Community-Based Fundraising with Oregon Food Bank

Sean: Good morning and afternoon to everybody. Thank you, first off, for your patience while we were taking care of some technical issues, but now we are ready to go. My name is Sean. I want to introduce to you the Community Philanthropy team at Oregon Food Bank. They have embarked upon a Read More

Sean: Good morning and afternoon to everybody. Thank you, first off, for your patience while we were taking care of some technical issues, but now we are ready to go. My name is Sean. I want to introduce to you the Community Philanthropy team at Oregon Food Bank. They have embarked upon a transformational paradigm shift in their approach to ending hunger and hunger’s root causes. They no longer evaluate their performance based upon the financial outcomes of their work, instead, they design and implement philanthropic development programs oriented to new metrics rooted in love and equity. As always, any conversation you want to have amongst yourself, you can do in the chat. Any questions that you’d like to pose to the team, please put in the Q&A for us. That’s everything I’ve got. Nathan, you can take it away. Nathan: Hello, good morning. I’m Nathan Harris Director of Community Philanthropy at Oregon Food Bank. The voice coming through your computer from the great digital divide. We’re going to take a minute to offer a land acknowledgment and then provide a bit of context about Oregon Food Bank, our organization, and our communities. You can join me by using the link presented on this slide, to learn more about the first peoples who occupied the lands that you now may reside upon, [unintelligible 00:01:42] policies of genocide and relocation. Oregon Food Bank facilities run some traditional village sites of the Multnomah, Cathlamet, Clackamas, [unintelligible 00:01:54], Malheur, and many other tribes who made their homes along the Columbia River. We thank the descendants of these tribes for being the original stewards and protectors of these lands since time immemorial and we are honored to be guests upon these lands. Let me share a bit about Oregon Food Bank, our vision, and our mission. Our vision over the next 10 years is to build resilient communities that never go hungry, and for more than 30 years, our mission has been to end hunger and hunger’s root causes so no one goes hungry. We believe that the root causes of hunger include poverty and systemic inequity drives poverty. Hunger is the result of the failure of systems meant to protect us. Lack of affordable housing, accessible healthcare, and living-wage jobs, and that is made possible due to disparate distributions of wealth, power, and represented voice that most often leave behind Black, Indigenous, and people of color, immigrants and refugees, transgender and gender non-conforming folks, and single mothers and caregivers. Those in our community who face the highest and disproportionate rates upon them. This vision and our mission have been daunted, in part, by COVID-19. It’s definitely presented a challenge. Many in our community have long endured systemic inequities that drive hunger. In the past year, COVID-19 exposed this reality had exacerbated it. Hunger nearly doubled. Prior to the pandemic, one in 11 of our neighbors faced hunger and that escalated to nearly 1 in 5 in our region in the past year. This has been felt particularly by Black, Indigenous, and people of color communities, as well as immigrant and refugee communities. Among the immigrant and refugee communities, the economic impact of COVID-19 can be even more severe for those who do not qualify for public safety net benefits like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program called SNAP, formerly known as food stamps, as well as services like unemployment or stimulus payments. We believe it doesn’t have to be this way. Imagine that community power encompassing over a million people experiencing hunger. Those people access food, the meal sites, and food assistance sites at 1,400 locations across our region. Food is sourced to those sites by 21 regional food banks that receive food from Oregon Food Bank statewide warehouse. While we distribute that food, we work alongside movement building and policy advocacy partners, because we believe that it’s a moral imperative to feed our neighbors facing hunger, and when the systems meant to protect us exclude our people and beget hunger, we work within this ecosystem to make systems change. We work with all of these partners the agricultural industry, food retailers, farmers, farmworkers, state and federal elected officials, activists and boards. Our organization has a $34 million operating budget this fiscal year with staff over 200 employees and more than 50% of us have lived experience of hunger. We are the leaders ending hunger who have the knowledge of lived experience of hunger to end hunger. Within the Community Philanthropy team, we have 35 incredible human beings working with 63,000 annual donors and 40,000 annual volunteers to resource and end the hunger and hunger’s root causes. Three of my colleagues are joining me today and I would like them to introduce themselves before we get fully into our presentation. Vicky: Thanks, Nathan, I’ll go first and pass it along to my colleagues. Hello, everyone. I’m so excited to be with you. My name is Vicky Schwoeffermann, and I’m the Community Philanthropy senior strategist at the Oregon Food Bank. My role is largely to work closely with our Community Philanthropy team to drive forward emergent and transformative programs that really foster collaboration across stakeholder groups. With my role, I focus on integrating equity and social justice into donor engagement programs, and I support driving forward our 10-year strategic vision and the ways to do