we’re tactical, there is still abundance and there is still plenty of story, plenty of movement for us to go on here.
Junious Williams: I’m going to go back to a comment that Erika made earlier and talk a little bit about it because when you were talking about risk and risk assessment and analysis, you said this is not the traditional sort of risk analysis, that it’s got to be much more expansive and multidimensional given the dynamics that we’re in.
And one of the things that I’ve observed and that I’m concerned about in terms of doing the risk analysis is that we’re experiencing attrition in this movement, right? This has scared a lot of people and working in California one of the things I’m able to do and I commented the other day, I can now sometimes look in the face of the audience and the people and see that some people are disconnecting, that they’ve got questions, they’ve got concerns that they might be like questioning whether or not to be on the equity train so to speak, and it caused me to say to my colleagues there, you’ve got to make sure that the folks who are your allies are still on board because they have been affected by the misinformation, the disinformation, the whole campaign against DEI and you can sometimes see the questions in their eyes.
So one of the things that I wanted to talk a little bit about is what should we be doing with our current core? I mean if we’re in a big collaborative, what should we be doing to shore up the support and to mend or address some of the concerns that people now have about whether or not to continue this movement toward equity, and what that means as you scale it up from the individual to the organizational to the collaborative to the community. What should we be doing around solidifying the existing base to make sure that the sort of warriors are really still with us? And that concerns me a lot because I see too many faces where people are saying this is a permission structure to get the hell out of this work so your thoughts on that.
How should we be looking at the folks who traditionally have been allies and supporters and sometimes they’re waning support or at least questioning of the equity movement.
Erika Bernabei: I’ll kick us off. I’ll just say a couple of things on this. First thing is really about being honest and clear about where we are individually and organizationally. Let’s not do wolf in sheep’s clothing at this moment and if that means that our collaborative shrinks, it means our collaborative shrinks but we have to be honest about what our organization and we are personally believing and thinking. This is not a time to throw anyone away. This is not a time to exclude folks but it is a time to be honest enough to say this is what we’re dealing with, this is what we’re afraid of, this is what we’re willing to put our necks out on or this is where we need help or protection.
Theo and I always talk about how when we work with a collective impact collaborative, it’s not just all of the racial equity organizations that have been around for 50 to 100 years, right? We don’t have the luxury of that. We want everybody who’s willing to make a contribution to this work to be at the table but I do think that, again, with the corporatization of DEI, I think a little bit with on the expectation that folks are doing equity work even when it’s not at the core of their organization’s mission, I think we do have a few folks that may choose to leave the movement and that’s OK but the rest of us, everyone who’s trying and working and sustaining this work, there’s got to be really some real honest conversations. What is your risk tolerance?
And again, Junious, not risk as in legal risk or risk of going under but actually like cultural risk. What is it that you’re willing to give up? What is it that you’re willing to do or not do? How do you feel? I know these conversations are not the things we talk about in most of our collective impact tables but the truth of the matter is there are going to have to be some folks who move to the front and there are going to be some folks who need a little protection and then there are doing to be those that aren’t going to make it through this in this collaborative and are going to go off and do their thing somewhere else.
I do think on the other end of this period of time we will have strengthened institutions and strengthened partnerships, but I do think sometimes things kind of become real clear when we can have honest conversations. I think those conversations can be facilitated sometimes. They can be done in affinity so philanthropy can have conversation with philanthropy sometimes, nonprofit with nonprofit but then we have to come back together and bravely share where we’re at, and receive the pushback and receive the feedback. Hey, Erika, I hear you but we need you to step up right now in fact, right? Or we got your back, all these different kind of conversations. Theo, what do you think?
Theo Miller: Yeah, I want to underscore the conversation point because I think that at a minimum for those of us, you can put DEI aside with the terms. For those of us who are committed ethically, morally to a multiracial democracy, and what do I mean by that? I mean like a nation state, a place, a globe in which people regardless of their background or their national origin or their gender or their sexual orientation can live, can be, can thrive, can be amazing. If you’re committed to that, then a first step at this moment is what Erika says, let’s have a conversation about where you’re at with this.
