2026. The 250th anniversary of the United States. A celebration of victory and exceptionalism has been rising in volume all year, yet we know this myth of guiltless glory is false. Ours is a nation founded on Native genocide and the enslavement of African people, harm that has never been meaningfully acknowledged or repaired.

The historical record is clear. Black communities achieved massive policy change from Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Acts of the 1860s and 1870s to the Voting and Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s to the sweeping DEI commitments of 2020. And then organized white backlash dismantled these gains: Redemption followed Reconstruction, Massive Resistance followed the Civil Rights Movement, and the backlash to the Black Lives Matter movement has produced, among other things, a regressive Supreme Court handing down rulings such as Louisiana v. Callais which has stripped thousands of Black voters of representation and put 191 state legislative seats at risk across the South.

The question this pattern forces is not “how do we win more.” It is: why do the wins keep getting dismantled? And whose responsibility is it to change that?

Black movement leaders have long been clear in their analysis of the three groups at play in the movement for racial justice: Black, Indigenous, and communities of color who continue winning real structural transformation across generations; white people who actively organize against justice and democracy (the backlash); and white people, who claim to hold values of democracy and equity, who vote consistently and read the books, but who are not taking the relationship-based, daily actions that would actually transform the behavior and culture of themselves and their white peers. This article is about that third group. Of which I am a part.

Why do the wins keep getting dismantled? And whose responsibility is it to change that?

For many of my 12 years in this movement, I disregarded these questions and focused on winning more. I took a month off to volunteer full-time on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. I attended countless protests, from Michael Brown to George Floyd. Since 2019, I’ve volunteered with the incredible Rollin’ to the Polls, mobilizing Black voters in West and North Montgomery, Alabama. It was an honor to work at the Equal Justice Initiative for three years, which educated me about the depth and continuity of racial injustice in our nation. In many ways, I was doing the work.

And then I would come home.

Two blocks from my house, my neighborhood’s association met each month. Its mandate was to preserve historic buildings. But as I learned when I finally chose to join, this group of older white residents was instead using it as a forum for organizing police surveillance and arrest of our Black neighbors.

Showing Up Where We’re Actually Needed

The connection to my day job was not abstract: in Alabama, arrests feed into a criminal legal system that strips people of the right to vote. I was fighting disenfranchisement at the level of history and policy, while two blocks away, my neighbors were organizing it in real time. And I was choosing not to be there.

Initially, I left each meeting enraged. The entire hour focused on just the first agenda item: a report from six police officers on “community safety” which devolved into racist dog-whistling. But if I wanted to organize my white neighbors, I had to get close and be curious instead of retreat in exasperation. I learned that no one’s needs were being met: our Black neighbors were being harassed; our white neighbors remained isolated and lonely; and one police officer told me directly, “This is not where we want or need to be.”

We experimented with one small and one big change. Small change: we switched the order of the agenda items. The community safety report moved from first to last. Instead of 60 minutes, it then took less than 10. Instead of six police officers, only one kept coming.

Big change: creating an alternative to calling the police. We started developing a community mediation process, led by a multi-racial and multi-generational group of neighbors and local pastors, to address the frictions of neighborhood life without defaulting to criminalization. It was slow and remains incomplete; I moved before the work was finished.

I offer this not as a success story but as an indication of what can become possible when white people show up where we are actually needed: at the source of the problem, within our own communities.

Organizing Infrastructure

Volunteering, voting, protesting and learning are all vital. They are the foundations of meaningful participation in the multiracial movement for justice. What my failures demonstrate is the risk of focusing solely on external outcomes, when the culture that determines whether those outcomes survive was happening right in front of me.

Dr. King named this failure, as did James Baldwin. Malcolm X, in the final chapter of his autobiography, wrote:

“I tell sincere white people, ‘Work in conjunction with us—each of us working among our own kind.’ Let sincere white individuals find all other white people they can who feel as they do—and let them form their own all-white groups, to work trying to convert other white people who are thinking and acting so racist… Working separately, the sincere white people and sincere Black people actually will be working together. In our mutual sincerity we might be able to show a road to the salvation of America’s very soul.”

Black and white communities have different work to do—and require different infrastructure to do it.

Black communities—from the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 to the redrawing of racist congressional maps in 2022—have built extraordinarily robust organizing infrastructure that achieves their goal: policy change.

White liberals have not done the equivalent. Building effective infrastructure requires first seeing our responsibility clearly: that our communities are where the backlash is organized, time and again, and that we are not only witnesses to the problem but participants in it. This confrontation—that we are responsible for changing the culture so that policy wins are sustained—is not something that white liberals have been willing to engage.

Clearly, there is a shared destination: justice, repair, genuine democracy. But with different groups starting from different places, the same path to get there won’t be successful.

It’s as if Black activist communities are on land. They envisioned the road ahead and built a bus, and that bus continues making progress. white liberals look at that and think: we need a bus. But we are not on land. We are standing on the bank of a river. Buses sink in rivers. What we need is a boat: something designed for where we actually are, to get us where we want to go. We haven’t built it because we haven’t been willing to admit we’re standing on a river.

This riverbank that white liberals are standing on is our own communities: families, neighborhood associations, workplaces, schools. This is where culture is (re)produced and backlash is organized, and where white liberals are consistently absent.

Every time we lean into instead of away from a reckoning conversation, something unexpected and hopeful develops that points us to the next step.

In my own experience, I know that talking to my white neighbor feels a hundred times harder than phone-banking a stranger in a swing state. I can hang up on the stranger. My neighbor, my family member, my colleague—those relationships carry history, care, and real risk.

Research shows that attitude shifts from deep-listening and narrative conversations between strangers can hold for up to four months. But relationships and repeated contact are vital to moving from attitude change to long-term culture transformation. White liberals already have these relationships. The Public Religion Research Institute found that 90 precent of white Democrats’ and 93 percent of white Republicans’ core social networks are other white people. We’re just not using them.

Culture Change

This is what Reckon With is building: a structured, ongoing practice space for relational organizing, so white people who say they care about justice can become the frontline of the culture change that policy wins require to survive.

When and how do we go about changing culture? This 250th anniversary year is giving us a lot of opportunities to try. Between May and July 2026, 46 participants (including me) went through Reckon With’s inaugural fourth of July program, using Independence Day to turn toward our white communities rather than away from them.

With this in mind, I knew I had to do what I hadn’t in over a decade: go back to my hometown in Connecticut and attend my neighbors’ annual fireworks BBQ.

Over my two-week visit, I had one-on-one conversations with three of my four neighbors. I was honest, for the first time, about why I had avoided coming home, how anxious I had felt to share my true beliefs with them, and how that fear had been deteriorating our relationships. I apologized for turning away.

A pattern that is common across Reckon With’s participants emerged: every time we lean into instead of away from a reckoning conversation, something unexpected and hopeful develops that points us to the next step. This time it came through asking a neighbor’s daughter for her advice on how to talk to her father when I disagree with him. I learned that she is also trying to have hard conversations with him—not about racial injustice, but about honesty and depth in their relationship. Without knowing it, we were both working toward the same aspiration: how to invite this person into something more authentic.

I took her advice about when and how to approach her dad. It helped. I let her know. And most importantly, through those two weeks, I was honest with her about my beliefs as they arose. I chose to trust that twenty-eight years of relationship can hold steady under the weight of truth.

A few days later, walking together past a poster reading “Party like it’s 1776,” I said something instead of staying silent. I shared about the Juneteenth event I’d attended and my own reckoning work, including reconnecting with Black Woodsons to whom I am related because my ancestors enslaved their ancestors. Every time I shared truthfully, she stayed. She listened. With grace and curiosity. Nothing came crashing down, as I had feared. It was the opposite. The more honestly I share, the closer we can grow.

Did my actions result in immediate or dramatic change? No. But did they give me a clear next step toward repair? Yes. That is how I’ve learned that culture truly changes: one caring interaction at a time, over time, for a long time. Until white liberals commit to this granular, disciplined, loving and rigorous work, equitable policies won will remain at risk of derailment and all of us will suffer in the absence of repair and genuine democracy.

A companion piece sharing what emerged across the 40+ Reckon With participants who participated in our 4th of July program will be forthcoming. If you’re white and looking for support to do this work, consider joining a Reckon With peer support group at www.reckonwith.org/joinus.

Generation Citizen opens with a call to reimagine democracy by recognizing youth voice and civic imagination as essential civic infrastructure and makes the case for why expanding youth access to civic opportunities is essential to democracy’s next 250 years. The essays that follow feature personal reflections from young people on the experiences that shaped their civic identities—from advocating for change in their schools to engaging local leaders and organizing in their communities.

Generation Citizen: When did you first begin to see yourself as someone who could influence change in your community?

Sumaiya Alam: My seventh-grade class had been working on a project to improve the food provided by the Department of Education and get halal food into our school. We worked for almost half the school year in our social studies class. I was chosen along with two other classmates to present the project at the New York City Bar Association for Civics Day. There, I saw how attentively community advisors listened and took part in our conversations that we had regarding our school system, which felt incredibly empowering. This whole experience taught me that I can create systemic change when I already have so much support from civic educators and organizations like Generation Citizen. I no longer just talk about the issues in my community, I actually do something about them.

Generation Citizen: How did your experience with Generation Citizen shape your understanding of civic engagement?

Sumaiya Alam: There are so many people my age that have such great ideas, but everyone requires a little courage to actually do anything with them, and that’s what Generation Citizen truly did for me. It sparked in me a more profound way of thinking about society and my role in it. I learned that the government is built from its people and without us engaging in democracy and partaking civically, impact may not be possible.

Generation Citizen: What lessons from that experience still stay with you today?

Sumaiya Alam: One person alone cannot determine the course of our government’s decisions but when people come together to enforce something, it creates more pressure on the people that have a say in anything that we do. I’ve also realized that people who aren’t as engaged in civics, are either people who live in fear, simply don’t care, or aren’t educated enough regarding their role in government. But we can slowly dismantle those specific mindsets. By having youth like me take the first step, and truly see the impact of our work, we can better understand how expressing our ideas can actually make a difference so more of us understand the importance of staying civically engaged.

Generation Citizen: How has your understanding of democracy evolved since high school?

Sumaiya Alam: I thought democracy just meant voting in the general elections. However, after taking part in civic engagement in my community, in many different ways, I realized that democracy goes beyond the voting booth. It is the power of everyone’s voice that can be used to fight against injustice and inequality, because we have the ability to influence the laws and governmental decisions to ensure no one has any right taken from them.

Generation Citizen: What should democracy look and feel like over the next 25, 50 or 250 years?

Sumaiya Alam: Whether it is in 25, 50, or 250 years, people should understand the impact of their voices and the amount of power they have to create change. In the future, I hope that the government and government officials take the opinions of the public into consideration, to create and impose laws, ones which do not oppress people. I also hope that voter registration and civic engagement is much higher among youth who should continuously be educated about their government and their role in it.

Generation Citizen: What gives you hope about the future of civic participation?

Sumaiya Alam: I get hope when I see even a small percentage of my peers discuss the political state of America but also their own countries. Although I do disagree with some opinions, I love that people step out of their comfort zone to discuss their ideas and thoughts which are foreign to my own. To see new perspectives and people not being afraid to be transparent, is what I love most about my own generation. I often see some of my classmates, friends, and colleagues also post about political activism and their views on social media, which I find very brave.

Generation Citizen: What does meaningfully incorporating the youth voice look like in practice?

Sumaiya Alam: Youth should be offered spaces to express their concerns regarding issues in their community, and community leaders should listen to their concerns and propose solutions to the problems. We are the ones who will be impacted by these issues in the future when we hold critical roles in our society as adults. Opportunities to take part in governmental decisions to be found in schools, so students can take what they are educated on in their social studies classes and actually implement what they learned in real time. For example, having students pre-register to vote, partake in participatory budgeting elections, hold debates regarding laws as well as moral and ethical dilemmas, connect with other students to advocate for different agendas, and act upon them using the help of community leaders.

Generation Citizen: What does “civic imagination” mean to you?

“Civic Imagination” to me means using unusual and out-of-the-box tactics to get a response from people and even solve the issue which someone is tackling. I have used my own civic imagination to find ways to attract students at school to get civically engaged. I’ve used the civic imagination of others to connect with community leaders to learn more about their career and look for possible ways they could help with community issues I was working on.

“What did the mothers spend the money on?”

I have been asked some version of that question countless times in the better part of a decade since we launched the Magnolia Mother’s Trust: Springboard to Opportunities’ guaranteed income initiative for Black mothers living in federally subsidized affordable housing in Jackson, Mississippi. It is usually presented as practical curiosity. Funders want to understand outcomes. Reporters want specifics. Policymakers want to know whether people made the “right” choices.

But after 13 years of working alongside families at Springboard, I experience something larger inside that question. I see an assumption that people trying to survive poverty in this country must prove they can be trusted before they deserve resources. I hear the belief that the most important measure of a mother’s judgment is whether an outsider approves of how she meets her family’s needs. I smell a trope that reduces people to their scarcity and treats their humanity as an open question.

But the South has always been more than a measure of what was withheld from it. It is a blueprint for what communities can build when they turn shared struggle into care, ingenuity and collective power.

The question that should be asked is: what did the money make possible?

How did this money make room for joy? How did it create breathing room? What happens when survival is no longer consuming every ounce of energy? What happens when people have enough breathing room to make choices rather than simply react to crises? That is what policy evaluations too often miss. When people are constantly managing scarcity, they are forced to focus only on survival. But when there is space created from outside of constantly having to carry the toxic stress of meeting one’s basic needs, people can imagine, create, and plan.

For generations, the South has been cast as America’s democratic failure, a place defined by what it lacks and in need of rescue from somewhere else. Mississippi, in particular, is often discussed through a deficit lens. We are described by rankings and statistics, by poverty rates and political dysfunction, by all the ways the state falls short. But the South has always been more than a measure of what was withheld from it. It is a blueprint for what communities can build when they turn shared struggle into care, ingenuity and collective power.

The Magnolia Mother’s Trust is a microcosm of this impact; it was never just about whether mothers could manage money. There is no better person at budgeting than a mom in the grocery aisle with hungry kids at home and a skinny paycheck. The work we have been doing is not about confirming obvious answers; of course doubling the income of families living off $12,000 a year betters their financial outcomes.