that. Now, I’d like to pass it over to Vivien. Vivien: Thank you, Vicky. My name is Vivien Trinh. I use she/her pronouns. I am the Community Philanthropy Associate Director of Operations. I’m a builder, I create systems and process to support our teams as they navigate our theory of change, build relationships with our supporters, their staff, and our work. In addition to that, I oversee the database team and the prospect development team. I’m going to pass it over to Celia. Over to Celia. Celia: Hi, good morning or good afternoon if you’re on the East Coast. I’m Celia Ferrer and my pronouns are she and her. I’m the Corporate and Community Relations Manager for the Oregon Food Bank. I lead a team of developers or community philanthropists or, I’d like to call them philanthropic disruptors. We manage corporate portfolios, do food and fund drives. We process community gifts and we also do community events, partner events, and workplace giving. This is a special time at the Oregon Food Bank because we’re in a special point of growth. I feel like my role includes building an infrastructure poised for growth that is focused on equity and sustainability ensuring that we put our clients in the center of what we do and our hope is to develop new matrices for love. I’ll kick it back to Nathan. Nathan: Thanks, Celia. Nathan Harris, Director of Community at Oregon Food Bank. For the rest of our time today, I’m going to provide a little bit of background about Oregon Food Bank’s area of change and the Community Philanthropy team. Then we’re going to move into an interview with Celia, Vicky, and Vivien. Everything that I referenced and that we talked about is linked to additional resources through a handout that is connected to this conference presentation. I welcome you all to find that handout, click through the links. There you can find resource that we referenced and tools we’ve developed that we may allude to during our time together. Our purpose on the Community Philanthropy team Oregon Food Bank is to encourage, engage, and equip our community to take philanthropic action and build political power and service to Oregon Food Bank’s vision and mission. Our theory of change in shorthand has decentering money to center love and equity. In January of 2020, the Oregon Food Bank Community Philanthropy team adopted this new theory of change, sparking its transformational change initiative that has touched every facet of our work as we apply it to every discipline, every role within our team at Oregon Food Bank. Why have we adopted this theory of change? In short, it’s to create a more just experience of philanthropy for our staff and donors. We believe that an orientation to financial outcomes is a gateway to harm rooted in White supremacist, colonial capitalist constructs that exploit people in the greedy extraction and hoarding of resources. Some examples of this show up as sexual harassment at the fundraisers. One in four women in our profession and of those who report sexual harassment, 65% name donors as the perpetrators of sexual harassment. We know that women in our profession, according to their self-reporting, may not actually interrupt sexual harassment or report it when a large gift is on the line, or if they fear their career would be impacted by not raising as much resource. We know that there is racial bias in the nonprofit sector and that less than 10% of those in our profession are black, indigenous and people of color. We know that CEOs and EDs report feeling at a disadvantage in raising financial resources for the nonprofits that they lead in contrast over our counterparts, even when those same EDs of CEOs describe themselves as more visionary and representative of the community served by nonprofits. We know that the nonprofit sector recreates racial hierarchies and advantages rooted and white supremacy. We’ve seen research on an Exodus from our profession rooted in distress and pressure of unrealistic financial goals. Right now, those attending this conference among us 51%, may be contemplating leaving their current job right now and 30% are contemplating leaving the profession altogether. We see donor attrition from donors feeling like they’re treated as financial targets, and we know from giving USA that while more and more money may be given every year to charitable causes, fewer and fewer households are given. This could be due to the growing wealth gap in the United States and it could be due to the fact that when donors seek to do good in the world and join movements for social change, what they find is that they’re treated like just another transaction, just like in the for-profit marketplace. How do we create a more just experience? We theorize that a reclamation of philanthropy’s true meaning, any voluntary act for the common good root, a love for humankind will bring into balance our professions, historic and disproportionate orientation to financial outcomes. By bringing into balance, what we mean is that we of course have financial goals at Oregon Food Bank. We are proud to be resource mobilizers helping in hunger and hunger’s root causes through a more just distribution of wealth. We believe that money can be healing. I often think about [unintelligible 00:12:35] words of money as reparation. Money like water can create fertile soil and the field that once experienced drought and water can also be pushed through a house at high volumes and sprayed at protestors to suppress first amendment rights. Money is complex, and what we are acknowledging is that we cannot continue operating in a status quo paradigm where money is paramount. By centering love and equity and decentering money we’re fostering innovation, this approach touches every facet of our work and forces us to rethink what we do and why. It roots our evaluation