I’ve been humbled and pleased to be in conversations over the last couple weeks in some of my very, very conservative jurisdictions and spaces and places where this president won quite a large percentage of the vote and yet you listen and you hear public health directors and sheriffs and law enforcement and economic development directors say like, I don’t know the language but we are committed to ensuring that we are governing for all people, and that we want to advance but I don’t know how to do it. I don’t know how to do it in this climate, and so I’m concerned and I’m scared, and so that’s like a first step, Junious.
And for folks who are not willing to have that conversation as Erika said, you’re probably not willing to be on the train and that’s sad, and for those of us in the movement who are doing this work, there’s grieving. There has been righteous rage that I’ve felt. There has been sadness that I’ve felt. There has been collaboratives and partnerships that I’ve been in over the last six months that I am furious about, that I no longer want to be a part of, right? I have to sit with that. I have to be honest about that and acknowledge that, and then from that space you can move into an assessment, again, what we’ve been talking about in this conversation as to what we can do. What are we focused on? What do we want our impact to be? What are our assets? What are our resources?
And the sad reality that I’m seeing is that most of the time those closest in proximity to power, to dominant power, to money, to political power, are backing away. But those closest in proximity to the people, to the challenges, have no choice but to stay in it, and so those of us who maybe have a little bit more cushion, those of us in philanthropy or are intermediaries, if we can figure out creative ways to kind of retool the collective impact infrastructure based on this current moment, I think we can do something.
The last thing I’ll say on that is that in terms of risk mitigation and I know, Junious, you’ve read a lot of this stuff, there’s a lot of ways to think about the equity work. There’s a lot of language that we can do, and it’s not just code shifting although as a Black person we know how to code shift like we move between but it’s actually getting even more precise about where it is we’re headed. The language has changed in the work since Du Bois in 1900 to now, and we can evolve, we can adapt. What we don’t want to do as Erika said, we don’t want to be wolves in sheep’s clothing. We want to be clear about our ethic, our principles, what we’re focused on in terms of the data, and in what is actually possible, and then I think we have a chance here.
Junious Williams: So one of the things that is probably going to be determinative for a lot of people about their continued support and engagement in equity work might be exactly what is the work but at the same time one of the criticisms that I’ve heard a lot is, wow, the progressive movement kind of got blindsided. We haven’t put up a very effective defense on this assault and we literally have little or no offensive activity going on, and we have maybe ceded too much ground to the other side. They have defined the terms, the boundaries of the conversation and everything.
So one of the things I wanted to talk a little bit about is do you think of and have you seen some things that are good defensive action around people protecting people or work that needs to happen, and what have you seen on the offensive side that’s encouraging to you that we’re getting some footing around having both a defense to protect and an offense that tries to gain back ground?
Theo Miller: I love this question. It’s been a mixed bag for me. It’s been a hundred thousand examples of frustration over the last decade really on the lack of a really robust offensive approach to advance this work, and it’s been simultaneously a hundred thousand amazing examples.
Two weeks ago I was in a southern city that I won’t name, I was in the mayor’s office and we were doing some work with a client and the mayor themself came in, and on that day the president had issued an order to the justice department that any mayor who is cooperating with undocumented immigrants and so forth would be subject to criminal liability themself, and the mayor is like you want to put me in prison. So again, this is unprecedented times and yet what the mayor said is but we are doubling down on the services and support and wellbeing of all of our people in this city, and if we have to call it the vision leadership, the vision work, the opportunity agenda, we will do that.
So I think for those of us in the work, we need to take a pause. We need to think critically about the language. I’m not saying we just erase and we run away from antiracism or we run away from equity but I’m saying we have to really be tactical, and I’m seeing particularly in municipalities where they are relying on federal funds for Black infant health or for maternal mortality or for real robust evidence-based practices that are dealing with racial disparities, they’ve got to be pretty creative and they don’t want to lose those resources and yet they want to be clear about the impact that they’re seeing, and so in some cases you’ve got to use universal language but have a targeted approach.