The more interesting question is what becomes possible when we stop asking people to prove they are worthy of support and instead create the conditions for their inherent brilliance to emerge. What happens when we trust people with the resources and authority to determine what their families and communities need? This is not simply a question of economic mobility. It is about agency, power, and, ultimately, democracy.

The mothers in our community had been managing impossible budgets, making difficult tradeoffs and holding their families together long before Springboard arrived with a guaranteed income program. They did not need us to teach them how to be resourceful. They needed the material conditions and the dignity to live beyond perpetual crisis.

In communities like the ones Springboard serves, democracy has had to be practiced in the spaces left behind by institutional failure.

To exercise agency—to make choices, imagine a different future, and have a meaningful say in the circumstances that shape their lives—individuals must have the necessary material conditions at their disposal. When every decision is constrained by whether there will be enough money to make it through the week, choice becomes a luxury. When people have breathing room, agency becomes possible. And when people have agency, they can begin to exercise power.

Democracy’s Material Conditions

This work has taught me something fundamental about democracy: it is not only what happens in a voting booth, a courtroom, or a legislative chamber. Democracy is also what happens when people have enough stability to make choices and enough power to shape the circumstances that affect their lives.

For too long, our country has told its democratic story through institutions. We celebrate elections, constitutions, and landmark court decisions. Those things matter. But they are not the whole story, especially for people whose experiences with institutions have too often been defined by systemic exclusion, surveillance, and broken promises.

In communities like the ones Springboard serves, democracy has had to be practiced in the spaces left behind by institutional failure. Democracy lives in the neighbor who watches a child so a mother can get to work; the text threads among families who share information about resources, solve problems collectively, and offer support when a crisis arrives. Democracy survives through the wisdom people develop when they must navigate systems that were not designed with their well-being in mind.

The communities that we call marginalized have never been on the margins of democracy. They have been practicing it all along. The problem is that too many institutions have failed to recognize it.

Building Resilient Relationships

One of the most important lessons I have learned at Springboard is that collective decision-making does not begin with a listening session.

Too often, institutions approach community engagement as a task to complete. They hold a meeting, gather input, and move into action. They want the knowledge, solutions, and trust from the people most affected by a problem, but they have not done the relational work required to earn any of it. Relationships do not work that way, nor should they.

Building real relationships takes time, intention, consistency, and vulnerability. Sustaining them takes reciprocity. That means showing up before you need something from people, being honest about what you can and cannot do, accepting that community members may not agree with you, and being willing to change course when they tell you something isn’t working.

At Springboard, we describe our work as radically resident-driven. That does not mean we ask residents for feedback and then return to the office to make the decisions ourselves. Instead, it shows up as a commitment to building the conditions in which people believe their voices matter, because they have seen evidence that their voices can lead to change. That is a much higher bar than engagement.

It is also much harder to meet. We cannot expect people to share their deepest concerns, their boldest ideas, or their honest assessments with organizations that have appeared only once or twice. We shouldn’t ask communities to trust systems that have repeatedly disappointed them without first acknowledging the damage those systems have caused. And we must not claim to believe in community leadership if we are unwilling to share power when community members lead us somewhere we did not expect to go.

This is where so much of the civic-engagement conversation falls short. We often focus on participation: Did people attend? Did they vote? Did they provide input? Those are meaningful measures, but they do not tell us whether power actually moved.

The more important question is whether people had the relationships, resources, and institutional responsiveness necessary to make their participation matter.

Doing the Narrative Work

The Magnolia Mother’s Trust deepened my understanding of what community power requires. Before we started, I knew the mothers we served were brilliant. I knew they made extraordinary decisions every day with limited resources. I knew they were experts in their own lives.

What I did not fully understand was how deeply the dominant narrative about poverty had shaped how many mothers saw themselves. Our society is very good at telling people in poverty that their circumstances are evidence of personal failure. We tell mothers that if they are struggling, they must have made poor choices, while ignoring the fact that having good choices is in itself a tremendous privilege. We treat structural barriers as background noise and individual behavior as the entire story. Over time, those messages often become internalized. People who have been systematically underestimated may begin to question their own wisdom, leadership, and capacity.

That is heartbreaking to witness. And it made clear that the work of building community power is not only material, though material support is essential. It is also narrative work.

I recently got to see the power of transforming these narratives happen in real time with one of our moms, Javonica. A single mother of three, she was balancing school, work, and the daily pressures of raising a family when a difficult day at cosmetology school made her question whether she should continue. After an unexpected meeting with former Vice President Kamala Harris through a Springboard event, Javonica found encouragement from someone who reflected a possibility too often denied to Black mothers living in poverty: that she was capable, ambitious, and worthy of investing in. Harris urged her to stay in school, and shared her story with a packed audience later that evening. Seeing someone in a position of power reflect her inherent value back to her gave her the resolve to not only return to school and remain on the dean’s list, but to advocate on behalf of low-income families at the state capitol. Javonica did not suddenly become capable in that moment; she had always been capable. But being seen clearly helped her see herself clearly, too.

When people are constantly told they are deficient, they cannot be expected to see themselves with clarity. They may have been navigating impossible circumstances with creativity, intelligence, and courage, yet still carry the message that they are the problem.

When we stop requiring people to prove that they are worthy of support, we make space for a different story to emerge. A mother is not merely a recipient of assistance. She is a decision-maker. She is not a problem to solve. She is a person with knowledge, aspirations, and the ability to determine what her family needs. She is not waiting for an institution to grant her agency. She already has it.

Respecting and Uplifting Community Knowledge

The responsibility of institutions is to stop standing in the way of community knowledge. This is why I resist the framing of guaranteed income as charity. It is not charity to trust people with resources, to recognize that families deserve stability, to create conditions in which people can flourish. It is a more democratic way of organizing our economy.

As the country commemorates its 250th anniversary, we have heard many arguments about the future of American democracy. Some focus on the strength of our institutions. Others on the fragility of our political system. Both conversations are necessary. But I hope we also ask where democratic knowledge already lives—and, I can tell you, it is most certainly here in Mississippi.

Still, the failures are real, and we should not romanticize them. But they do not tell the whole story. It is certainly not the story I have witnessed in my years of working alongside families in Jackson. I have seen communities build systems of care where formal systems have failed. I have seen people share information, resources, and responsibility. I have seen mothers care for one another’s children, problem-solve together, and show up for their neighbors with an understanding that individual well-being is tied to collective well-being.

That interdependent work is not a substitute for public investment or accountable government. Communities should not have to compensate for the failures of the systems meant to serve them. But we should recognize the democratic practice embedded in how people survive and lead despite those failures.

The South is not merely a place to fix. It is a place to learn from. If we only see Mississippi and the rest of the region through what it lacks, we will miss what its people have built: enduring networks of care, shared responsibility, and collective power.

Black Southern communities have long created forms of mutual aid, economic cooperation, organizing, and shared leadership that the country is only beginning to treat as innovation. Philanthropy and the nonprofit sector must stop approaching these communities as sites of need alone. They are sites of expertise.

If we are serious about strengthening democracy, philanthropy must change how it invests, how it listens and how it understands leadership.

First, funders must invest more deeply in Southern, Black-led organizations and do so with flexible, long-term funding. Relationship building is not a short-term deliverable. Trust cannot be built on annual grant cycles, narrowly prescribed outcomes and the constant pressure to prove that an organization deserves to exist.

Second, funders must replace narratives of deficiency and resilience with narratives of agency and innovation. Resilience can sound like praise, but it often becomes an excuse. We celebrate people for surviving conditions that should never have been imposed on them, rather than changing those conditions. We need to ask not only how communities endure, but what they could build with genuine power and resources.

Finally, institutions must be willing to let community knowledge shape their strategies. This means more than adding residents to advisory boards or asking them to validate plans that have already been made. It means building from the infrastructure communities have created: their relationships, their networks, their expertise, and their visions for what is possible. That requires humility. It requires patience. And it requires institutions to relinquish the comfort of believing they already know the answer.

Democracy cannot be delivered to communities from the outside or reduced to participation without power, to consultation without accountability. It is sustained when people have the resources to live with dignity, the relationships to act collectively, and the authority to shape the systems that govern their lives.

That is the lesson I have learned from the mothers of Magnolia Mother’s Trust and from the residents who have shaped Springboard to Opportunities over the past 13 years. They have taught me that people are not waiting to be empowered. They are waiting to be recognized.

Located in the heart of central Louisiana is a 17-acre certified organic farm owned by a nonprofit organization, Jubilee Justice. But this farm is more than just an agricultural project. The farm serves as economic infrastructure built through community ownership.

The nonprofit Jubilee Justice has already made headlines for its movement to end rural racism by creating systems, like the farm and its mill, that successfully serve Black farming communities. But one question remains: if philanthropy succeeds in helping communities build ownership, what comes next?

Building the foundation is only the first victory. It’s time to ask what it takes to make community ownership last.

Philanthropy Can Build Assets, but Ownership Requires Systems

Community ownership requires more than startup capital. It depends on work we rarely see, like developing markets, community wealth building, governance, and long-term financial sustainability.

Co-Founded by president Konda Mason and vice president Mark Watson in Alexandria, LA, Jubilee Justice is home to the Black farmers’ rice incubator project. The organization, built on a former cotton plantation, aims to combat racial and economic disparities in the Black agricultural community while drawing inspiration from Afro-Indigenous farming techniques. To help Black farmers reclaim their heritage and recover from their loss of land—which Jubilee Justice puts at 90 percent since the 1920s—the rice project was created.

Philanthropy needs to understand the difference between funding a project and supporting the economic systems that enable the project to continue.

The project uses a community wealth-building approach that allows Black farmers ownership from seed to market. The cooperatively owned Black farmers’ rice mill enables Black farmers to retain the processing and market earnings.

Rather than just focusing on food production, the organization has created assets that generate wealth and local control. This is what sets Jubilee Justice apart from philanthropic funding of projects: Jubilee funds ecosystems that serve the community.

But building physical assets is only the first step to community ownership. For this type of shared ownership to actually last depends on systems of relationships, institutions, and resources that extend past the initial grant period. Without supporting systems, there can be very little access to processing facilities, buyers, expertise, and governance structures capable of carrying out the work for years to come. Philanthropy needs to understand the difference between funding a project and supporting the economic systems that enable the project to continue.

So, what does an ecosystem that supports community ownership look like?

The Hidden Infrastructure Behind Community Ownership

Community wealth building offers one answer. This is an economic development model with a goal of giving communities direct ownership and control of their assets. First circulated by The Democracy Collaborative in 2005, the model seeks to create local economies where wealth is generated, kept, and shared amongst the community.

Another example of the principles of community wealth building is the Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland, Ohio. Developed in partnership with the Democracy Collaborative, this cooperative is on a mission to create jobs through a network of employee-owned enterprises to revitalize low-to-medium income neighborhoods.

The community wealth building network makes it clear that ownership alone is simply not enough.

Rather than relying solely on grants, the Evergreen Cooperatives have created assets that convert businesses to employee ownership, allowing jobs, ownership, and earnings to remain within the community. The support systems don’t just stop there. Ongoing business support is given to assist the worker cooperative and ensure that the project meets its goals.

Jubilee Justice reflects many of the principles of community wealth building as well. Its certified organic farm is a community asset, and its success relies on the support systems of the broader ecosystem surrounding it. The solar-powered rice mill, the education program, and land stewardship are just some of the support systems that help this organization meet its long-term goals.

Behind the scenes, Jubilee Justice’s annual review shares that it maintains ongoing, honest dialogue with equipment manufacturers and organic no-till/minimal tillage growers to further farmers’ expertise and support the economic systems that enable the project to continue. Partnerships with professors at Cornell University help maintain and improve the technical expertise needed to grow the community asset.

The community wealth building network makes it clear that ownership alone is simply not enough. Communities like those in the Evergreen Cooperatives and Jubilee Justice need the systems that allow their assets to generate economic opportunity lasting for generations to come.

Measuring Success Beyond Outputs

Measuring the success of community ownership projects is not as simple as traditional philanthropic metrics like acres grown or number of people trained. When it comes to community ownership, it’s time to rethink traditional evaluation frameworks that look at short-term outputs. Yes, they provide valuable snapshots of progress, but they’re no longer enough to determine real success.

Instead of looking at measurable outputs, more meaningful questions to ask could include:

• Who makes decisions? Is it a community effort?
• Who controls the economic value?
• Does the wealth remain within the community producing it?

While these types of outcomes can take years to evaluate and measure, there is already evidence that can tell us a bit about the model’s results for now. For example, the 18 nearby farms in neighboring states that have joined the Jubilee Justice project, illustrating that it is a community effort. The operational Jubilee Justice Specialty Foods Mill itself is a measure of success, as it continues to ensure that wealth remains within the community producing the seeds.

Jubilee Justice’s agriculture project is less a finished success story and more a case study that other philanthropic projects can use as they enter the next phase of community economic development. The farm project is an example of the difference between funding an organization—and funding the conditions that allow for community ownership to endure.

If your organization is serious about funding community ownership, you need to focus on investing in the long-term conditions like governance, relationships, infrastructure, and expertise to make sure that the assets you’ve built can sustain future generations to come.

As California prepares to observe Transgender History Month this August, still a recognition unique to this state, and the nation marks its 250th anniversary, we asked local LGBTQIA+ leaders, including my Co-Executive Director at the Transgender District, about what daily life actually looks like for the communities we serve right now, how federal funding cuts and legal setbacks are reshaping their work and their organizations, and what this moment in history demands of San Francisco and the country.

Jen Valles is the new Executive Director of the SF LGBT Center. Megan Rohrer, PhD and DMin, is a San Francisco based historian, artist and advocate for unhoused and LGBTQ communities. Carlo Gómez Arteaga is my co-Executive Director at the Transgender District and a longtime organizer on LGBTQIA+ equity, immigrant rights, and economic justice.

Q: San Francisco is known as a sanctuary for LGBTQIA+ people, but what does daily life actually look like for the communities you serve right now? How does that compare to what you’re seeing or hearing nationally?

Jen: There is a duality at play. San Francisco represents a beacon for the LGBTQIA+ community: we have strength in our numbers, and we have strength in our history. The Bay Area blooms with diversity and representation of every corner of our community. I’ve heard visitors, newcomers, and locals describe a palpable sense of permission and encouragement to be exactly who we are. Simultaneously, we are also deeply feeling the impacts of the national and global crises we find ourselves in, both politically and economically. Our people are fleeing from war & targeted hate violence in other countries, fleeing from the same here in our own country. Fleeing just to be able to drive a car or use the bathroom without being sued or attacked or imprisoned as current laws are making living as Transgender illegal in states across the US. Our Trans siblings and our youth and our undocumented community members especially are fleeing here for their lives—to find their own safety in community.

