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Joann Lee Wagner, Vice President of People Operations:
When you face an intractable, deeply entrenched issue like the racial wealth gap, it requires a certain amount of vision, audacity, and faith to believe that we are the ones that have the solutions that we and our communities have been waiting for.
Common Future is a network of community leaders and funders in community economic development that boldly innovate and experiment to build inclusive economies. As we set out to build a team to meet this moment and accelerate the work happening in communities, we purposefully recruited those that reflected our network and exhibited the qualities of leadership we knew to be necessary: builders, optimists, growth mindset, comfort with ambiguity, and those that don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. But it wasn’t just enough to bring the people together. We had to collectively unlearn the behaviors of white supremacy culture and nonprofit scarcity mindset that were a part of all of us.
The ideals of perfectionism that consistently hold us to unattainable standards and prevent us from launching good-enough prototypes or constantly trying to do more with less in ways that were toxic and caused burn out. We also allowed for failure in our work and created safety nets that are too often inaccessible to BIPOC and women entrepreneurs. With the spirit of innovation guiding us and through deep relationships and collaboration with our network, we have been able to incubate and experiment with ideas like character-based lending and so much more.
As an organization, we continue to learn and give ourselves the chance to develop the solutions we have been waiting for. In this issue, we are exploring what this looks like in the following ways:
We hope you’ll take this time to reflect with us and share what we’re doing to create a more inclusive economy. Like the stories you read? Share them with your network on social and be sure to tag @commonfutureco.
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