So I’m seeing cases where folks are still targeting zip codes, they’re targeting census tracks, they’re targeting jurisdictions, and lot of the stuff that I’m describing today are things that we’ve seen, we’ve learned. We did it in California during the days of Pete Wilson. There have been days in which folks, the anti-affirmative action period, right? So there are examples where folks are being careful and defensive. I’m not seeing as much, I don’t know about you, Junious or Erika, where folks are being much more overt and explicit. We have a few examples of maybe those folks who are being more explicit but not as much. There’s a lot of fear around the country and I’m not seeing as much of that.
Erika Bernabei: Yeah, I would agree that there’s a lot more desire to do the work and less interest in what it sounds like or is written on paper but we do have a couple of collective impact collaboratives, one in particular in California, where the leadership at the county level government has said no, we’re doing this, and they are staying explicit, and it really does require that executive-level collaboration at the very top at this moment to resist and it also requires folks to be in states where the governor or whomever is actually aligned with the vision for racial equity.
I’ll also just say that one of the things that Theo has spoken quite a bit about and Theo, please jump in here, I don’t want to steal your thunder but is that when we dissociate the person and the people and the community away from the policy or from the number and when the stories are no longer being told and we’re just in a frenzy, all we can do is be defensive but as we step into that storytelling and bringing those stories of those individuals as Junious spoke about with the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and all these individual names into the public and the pictures and the images and all of what goes along with our humanity, that there is a way that that becomes offensive because it’s really about not losing the data in a different form.
The quantitative data can be really dehumanizing and used against people that we are really committed to but that’s—those stories and I often hear, Junious, I don’t know if you hear this, people use the term anecdote as something that’s really this derogatory terminology that says, oh, that’s not data, it’s an anecdote. I’m thinking to myself so the disrespect of the fact that somebody’s lived experience has not been captured and cannot be captured quantitatively but is actually guiding us to a new structure or a new policy that we couldn’t have seen before is just infuriating, and so I believe that when I see various unions across the country telling the story of what it means to be a part of the union and how hardworking the people are and how successful that is or when I hear again these county executives or organizational leadership like Ashleigh Gardere stand firm at PolicyLink saying like we are here for the all, we’ve always been here for the all, we’re going to continue to be here and, you know, just like this drumbeat, we want to lift up their stories as leaders so that we’re not just cowering in the corner. Theo, any thoughts on that because I know that you talked a lot about this work.
Theo Miller: I love that, E, and I’m reminded that we know and I’m curious as to your take on this too, Junious, it’s not as if these institutions whether it’s federal or municipal have been—or even corporate, my goodness, have been extraordinary for DEI in the last 25 years. It’s not as if there’s been these remarkable extraordinary gains and yet we had some good work that was happening. So now so much of the language of resistance—again, I’m not a Democratic operative, I’m not a lobbyist, so you take it with a grain of salt but I do get the solicitations. I do get the give me 50 dollars for the blue fund, and so much of the language is about Elon or Trump. So little is about the stories of the people who we are actually in this work for. So little is about the amazing 15 Black youth I was with last week in East Oakland who are leaders and organizers and who are doing the work in a collaborative of trying to transform their city despite what you might hear about Oakland on the news or in Montgomery, Alabama or in Atlanta or all over the country.
So I just—my wish and my hope is that if any good comes out of this moment it’s that we kind of hunker down. You know what it’s like when you’re in a foxhole and people are coming after you? You want to know who you’re going to be in that foxhole with. I’m going to be in there with Erika Bernabei and Junious Williams. I’m going to get in there, we’re going to tell our stories, we’re going to get our people, get our family, name it, name the impact, and it may not look pretty immediately but I again am convinced, I’ve done this work long enough, that we have the side of the moral universe on our side. We actually do.
As you sit back on this and I wonder when you think about this, Junious, because I know you’ve got that righteous rage in you, my brother, but when you sit back and you think about what’s right, who’s in the right, who really deserves to be impacted, what does this really mean, I know that we’re working on the right side of justice but we have to be more tactical. We’ve got to tell the story and we’ve got to be more organized. That’s part of what I’m sitting with.