Yet, it’s hard to ignore the realities of trying to make a living in San Francisco when housing, food, and transportation costs have skyrocketed, disproportionately affecting the Trans and GNC community. We are seeing more and more demand for our services at the SF LGBT Center—more than ever, people are turning to us to access the safety net resources and programs they need to survive. In San Francisco, we have a long history as a place of refuge for our community, and we’re working hard to keep it that way.

Carlo: On the ground in San Francisco, daily life for many in the LGBTQIA+ community means holding on to hard-won local protections while battling a relentless federal assault which we’re seeing play out in several ways. The federal government has launched an unprecedented attack on LGBTQ+ rights, targeting trans health care, HIV/AIDS funding and erasing non-binary identities on federal documents. Even in what’s considered a sanctuary city, this has created a climate of fear and uncertainty.

These policy attacks also translate directly into real-world need, since for many, daily life now comes down to accessing basic necessities. San Francisco’s local organizations try to provide a safety net, but the instability is coming from the top down, and its local organizations, not the federal government, who are left to absorb the impact. That’s left them in a state of limbo, unable to plan or hire for the long term, even as demand for their services keeps climbing.

Dr. Megan: San Francisco’s laws provide bathroom (in both public and private spaces) and health care access. The Mayor’s office of Transgender Initiatives serves as a liaison to help trans people resolve issues, learn about community events and communicate changing laws. The trans district helps trans individuals navigate changing ID rules, celebrate trans leadership and art and wellness. Nationally, all of these things are being outlined in states throughout the United States.

Preserving that historical identity, for the city and the state alike, is a political act, and one that stands in direct opposition to the federal government’s attempts to deny the existence and legitimacy of transgender and non-binary people.

San Francisco’s protections are important, but trans people continue to have a hard time obtaining jobs. The non-profit sector is nervous that hiring trans employees will jeopardize federal funding.  LGBTQIA+ orgs have funding cuts announced and later restored so often that it is hard to fundraise. Donors are nervous that there will be retribution if they fund trans programs. Financial instability makes it difficult for trans people to plan for the future, afford housing or seek medical care. At the same time publicly, identifiable trans people face growing backlash and vile threats online because social media sites have ended the filtering that flags and silences hate speech.

In other parts of the country, anti-trans legislation makes it clear that trans rights are under attack. Here in San Francisco, people are confused if trans people need support or if the city is protecting people. It is harder to generate support for trans people and rally against the growing federal discrimination.

Q: We’re seeing LGBTQIA+ history being rewritten in real time—in policy, mainstream discourse, and in public memory. How is that showing up in San Francisco?

Carlo: San Francisco, as a city that has been an epicenter for LGBTQIA+ history, is a key battleground in the struggle over historical memory. We see this through the growing recognition of Transgender History Month, a statewide recognized commemoration of historical contributions. Preserving that historical identity, for the city and the state alike, is a political act, and one that stands in direct opposition to the federal government’s attempts to deny the existence and legitimacy of transgender and non-binary people.

Jen: Immigrants and the LGBTQIA+ community literally built this city. We chose this place because it was where we were able to take up space; to live fully into ourselves & each other; to build and organize. LGBTQIA+ people converged in San Francisco and, together, built thriving communities and economies—businesses, third spaces, and complex networks of care & mutual aid.

These spaces and systems are embedded in the fabric of San Francisco. The legacies of those businesses, those third spaces, those values of community care are what allow us still to gather, love, and organize—and what calls to those who are not here. San Francisco was the first city to create a Transgender District, the first city to name a Drag laureate, but now the LGBTQ+ community appears to be disappearing from our civic leaders’ initiatives. It is our great responsibility to secure and build on San Francisco’s queer legacy, not just to those of us here, but to the many who dream of coming here—for survival, safety, autonomy, opportunity, community, affirmation, love & joy. To the many across the nation and globe for whom our mere existence provides hope. We cannot let that hope go dark. I extend my deepest gratitude and admiration to the community leaders we honor today for fortifying our legacies and keeping that hope burning bright.

Q: Trans and queer-led organizations are facing serious funding cuts at the moment when the need is greatest. How is your organization navigating that, and what do you want funders and allies to understand about what is at stake?

Jen: Trans history is the people’s history. The erasure of Transgender people has always been a cornerstone of fascism. During the Holocaust, Nazis burned all data and documentation of Trans people in the Institute of Sexology. Transness and Queerness are historically the first to be suppressed in the process of establishing a fascist regime: after all, our existence threatens conformity and essentialism—core requirements of control. Trans and Queer people who choose to live authentically threaten the power structure because we are required to find a different path than the one laid out, which opens the door to all possibilities. People who understand they have free will cannot be controlled.

The serious funding cuts are part of the strategy of this erasure. They are not just a matter of dwindling supportive services—which are critically important for the literal survival, health & wellbeing of so many people—but the elimination of so-called “third spaces,” where we dream, and gather, and organize; the elimination of hope; the elimination of joy; the elimination of our ability to access collective power. Each is critical to our liberation. Taking down our organizations is one critical piece in the building of authoritarianism.

Carlo: The District is navigating this moment by focusing on connection, resilience and collective advocacy, even as we operate with less funding. We are diligently pushing our work forward while knowing that nonprofits across the sector are contingency planning to sunset programs, or entire organizations, given the threat and reality of cuts from every funding source.

For example, we joined a coalition of 11 LGBTQ+ service providers to publicly call on the city government to restore remaining cuts and to make funding permanent rather than a one-year stop gap. Along with advocacy with trans-led organizations and the San Francisco’s People’s Budget to broaden our spheres of advocacy and solidarity.

I want funders to understand that this is deeper than a financial issue, it is a matter of life and death, community survival and the erasure of progress for our communities. To defund these programs now is to pull the rug out from under the most vulnerable among us.

Q: What does building collective power look like in San Francisco? And what lessons from SF do you think the rest of the country could learn from?

Jen: What feels quintessentially San Francisco to me is the Free Love Movement, which I interpret as weaving together personal freedom with social change for the liberation of all. It wasn’t about fighting systems, but building an alternative based in love, self-expression, community care. It was, at its core, anti-fascist and pro-liberation for all people—a symbol of resistance to conformity. And that is what I believe we need to be embracing now. I believe with every fiber of my being that we can build a community that, with all its messiness and differences, is whole, is connected, and lifts each other up—not in spite of our nuances, but because of them. A community that works every day at practicing kindness, empathy, and connection with each other. Radical welcome in these times is an act of resistance, and it is the only thing that will lead us to collective liberation. And San Francisco holds the legacy, the energy, of that movement.

Dr. Megan: Collective power grows when people of diverse socio-economic backgrounds, races, cultures and political perspectives work together to ensure that everyone has basic rights and dignity. The People’s March was a beautiful example of trans and gender non-conforming leaders rallying for immigrant rights. We are stronger when we speak out intersectionally.

San Francisco has incorporated trans leadership on many city commissions and boards, as employee in most city departments and as first responders. Incorporating trans voices and lived experience throughout the city, helps make proclamations, laws and sanctuary status visible and tangible.

Carlo: A critical lesson others can learn from our work in San Francisco is the power of solidarity and coalition-building. Cross-sector coalitions united to oppose city budget cuts and demonstrated a shared commitment to the entire ecosystem of care, standing together even when some received partial restorations and others did not.

Additionally, physical space is power, and local policy backed by a united institutional front can act as a shield, sending a powerful message of protection and care for our most vulnerable populations. Broad coalition building is essential, because collective needs require collective, systemic solutions, not organizations fighting in isolation.

Q: As the United States marks 250 years, what piece(s) of LGBTQIA+ history do you think the country most needs to reckon with, and how does San Francisco’s own history fit into that larger national story?

Dr. Megan: Trans culture was present in native communities prior to the nation’s founding. There has been a long history of supporting and monetizing trans art, while criminalizing Black, brown and low income trans people. Housing and employment discriminations continue today in San Francisco and beyond.

Carlo: As the United States marks 250 years, it must reckon with the fact that LGBTQIA+ resistance and resilience are inseparable from the broader American story. The most urgent history to examine is state-sanctioned violence and erasure, and how it’s repeating itself today: violence against Black trans lives, the AIDS crisis, and the erasure of trans and non-binary history now being rewritten by executive order.

From the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot in San Francisco in 1966 to the trans women of color at the forefront of Stonewall, trans people have always led this movement. The federal government’s refusal to acknowledge trans people’s existence is an attempt to sever the country from that truth, and San Francisco’s history is a vital chapter in the national story.

Jen: Protections we believed were settled are being called back into question. Just this spring, the Supreme Court sided with a counselor providing conversion therapy to minors in Colorado, despite the state’s ban on this harmful practice. The decision did not strike down conversion therapy bans outright, but it puts laws in California and more than 20 other states on uncertain legal ground—and sent a painful message to LGBTQ+ youth and the people who love them.

Every major medical and mental health organization in the country is unequivocal: conversion therapy is harmful, ineffective, and dangerous. LGBTQ+ youth who are subjected to it face significantly higher risks of depression, anxiety, and self-harm. Our community spent years securing protections to keep kids safe from conversion therapy, and the ground beneath those protections is now shifting. For a community that fought for decades to end the practice of trying to deny our existence and change who we are, rulings like this reopen wounds many of us thought had finally begun to heal.

This is an all-hands on deck moment for LGBTQ+ rights, and now is the moment to act. This goes so far beyond just our community—it’s about protecting the freedom of everyone to live a life of authenticity, on our own terms.

On the third floor of the SF LGBT Center, sunlight shines through the Psychiatric Survivors Memorial Skylight, a living art piece that reminds onlookers not to forget the painful history of institutionalization of trans youth. The piece was created by Camille Moran, a trans artist and activist who worked against psychiatric abuse of queer and trans youth. As a six-year-old child in the 1950s, Moran was institutionalized and subjected to electroconvulsive “therapy” and abuse because her parents could not reckon with her gender non-conformity. The United States must reckon with its past and learn from its mistakes, or we risk repeating the darkest chapters of our history. Put simply, we are here. We have always been here. And we are not going anywhere.

Q: Despite everything, what gives you hope? What do you need from LGBTQIA+ allies and philanthropic funders to get there?

Jen: We give me hope. The ways we continue to show up for one another through mutual aid, through creating joy, through holding space as our most queer selves. We cannot take our LGBT community centers, or our service providers, or our organizers for granted. This is an all-hands on deck moment for LGBTQ+ rights, and now is the moment to act. This goes so far beyond just our community—it’s about protecting the freedom of everyone to live a life of authenticity, on our own terms.

Dr. Megan: Lawsuits by the city, state and trans leaders that stall federal laws and make it expensive to discriminate give me hope. There are also beautiful efforts to provide self-care support and transform trauma into art. There should be more funding for communal art activities for the trans community, especially for those paired with wellness activities.

LGBTQIA+ allies should speak out more—so that trans people do not have to draw attention to themselves in these uncertain times federally. Funders should help trans led organizations have the support they need to navigate the changing tides of government support. Additional funds should make it possible for non-profits to hire trans individuals—particularly the ones that need to show on federal audits that funding is separate.

Carlo: What we need from LGBTQIA+ allies and philanthropic funders is three things:

Trust and unrestricted funding. The organizations on the ground know what the community needs. Provide flexible, multi-year, unrestricted funding, since the one-year budget cycles we’re seeing now aren’t enough to hire staff or plan services. Unrestricted funding lets us respond to urgent, unanticipated needs and build resilience from the inside out, rather than constantly reacting to crises.

Be a stabilizing force. The political climate is volatile, and funders and allies can offer stability by making long-term commitments, particularly to core infrastructure. Stable, reliable funding helps insulate our organizations from the instability coming out of Washington.

Join the fight for the long haul. Be partners in that long-term struggle: amplify our voices, and use your influence to advocate for systemic change. Stand with us, not just with a check, but with your platform.

Looking at what they’d requested, we realized this was the ultimate test of our values-based design. It was to be our highest-visibility project to date, but designing a carceral project, even one framed as “more humane” or “smaller,” would cement, quite literally, a decision to perpetuate the infrastructure of incarceration for generations to come. We knew at the end of the day, DJDS hadn’t come to make a jail more humane. We had come to abolish it.

It was intimidating to say,  “We don’t build jails or jail cells, full stop; if that is a requirement, then we will have to leave the project,” out loud in a room with that much power in it. I looked around the table, holding my breath, waiting for their response. In that moment, the city rolled back their request for the active jail cell option.

The decision didn’t come from cost savings, a better rendering, or a more persuasive deck. It came from spending the one form of leverage an architecture firm actually has: the willingness to refuse to design something, backed by a steadfast belief in a world where repair and care are center stage.

A decade later, I look back on that refusal as less an isolated act of nerve and more a formative moment when we understood what we were actually in the business of doing. Not softening the edges of punishment, but deciding, room by room, building by building, what gets to last in our world. We would spend all our creative energy on imagining a world of care instead.

The Built Environment as a Moral Document

Architecture is never neutral. A highway overpass, a housing tower, a prison wall — every building is a series of decisions rendered in concrete, wood, steel, fiber. Unlike a law, which can be repealed by the next legislature, or a policy, which can be reversed by the next administration, a building often will stand to outlive the political era that produced it. It becomes the physical residue of a set of values, sitting on the land long after the people who designed and approved it have moved on, retired, or died. Everywhere we look, we see a built environment that is a physical manifestation and moral document of what those with design control have decided to value over time: A record of whose safety, dignity, and future were considered worth building for, and whose were not.

The built environment is imagination made real. And durability is exactly why the environment has so often been weaponized to divide and control.

In our 250th year as a country, we have an administration led by a real estate developer who has paid unprecedented attention to removing, rebuilding, and reorganizing both the political landscape and the built environment of Washington, DC – from ballrooms and reflecting pools to inhumane ICE detention facilities.

Meanwhile, as some parts of the country embark on significant construction and infrastructure projects — memorials, transit lines, public buildings, and redevelopment projects — others decay, break down, collapse entirely, or wither from social, political, and economic neglect. The question worth asking is not only what we are building, but whose imagination are we making permanent? Who is helping build our future, and whose futures are left outside without a chance to be heard?

