Weekly Reads
“[W]e wanted to challenge ourselves not just to move relationally in the communities we serve, but to take the power of network to the next level. In preparing to make 100 mostly out-of-the-blue responsive grants based on trust, we wanted to be intentional about, and take a decidedly different approach to, whose trust we were working to earn, and who was getting opportunities to be trusted. … Coming across people and organizations not already familiar to us, with minimal demands on their time, was a metric we set ourselves.” [more]
Chicago Beyond for Trust-Based Philanthropy Project
“Throughout history, protest movements have been the instigators of several instances of large-scale social change, and they deserve greater funding to continue. Funders should direct a greater proportion of their resources towards protest movements, to build a stronger ecology of social change. Given how even woefully underfunded protest movements have had catalytic impacts in bringing about large-scale positive change, supporting young, upcoming protest movements might be one of the most impactful things philanthropists can do.” [more]
James Ozden, Social Change Lab, for Stanford Social Innovation Review
“Our organizations rarely reflect our communities. Strategies and needs are often misaligned. PEAK2022 shone a bright light at these issues, calling out the flaws but also offering solutions.” [more]
Sam Kaplan, Submittable
“Because of how humans see systems, the more we view and embrace issues as systemic, the more we run the risk that people will think that there simply isn’t anything that we can do to make things better. That’s a problem. But it doesn’t have to be this way. By being careful about how we present systems, we can guard against fatalistic interpretations and advance a constructive understanding of systems as under the control of people and therefore able and open to change.” [more]
Nat Kendall-Taylor and Bill Pitkin, FrameWorks Institute, on The Communications Network
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