Junious Williams: I want to follow up on that for a moment because Cindy Santos and Jennifer from the Collective Impact Forum did some interviews and some discussions with practitioners, foundations, other folks involved in the work about how they were adapting to this sort of hostile climate around equity. This started back early in 2024 but one of the findings that they came out with in terms of the work that needed to be done I want to highlight which is that we’ve done a horrible job around our storytelling and around creating the narrative for the DEI work.
That’s one of the things that they cited in their work as coming from foundations as well as practitioners, help and assistance in terms of creating the narrative that we need to counter their attacks and to give people a sense of, as you were saying, we haven’t done it all but we accomplished a hell of a lot in terms of moving the conversation, opening it up, hopefully swaying some people so I want to just reemphasize what you’re saying about this narrative and about the storytelling, and also cite some of the work that John Kania has been doing around how you convert stories into quantitative data and just some fascinating work around that that I think both elevates the stories and how we tell the stories to a different level that is much more inclusive but also just the fact that we need to be using the information that’s most readily available to us which is the information comes from the stories of the people that we work with and how that gets elevated to the level, at least the same level as bad quantitative data which we’ve been relying on for an inordinate amount of time even knowing that it’s full of holes.
Theo Miller: I mean, Junious, amen I say. We are the ancestors, all of us collectively, of storytellers. John Coltrane, Aretha Franklin, Frederick Douglas, Fannie Lou Hamer. I’m reminded of our dear friend, Justin Merrick who leads an organization in Memphis, Tennessee, where they have this concept that Audrey Jordan helped create called measuring love where they are actually measuring qualitatively and through some quantitative data as well the stories of Black life in Memphis and they’re tracking it and they’re building. So we know through our arts community, through our legacy, through our organizers, we know the power of our story and that’s why the right is actually so much more afraid than we sometimes realize. We have the narrative but we’ve taken a body blow here and we’ve got to get reorganized, we’ve got to get reactivated. We’ve got to strengthen our collective impact initiatives and as you said, sustain the warriors, center our culture, center our ethic, and frankly have some really strong legal and political organizers that are also helping to hold the wall because this is a battle.
I don’t want to minimize the seriousness about this and yet there are hundreds of millions of people across this country that every day whether you’re in a union or whether you’re in a school are trying to figure out ways to make greater impact and trying to address those disparities that we know are real and that can be undone, and in many ways as my friend, Dominic, often says, that data tells us about the unwarranted and unjustified suffering that particularly people of color are experiencing in this country and so shame on us if we don’t focus on that, if we don’t articulate that, and if we don’t address that, and if we don’t use the power of those voices to do something about that.
Erika Bernabei: I love that what both of you have shared. I want to make just two other points that are not as, perhaps not as really touching and moving but still I think technically helpful I hope which are, one, and I’ve said it before but it gets to what Theo was talking about as well, about the local. I understand the desire of collective impact to sort of amplify impact exponentially by how the pieces of the pie come together, and sometimes we get to the regional or we get to the state or we get to the national collective impact and it’s this really incredible moment.
My experience at the moment is that those local communities, even sometimes neighborhood by neighborhood collective impact, is where it’s at at the moment. The offensive can be inside of those deep relationships at this moment, and it’s OK in my opinion to scale down so that you can strengthen, so that you can then expand and scale up.
The other thing I just wanted to name was intermediaries, and I include philanthropy in intermediaries as well as large organizations that are nonprofits, etc., and even functional intermediaries, organizations that maybe are part of government but function in a sort of backbone or hub-ish role is to say like even though intermediary organizations’ proximity to what’s going on on the ground is sometimes that of a grantor or that of a researcher or that of a policymaker or policy advocate, that having private funding, having large institutions and structures that you can stand strong inside of means that there’s a moment right now to be on the offensive and really hoping, and especially those that have the backing of their long-term funding resourcing as well as the people within that have the stature and have the respect of the sector to really begin to come out front.