Scholar Ruha Benjamin frames this directly in Imagination: A Manifesto: “Whether we turn to children playing in the sand or tech billionaires offering us solutions while they build underground bunkers to survive the climate emergency, it matters whose imaginations get to materialize as our shared future.” The built environment is imagination made real. And durability is exactly why the environment has so often been weaponized to divide and control.

A History Written in Concrete and Steel

American history offers a grim inventory of infrastructure deployed for exclusion. The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 went beyond connecting cities; it routed interstates directly through thriving Black neighborhoods, using eminent domain to demolish communities under the banner of “progress.”

Redlining drew hard lines around neighborhoods deemed unfit for investment, and those lines still shape wealth gaps today, decades after the maps were officially discontinued. “Towers-in-the-Park” public housing concentrated poverty in isolated high-rises, severed from transit, jobs, and the informal social fabric that makes neighborhoods function, such as a parent’s ability to see their children play from home. The subprime mortgage crisis targeted Black and Latino homeowners with predatory loans, engineering a wave of foreclosures that erased a generation of family wealth. And the prisons, jails, and detention centers built at extraordinary public expense materialized a national commitment to punishment rather than repair, concentrated disproportionately in the same communities already harmed.

Between 1984 and 2005, the US built a new prison or jail every 8.5 days. During the prison boom of 1970-2010, 70 percent of new prisons were built in rural communities. These were often sold on promises of economic growth that never materialized; a 25-year study later found no meaningful economic difference between counties that hosted a prison and those that didn’t. As incarceration rates have fallen back to 1970s levels, these communities are watching the prison industry leave.

None of this was accidental. These were not neutral engineering choices or unfortunate byproducts of industrial growth; they were deliberate decisions, made by a relatively small and privileged set of planners, developers, and officials, whose consequences were foreseeable and whose burdens were not evenly shared.

But if the tools of world building can be weaponized and hoarded, they can also be reclaimed and democratized.

Consider the growing movement to repurpose shuttered prisons. In California, which incarcerates the second highest number of people in the country, as many as 12 correctional facilities, including prisons, conservation camps, and juvenile facilities, have closed in the past 20 years. And these “warm shutdowns” cost taxpayers money to maintain: the CA 2023-24 budget allocated $3.4M to maintain closed Division of Juvenile Justice facilities alone.

What if facilities could be transformed into something far more useful, humane, and fiscally responsible than the punitive function they once served? What if they could be turned into affordable housing, community space, even greenhouses and cultural centers, rather than left to decay or, worse, repurposed into new sites of detention? This is what it looks like to write a different moral document with the same physical materials: Not erasing the harm but refusing to let the built environment keep enforcing it.

Lessons from Ten Years: What Community Power Actually Reveals

The bulk of our work, though, extends beyond closed prison and jail redevelopment, and raises a bigger question: what else do communities need instead of prisons and jails altogether? What are the spaces and infrastructure necessary for communities to thrive in their own neighborhoods, at the locus of need?

The answer seems obvious: local communities know best. What’s more surprising is that traditional architecture, real estate, and planning rarely involve those communities directly in design and decision-making.

As a participatory-design-driven firm, we’ve learned that meaningful, durable spaces don’t come from a handful of credentialed experts and firms dropping their ideas and “best practices” into a community for blanket acceptance, or from a town hall where a few outside options are voted on as a rubber-stamp of community approval. That’s the default design process that treats community response as a checkbox, one where decision-makers still hold all the control and communities see no real shift in power.

Ten years of our practice has illuminated something closer to a discipline of letting go. Again and again, we’ve humbly discovered that communities already possess the imagination and solutions to shape their own environments. Our job as architects is to draw out that capacity, apply it to the creative design process, and steward it through the regulatory and financial systems — often prohibitive ones — that currently keep most people from exercising the self-determination to shape their own environment. This is how we help community dreams become physical reality.

One project that shaped our approach early on was the Women’s Mobile Refuge Trailer. We took on work to address the challenges facing women and their personal safety when they’re released from incarceration in the middle of the night. Many of these women entered the carceral system with a history of abuse and trauma, physical and mental health issues, and needed additional supports between release and safe reintegration with their communities and social networks.

The DJDS team went into the project with a basic idea of what would provide rest and refuge: a room with beds, a place to lie down. But what the 60 women incarcerated at County Jail #2 in San Francisco actually asked for were lounge chairs, because the room needed to function less like a dormitory and more like a space where you could access services and care — the kind of space where you can use technology to find a place to go next, get essential medications, change into a clean set of clothes, sit with a social worker, or simply be upright and present rather than horizontal and withdrawn.

The design shifted from a sleeping space to a community-driven healing space. It was a small material change with a large implication: the DJDS team had correctly identified the need for rest and refuge, but had incomplete assumptions about the priorities of people who actually lived through the harm the carceral system inflicts.

Nearly a decade later, working on short-term transitional housing for people re-entering after incarceration with the Mobile Refuge Room, our assumptions were once again challenged for the better. Alongside formerly incarcerated individuals in a workshop where we built full-scale cardboard mock-ups to test new ideas, we designed modular spaces that could be flat-packed, quickly assembled, and clustered in different configurations within existing spaces, adapting to individual preferences. DJDS’ team put casters — wheels — on every unit, reasoning that mobility signaled flexibility, adaptability, and responsiveness to changing needs (and made it easier to comply with building codes).

The community read it the opposite way. Wheels didn’t say we can adapt this space for you. They said this space is not permanent, and neither is your claim to it. What the design team coded as flexibility, the people who would actually use the room experienced as a threat to psychological safety.

The wheels came off, but that’s a small design decision within a larger story. We brought the same workshop participants back multiple times to review design options, and the final unit is theirs at nearly every scale. It’s not only the absence of wheels but also the desk, Murphy bed, materiality, and modularity that reflect how they actually described wanting to live. The room that exists today is a direct translation of the full-scale mock-ups the community built themselves.

Designed to Prioritize Relationship and Healing

These same discoveries apply to larger-scale, brick-and-mortar projects, including the adaptive reuse of a 20,000-square-foot commercial building into a restorative and economic-justice hub: Restore Oakland at the Ella Baker Center.

Through design workshops with partner tenant organizations, we set out to understand what a room dedicated entirely to peacemaking truly needed — physically, not just programmatically. Designing for restorative justice, we learned, means designing for the nervous system. It looks like spaces where people feel heard, can calm themselves, and see themselves reflected in the room around them.

The resulting Peace Room, on the top floor of the building, has soft colors, lighting that mimics clouds, greenery pulled toward every available source of natural light, and art rooted in the cultures of the people who would use the space. Each material choice was calibrated to bring a body down from crisis and into a relational mindset, not up into confrontation.

One of the most revelatory discoveries from that engagement process, though, had nothing to do with color or light. The practitioners we engaged told us the room needed two separate points of entry, so harmed and responsible parties could come and go without crossing paths. Clear, designated routes for difficult conversations. Spaces of refuge where someone could step out, breathe, and feel protected before stepping back in.  A dedicated space where no other work could happen.

Later, our post-occupancy evaluation confirmed what the workshops had posited. Those choices didn’t just make the room feel different; they changed behavior. When people have a clear, embodied sense of how they’re expected to move and engage in a space, they engage differently, more safely, and more intentionally. It’s the same instinct that tells you how to hold yourself in a courtroom, where every bench, railing, and raised platform communicates a hierarchy of power and domination. The Peace Room asks a different question: what does a room look like when it’s designed to prioritize relationship and healing instead?

Throughout every project of the last decade, what continues to ring true and be missed by the field is that lived experience is its own credential. In every project, we have consistently heard people sharing, often with some surprise, that they had never been engaged in a design process like this before.

Participatory design is usually framed as a way to gather input. What a decade of practice taught DJDS is that it’s better understood as a way to redistribute the authority to define expertise itself — and that when you do so honestly, communities don’t just shape better buildings. They build something that unlocks futures we could not even imagine alone.

A Vision for the Next Fifty Years: Building the Future We Deserve

Picture a different kind of groundbreaking. A community meeting three years before anyone breaks ground, where the people who will live, work, and gather in a space help decide what it will become. A development process where “community input” means more than a comment period tacked onto plans already finalized. A restorative justice framework applied to the built environment itself — spaces designed to repair rather than confine, to nurture people rather than warehouse them.

This is already happening in pockets, in projects that prove community-led development isn’t slower or less rigorous than top-down planning, but is, in fact, more durable because the communities who shaped it have a stake in defending it.

The next fifty years—the lifespan of most modern buildings—will be shaped by what gets built with, not just for, communities. An asset-building movement is emerging within community organizations, treating real estate as a tool for change: land trusts, cooperative ownership models, and community-controlled development corporations.

What would you have said, if someone had handed you the pen instead of the finished design?

These opportunities also open up avenues for organizations and businesses that are not ready to own, to rent from values-aligned partners, and to put their dollars toward a future they want to build, rather than to landowners who further marginalize them through other means. Equity, permanence, and safety are the pillars these new institutions aim to establish.

None of this is possible without imagination. If we can reimagine a courthouse as a peace-and-reconciliation house, a former prison as a vertical farm, a highway corridor as a boulevard lined with basic needs and healthcare services ( (like our Pop-up Village) that people can walk to from their homes — we can build it. Imagination is not the ribbon cutting at a building opening; it is the load-bearing structure that keeps the building standing for generations.

What Actions Must We Take?

“Abolition is not absence, it is presence. What the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities. So those who feel in their gut deep anxiety that abolition means knock it all down, scorch the earth and start something new, let that go. Abolition is building the future from the present, in all of the ways we can.” – Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Think about the community you grew up in. The place where you first learned your address by heart and how to get to your friend’s home nearby to play. The buildings that were suddenly torn down and changed, or the pool that was once a public hangout and the next year was fenced off and privatized.

Somewhere in that landscape is a decision you never got to weigh in on — a zoning meeting you didn’t know was happening, a development plan finalized before anyone asked what you needed. What would you have said, if someone had handed you the pen instead of the finished design?

Now think about the spaces that held you, where you felt like you belonged. The kitchen table where you shared countless meals. The local public library with resources for growing knowledge, skills, and spaces for connection. The corner store where the clerk knows your name and your favorite items. The spaces that are built for people to connect and simply exist. What do you see, hear, smell, touch? What made these places special?

Your answers are how we start to imagine, design, and build a world that loves and cares for all of us. What are the foundational blocks – material, practice, and policy – that we need to lay down today to create a more just and humane future in 50 years, at the 300th anniversary of the United States?

• Centering community voice at every stage of development: not as consultation after the fact, but as authorship from the first sketch.
• Making architectural and real estate processes transparent and accessible: demystifying zoning boards, financing structures, and planning timelines so participation isn’t a luxury reserved for those who already speak the language of power.
• Investing in physical power bases for marginalized groups: land trusts, community-owned buildings, and permanent institutional homes that can’t be zoned away when political winds shift.
• Redefining “justice architecture” to support healing, not punishment: designing spaces that assume people deserve dignity rather than surveillance.
• Treating the built environment as a living record we all have the right, and responsibility, to co-author.

Together, let’s build a world that loves us back. It starts with you, today.

For Black women that assumption has never reflected reality, because repair has long been an everyday practice rather than an emerging framework. Long before philanthropy adopted the language of repair, Black women were building systems that enabled communities to navigate instability when institutions either excluded them or failed them altogether. Throughout US history, Black women organized mutual aid societies, established schools and educational networks, founded civic organizations, preserved family and community histories, redistributed resources, and created spaces where people could grieve, organize, learn, celebrate, and imagine together.¹ These efforts did not emerge because Black women possessed an extraordinary capacity for sacrifice or because care somehow came naturally to them. Instead, they emerged because communities repeatedly encountered institutions that were either unwilling or unable to meet their needs, which necessitated the creation of systems capable of carrying what formal structures would not.

The history of Black women’s organizing illustrates this point well. According to Paula Giddings, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Black women’s clubs established schools, libraries, settlement houses, childcare initiatives, voter education campaigns, and mutual aid networks at a time when segregation systematically denied Black communities access to public resources. Their work was rooted in a simple but profound understanding: communities could not afford to wait for institutions to become equitable before responding to immediate needs. They built what was missing, strengthened what already existed, and created structures capable of carrying generations forward. Although they would not have described their work using today’s language of repair, that is precisely what they were practicing. They were repairing the consequences of exclusion while creating conditions under which Black communities could continue to learn, organize, and flourish.

Therefore, the question is not whether cultures of repair exist but why the people who have been building them for generations remain consistently overlooked, underfunded, and misunderstood. Part of the answer lies in how we define infrastructure. When most people hear the word, they imagine roads, bridges, hospitals, schools, transportation systems, or broadband networks because these are the investments societies intentionally build, maintain, and fund. Infrastructure is associated with permanence, public value, and collective dependence. Yet communities also rely upon infrastructures that cannot be measured in miles of pavement or square feet of construction. Sociologist Eric Klinenberg argues in his book Palaces for the People that communities depend just as deeply on what he calls social infrastructure: the relationships, organizations, and shared spaces that determine whether people can connect, solve problems together, and respond collectively during moments of crisis. Black communities have long understood this principle in practice, knowing that while roads help people move, relationships help people survive.²

Community Building Starts in… Well, Communities

If you ask almost any Black woman where she first learned what community looked like, she is unlikely to begin with a government agency, a nonprofit organization, or a grant-funded initiative. She is far more likely to tell you about a grandmother’s kitchen where neighbors gathered after church, a beauty salon where information traveled faster than the evening news, a church basement where families organized around problems no one else seemed interested in solving, or an elder whose stories filled in the gaps left by textbooks and official archives. Those spaces taught people how to belong to one another. They became places where responsibility was shared rather than individualized, where knowledge moved across generations, and where communities learned that their greatest source of stability often came from one another long before outside institutions arrived. We often attribute this work to care, volunteerism, or community engagement, but those descriptions dramatically understate what is actually taking place because these are not simply acts of generosity; instead, they are systems that absorb institutional failure while making collective life possible.