in activities, not outcomes. What we can control are the activities that we design and implement with excellence that we theorize will create certain outcomes, but we cannot control our donor decisions. Decentering money to center of and equity, allows us to engage supporters as holistic actors and facilitate more authentic relationship development with our supporters, that then in turn democratizes philanthropy that makes philanthropy more accessible. It orients us to make philanthropy more welcoming to all people. It helps to interrupt a charity model. We instead of saying to our donors that a meal solves hunger, and that is a very common message that generates strong financial outcomes. Instead, we can tell the true story of hunger and tell the true solution of hunger. It is true that we could feed someone who is hungry today, and that is a moral imperative. If we don’t address the root causes of hunger, that person will be hungry again tomorrow, and the day after. Finally, this theory of change intends to cultivate a market diverse team and profession in which the integrity and wellbeing of love at community, both donors and staff, are valued more than money. That is our intent with this theory of change and I want to move into some Q & A, with my colleagues here on the call with me and they can speak from their perspectives and experiences, what it’s like working within this theory of change. My first question as I’ve shared a bit about our intent, I’d love to hear more from each of you, and two of you joined our team after we had implemented this transformation change initiative. You knew full way out well what you were getting yourselves into and all three of you have been leaders in championing this theory against implementation. Tell me, why is this undertaking so paramount to you in your own words? Vivien: I can go first. As the person who was at Oregon Food Bank at the beginning of the journey, I started at Oregon Food Bank about seven years ago. It was my job to create reports on the financial outcomes. I knew going into it, it was not a great direction to go to, and it turns out I was right. I should have trusted my instincts, but I went forward with it instead of checking myself. I witnessed firsthand the morale impacts it had on staff much to Nathan’s point earlier, focusing so much on financial outcomes, particularly at the developer level led to a culture of fear. When you are operating in that type of culture, you are unable to innovate and be creative to really take risks to try things a different and new way. One of the ways it showed up was that portfolios were just too large. If you have financial goals, you’re just gonna keep the donors that you have instead of shrinking them and taking the time to build those really deep transformational relationships. Then, what that leads to is burnout, it leads to overwhelm and then folks are like, “You know what? I’m out of here, this isn’t for me anymore.” At the time, particularly on the prospect development realm, we weren’t really having these types of conversations. It’s much better now, but seven years ago, it wasn’t really even on our radar, we knew there was turnover within our gift developer colleagues, but we couldn’t really figure out why. The impact had on me was that it really made me feel disconnected from my colleagues, from the organization, even from the mission, I didn’t feel values aligned with the equity work that the organization was doing, because I was seeing this disconnect. What this theory of change really allows for within myself for me is that it inspires me to continue being in philanthropy, to continue being a fundraiser. It gets me out of bed in the morning and my hope is that by focusing on centering love and equity, I’m helping create a different experience for both the donors and my colleagues. Vicky: Thank you so much, Vivien. Your comments brought up for me definitely burnout. That rings true for me. I’ve been in philanthropy for 50 years now and when I first started as a newbie, I wanted to please everyone on my portfolio, I want to please my supervisors and my internal team and so in the attempt to do that, I asked the question for how do we measure or success and what does success look like? I kept getting different answers from people but the infrastructure that I was working with at the time seemed to reward those who were bringing millions of dollars in the door. Naturally, I chased money, and that happiness or that feeling can only be sustained for so long before you start to question, “How long will this impact continue to live on throughout our communities and within myself? How long will this relationship be able to stay in intact and run its course?” Because there’s only so many times you can go back to a donor for money. There’s only so many times you can reach out to that donor and have that awkward moment where the donor knows you’re reaching out for money, you know you’re reaching out for one thing and you start walking into these meetings. From my experience, I start walking into these meetings less and less of myself. I didn’t feel like I could truly be authentic with sharing my passion and my heart with the donor, and because I was so focused on that financial goal, I realized it was impacting our relationship, so I couldn’t in turn actively listen to what drives a donor as well. We are all donors in a way. We have all decided what we want to lend our time our talent and our treasure to and to allow an opportunity or to create an opportunity where someone can be fully seen for their fullness and not just the dollars that they may or may not have in the bank or in their pocket, I found gave our communications, gave my conversations much more of depth to it. It allowed me to feel more fulfilled from the amount of time