Power of the People:

What has felt challenging in our work has been maintaining personal and inter-team wellness. Our team, at every level, is made up of people who come from and belong to the very same communities that we serve. Therefore, we share in the same victories but also the same struggles that our neighbors face. Sometimes it can be difficult to take care of ourselves within the team due to financial burdens, racially-motivated police intimidation, and the focus on and love that we have for others. And so, it has felt challenging to experience exhaustion, racism, and forms of poverty while being called to uplift others and model holistic wellness.”

What has felt most challenging has been the constant fires we have to organize around in addition to our core work. Water crisis, infringement on constitutional rights with the capital police expansion, garbage contracts, winter storms. Mississippi is under siege and we are holding both reactive and proactive strategies at all times, which leads to burnout.

Something that has felt challenging in my work is work boundaries and balance. As someone who works in comms, and in Texas where there is seemingly an emergency every other week, be it in the form of legislators moving to strip away our human rights, interpersonal or environmental harm toward our unhoused neighbors, or an urgent call to action due to police killing, it can feel hard at times to find balance. As someone with CPTSD, anxiety, and depression, this work can feel immensely triggering and demanding on my mental and physical health to create and advocate when it feels like the world is burning.

What feels challenging is that there’s a lot to deal with in our community. There are so many different intersectional experiences and issues. There’s so much I want to do to support our community, but it takes a lot of capacity, people power, and a lot of time to make the change we want to see. I admire the way the FI focuses on the community and continues to build up our people, despite this work being hard.

It’s challenging as well, that the power-brokers and City Leadership, are so resistant to positive, 21st Century progressive police reform. Changes that would build trust, create equity and transparency, and thereby improve public safety in the community. They dodge us, stall us, and “kick the can down the road” often, but we still persist. It takes a long time to get some of the little changes, but we ARE seeing progress.

The most challenging component of our work and lesson learned is how strong the influence of the Fraternal Order of Police has in our County. Understanding this makes the goal of building grassroots critical. Our residents need the information and education on how to use their voices to affect change. There is a lot of apathy and hopelessness, but we look at what our relatively small coalition and team has been able to accomplish and see that with more eyes on the legislation and voices that speak out we can do much more.

Every about 9 months we are faced with a deficit and have to take focused and ‘heroic’ steps to raise money to ‘carry us through.

We are moving in so many spheres, programs, and entities that it is difficult to operate when all of our funding is programming specific. Sometimes we have to choose to not move in a critical direction (based on the current needs of the communities we serve) because we don’t have funding flexible enough to allow us to meet the present call/needs.

Funders aren’t always invested in the issues in the same way we are, their focus is sometimes only on the numbers … our team is small but mighty (staff of 4, doing the work of larger orgs)

It is our understanding that very little capital grants are available and with more and more organizations looking at land acquisition as power building initiatives it would be responsive to include capital grants moving forward.

When we bring our people together to work on our issues, it’s becoming more apparent the level of financial support they need to get there. Our people need travel support, lodging support, meal support, and the ability to take time away from their jobs and home responsibilities to engage in our work.

Maybe also a focus on rapid response aid for folks facing mental health crises. There are little to no options in that area.

Training opportunities and seminars related to 501c3 financial activity, including fundraising, are always incredibly helpful tools for organizations like ours, who are founded with a heavy emphasis on organizing and who have to learn much of our internal operations as we grow.

Borealis and other foundations with resources can support our organization and our community by continuing to offer development-related trainings and workshops. We have a new Development team and it would be helpful for them to take part in those trainings & workshops so that our organization can continue to learn and evolve, while also adapting our strategies to work towards sustainable systemic change.

It was really helpful to have someone review our individual budget and learn how to write the budget for the following year. Doing that for each grantee would be wonderful with quarterly reviews. Also having someone who does official audits we have access to would be great.

One of the biggest lessons that I’ve learned from my work this year is how much time and patience is required to see and make change happen. This has been the most humbling part of organizing and being in the community while the world seems to be crumbling apart. Experiencing this has really tested my ability to avoid falling into a deep sense of cynicism and continuously pushed me to understand hope as praxis.

Some of the lessons that I have learned in my work this year is the importance of radical Administration and Operations. What happens when ‘we win?’ What does that look like? How do we implement all of the changes once the old agencies and systems are overthrown? It’s about understanding that in most cases Reform is not enough. We must find our own way to take community control. Make our own decisions. Implement our own programs. Solve our own problems. Mobilize and organize our own communities. It’s really a two-part process and we tend to get distracted by numbers (mobilization) and forget that getting people to agree on an idea and new way of doing things (organizing) is really how we win power. Then we have to take it a step further so that we maintain power. We have to have a plan to implement our changes in a trauma-informed, survivor & queer-centered, efficient and effective way. That takes radical administration and operations planning.

As organizers, it’s hard to draw the line between caring for the community and caring for oneself. But I recognize that to create good trouble for years to come, it is essential to take time to nurture the person doing the work. While I wish we could dismantle the system in one day, I understand we are up against a system that took 100s of years to build. So being long-winded, committed, and at my best means taking it step by step and resting when needed is more beneficial than burning out.

Our organization has a goal of raising $40M over the next 2.5 years for our capital campaign for our land and retreat center in rural Georgia. No one on our staff is an experienced capital campaigner – however we are deeply experienced campaigners and resource mobilizers. We know we have the skill set and organizing ability to meet our goal and set up the next generations or grassroots Black organizers for success.

Although community organizing has once again left mainstream consciousness, and people are exhausted and burnt out, [we are] here for the long haul. We have firmly laid down roots in the city this year and are reigniting our commitment to the difficult and tireless work of challenging systems of oppression.

Throughout this year, I’ve gained valuable insights from our work that have reinforced the importance of persevering in the face of intricate tasks. It is all too easy to become discouraged when we encounter challenges or find ourselves lacking the necessary resources. However, it is precisely in these moments that we must maintain our resolve and continue to pursue ambitious goals, expectations, and outcomes.