That failure of recognition becomes especially visible when we turn to cultural work. Storytelling is often treated as something that happens after the important work is finished, as though organizing, advocacy, policy campaigns, and movement building come first, while archives, oral histories, exhibitions, films, and community storytelling simply preserve what has already happened. Black communities have rarely had the luxury of separating those things because storytelling has never simply documented movements. It has protected histories that institutions ignored, preserved community knowledge before it disappeared, created language for experiences that had long gone unnamed, and helped communities understand themselves beyond the violence they endured. Scholars of community archives argue that archives are not neutral repositories of historical material but places where communities preserve their own histories, shape collective memory, and challenge dominant narratives about whose lives are considered worthy of remembrance. Rather than existing alongside repair, culture work has long been one of the ways community repair has been practiced.

The significance of that distinction extends well beyond the archive itself, because harm is rarely confined to what has been physically taken. Harm also lives in what has been forgotten, distorted, erased, or deemed unworthy of preservation. Entire communities have experienced the loss of photographs, family records, neighborhood histories, oral traditions, and cultural memory because institutions decided those stories were not worth collecting or protecting. Black women have spent generations resisting that disappearance by becoming archivists in the broadest sense of the word. Some preserved family photographs inside albums and shoeboxes that eventually became the only surviving record of entire branches of a family. Others recorded the stories of elders before they were lost, documented neighborhoods before redevelopment erased them, or created books, exhibitions, films, and community archives that ensured future generations inherited something more substantial than fragments. These practices do far more than preserve the past. They repair ruptures caused by historical neglect, while ensuring that future generations inherit histories of possibility rather than only histories of loss.

One example can be found in Colombia through the work of Black women leaders within the Proceso de Comunidades Negras (Process of Black Comunities) and its Sistema Integral de Protección y Cuidado de la Vida y los Territorios (Comprehensive System for the Protection and Care of Life and Territories), known as SIPVIDA-PCN. For decades, PCN organized to advance the territorial, cultural, and collective rights of Afro-Colombian communities, contributing to the advocacy that ultimately led to Law 70 of 1993, which recognized Afro-Colombians as a distinct people with collective cultural and territorial rights. As significant as those victories were, Black women within the movement have worked to ensure that their own experiences, leadership, and safety receive greater visibility. Through their organizing, they have expanded PCN’s work to more explicitly address the rights and realities of Black women and girls while remaining firmly committed to the broader struggle for Black liberation. Their leadership reflects a belief that liberation is strengthened, not weakened, when movements evolve to hold the realities of the people who sustain them.

What makes SIPVIDA-PCN so compelling is not simply that it exists, but that it illustrates a broader principle about repair. Repair is often imagined as beginning after something has broken, when in reality, it frequently begins the moment communities recognize that existing structures are incapable of fully holding their lives. The response is not always to replace those structures, more often, it is to expand and strengthen them, and build what is missing so that more people can belong within them.

Investing on Cultural Labor

These examples ask us to recognize that cultures of repair should also change the questions philanthropy asks, because too often, funding conversations begin with innovation. Grant guidelines ask organizations to propose the next transformative framework, the next scalable model, or the next groundbreaking solution, even though communities are rarely beginning from nothing. They are building upon generations of knowledge, relationships, organizing traditions, cultural practices, and institutions that have already demonstrated an extraordinary capacity to sustain people through harm. The search for novelty can unintentionally obscure the infrastructures communities have spent decades, and often centuries, building, refining, and trusting because those systems do not always appear innovative to people who have only recently begun paying attention.

In addition, it’s important to recognize that focusing on alternative resourcing offers a different place to begin. Rather than asking communities what they intend to create next, it asks what they have already built, what relationships they have already cultivated, and what systems have already earned the trust of the people they serve. That shift requires more than changing grant guidelines. It requires redefining what counts as expertise and recognizing that community knowledge, cultural labor, storytelling, organizing, and memory work are not supplemental to social change but among the conditions that make it possible. If philanthropy is willing to recognize these practices as infrastructure rather than charity, it can begin investing in the systems communities already trust, rather than continually asking them to prove their value through new language, new frameworks, or new pilot projects.

Perhaps the future of repair will not be determined by the next framework philanthropy funds but by whether institutions are finally willing to recognize that Black women have spent generations building the very infrastructures they have been searching for all along. If the central question facing philanthropy is how to build a culture of repair, then Black women have already offered part of the answer. The cultures of repair philanthropy are not waiting to be invented; they have been built, sustained, and carried forward for generations, asking not to be discovered but to be recognized, resourced, and trusted.

Notes:

1. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd ed. (Routledge, 2000); Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex In America (W. Morrow, 1984); Martha S. Jones, Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality For All (Basic Books, 2000); bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (South End Press, 1990).
2. Eric Klinenberg, Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life (Crown, 2018).

With the United States’ 250th anniversary in full swing, you’re likely to read a common narrative about what freedom means and the men who built it. But our nation was not built by men alone. Throughout our history, women have been at the forefront of bodily autonomy movements, an essential type of independence. Without bodily autonomy—the right to make decisions about our own lives, bodies, and futures—freedom and independence simply cannot be realized. It is imperative that we uplift the foremothers who have been essential to making the abstract concept of bodily autonomy real for everyday people.

Independent reproductive healthcare clinics like Feminist Center and Cedar River Clinics are powerful examples of women defining freedom on their own terms. Although these clinics were established on opposite sides of the country, both were created to expand freedom and autonomy to people with uteruses, using reproductive health care as a key tool.

As we move through the United States’ 250th anniversary, we’re resurfacing Feminist Center and Cedar River Clinics’ history and how we’ve tenaciously carved a path toward freedom and bodily autonomy. Those freedoms include the ability to have an abortion, choose your own form of birth control, access care, and raise families with dignity.

These two geographically opposing clinics symbolize the present-day dual realities for reproductive health clinics nationwide. In Atlanta, Georgia, Feminist Center faces significant barriers to reproductive liberation including a brutal six-week abortion ban. In Yakima, Washington, Cedar River Clinics benefits from pro-abortion policies but face ever-growing needs due to fractured reproductive rights across the country. Despite our differences, both of our clinics fearlessly demand, defend, and expand freedom and autonomy in the United States. And it is essential our voices and histories are heard.

Space to Restore Connection and Community

Reproductive freedom stems from a larger movement that sees care as a community creation rooted in survival and self-knowledge of the body, guided by people who share similar experiences. This movement has existed for centuries, in many places, and in many forms: enslaved African women offering cotton root to bring on a period, suffragettes passing out illicit condom pamphlets, a Spanish-speaking doula translating for her pregnant patient.

The theme of this movement is universal. Freedom is more than casting a ballot or protesting. It is also about having the knowledge, tools, and communities of support we need to make choices about our bodies. And it is rooted in the acknowledgement that taking control of our bodies is a form of resistance in a world that seeks to contain and control us.

Since the beginning, Black women in particular have played—and continue to play—an essential role in the work for reproductive autonomy. The movement has many communities, and our many voices have converged significantly. Feminist Center and Cedar River Clinics are proud to be part of the enduring legacy and transformation of reproductive liberation movements.

Our clinics’ story starts in the 1970s. At the time, women experienced misogyny and contradictions in healthcare as reproductive rights expanded across the United States. Decisions like Roe v. Wade and Griswold v. Connecticut offered limited access to abortion and birth control. While these rights existed on paper, some of the most important tools we needed to exercise reproductive freedom, like brick-and-mortar clinics, medical knowledge, and research, remained in the hands of white men acting as “authorities” over those needing care. Many of us were in the dark about how our bodies functioned or what was “normal.”

Cornerstone resources like the book Our Bodies, Ourselves changed that by openly critiquing misogyny in health care, offering accessible reproductive health information, and encouraging people to advocate for themselves. Women’s health groups began emerging on college campuses and beyond to discuss the pros and cons of birth control. Feminist organizations started to advocate for an equal rights amendment in our constitution. Women gathered in kitchens and living rooms for “consciousness raising” to talk about their experiences and learn from one another.

As important as these moments were, we needed more than books, awareness groups, and policy to be free. We needed physical spaces to safely provide care and help shape the future of our collective freedom.

In the late 1970s, Feminist Center and Cedar River Clinics were established to do just that. We were created to a federation of Feminist Women’s Health Clinics that offered abortion and birth control, led by the people receiving care. More than providing clinical services, we developed community programming to restore our connection to our bodies and build a sense of autonomy after centuries of it being stripped away.

One of our first opportunities to build that connection was a workshop that taught everyday people how to perform a self-examination of their cervix using a mirror and speculum. In a time when the cervix was often only seen by a doctor, this workshop was a revolutionary first step to freedom. The end goal was to create a baseline of self-awareness—and use that knowledge to identify fertility windows and health issues. The workshops were led by people who performed the examination on themselves and those who were already known in the community, which provided a sense of security and safety that was often missing in more institutionalized health care settings.

We did not just keep this knowledge to ourselves; we spread it all around. Inspired by putting women’s health in women’s hands, Feminist Center and Cedar River Clinics’ founders traveled across the country offering “OK-to-Peek” kits for cervical self-exams and menstrual extraction—a self-managed way of removing the contents of the uterus, be it a pregnancy or a period—workshops for those eager to learn about their bodies.

During our early years in the 1970s and 1980s, we led reproductive health research to expand the ways we could exercise bodily autonomy. Both Cedar River Clinics and Feminist Center advocated for FDA approval of the cervical cap, a silicon barrier that covers the cervix to prevent pregnancy. Feminist Center was also a clinical testing site for the abortion pill mifepristone, one of the most common abortion methods in the world.

Nearly 50 years ago, our clinics were developing the conditions for freedom to be realized, and we were expanding our concept of what it meant to have control over our bodies.

Maintaining and Reimagining Reproductive Freedom

Feminist Center and Cedar River Clinics helped build and shape reproductive freedom as we know it today, but that freedom must also be maintained. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, we staved off attacks to reproductive freedom at multiple scales—backlash against Roe rocked both of our clinics and protestors physically blocked patients from entering our doors—and survived. Our clinics even organized brigades of clinic escorts, a now ubiquitous tool for clinic defense, to ensure patients could get care.

We were also part of systemic solutions to defending freedom, in our own ways. Feminist Center took part in early clinic defense cases that protected people’s right to care. As the violence escalated throughout the 90s, Cedar River Clinics helped build policies to protect clinics throughout Washington State. This law became a precursor to the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, making it a crime to interfere with patients or providers exercising their rights to care.

In addition to being maintained, freedom must also be reimagined to meet the needs of all people. To that end, Black women have always been ahead of the curve when it comes to movement building that wholistically address systemic oppression like racism and sexism. From Claudia Jones to Kimberlé Crenshaw, Black women have forged significant pathways to reproductive freedom from the start. In the early 1990s, another group of trailblazing Black women created the reproductive justice (RJ) framework—the human right to bodily autonomy and the freedom to choose to have children, not have children, or parent children in safe and sustainable communities—which laid bare the shortcomings of second wave feminism, the ideology underpinning our respective foundings. This comprehensive framework moved mainstream women’s reproductive rights to include intersectional and socioeconomic factors essential to reproductive health decisions and the ability to make those decisions.

Icon activist and reproductive justice co-founder Loretta Ross joined the Feminist Center board of directors and helped our clinic incorporate this framework into the work in the early 2000s. It would take several more years before Feminist Center appointed its first Black executive director in 2018 and built a leadership team that truly reflects the communities that we serve. Cedar River Clinics began implementing the more inclusive framework between the 2000s through the 2010s.

Adopting this framework led our clinics to create programming developed by and for the people at the intersections of multiple oppressions. One example is Feminist Center’s the Lifting Latinx Voices initiative (LLVI), Georgia’s first and only Latina-led reproductive health education program to offer culturally competent health information. The program was developed in recognition that culture, ethnicity, immigration status and other factors can impact the tools you use to make reproductive liberation a reality. The LLVI community addresses this reality by hosting a training to develop existing leaders in the Latinx community to become Promotoras who offer resources, education, and linkages to care.

As we committed ourselves to the vision of reproductive justice that Black women set forth, we began reformulating our concept of womanhood. More nuanced understandings of sex and gender came to the mainstream in the 2010s, and we examined our role in expanding access to care for the LGBTQ community—many of whom have been meaningful leaders throughout our movement’s history. We knew our fight for reproductive liberation was intertwined with transgender and nonbinary people, and we knew our services were not just for women—but for all people who needed it. So Feminist Center and Cedar River Clinics reformulated how we frame and talk about reproductive care and began offering hormone replacement therapy and gender affirming care to ensure all people could experience bodily autonomy under our roofs.

Bodily Autonomy for All

Our movement has been unfolding for over 50 years, and it is not going anywhere. For decades independent reproductive health clinics like Cedar River Clinics and Feminist Center, in allyship with other movements and thought leaders, have remained nimble, adaptable, and innovative in advancing our freedoms no matter the obstacles in our path. For many people our clinics serve, we are the sole access to health care they have, providing compassionate, nonjudgmental lifesaving care.

But our clinics’ missions extend beyond simply providing care. It also includes advocating for our rights, educating ourselves, and listening to our communities to reimagine freedom in the face of emerging needs.

The foundation of our movement is community—connecting directly with people on the ground to understand what freedom actually means on our own terms and sharing that knowledge with one another.

We ask you, in honor of the United States’ 250th anniversary to join us on the journey to liberation by directly supporting independent reproductive health clinics as we progress our movement with unwavering determination.

Right now, in our country, the freedoms we have on paper are hollow. A right is not a right without the ability to exercise it. But we are in this movement together for our collective liberation, and we have been paving the way towards bodily autonomy and our fundamental freedoms for more than half a century. We have been here, we are here, and we will still be here at the frontlines defending and expanding our collective freedoms to realize true independence and freedom for all.

Cedar River Clinics was founded in 1979 as the Feminist Women’s Health Center in Yakima, Washington. Today, Cedar River Clinics has three locations in Renton, Tacoma, and Yakima, Washington and provides telemedicine services. As a social service organization, Cedar River Clinics combine direct services with advocacy and community education. Cedar River Clinics’ direct services include abortion, birth control, STI testing and treatment, cancer screenings, gender-affirming hormone therapy, and more.

Feminist Center for Reproductive Liberation (formerly Feminist Women’s Health Center) is a reproductive health, rights, and justice organization based in Atlanta, Georgia. Feminist Center provides compassionate reproductive healthcare including abortion, educates communities, and organizes people across all axes of oppression so that everyone has the rights, resources, and support needed to make empowered decisions.  