As a queer person I can say this but it’s a bit of a coming out party like, yeah, we said DEI when times were good. Do we still stand behind DEI when times are bad? We see some corporate sector folks, you know, the usual suspects like Ben & Jerry’s of course but also companies like Costco still standing strong. Then we see others floundering, and the same is going to be true of national nonprofits and big philanthropies. Can folks actually make some choices.
So at the national level those big groups and then at the local level, all we know from every community organizer we’ve ever talked to across time and space is that the local is where you go to strengthen and to bind tight ties that can withstand this storm, and that is collective impact. Collective impact, when you kind of shake it out, is organizing, right? It’s structured and it has all these components and it’s much more savvy and can move in these different ways but it is organizing, and so if we can see it that way, I think that is our greatest offense.
Theo Miller: What Erika made me think about is think about this work in the context of like a long journey and then in some ways while this conversation we’ve focused on this immediate crisis and this immediate inflection point, as I step back I’m not totally convinced that this crisis just began January of 2025. Actually if you step back you might think of a post-Obama, even sooner, that this thing has been a war even prior to George Floyd and Breonna Taylor’s murder, and so that if we’re really tactical about it, we need to be thinking about turning this curve that predates even this moment.
So what I’m thinking about in my current state of my career and you’re a mentor and I have some admiration for you, Junious, is like what do I want the next 10 to 20 years of my practice to look like? What is it that I want to put my energy into in terms of this longer-term project? We heard this at the PolicyLink summit last summer, brilliant Muslim sister, Erika’s going to remind me of her name, where she said like this is not a one-year—
Erika Bernabei: Linda Sarsour.
Theo Miller: Thank you, Linda Sarsour, want to give credit where credit is due. Linda Sarsour said like how are we organizing for the next 50 years? Now I won’t be here in 50 years from now. I’ll be golfing in heaven or something but like how are we actually thinking about the long-term inflection points? So that’s just something I was thinking about that Erika was wrapping then and I want you to take it wherever you want to go, Junious, but I just think about you because you’ve seen this game from different cities and a lot of spaces and where this thing is headed.
Junious Williams: Yeah, I wish I could be that optimistic. My thing is that this is not going to last very long and that’s what concerns me so. It’s going to implode one way or another. Either we as a people are going to take collective action and say no, stop the bullshit, and push back on all of this or they’re going to steamroll us all and it’s not going to matter. An election two years down the road. I just think there’s an urgency to what’s going on.
I mean the most startling picture in my memory although I did not watch it, I read the news accounts of the president of the United States standing in front of the world’s richest White men, right? And that’s what it is, and this is about oligarchy. This is about saying this democratic stuff does not work for White people, right? It worked as long as White folks were in the majority, it no longer works so what’s the alternative? And they are rapidly convincing the American people that minority rule is OK. An abandonment of our commitment and that’s why I wanted to frame this, this is about the interaction of democracy and equity and my feeling that there ain’t gonna be democracy in America unless we get equity right and there’s not going to be equity in America unless we get democracy so there’s been a joinder of these two issues in a way that is really compelling and with an urgency.
That’s why they’re moving so fast, and we might want to, and one of the critiques of progressives is that we don’t have the 50-year vision that took over the Supreme Court and reconstructed democracy at this point, boy, but if we don’t get the next couple years right around pushing back to saying no, this is not acceptable, that our vision as you said and it’s my vision too, Theo, a multiracial, multiethnic, multi-issue democracy that everybody is welcome into if you want to believe in the collective of us.
So that really concerns me and that’s why there are a couple of early things that I’ve seen that are I think really important. One of them is moving back against business. So you’re going to retreat from DEI and you’re going to retreat from not only DEI but the principles behind treating people fairly and inclusive and having welcoming environment, then we ain’t gonna buy your stuff. We really need to be leveraging our buying power as we talk to business because presumably, they’re saying all of this is about profit and the bottom line and protecting it so if that’s truly what it is and not your abandonment of democracy, let’s do a little test. Like people are already talking about February 28th having a one-day boycott and perhaps a longer one but visiting pain and suffering on those, by the same token supporting those businesses who have steadfast and said, no, it’s the right thing to do.
