It’s a tough time for us humans, as both social safety nets and social progress – hard won and yet incomplete – are being willfully unraveled through cruelty, corruption and capitulation. As an equity strategist and practitioner with more than 20 years of experience in philanthropy, it’s been a time of not only deep sadness but also introspection.
How can progress endure through pushback and retrenchment and what makes the difference between lasting and fleeting change?
My conclusion: soil.
As I visited the farmers market each Saturday morning this summer, I have been struck by the abundant variety of cucumbers. When I was growing up, we had, well, just cucumbers – whatever that one kind was that all the grocery stores sold. In the last couple of years, however, my awareness has exploded to include the seedless Persian and English cukes, the sunny orbs of lemon cucumber and the fuzzy curves of the Armenian snake melon. A similar explosion of possibilities awaits with eggplant. Don’t even get me started on tomatoes.
To be sure, each of these amazements begins with a seed – coded as heirloom or hybrid, suited for containers, hothouses or open fields. But the seed alone cannot produce the bounty; it must interact with the sun, the wind, insects, water and more. And the first step is not only planting seeds in a spot that gets the right amount of sun – but also preparing the soil.
Here in Durham, NC, the rich red clay beneath our feet is the joy of potters, but the bane of gardeners. To “garden” here often means digging out clay and replacing it with nutrient rich soil in which seeds have a fighting chance of taking root and thriving, perhaps producing something that feeds our bellies and/or our senses.
Likewise, when it comes to cultivating organizational change, culture is the “soil” in which the seeds of equity are planted. For many philanthropic organizations over the last few years, there’s been an explosion of seeds – ideas, vocabulary, tools, and frameworks designed to germinate new grantmaking practices, leadership formations, decision-making processes, and other equity innovations and possibilities. But in what soil were these seeds planted?
For most institutions in the U.S. and around the globe, the default soil is white dominant culture – a toxic mix of zero-sum individualism, binary thinking, scarcity mentality and power-over orientation that sprouts cultivars of greed, domination, control, extraction and exploitation. Like the proverbial air we breathe or water we swim in, most of us are not fully conscious of the toxins in our cultural soil. But it reveals itself in part by the words we use and the meaning, often unspoken, we ascribe to those words. Here’s a starter pack for philanthropy:
- accountability
- capacity
- confidentiality
- conflict of interest
- effectiveness
- efficiency
- evidence
- fiduciary
- impact
- legacy
- metrics
- objectivity
- professional
- risk
- strategic
It is not that these words are bad and should be banned (in general, let’s not ban words). But they do need to be interrogated and, most likely, expanded in how we use and understand them. To be honest, for most organizations, the assumed meaning of these terms and countless others does not bode well for equity. They are conversation stoppers, and they drive toward a singular, “one right way” of being and doing that constrains our relationships, flattens our dreams, narrows our thinking, and limits our options.
The only chance the equity seed has of producing – and importantly, sustaining – equity blossoms is if it is planted in hospitable, nurturing soil. As my gardening friends can attest, this might require some unglamorous backbreaking work to break up and dig out the clay or rocks or sand and replace it with rich, healthy, life-giving soil.
In an organizational context, this can look like being “that person” who risks generating some conflict and bravely asks uncomfortable questions like – what do we mean by “capacity” (or fill-in-the-blank)? Where does that (limited/limiting) idea come from? How does that meaning shape the conversations we have, the work we engage in, how we relate to the community and each other, and what we think of as progress? How could we think about this differently – not just in the opposite way (the flip side of any binary) but perhaps in more multi-faceted and nuanced ways that reflect the complexity of a particular context?
To be sure, it would be much easier and more appealing to our sense of action to jump right to planting seeds – or take a shortcut and just scatter them. But as current, hard experience is showing us, there is just no shortcut to equity.
So let’s get out our shovels, tillers, and trowels, roll up our sleeves, and do the critical work needed to tend the cultural soil of our organizations and cultivate the lasting change we want to see in the world.
Join the Conversation
These ideas are not just aspirational—they are being practiced in real time by racial equity practitioners. Borealis Philanthropy, through its Racial Equity to Accelerate Change Fund, is supporting transformative governance work that lives at the intersections of racial equity, systems change, and community-rooted leadership. On Monday, September 29 at 3:00 pm ET, join Borealis and GEO for a conversation on The Alchemy of Consent and the Fractal Nature of Change: Lessons from Racial Equity to Accelerate Change.
In this interactive session, Borealis grantee partners Circle Forward and OpenSource Leadership Strategies will share how regenerative governance shows up in practice. You’ll hear examples of:
- How discomfort is welcomed as data to guide course correction
- How objection and dissent are structured into group decision-making
- How equity principles are operationalized in governance bodies to build trust and shared ownership
Funders will be prompted to surface barriers and opportunities for the mind- and practice-shifts needed in their institutions, as well as the philanthropic sector overall. Join us here.
Gita Gulati-Partee, is the founder and principal of OpenSource Leadership Strategies, Inc. which advises and supports leaders to build equity mindsets, skillsets, and toolsets for social progress.