This Black Philanthropy Month, is a time to honor the generosity, brilliance, and community-rooted power of Black giving. But celebrating is not enough.

We also have to ask what Black generosity has been forced to hold in the absence of just systems. We must ask what Black women have been building with too little, for too long. And, what it would look like to fund not only our work, but our wellness. Not only our organizations, but our imagination. Not only our response to crisis, but our right to joy.

This understanding prompts a question for me that feels both ancient and urgent: What does it actually mean for Black women to be wealthy?

This Black Philanthropy Month, is a time to honor the generosity, brilliance, and community-rooted power of Black giving. But celebrating is not enough. We also have to ask what Black generosity has been forced to hold in the absence of just systems.

Not defining wealthy in the narrow way this country so often defines it—as accumulation, status, or proximity to systems that were never designed for our wholeness. But defining wealth as freedom. Wealth as breathing room. Wealth as the ability to rest without fear. Wealth as health, safety, belonging, time, joy, family stability, spiritual grounding, and the power to imagine a future beyond survival.

That does not mean money does not matter. It matters deeply. Financial resources shape whether someone can pay rent, buy food, access care, leave an unsafe situation, start a business, support family, rest, recover, or plan for the future. Money matters because of the conditions it can make possible.

After years of listening to Black women through The Highland Project, we know those conditions matter just as much as the number in a bank account. Across our multi-year polling in collaboration with brilliant corners Research and Strategies, Black women have repeatedly described economic security in ways that extend beyond income: safety, health, care, joy, time, belonging, economic breathing room, and the ability to shape what comes next.

If Black women are telling us that wealth includes time, health, belonging, safety, joy, and the ability to dream, then the philanthropic sector has to ask whether its own definition of investment is too small.

Philanthropy Must Widen its Lens 

What becomes possible if philanthropy stops treating the ingenuity of Black women as an endlessly renewable resource and begins providing resources at the level it deserves?

Black women have always understood that wealth is about more than money. Across generations, we have practiced forms of abundance that rarely appear solely on balance sheets. We have built mutual aid networks, cared for children who were not our own, organized churches and freedom movements, protected elders, held communities together, stretched resources into possibility, and seeded futures with far less than the scale of what we were carrying.

Too often, philanthropy is more practiced in the art of responding to what is broken instead of investing in what would make wholeness possible. We know how to fund emergency response. We know how to fund programs, leadership development, civic engagement, and economic mobility. But we are less practiced at investing, at scale and over time, in the conditions that could make a crisis less inevitable. And Black generosity has too often been asked to fill that gap.

Our community networks, mutual aid, institutions, leadership, and innovation did not emerge because systems worked particularly well for us. In many cases, they emerged because those systems did not. Black women have repeatedly built what was missing, held what was falling apart, and created possibility where institutional investment was absent.

Black Women’s Research Yields Insights on the Infrastructure Needed for Wellbeing

The Highland Project’s multi-year polling helps us understand the contours of what Black women are naming as important infrastructure for society. The research from Mississippi in 2026 offers one recent example; in this poll Black women described wealth not as status, but as peace. Having enough money to live comfortably meant “breathing room”: the ability to rest, plan, care for family, and enjoy the life they are building. When asked what an additional $1,000 a month would make possible, women named deeply practical priorities: paying down debt, covering housing and food expenses, building savings, and creating more stability.

But Mississippi is not an anomaly. It is one data point in a longer story that Black women have been telling us which offers an imperative distinction for philanthropy.

If philanthropy wants to center the voices of the community it serves, it must include listening to Black women and shift its practices—the sector needs to change how investment is defined, how strategies are designed, what impact is measured against, and who holds power over those decisions.

To amplify these messages, we wanted to create a unique listening space that could deepen what our polling was teaching us by inviting Black women leaders to the table where they could speak beyond the traditional questions institutions tend to ask. Not asking: what did you accomplish? Asking instead: what are you carrying? What are you healing from? What are you remembering? What are you trying to seed? What does freedom feel like in your life?

Across those conversations, Black women have named legacy, land, lineage, emotional intelligence, freedom, rest, care, imagination, grief, power, and joy. They have talked about building for the generations they may never meet, and refusing definitions of leadership that require their depletion.

If our polling shows us the contours of what Black women’s definition of wealth, these conversations help reveal the interior life of that vision.

Together, they reinforce the concept that listening cannot begin and end with asking Black women about pain points, gaps, deficits, or needs. Because we have dreams that do not rely on surviving old systems. And if philanthropy wants to center the voices of the community it serves, it must include listening to Black women and shift its practices—the sector needs to change how investment is defined, how strategies are designed, what impact is measured against, and who holds power over those decisions.

Moving from Admiration to Alignment

The future of Black philanthropy cannot simply be measured only by whether more money moves. It must also be measured by whether philanthropy is willing to transform the frameworks that decide what counts as wealth, investment, and success.

If philanthropy is serious about moving with trust and sharing decision-making power with Black women leaders, then Black women cannot be solely consulted after strategies have already been designed. Black women must be trusted at the beginning to shape the design and focus—in defining the questions, naming the conditions, shaping the metrics, designing the investments, and determining what success actually looks like.

Black women have always known that wealth and wellbeing is about more than money. We have known that abundance lives in care, memory, land, rest, safety, choice, belonging, and the ability to leave those who come after us more free. The question now is not whether Black women can keep imagining new futures. We already are.

The question is whether philanthropy is ready to listen closely enough and grasp onto the imagination to change what—and how—it funds.

There is a woman on Milwaukee’s North Side who has been doing housing work for years without a job description that says so. She knows which landlords are predatory. She knows which properties are quietly slipping into tax default before anyone files the paperwork. She knows who on her block is one missed paycheck from eviction. When a neighbor faced foreclosure last winter, she connected them to a housing counselor, walked them to the appointment, and followed up when the process stalled. No program funded that intervention. No grant covered her time. She did it because she understood that stable housing is the foundation everything else rests on, and because no institution in her neighborhood was doing it reliably enough.

The infrastructure that has sustained housing stability in disinvested neighborhoods was never fully in the programs. Understanding that helps us see how federal housing cuts are not only a crisis, but a forced reckoning.

Her work is not exceptional. It is the rule. Across Milwaukee’s historically disinvested Black neighborhoods, and in Portland, Oregon, where different demographics face structurally identical conditions, informal housing leadership has quietly sustained communities that federal housing programs were designed to serve but never fully reached. Now, as the federal government moves to eliminate CDBG, HOME, Section 8, down payment assistance, and the organizational infrastructure supporting affordable housing development, the sector is asking: where will the money come from?

That is the right question, but not the only one. The more important question, the one the field has been slow to ask, is: where has the work been coming from all along? This essay shows how infrastructure that has sustained housing stability in disinvested neighborhoods was never fully inside the programs. Understanding this helps us see how federal housing cuts are not only a crisis, but a forced reckoning. 

What Is Actually Being Cut

The proposed FY 2027 federal budget requests a 13 percent reduction in HUD funding, over 10 billion dollars, continuing a pattern of proposed eliminations that began with the FY 2026 cycle. The Community Development Block Grant program, the primary flexible federal tool for housing rehabilitation and neighborhood revitalization, is proposed for full elimination, affecting over 1,200 local governments nationwide. In Milwaukee alone, CDBG has supported emergency housing for more than 13,000 residents over the past five years. The HOME Investment Partnerships Program, which functions as gap financing for affordable housing development and is one of the only federal programs explicitly structured to support low-income homeownership, is also targeted for elimination. Without HOME, the financing architecture for many Low Income Housing Tax Credit developments collapses. Units do not get built.

Housing Choice Vouchers are being restructured into a state block grant with two-year caps on assistance for working-age adults. That is not a reform. It is the removal of the federal guarantee from rental stability for millions of households. In Portland, Multnomah County’s housing authority Home Forward is already absorbing a $35 million budget shortfall tied directly to federal reductions. Staff have been laid off. New voucher issuance is frozen. Down payment assistance programs are threatened. People are currently experiencing evictions because of such cuts.  Fair housing enforcement is targeted. NeighborWorks America, which supports nearly 250 nonprofit housing and community development organizations, is proposed for defunding. Every layer of the housing system serving households below median income is under simultaneous pressure.

In Milwaukee, where Black homeownership sits at 27.2 percent, among the lowest rates of any major metropolitan area in the country, these cuts are not marginal. Down payment assistance is not supplemental for a household earning $31,000 annually in a city where homeownership requires income approaching $54,000 to avoid cost burden. It is the margin between entering ownership and permanent racial dependence. When that margin disappears, the wide racial wealth gap does not hold steady. It widens.

Milwaukee just did something significant. In July 2025, the Common Council adopted the Housing Element of the City’s Comprehensive Plan, signed by the Mayor the following day. The plan, shaped by two years of community engagement and over ten rounds of public meetings, explicitly incorporates anti-displacement priorities, homeownership support, and the recommendations of the Collective Affordable Housing Strategic Plan. More than 80 percent of all in-person engagement activities were held in or directly adjacent to Qualified Census Tracts, the very neighborhoods where median household incomes fall below 60 percent of Area Median Income. The plan is serious, hard-won, and necessary.

It also has an implementation problem. When community leaders from Metcalfe Park Community Bridges endorsed the plan, they did so with an explicit condition: continued deep investment in community engagement. That is not a procedural request. It is a warning. A comprehensive plan is a framework. What determines whether its anti-displacement commitments and homeownership priorities reach the households they are designed to serve is not the text of the plan. It is the relational infrastructure on the ground. The Housing Element was written with the community. Whether it is implemented with the community depends on whether the field can recognize and resource the neighborhood stewards who will carry that implementation in the blocks and buildings where no city planner is present.

The Infrastructure the Government Built Against

Before naming what Black women built, it is necessary to name what was built against them. Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law documents in granular detail how federal housing policy—from the explicit discrimination written into the Federal Housing Administration’s underwriting guidelines to the practice of redlining that denied Black families the mortgages through which white families built generational wealth across the twentieth century—produced the concentrated poverty in Black urban neighborhoods. Contemporary development frameworks now diagnose that poverty as a personal deficiency without accounting for how that concentration was manufactured. This is not ancient history. The segregation it produced is the map that community development organizations still work within. The wealth it denied is the gap that down payment assistance programs are now trying to close with a fraction of the resources that created it.

These leaders hold what no housing database captures: the living map of which properties are at risk, which tenants are vulnerable, which landlords are predatory, which resources are actually accessible, versus theoretically available but practically out of reach.

What Rothstein documents and what the community development field has been slowest to confront is this: inside the deliberately confined spaces of the redlined city, Black women built governance infrastructure anyway. Systems of care, mutual aid, and economic circulation that sustained community life despite being denied every form of institutional support that was simultaneously subsidizing the construction of white suburbs and white wealth. The neighborhood stewards in Milwaukee’s who know every landlord and every vulnerable tenant did not learn that knowledge from a program. She inherited a tradition of knowing, of watching, of organizing the block, that stretches back through generations of Black women who understood that no institution was coming and that the community would have to govern itself or not survive. That tradition is not resilience as metaphor. It is governance as practice, and it is more than two hundred and fifty years old.

Compassion, Communication, Consistency

Here is what the field needs to reckon with honestly: CDBG, HOME, and vouchers were essential. They were also never enough. Milwaukee’s 27.2 percent Black homeownership rate did not happen despite federal housing investment. It happened alongside it. Portland’s long-term Black community displacement from Albina, a neighborhood once home to 80 percent of the city’s Black population, occurred across decades of federal housing program operation. Between 1990 and 2010, more than 11,000 Black residents were displaced. The programs addressed some conditions. They did not close the structural gaps. What sustained neighborhoods through those gaps, what kept communities viable in the persistent presence of institutional failure, was something the field has never adequately named or resourced.

My doctoral research, conducted across Milwaukee’s North Side and Near West Side, names it. I call it Cultivated Governance. Not informal helping. Not volunteerism. Sophisticated, deliberate, sustained governance work performed by community members, primarily Black women, who have treated housing stability as a neighborhood responsibility rather than a program outcome. These leaders hold what no housing database captures: the living map of which properties are at risk, which tenants are vulnerable, which landlords are predatory, which resources are actually accessible versus theoretically available but practically out of reach.

Cultivated governance operates through three commitments I call the 3 C’s: Compassion, Communication, and Consistency.

• Compassion is the relational precision to read housing need accurately, to know the difference between a neighbor who needs a referral and one who needs someone to walk them through the door.
• Communication is the deliberate information infrastructure these leaders maintain, the networks through which housing resources, legal risks, and warnings actually move in a neighborhood.
• Consistency is the sustained, long-term presence that makes any of it possible. Trust in neighborhoods with long histories of institutional failure is not given. It is built over years and maintained through showing up, repeatedly, without a grant cycle determining when you start or stop.

What the Field Has Been Getting for Free

Often, this is called community engagement. It is, more precisely, a cost borne by community members who are never reimbursed for it. That must change.

A housing counselor arriving on a twelve-month grant cycle must spend the first six months building the trust a neighborhood steward already holds. That is not a soft observation. It is a structural cost with a dollar value that the field has never honestly accounted for. Community development organizations have benefited from neighborhood stewardship for decades without naming it as an input, compensating it as labor, or building program design around it as expertise. That is not a small omission. It is a foundational one.

When an organization begins work in a neighborhood, it typically invests significant time and resources in community trust development, relationship-building, and knowledge acquisition before any programmatic work can take root. Custodial leaders have already made that investment, at their own expense, over years and often decades. When housing programs partner meaningfully with existing neighborhood stewards, they skip the most expensive and time-intensive phase of community work. When programs ignore those leaders and attempt to rebuild relationships from scratch, they spend money reproducing infrastructure that already exists.

Often, this is called community engagement. It is, more precisely, a cost borne by community members who are never reimbursed for it. That must change. And it must change with more urgency as federal resources are being cut, and the field cannot afford to keep rebuilding what already exists.

Portland Is Building the Answer in Real Time

Portland is doing something the field should study carefully, because two active projects are attempting, with different tools and at different scales, to close the gap between institutional housing investment and community-rooted leadership. Neither project has fully resolved the tension. Together, they define the frontier of what equitable housing development can look like when community governance is treated as architecture rather than afterthought.