One of the worst parts about all of this for me having grown up in the ’60s and stuff is there’s no longer a moral component to any of this, right? That part of Trump’s success is he extinguished morality as an element of how we’re navigating and trying to work with each other and trying to organize and move this nation. Morality just ain’t even on the table anymore and it’s very hard when people don’t want to look at the evidence in terms of business that you do better regionally around the world if you have a more inclusive society. They don’t want to deal with that evidence so it really concerns me that, boy, I know I’m wandering on. I’m just really frustrated and don’t know exactly what to do, where to go but I know that if we wait too long, boy, there’s not going to be anything left. The rapidity with which stuff is happening is frightening.
Theo Miller: It’s incredibly frightening to bear witness to the multiplicity of institutions that are just like assaulting the values and the visions that we all hold dear. For us in this conversation we talk a lot about the people. When you are trying to dismantle what you may think of as DEI, I think of maternal health. I think of babies that are dying. I think of life. I think of our trans community. I think of undocumented children. I think of real people so it is on the one hand incredibly frightening, incredibly urgent, incredibly real as you read about hundreds of thousands of people being deported, as you read about the reactivation of Guantanamo as a prison site I mean, so, yes, I agree with you and yet I’m reminded of what James Baldwin said in 1962. I have no choice but to be optimistic because I know for me, Junious, that I am my ancestors’, ancestors’, ancestors’, ancestors’ wildest dream, and I know and I do believe that Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, that it was actually a small percentage of the population back in 1854 who were abolitionists and who really wanted to end chattel slavery, and so I’m not waiting for the vote two years from now. Fifty million people or seventy million, eighty million people the next time, people saying who’s going to be the next Obama. I’m not waiting for the next Obama but I’m a believer in the small spaces of democratic resistance that we’ve talked about in this conversation, and I think all we can do is do our part.
So I agree with you. I feel the urgency. I feel the pain and yet every time I’m in a room with organizations that are in service of collective impact that are clear on their principles, that are looking at the data, and that are doing whatever they can to deploy and put together their assets, their resources to address these structural roots that again were not created in January 2025, like this thing is a long game, I have a sense of hope.
So I’m with you. I think it’s a both/and, and over the last week I’ve been encouraged by what I’ve seen finally from my lawyers. I’m not an active member of the bar but I did pass the bar in California and New York, and I’m proud that some lawyers are stepping up because we need warriors on all fronts so that the educators can do their thing, so that Erika and I can do our thing, so you can do your thing. I believe this game is far from over is all I’ll say.
Erika Bernabei: I don’t have the same kind of hope Theo has but I do this work out of love. I don’t do this work because I—I know.
Theo Miller: I love that. That’s why we can colab.
Erika Bernabei: We can pretend that there are—but like I don’t. I think that sometimes things need to shrink and become different so that they can become the new version of themselves. I do think we’re in really big trouble right now but I do know that love is not easy. So since Theo likes to quote stuff, Bell Hooks is always my favorite. I’m not going to quote her but I am going to say that what you learn from Bell Hooks is that love is a verb and it requires sacrifice and it requires us stepping up to the plate. Who knows what your capacity for love is until you’re called to action, and so it’s at this moment when we say get local, get close to your people but also intermediaries, big folks that can really step up to the plate, now’s your moment. This is the moment to show not necessarily that you have all the answers but that you actually have the capacity to love in service of the work that we’re here to do on this earth. So that’s what I’ll just say.
A final call-in just to folks that look like me who have privilege, now’s an opportunity for us to also show up in serious ways. So if you’re not in community with folks, other folks of privilege who you can drag kicking and screaming sometimes to the front of the line, then you’re not with the right people. It’s really time to activate so I’ll pass it to you, Junious.
