Top Takeaways from our Risky Business Webinar

Nonprofit AF’s Vu Le and Common Future’s Jennifer Njuguna led an eye-opening webinar on June 27th, where they dove into organizational risk. Learn how bias and fear influence our risk perception, hindering progress toward equity.

It's no secret that the progress many of us have made towards justice is under siege. The result is an environment where it feels far too risky to speak out. But to foster an equitable economy, we must examine and challenge how we think about risk as these notions are often deeply entwined with race-based exclusion and extraction. Who and what are at risk when we don't continue our work? What kind of risks are we truly up against?

These questions and more led us to our first webinar in our Redefining Risk series, in which Nonprofit AF’s Vu Le and our co-CEO Jennifer Njuguna Esq. explored the various aspects of organizational risk we encounter, from losing funders to lawsuits. Jennifer, leaning into her background as a lawyer, analyzed recent court battles and the environment these suits are creating. Vu challenged us to think beyond scarcity and to consider that we might have more people on our side than we think. Here are the top takeaways from their conversation.

The decision to block the Fearless Fund is a scary perversion of the law.

In discussing the recent 11th Circuit Court block to the Fearless Fund’s grant program, Jennifer highlighted much of what she recently wrote in reaction to the decision. “What's most alarming about this case is, as we saw with the Supreme Court Affirmative Action case, the ramifications and fear that it’s inspiring around the remedies and the work that we can do to advance racial and economic justice…there was a law, section 1981, of the Civil Rights Act of 1866. That law was passed after the Civil War, after Blacks who were enslaved, had been freed, just in the recognition that freedom from being enslaved, didn't guarantee any other rights. This law guaranteed the opportunity to enter contracts free from discrimination. And so we think about a law that was designed to provide a remedy to Black people to ensure their economic empowerment was used more than 100 years later to attack groups that are seeking to advance racial and economic justice and provide remedies given that our society is so inequitable.“

The decision to block Fearless Fund was part of a much larger, calculated effort to block considerations of race in a country that has long made and implemented race-based decisions. Whether we’re discussing the weaponization of the courts against remedies to racial harm, attacks on DEI work and education, or dismantling reparations, we’re witnessing an effort to restrict rights and permanently block any attempt to remedy historic and ongoing race-based harms—even though the law has historically and currently permits such remedies. 

Vu, in empathizing with much of the sector, very much agreed, “I think what's been terrifying for me, and I think for a lot of people in the sector, is this is our work. So many of our organizations explicitly state that we are supporting certain groups of individuals experiencing injustice and inequity. And so this presents an existential threat to many of our missions, in some ways, right? “

The backlash goes beyond lawsuits. Plagiarism allegations are the new tool to silence Black women

“It's plagiarism as the new code word for how we can not only take someone down but tap into underlying stereotypes around merits and deservingness. ‘Who should be in these roles? Who should be in these positions? Are you qualified? Are you just a DEI hire? Of course, you are. And on top of that, you've plagiarized?’” Jennifer explained.

“[At Common Future] we’re starting to talk to other groups about what they're experiencing, and gaining insights from how this is manifesting for different groups of people. You know, for some, it’s in conversation with funders that are asking them to be more subtle, for others, it's doubling down and describing who is served and the work that is done and being clear about what the law says, but also what it doesn't say, and being willing to take the risk based on the contours of the law.”

“When I think about where we are today, it's a very precarious time…when I reflect on the past few years, the pandemic, the racial justice reckoning, wars, and more, we're in a space where we need to be thinking about the risks that we have to take as a sector in order to continue doing the work that we do, and showing up in the ways that we need to, to create a just society…It means we actually have to think about this idea, this concept of risk, because it is the thing that can either allow us to make the best decisions and propel forward, or it's the thing that can really hinder us and keep us in locked in our steps and locked into a status quo, which is not only a society that is unjust, but continuing to get worse.”.

Progressives fear risk. Conservatives have embraced using it through coordination, strategy, and funder-backed aggressive tactics.

“It seems like progressive funders, movements, organizations are the ones who were always terrified of everything…always you'll have, ‘We got to mitigate risks, we can't get sued, we can't lose our funding.’ You know, ‘We can’t be in the crosshairs of right-wing pundits,’” Vu explained, “Whereas the legal team on conservative movements are [saying], ‘Oh, no, we're just gonna go forward. And if anyone sues us we're gonna sue them right back.’”

Jennifer added that beyond aligning on dedicated narratives, and forming organizations dedicated to churning out coordinated talking points, this is in large part because “conservative movements, number one, are much more coordinated and aligned on the top things that they want to advance…That's not happening in the progressive space.” She adds, “They have these major funders that are also aligned and behind some of these things. And so, when they're able to get that kind of funding, it means they can move differently in this space, it means they can launch a multi-pronged strategy for what they're going to do, including the lawsuits.”

The law is neutral. Lawsuits can be a good thing.