In 2018, a coalition of community-based organizations in the Cully neighborhood approached Prosper Portland not to receive an urban renewal plan, but to co-create one. The result, the Cully Tax Increment Finance (TIF) District, established unanimously by Portland City Council in November 2022 with $350 million in maximum indebtedness, was explicit from the outset that its primary purpose was stabilization over development: preventing the displacement of vulnerable residents before initiating growth. Over the prior decade, the Cully neighborhood had lost 50 percent of its Black population. The TIF district was designed to stop the rapid decline. A Community Leadership Committee drawn directly from neighborhood stakeholders provides ongoing guidance and oversight of every action plan and investment priority, not advisory input, but governance authority over how dollars are sequenced and where they flow.

This is not standard urban renewal practice. Standard urban renewal produced Albina. It produced the Interstate 5 construction that slashed a thriving Black neighborhood in half in 1962, the Veterans Memorial Coliseum that displaced hundreds of families, the Legacy Emanuel Hospital expansion that erased more. What Cully is attempting is the structural inverse: community members initiating the process, naming the beneficiaries explicitly in the plan text, prioritizing stabilization before development, and retaining governance authority over the sequencing of investment. That is the institutional architecture of cultivated governance. It is what happens when the field stops extracting community knowledge for program validation and starts building the program around it from the beginning.

Albina Vision Trust is doing something more ambitious still. AVT describes its work as restorative redevelopment, and the framing is precise. This is not revitalization, a word that has historically signaled displacement rebranded as investment. It is the deliberate reconstitution of a community that was dismantled by public policy, returning both people and wealth to the place from which both were extracted. The organization’s own language names the theoretical stakes: AVT exists to ensure that the most marginalized communities are reflected in the built environment and participate in the wealth generated by their presence as owners of homes and businesses. Connection, the organization asserts, is capital. Community can heal. Healing can transform what is possible for generations yet to come.

The Community Investment Plan that anchors AVT’s work was itself a three-year, community-led planning process launched in 2020, pairing planners, architects, artists, and economists with Black Portlanders in what AVT describes as a people-first, multi-generational engagement approach. The plan received international recognition, including the AZ Honor Award for Social Good. It is now the foundation for the Reconnecting Albina Planning Project, a formal partnership between AVT, the Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability, the Portland Bureau of Transportation, and Prosper Portland, funded through a federal Department of Transportation Reconnecting Communities grant. The project, expected to conclude in fall 2026, is creating land use, transportation, and governance frameworks for the redevelopment of Lower Albina, centering a set of questions that the community development field has rarely asked publicly: how will the economic benefits of community ownership be achieved and shared? What governance structures and community stewardship mechanisms are necessary to sustain equitable development over time?

Albina One, AVT’s first completed development, is a 94-unit affordable housing building constructed by Colas Construction, one of the only Black-owned general contractors in Oregon, and designed by a Black woman who is not only a seasoned architect but one from Portland. Seventy-five units are locked between 30 and 60 percent area median income (AMI). Nineteen units are Section 8 eligible. Preference in housing applications is given to residents with historical and generational ties to the neighborhood under the city’s North/Northeast Preference Policy. The building was opened with a daylong block party featuring Black artists, vendors, and community groups. These are not decorative choices. They are structural decisions about who builds equity through the build, not only who is housed by it.

AVT names what neighborhood stewardship has always known: connection is capital, and the community that maintains connection through dispossession is the community that holds the most valuable and least compensated asset in neighborhood development.

What Cultivated Governance Offers These Models 

The Cully TIF and Albina Vision Trust are extraordinary. They represent genuine advances in how the community development field can structure investment to align with community governance. They are also not yet replicable without a theoretical framework that explains why they work, makes their logic transferable across contexts, and gives practitioners the language to recognize and sustain the leadership conditions that made them possible in the first place.

That is what cultivated governance is built to do. Cultivated governance does not describe exceptional leaders doing exceptional work in exceptional places. It describes a form of governance that exists in every neighborhood that has survived disinvestment, that has always existed there, and that has been systematically invisible to the frameworks the community development field uses to evaluate, fund, and design programs. And it is, in fact, exemplary! The community members who approached Prosper Portland in 2018, before there was a TIF district, before there was a plan, with a vision for what their neighborhood needed, were exercising neighborhood stewardship in its most elemental form. AVT’s founding logic, that the community most harmed by displacement should govern the process of return, is neighborhood stewardship as organizational mission.

The Reconnecting Albina Planning Project’s fourth governance question—what implementation tools, governance structures, and community stewardship mechanisms are needed to facilitate and sustain desired development?—is precisely the question cultivated governance is designed to answer.

The three C’s—Compassion, Communication, and Consistency—name the specific capacities that make community-rooted housing governance functional over time. They give program designers something to look for when building community leadership committees, something to protect when institutional incentives push toward efficiency over relationship, and something to build around when designing the governance architecture of a TIF or a community land trust or a restorative redevelopment district.

In Milwaukee, those capacities live in individual neighborhood stewards who have never been offered organizational infrastructure or compensation. In Cully and Albina, those capacities are being institutionalized, with real tension and real stakes, into formal governance structures. Cultivated governance bridges those contexts. It names what is being built and why it works, and names what is lost when it is built over rather than from.

The Rebuild Has to Be Different

The advocacy work to restore federal housing funding must continue. Federal investment in housing is not optional. The market will not produce affordable units at the scale the country needs. State and local governments cannot fill a $10 billion HUD reduction. The legal and legislative fights over CDBG, HOME, and vouchers are necessary and should be pressed hard.

But the field should not fight to restore what was cut without asking whether what existed before was sufficient. The honest answer, in Milwaukee and Portland both, is that it was not. The rebuild is an opportunity to design something more aligned with how housing stability actually works in communities, which is through the sustained, deliberate, relational leadership of people who treat their neighborhoods as a governance responsibility rather than a service area.

That means flexible, direct funding mechanisms that reach neighborhood stewards without requiring organizational incorporation as the price of access. It means housing organizations changing how they hire, partner, and attribute expertise. It means formally compensating the housing knowledge that informal leaders have spent years accumulating. It means building programs that treat relational infrastructure as an input, not an output. And it means using the theoretical language that makes these commitments transferable, that allows a practitioner in Portland to recognize in Cully what a researcher found in Milwaukee, and to build accordingly.

Portland is asking the right questions right now. The Reconnecting Albina Planning Project is active. The Cully Community Leadership Committee is meeting. Albina Vision Trust is negotiating the acquisition of a 10.5-acre parcel that could return thousands of people to a neighborhood from which they were expelled by public policy. Milwaukee enacted a Housing Element in July 2025 that explicitly names anti-displacement and homeownership for existing residents as governing priorities, and that was built through two years of engagement concentrated in the city’s lowest-income neighborhoods. These are not finished models. They are live commitments, and every one of them faces an implementation gap between the policy on paper and the relational infrastructure required to make it real. That gap is where cultivated governance operates. That gap is where the research lives.

The woman on Milwaukee’s North Side who walked her neighbor to the housing counselor is not a footnote. She is not a feel-good story about resilience in the face of institutional failure. She is the record. She is the two-hundred-and-fifty-year-plus record of what Black women have done with the neighborhoods the government confined them to, built inside the walls that federal policy constructed, sustained the communities that urban renewal tried to erase, kept alive the knowledge that no housing database has ever captured.

The question before the field now, in Milwaukee and Portland and every city with a disinvested neighborhood, is whether the institutions rebuilding after federal cuts will finally organize themselves around leaders like her. Or whether they will, once again, build over her and call it progress.

First proposed in Congress in 1971, Women’s Equality Day is a formal recognition of women’s progress and a reminder of the work that still needs to be done.

For employers, that work means equal pay and equal opportunity for women in the workplace. It means investing in and maintaining systems designed to identify and reduce bias. It also means prioritizing inclusion and embedding it into the organization’s culture, hiring practices, and evaluation criteria.

As the Donald Trump administration continues its crackdown on what it refers to as “illegal DEI,” many organizations have backpedaled on promises and initiatives, while others have continued this work quietly, behind the scenes.

A recent Catalyst survey found that while 55 percent of organizations publicly signaled a shift away from inclusion efforts, only 34 percent had actually decreased those efforts.

“Leaders are operating in a highly charged legal and cultural environment . . . where even lawful, values-based efforts to promote fairness can be mischaracterized or targeted,” Andrew Grissom, a senior director at Catalyst, a global nonprofit focused on women’s advancement and inclusion, told NPQ. “Some companies are becoming quieter or more careful in how they talk about inclusion publicly.”

A Shift Toward Quiet Inclusion

Catalyst’s research revealed that organizations are still committed to inclusion, and in many cases, they are continuing the work privately even while publicly moving away from DEI.

“Most employees [surveyed] still say their organizations are committed to fairness, inclusion, and diversity,” said Grissom. “And many organizations understand that pulling back entirely would create real talent, culture, and business risks.”

The dismantling of DEI was a key campaign promise from Trump. Since he took office, he has been fulfilling that promise; however, his administration’s actions have raised questions around the legality of DEI, creating uncertainty about which programs and practices could be considered unlawful.

As the Donald Trump administration continues its crackdown on what it refers to as “illegal DEI,” many organizations have backpedaled on promises and initiatives, while others have continued this work quietly, behind the scenes.

This environment is challenging for nonprofit organizations that rely on government grants or private funding that can shift with the winds of politics. That uncertainty has resulted in a culture of complying in advance. Many organizations that continue to strive for gender equality are doing so quietly, out of the public eye, or rebranding DEI initiatives to avoid ire from the federal government.

Employment data from 2025 also show stark racial differences in how women fared in the job market. Though Black women made up just 14.1 percent of the female workforce at the start of the year, they accounted for 54.7 percent of total female job losses between January and August.

“Black women have already borne a disproportionate share of the damage,” Carol Joyner, director of Family Values @ Work Action, a national network advancing policies and organizing that support women, caregivers, low-wage workers, and families, told NPQ. “That should tell us who is likely to be harmed first when institutions abandon visible commitments to inclusion.”

The shift toward quiet inclusion has forced organizations to look closely at their values and business priorities. Joyner also noted that “organizations that quietly capitulate may become less likely to hire and promote women, people of color, and people with disabilities.”

Even when an organization pulls back publicly, that doesn’t mean abandoning the work. “The strongest organizations are not simply changing labels; they are trying to be responsive, not reactive, embedding inclusion into how decisions are made, how leaders are held accountable, and how employees experience fairness, trust, and opportunity day to day,” Grissom said.

Does Progress Die in Darkness?

Women’s Equality Day grew out of the 1970 Women’s Strike for Equality, which brought inequities in employment, education, and childcare directly into the spotlight. Issues that had been shrouded in darkness were now brightly lit and highly visible.

It has become harder to ignore the systems perpetuating these issues or to operate as if there were no tangible solutions.

“Visibility has always mattered to progress,” said Grissom. “If companies become less willing to name gender inequality, there is a risk that employees will interpret that silence as retreat, even when work continues behind the scenes.”

This doesn’t necessarily mean that the lack of public visibility will stall progress, but it may make that progress harder to sustain.

Noreen Farrell, a civil rights attorney, leader on gender justice, and executive director of Equal Rights Advocates, told NPQ that less public discourse from an organization means “there’s no longer a visible standard for anyone to be held to.”

“The real danger for women in the workplace is the slow disappearance of any shared expectation that employers are supposed to be doing this work at all,” said Farrell.

As with the roots of Women’s Equality Day, publicly naming the challenges facing women brings ingrained biases and systemic barriers into view and sets a standard for those in charge to address them.

That standard can also be weakened when organizations change or remove DEI language.

The effects can extend beyond public messaging. “When an organization stops naming gender or racial inequality, it becomes easier to stop measuring disparities, targeting resources, or holding leaders accountable,” said Joyner.

It has become harder to ignore the systems perpetuating these issues or to operate as if there were no tangible solutions.

“I believe that the language we use influences our actions and the intended outcomes,” Jennifer Camota Luebke, researcher and CEO of Relay Resources, a leading disability social enterprise nonprofit, told NPQ. “When organizations dilute messaging, even if practices continue, it dulls the understanding, reach, and impact of the importance and urgency of the intended change.”

Camota sees the erasure of DEI language as slowing down progress, especially in recruiting and retaining women in executive positions and traditionally male-dominated industries.

“We’ve been talking about women generally. But when we look at women who hold multiple identities, the picture is bleak,” Hady Méndez, founder of Boldly Speaking LLC and author of Calladita No More: My Latina Journey and the Lessons that Shaped Me, told NPQ.

Beyond the higher job losses among Black women, Méndez points to the role of intersectionality: “For queer women, women of color, and others navigating more than one margin, the movement backward is amplified and felt more deeply.”

Megan Fuciarelli, the founder and chief empowerment officer of US² Consulting, a global consulting firm focused on workplace culture, inclusion, and accountability, draws a distinction between changing the vocabulary and becoming unwilling to name the inequity itself.

“You cannot address gender inequity if you become afraid to acknowledge that gender inequity exists,” she said in an interview with NPQ. “We can change the vocabulary without changing our values.”

That distinction also matters inside the workplace. To ensure continued progress, the lack of visibility should never extend to employees. They should know what an organization is doing to reach gender equality, what systems are in place, who is accountable for tracking these systems, and what happens when a system falls short.

“When employees sense that certain conversations are no longer welcome, they may start editing themselves instead of raising concerns,” said Fuciarelli.

For her, the focus is on what women actually experience at work: “My concern isn’t whether companies continue using the letters DEI. My concern is whether women continue experiencing equitable access to opportunity and workplaces where they feel psychologically safe enough to speak when something isn’t working.”

“But if less visibility becomes less accountability,” she said, “women will pay the price.”

Quiet Inclusion Needs Stronger Accountability

For Grissom, the most important question is whether leaders are still doing the internal work of inclusion, including “examining talent systems, identifying where women face barriers, and making changes that improve access to opportunity and advancement.”

In practice, he said, quiet inclusion could mean “more emphasis on fair processes, inclusive leadership behaviors, employee experience, and evidence-based decision-making.”

But even if that internal work continues, reduced visibility can still weaken accountability.

“My concern is not simply that inclusion work becomes less visible. It is that reduced visibility can eventually produce reduced accountability,” Cheryl Ingram, DEI strategist and deputy executive director of Silicon Valley Equity in Education Institute, shared with NPQ in an email exchange.

