Infrastructure for a New World
For the past three years, NPQ has been exploring the question: Why have conditions for people of color not improved in the past 30 years, despite various DEI and racial justice efforts?
Our conversations with leaders of color in the field about what they need to create real social change has converged around a call to action for designing and building civic infrastructure that supports leaders of color. This expands the concept of infrastructure beyond support for nonprofit organizations, to support for leaders and the communities they serve.
The work has quickly evolved into Edge Leadership, a social change R&D platform designed primarily by and for people of color — in movements, philanthropy, nonprofits, politics, and culture — to meet, experiment, and create new forms that advance social change.
This summer, we hosted our first roundtable on this topic and found that leaders of color want to move infrastructure beyond tinkering with what is, toward a vision of how we want to be together as humans.
Below are the top four themes that emerged.
Vision
Perhaps not surprisingly, what leaders of color want most is vision.
Kristell Caballero Saucedo, Program Officer at Borealis Philanthropy says, “I think that it is important to have an image or a vision where everyone can understand what their role is and how they can thrive in this vision.”
Saucedo wants us to move away from “doing the opposite of what exists.” She explains that “the vision of what we want to live, is larger than just like the specific thing that we’re living at this moment.”
For example, this spring and summer we saw philanthropy move to fund criminal justice reform in response to months of daily massive protests across the country and beyond against anti-Black police brutality. But the problem is larger than this.
Saucedo says, “It’s larger than just things that you can give your money to one time.” Rather, “there is something that is not attached to the existing reality, but is something that we could create, or that is lifted up from the existing realities that live within our own communities, or the cultures that are being suppressed, and the stories that are being suppressed, and the value system that is being suppressed.
Author and consultant Dax-Devlon Ross agrees. “I’m concerned that the framing of a lot of the discourse right now from people in positions of authority is that this is a criminal justice issue, solely and strictly. And, so, I see a lot of our resources pouring towards justice-oriented organizations like NAACP. So, someone has defined this challenge. Who did you all talk to, to get a real sense of what is needed?”
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