Juniouw Williams: Yeah, you know I know I’m discouraged. I will say this though that as I did the prep for this and kind of caught up on my own reading and research, there are some points of encouragement. As I looked around and see people doing emergency and long-term financial assistance for organizations and for individuals, that’s really encouraging. The formation of legal defense funds and pro bono attorney assistance and availability of training to nonprofits and groups to help do the risk and legal assessment, those were very encouraging. I did see some things too that were more on the offensive side like new revenue streams for organizations that need to build their capacity to withstand this sort of assault in the long term. People working on positive narratives around the impact, collective buying power, and then some legal offensive things, and we’ll provide a list of some of the resources when the podcast is published that we found.
Those were encouraging signs, certainly not broad and extensive enough given the challenges but it does show as you’re saying that some people have their flags in the sand and said I’m not moving from here. I’m in the right place and I’m going to stay here and fight, and those who are in the position to do that, I commend and admire while understanding that some people for family or other reasons aren’t going to be able to do that.
The final thing I want to do is to give a plug for your workshop at the Collective Impact Action Summit. Do you want to tell folks a little bit about that as we close, that Erika and Theo will be doing a workshop at the Collective Impact Summit, folks?
Theo Miller: Yeah, thank you so much, Junious, and thank you to the Forum and everyone for this fiery conversation. Indeed, we’ll be back in community with practitioners, thinkers, intermediaries on Wednesday, April 30th, 11:00 to 12:00 p.m. Pacific. What’s that E? Two p.m. Eastern.
Erika Bernabei: You got it.
Theo Miller: We’ll be in conversations and the topic of the panel discussion is We Will Make Quilts. That’s paying homage to the great Nikki Giovanni utilizing results-based practices for the transformative impact that we need now. We’ll have a couple of guests on there with us, folks who are doing the real work down in community and are trying to move on a lot of the things that we’ve talked about in this conversation. So we think of this as a continuing conversation.
I also just want to say, Junious, I’ve also been encouraged about some of the continuing work that came out of the reparations movement, particularly land acquisitions, land repatriation, community land trust work so I think we have to also broaden our frame from the sort of DEI professional services to also think about the material resources that we can acquire in community and in collaboration. Again we’re reminded that oftentimes the greatest beneficiary of some of this work has been White female business owners, and so that business aspect piece as well we’ve got to interrogate. There’s a lot more to do and a lot more to come on it.
Erika Bernabei: Definitely join us at the Collective Impact Forum Summit, and Junious, always so grateful for your leadership and your fire and your mentorship in this work. We are so grateful also to the Collective Impact Forum for having us and for accepting us in our full fire or full hopelessness and our full love and all the good stuff that comes with being a human so grateful for you.
Junious Williams: Yeah, thank both of you. It’s been a great conversation, got my head spinning around, and thank you, Tracy, for the work that you did on organizing this, and we’ll hope to see both of you at the Collective Impact Summit if not before.
Erika Bernabei: Awesome, Junious. Thank you. Take care everybody.
Junious Williams: Bye bye.
Theo Miller: See you all.
(Outro) And this closes out this episode of the Collective Impact Forum podcast. If you are interested in learning more about what was discussed, you can find links to resources in the footnotes for this episode. And if you’re enjoying all that we share at the Collective Impact Forum podcast, we encourage you to rate us on your preferred podcast platform, and share your favorite episodes with colleagues.
We would like to acknowledge that this episode was produced and edited on the unceded, traditional lands of the Coast Salish people, including the Duwamish, Suquamish, Stillaguamish, and Muckleshoot tribes. We honor with gratitude the land itself and the past, present, and futures of these tribes.
The Intro music for this episode was composed by Rafael Krux and our outro music is composed by Kevin Macleod.
In Forum news, we’re excited to share that registration is open for the 2025 Collective Impact Action Summit, that will be held online this April 29-May 1, 2025. It’s our biggest learning event of the year, featuring over 30 virtual sessions, and sharing out best practices from collaboratives from across the U.S. and globally. Please visit our events section at collectiveimpactforum.org if you would like to join the 2025 Collective Impact Action Summit. We hope you can join us.
This is Tracy Timmons-Gray, Associate Director here at the Collective Impact Forum, and your podcast producer. I want to say thank you so much for listening, and we look forward to connecting with you more in our next episode. Until next time, let’s keep working towards collective impact.