“I’ve talked to people about the fact that organizations get sued. [But] that's why there's lawyers. That's why there's insurance. So it's not just the notion of being sued. We should  understand the merits because sometimes it's worth it to move forward with a lawsuit—which we see the conservative groups do…

For example, in regards to Fearless Fund, Jennifer showed the many victories we’ve seen in the sector, “there was a similar case, where a group called Hello Alice was sued in a district court in Ohio. And Hello Alice was providing grants to Black entrepreneurs. And the judge in that case said the group that sued them didn't have any standing and threw the case out. So we are hedging bets. In some ways, it's not necessarily a guarantee these risks that we take will go in a negative direction.

Vu agreed, and added, “I think about Alex Jones getting sued for all the defamation that he did, regarding the Sandy Hook Massacre, When he was going on on, on his show, and just talking about how it's all a hoax that all these kids were killed and parents were making stuff up, they were getting death threats and stuff. And he got sued, and now owes millions of dollars. And I think that is great, and we should be doing more of that.”

“All of these lawsuits, they indicate that what we're doing has been working right? In our sector, it seems that the focus on DEI has been leading to some really awesome stuff. This is why there's been so much pushback recently against it because people are afraid of what's actually been happening. Right? And so maybe the response isn't for us to back away from it. But to do more of it as a sector. “

We can’t unpack risk without unpacking the scarcity mindset as a core element that underpins many institutional practices and norms that replicate inequality across sectors.

Vu, across the interview, connected risk to the realities of the nonprofit/funder relationship by asking, “When we speak up what, what do we say? Do we lose donors? Do we lose funders? I think about organizations in the past, for example, that were getting into trouble for supporting Black Lives Matter, for example, or supporting Defund the Police. Right now, there are organizations being punished for speaking up against the genocide of Palestine and Palestinians…When we take risks, what happens when we speak up? What do you say to folks when they're in the space where they have to think about what what stance they take to even take a public stance on certain things?”

The scarcity mindset, which in the nonprofit sector is the idea that resources, opportunities, and success are limited and hard to come by, is something Vu has spoken about extensively. That’s actually how he and Jennifer first connected when he joined Common Future on an all-staff call to reframe how we as an organization think about scarcity because it truly permeates the nonprofit industry, and often gets in the way of what we try to accomplish as a sector.

“In our sector, where we're terrified of losing funding, we're terrified of offending people.” Vu explained in his chat with Jennifer, alluding to his extensive writing on the topic, where he has also written, “We are so freaked out about potential lack of funding that we underinvest in everything, leading to poorly paid, exhausted staff who sit on crappy chairs, typing on a 10-year-old computer, with 48 dollars and a dozen Beanie Babies as retirement savings.”

But as Jennifer explains, this didn’t happen by chance, “I think there's something about how our sector is set up that prohibits us, from wanting to take risks, from wanting to shake things up, from wanting to put ourselves out there—let alone our organizations out there…these are actually, people's jobs and livelihoods as well.”

The nonprofit sector is beholden to funders from the initial courting to the relationship building, to garnering funding, to then reporting on the results of that funding—and often this relationship is extractive. 

“It's been a norm for so long that even when we have the best intentions, we get into our various organizations, and it's part of the culture and we adapt, and we adopt in various ways. And so when you look at the aggregate, we end up just contributing to this norm of how a variety of us operate, “Jennifer says, “we are overly reliant on the whims of funders and the directions that they want to take us in, which are not always aligned with the goals that help us truly advance a just society, even when they think they're doing so.”

Risk is inherently part of this work. It always has been.

“We take a risk every day because we are here to advance racial and economic equity. That goes to the heart of some of the founding components of this country as we know it—a country that was founded through the extraction of land from Indigenous people [and] forced labor of Black people. It completely goes against how we were constructed. It just feels like a risk all the time, no matter what—to say that we should do something different, that we should have a different economy, that we should center the folks that have been most harmed by racial and economic injustice. But yet, here we are….We honor [the sacrifice of our ancestors] by carrying forward and continuing to weave this tapestry together. This is unfinished work and it will be for a long time, [but] this is how we do our part to prepare the future generations who will have to pick up the work. Even if we were to get to this place that we want to see, there's also the work to protect it from the snapback that is always lurking. There's the ideal of a destination, but it’s very much an ongoing journey for all of us and for generations to come. We honor our ancestors by continuing to tap in.” — Jennifer Njuguna

If these highlights resonate with you, then I invite you to listen to the full hour-long discussion, where Vu and Jennifer discuss these topics and many more. The goal of this series is to generate more conversation about what is holding us back from creating the economic conditions for us all to thrive. 

By providing real-life examples of how institutions and organizations have put into practice a reframe of risk we hope this series serves as a jumping-off point for those curious about how to have these conversations within their own organizations and ecosystems to advocate for more meaningful changes towards building an equitable economy. 

In our next webinar, Jennifer and fellow Co-CEOs Jess Yupanqui Feingold and Sandhya Nakhasi will join Dalberg Partners to discuss Beyond Racial Backlash: The Role of Funders, Intermediaries, and Practitioners in Forging Ahead Together. Sign up for the webinar here.