“Sometimes we think about racial justice work as: what’s the fight on the street? What’s the policy fight? But racial justice work is also about how we are shifting conditions for people in the movement, how we are challenging and tackling the issues that are faced among BIPOC leaders. Organizational transformation is part of racial justice work, and that’s not the story that gets highlighted.”
Liz Derias-Tyehimba, CompassPoint
Borealis Philanthropy’s Racial Equity to Accelerate Change (REACH) Fund exists to expand the capacity of the racial equity practitioners—capacity builders, facilitators, and healers—who are key to helping build strong organizations and, ultimately, a more powerful movement ecosystem. These practitioners support nonprofit and movement leaders to explore new ways of organizing themselves, in order to dismantle white supremacy, racial capitalism, and the various forms of intersectional oppression, so that we all can embody the liberation we seek.
Today, we’re proud to release Meeting the Moment, Keeping the Momentum: Stories of Racial Equity and Liberatory Practices from the Field, a report we co-authored with our friends at Research Action Design (RAD) that captures wisdom and learnings from the racial equity practitioners that comprise our grantee partner cohort.
Through written narrative and vibrant, in-depth case studies, Meeting the Moment, Keeping the Momentum outlines how organizations working for social change can—and must—transcend the limits of the existing nonprofit model to imagine new possibilities of organizing movements.
Acknowledging the work of racial equity as dynamic, emergent, relational, and emotional, the report seeks to provide tangible inspiration and example of what it looks like when social change organizations move away from racist practices (like pay inequity, undemocratic governance, elitist exclusion) and capitalistic pressures (like funding structures that encourage competition and prize conformity) to instead pursue liberatory practices (like inclusive governance, holistic healing, field building, and political education).
Meeting the Moment, Keeping the Momentum asks, explores, and offers answers to questions such as:
How can practices like consent-based decision strengthen our organizational cultures? What does it mean to center Indigenous wisdom in our work? How can we employ a reparative lens for compensation? What meaning does collective sense making have in our work? What courageous conversations are necessary to the deep transformation we seek?
The report focuses not only on the “how to” of racial equity organizational development work, but on its process—and the many gifts its undertaking offers.
Ultimately, it is our hope that this dynamic content accomplishes three big things.
1. Supports practitioners and organizers pushing against recent far-right gains, including the curbing of voting rights, attacks on bodily sovereignty, and the dismantling of affirmative action. We recognize that organizers are working to combat this extremism in the midst of an escalating climate crisis; an ongoing global pandemic; increased mass surveillance and state-sanctioned violence; and a growing wealth gap, all of which disproportionately impact Black, Indigenous, and People of Color communities—and could thus utilize this resource to ensure the healing and strategic alignment necessary for the long road ahead.
2. Expands the collective consciousness of funders, who are essential and long-term partners in this work, to the realities of racial justice work, which are often at odds with conventional philanthropic assumptions about program design, outcomes, and sustainability.
3. Mobilizes funders to provide sustained support for this work and also adopt bolder political stances that center racial equity to counter increasing tides of white supremacy.
Meeting the Moment, Keeping the Momentum and its contents can be found on a dedicated microsite, housed at meetingthemoment.borealisphilanthropy.org, available to all. We invite you to dig in and learn more about the role of these practitioners in our collective pursuit of racial justice.
To learn more about how you can support a national network of racial equity practitioners by partnering with the REACH Fund, please contact reach@borealisphilanthropy.org.