That makes explicit accountability and internal ownership even more important. For Grissom, quiet inclusion work must be paired with both: “Leaders need to explicitly claim accountability for inclusive outcomes before those outcomes are achieved, and name when gaps in promotion, sponsorship, representation, or opportunity are leadership problems to solve.”

The real risk isn’t in altering language, according to Courtney K. Ford, founder and CEO of CKF Collective, a leadership transition advisory firm that works with nonprofit CEOs, boards, and executive search partners. It’s in losing infrastructure, including “the accountability, practices, and everyday rituals that make the work real.”

Ford cautioned against confusing language with behavioral change in an interview with NPQ. “We can still change institutional norms, power dynamics, bias, and the conditions around leadership without calling it DEI.”

Measure the Outcomes

Even as the voices grow quiet and the work becomes less loud-and-proud and more heads-down, there are still ways to measure progress.

Grissom recommends focusing on the outcomes, which produce the data needed to determine whether an organization is truly moving toward gender equality.

“To understand whether workplace equality for women is advancing, organizations need deeper analytics at the points where real decisions are made: who is hired, who receives stretch assignments, who gets feedback and sponsorship, who is promoted, who stays, who leaves, and who advances into leadership,” he said.

Ingram warned against letting measurement and accountability disappear along with the language.

“The fight for gender equity has never taken place on an even playing field,” she said. “When organizations stop measuring disparities, communicating about them, establishing goals, or assigning accountability for outcomes, inequity does not simply disappear because we stopped using the language.”

Another important metric, according to Grissom, is employee experience data. Understanding the employee experience sheds light on hidden biases and unfair practices and helps leaders create supportive environments for women and all employees.

That includes asking women directly about what they’re experiencing. “Women’s Equality Day gives organizations an opportunity to celebrate progress, but it should also create space for reflection,” Fuciarelli said. “Don’t just tell women they’re valued. Ask women what they’re actually experiencing.”

Grissom emphasized that even if federal demographic reporting requirements change, organizations still need workforce data to understand whether they’re making progress toward gender equality. He also stressed that collecting that data would not become illegal if the reporting requirement changes.

“Companies still need reliable, privacy-conscious people analytics to understand whether their systems are fair and whether women have equal access to opportunity, advancement, and leadership,” noted Grissom. “The organizations that keep measuring, keep communicating clearly, and keep acting on what they learn will be better positioned to sustain progress in a cautious environment.”

As we approach Women’s Equality Day, Fuciarelli would like to see fewer social media posts and more accountability: “The real measure isn’t what appears on a company’s LinkedIn page on August 26. It’s what women experience inside that organization on August 27 and every day afterward.”

Notes from the Long Arc offers a candid, narrative-driven look at the unseen mechanics, inherited myths, and emerging possibilities within philanthropy and wealth work. Through stories, analysis, and movement-grounded observations, Sadé Dozan examines how resources flow—or fail to flow—through our social change ecosystems, and what that reveals about power, belonging, and democracy.

Naming has always been a site of power.

Across cultures, we name conditions. Colonized lands were renamed—mapped and claimed through the colonizers language and a framing that pervades the masses even today—in an attempt to erase what came before them. And still, original names remain in oral tradition, in land acknowledgements, in cultural memory, in Indigenous resistance movements that refuse to let them disappear. This is the power of naming.

Democracy often centers debates over naming, because naming is how societies decide what is real, what demands a response, and who belongs.

There are things we feel in our bones—not just through stories, but through naming. Through the body that carries those names forward. Through the ways we return to ourselves and our communities, even when the world attempts to rename us.

For me, I learned something early, not just about my name and the lineage it carries—but about how to move through spaces that are not built with people like me in mind.

I learned early that there is power in the act of naming. A name can help us see ourselves in relation to one another. It can reclaim a story, expose a condition that we have been taught to accept, or give people language for something they may have felt but could not yet articulate. And sometimes that shared language becomes the beginning of belonging, resistance, or an entire movement.

Here, I offer my personal reflections and analysis on the importance of leveraging the act of naming to fulfill the promise of democracy, belonging, and freedom. Because this is what this moment calls for.

The future of our movements—and our democracy—will be shaped by those willing to name what they know, challenge what has been handed down, and build something truer, even before the rest of the world has language for it.

Naming as Lineage

Some of my earliest childhood experiences were about whether people would learn to say my name: Sadé Nicolasa Dozan—it’s Sha-Day Nico-lah-sa Doh-zahn.

Sadé. Pronounced sha-day.

Four letters, an accent mark doing subtle but important work, and an invisible “h” doing its best to become visible.

From a young age, despite my saying it repeatedly to every teacher, every day it became something else.

Sadie.

Saday.

Sarah…

The future of our movements—and our democracy—will be shaped by those willing to name what they know, challenge what has been handed down, and build something truer, even before the rest of the world has language for it.

Sometimes, not even an attempt to pronounce it—just a pause. A hesitation. A question mark in someone’s eyes where recognition should have been. Sometimes, I didn’t correct it at all. I let “Sadie” sit in the room, even though she was not me. I let “Sarah” pass, even though it was a ridiculous attempt to call my name. I let the question marks remain unanswered. I was often so quiet. I hated having to fight for the correct pronunciation of my name every single time. I spent years defending, correcting, sometimes swallowing in silence.

For many of us, we learn early in life when to correct others and when to let it go. You learn to weigh the cost of being fully seen against the cost of constant correction. We often learn that sometimes, survival looks like letting something pass. Other times, it looks like insisting on being seen—being named correctly—no matter how uncomfortable it makes the room.

Nicolasa. Pronounced Nico-lah-sa.

My abuela’s name. A Taino woman, stout and firm. Born in Bayomón, one of the few strongholds in Puerto Rico that still holds its Indigenous name. That matters. Because retaining Indigenous naming, especially in places shaped by colonization, is never neutral or incidental—it’s reclamation.

Puerto Rico itself is a renamed place—four times in fact. Before it was Puerto Rico—or Porto Rico . . . or San Juan Bautista— it was Borikén.

And Borikén still lives—in the people. In language, in memory, in the taste of cassava on our tongues. People still call themselves Borinquen as a form of refusal. A refusal to forget, and to be fully renamed, a refusal to allow identity to be dictated solely by what is imposed.

And finally, there is…

Dozan. Pronounce Doh-zahn.

A name I chose. A blend of the last names my partner and I inherited—we formed a new name when we married. A creation of our own; a refusal to accept that inheritance must be static. We rename when inherited language no longer holds who we have become.

Over time, I’ve learned that naming is not just what we receive, it is about what we shape—what we choose to carry forward and the names we choose to lay down.

What we are able to collectively name through our shared experiences shapes what we can challenge, imagine, and ultimately change as we pursue our freedom.

When Language Is Strategy

In liberation movements, naming has been central.

The Civil Rights Movement did not start with fighting for rights—it began with naming conditions. Segregation. Discrimination. Suppression. Words that made something visible—and, therefore, actionable.

What our predecessors built in their fight for democracy was so effective that we are now watching those very same practices—organizing, storytelling, explicit naming—be weaponized in this moment. The very language constructed to protect against discrimination is being reinterpreted, repurposed, and redeployed to dismantle progress towards equity and the continued efforts to advance it.

Language itself is contested terrain.

And so, I think about what it means to not just inherit names, but to defend them. To expand, challenge, and create new ones when the old ones fail us.

At the center of any social sector mission, democracy must live. At its core, democracy requires something many of us—and our institutions—are still learning how to do: to move through discomfort.

A couple of years ago, I created a name for a pattern I could not unsee. During the most intense periods of 2020–2021, Black women were moving into leadership roles during compounded moments of crisis—the COVID-19 pandemic, a recession, intensifying coverage of racial injustice, severe natural disasters, and intense political volatility. These leaders, committed to channeling their energy to fulfill these new roles, were expected to stabilize, to repair, to lead through conditions others had not even dreamed solutions for—and then quickly blamed when those longstanding conditions did not immediately resolve. This act of blaming was not new, but the language we had did not fully hold it. And by 2024, I had named it explicitly.

The Ebony Edge.

An extension of the glass cliff, but sharper, more specific. Grounded in a moment when Black women were being pushed out of leadership in droves, once collective efforts toward racial equity across institutions stalled, and equity initiatives were demonized.

While the glass cliff describes the challenges women face when promoted during times of crisis, the Ebony Edge is about how these challenges are amplified for Black women, who are navigating leadership under the weight of additional expectations, racial bias, and fewer resources.

The Ebony Edge, drawn from lived experience and shaped by observations that resonated with shared identity and its history—and still I had to defend the naming.

I simply saw something. I offered language. And hundreds of people engaged—including Black women—not because the phenomenon was new, but because it had finally been named in a way that felt true.

And yet, some LinkedIn warriors explained to me that White leaders struggle too. That naming a specific group was unnecessary. That perhaps these women were simply, not qualified.

That is what naming does. It brings something into collective recognition. It shifts what we recognize . . . and, therefore, what we can change. But naming is also where the tension intensifies. Because once something is named, it can be challenged, distorted, dismissed, and sometimes rewritten. The same way a name, like mine, can be mispronounced.

The same way reality is debated instead of addressed—especially for Black women.

And this plays out in the social sector. We too are in the business of naming. What counts as impact, what counts as leadership, what counts as readiness.

The Inheritance of Legibility

We inherit a lot of things. I inherited my abuela’s name. My mother’s eyes. My father’s sharp sense of efficiency. And like so many of us, I inherited lessons from childhood that follow into adulthood—the lessons we reinforce and sometimes spend a lifetime unlearning.

For me, one of those lessons was learning to determine whether someone was worth the correction of my name. As part of my inner work, I regularly ask myself: What would it mean to stop editing myself—and others—before we are fully understood? I am still unlearning how “undeniable” my armor must be—to protect myself from being dismissed before I am seen and understood.

The more I work in philanthropy and share my story, the more I realize my story is not unique. Recently, my friend and colleague, Yolanda F. Johnson, and I laughed over our shared connection. She told me people have spent years trying to remove the “F.” from her name—a single letter. A leader in the sector, she founded Women of Color in Fundraising and Philanthropy (WOC)® and has transformed how many of us understand leadership. The shift in the spelling of her name is small enough to seem insignificant to others, but important enough that she once refused to let a concert program be distributed because it omitted it. “Yolanda Johnson” was someone else. The “F.” wasn’t decoration—it distinguished her identity, her work, her brand.

Explicit articulation gives people language to recognize themselves—and one another. And that’s what naming does at its best. It transforms isolated experiences into shared understanding and shared understanding into collective action.

The more conversations I have like these, the more I realize that these simply aren’t stories we collect. We are watching people do something profoundly democratic. Collectively, we give language to conditions that had long existed without names to hold them. When we name our shared experiences, we aren’t inventing new realities; we’re making existing ones visible.

And that visibility creates opportunity for collective action.

There is a long history of this kind of work.

What we now call “giving circles” often began as small, informal groups—friends or community members pooling, sharing decisions, and resourcing what mattered to them long before the practice had a formal name or framework for it. Organizations like Asian Women Giving Circle and Latino Community Foundation later helped codify and scale what had already been happening quietly; alongside more recent efforts like Geaux Girl Giving, which are modernizing approaches to responsive, community-driven capital.

The model is clear: the naming came after the practice. The practice of gathering. The practice of listening. The practice of exchanging. The practice of doing. It simply made it easier to see—and, in turn, easier to strengthen.

The Conditions of Belonging

At the center of any social sector mission, democracy must live.

At its core, democracy requires something many of us—and our institutions—are still learning how to do: to move through discomfort.

Democracy is not about ease. It is about belonging.

If we are serious about belonging—if we are serious about building something that holds all of us—then we cannot continue to ask those most impacted to translate themselves into something we can easily name, into something more palatable for our institutions, before we respond. This is often what the social sector does, and collectively we must shift this behavior to create real change.

Democracy requires adjustment. Not just in language and strategic plans—but behavior. In how we move resources, share institutional power, define who is ready, and determine whose knowledge counts.

Belonging requires us to sit with what we do not immediately understand. To challenge our own assumptions in real time and to remain in relationship even when clarity is not instant.

Belonging enables democracy, which requires that we tell the truth about what we see—even when it disrupts how we have learned to understand ourselves.

I truly believe we are capable of that.

We can interrogate our biases and still build. We can sit in discomfort and still move resources. We can question what we have inherited and still reshape it.

We can hold multitudes—and here are some steps we can take to do so. 

1. Philanthropy, change how you define the work itself. For my philanthropy folks reading this, if you recognize the ways in which the field’s definitions of impact, readiness, and leadership have been inherited without interrogation—then the work is not just to fund differently.

We must ask ourselves: Who decided what “readiness” looks like? What would be needed to fund efforts that are already working—even if it does not yet fit our current frameworks or theories of change? What would it mean to name winning differently?

Democracy requires adjustment. Not just in language and strategic plans—but in behavior. In how we move resources, share institutional power, define who is ready, and determine whose knowledge counts.

2. Nonprofits, notice where you have been asked to shrink to be understood. For my nonprofit leaders, if you have learned to translate, to over-perform, to shape your work to fit what is fundable, then the work is not just to survive the system.

We must ask ourselves: What have I renamed to remain acceptable? Where have I prioritized legibility over truth? And what would it look like to name my work fully without these constraints—even if it risks misinterpretation before it is embraced?

For those who feel discomfort reading this—that is okay. If parts of this feel unclear, challenging, or difficult to immediately grasp—then the work is not to move past that feeling. It is to stay in it.

Resist the instinct to dismiss what is not immediately legible. Listen more closely when something feels difficult to name. Recognize that discomfort is not a signal to disengage; it is often a signal that something important is being revealed.

For all of us working in service of social good, we must ask ourselves the question: What have I avoided naming because it felt too risky?

Where can I disrupt the notions of legibility? 

Naming What Already Exists

Naming has always been one of our first acts of power.

Naming is not neutral. It shapes what we see and what we fund; it shapes who is trusted to lead.

The question now is whether we are willing to name the sector’s practices that must shift—clearly enough to understand, honestly enough to challenge them, and boldly enough to create change.

Before we can ever get to something that resembles liberation, we must be honest about what democracy actually requires of us. Not the version we often reference in frameworks that live on our shelves or on our websites, but the versions that live beyond the academic refrains—the version that demands something more of us.

Because this is what this moment is asking of us. Not just to name what we see . . . but to change in response to it.