I’m using and taking away from my family to spend getting to know strangers in the community and trying to connect folks to opportunities to further their passion and to further the legacy that they want to live. I found that through this paradigm shift that we’re undertaking here at the Oregon Food Bank, I found that it was so important because from the beginning when I started in philanthropy up until now, I found that’s really, in my opinion, the only true way to approach philanthropy, so that I can sustain my endurance in the field. I can walk away with creating and bridging relationships that weren’t there before, and therefore elevating our communities to a higher level. Then we even if it’s not possible, and I could still achieve fulfillment and happiness while I do that. It was like a jack of all trades or a win situation for everyone involved. When I got in contact with Oregon Food Bank, I realized that we were taking this concept and providing an opportunity for people to safely test it out, and to also learn along the way, and to also have a voice in helping to shape how philanthropy could look. That appealed to me so much that was like–I felt like I was taking in fresh air. I didn’t realize and incoming on board that it would be an opportunity for me to also heal from my past traumas, the past harms that I’ve encountered from allowing money to drive a conversation. There’s a lot of harms that I would sweep under the rug because I thought the end goal is a dollar amount. Instead, I can share my heart with someone else free of fear that the only thing we’re talking about is money. The last thing I’ll say is when I realized that I could shift my approach in this work, and that it would be supported by an organization like Oregon Food Bank, I realized that the money was the easy part. Relationships are the hardest part, and relationships take time. I’m really grateful for a team that allows me to take time to go deep so that we can then go wide. Celia: Oh my goodness, preach. Preach, so many things from what Vicky said strongly resonated with me. The question is, why is this undertaking so paramount to us? I’d have to borrow some of the words you use Vicky because that’s exactly how I feel about my work. This is the air I breathe. This is in fact very healing for me and indulge me I’ll keep the story short, I can’t explain my answer without sharing a short story. I’m an Asian American. I moved to the US about 12 years ago. I came from the corporate sector. I worked as a director for corporate affairs in advertising and public relations, doing corporate work for about 15 years. Then I moved here and then I became a parent and then got divorced and got so deflated. I was a full-time mom for a while, and then I got divorced in this new world. The Philippines where I come from is very Americanized, but so coming here, living here on my own without familial support is so new to me, and my world came crumbling down. When that world crumbled down, I thought, “My God, this is so hard, but then I might have an opportunity to really rebuild my life the way I want to.” It’s not like a Rubik’s cube. It’s not like changing just one side or the other side, but really just taking everything apart and putting it back together. I decided I had very good more years in my life as an executive, what are my talents? Where do I want to devote my skills? What do I really want to do? I knew that whatever it was, I didn’t want it to be something that’s solely hinged on the bottom line because that’s what I focused on as a crisis communication expert and advertising and public relations, I was concerned about the bottom line. I was concerned about the one specific strategy that works that best every other strategies, the winning strategy, and that changed me as a person. I went after the money. I went after relationships that would give me access and power and money, and I just didn’t want that because I didn’t want that as the world that I would leave behind for my kids. I identify as a queer, single immigrant mother. In this new world of mine that I wanted to rebuild, I wanted it to be closer to who I really am, and who I want to be. When the opportunity came to work for a nonprofit, I would choose things that–Really, I would choose nonprofits that really advocated for the values that I believe in. To be honest, like four or five years ago, I checked out the Oregon Food Bank, and I felt they were talking about their equity journey then. I felt it was to check boxie, racial equity, we wanted to hire more bipoc folks, but I had several conversations with people from then it felt check boxie. I thought, no, because I really want to live a brave life, and that meant taking risks really going for it. I worked for other nonprofits, but lo and behold when COVID happened, there were so many openings of the Oregon Food Bank, and I thought, I really want to work for the Oregon Food Bank because food security and food justice, and racial justice are things I strongly believe in. Then I got a call from Nathan Harris, oh, my God on a Sunday, and we had–He said, “There’s a position open, would you consider it?” It turned out to be a lovely one-hour conversation about what the Oregon Food Bank is doing, the equity journey. Nathan talked about decentering money and developing matrices to do that. I’m like, “What, really? How do you plan to do this?” He was honest enough to say, “We haven’t quite figured that out yet perfectly, but we’re going to and we really want to and we really want to.” That for me was such an authentic, honest answer that it inspired me and I felt, I have some skills, I have the passion to do this, I want to do this and this is so much in line with who I want to become. That courage over fear, that wanting to provide access for myself, my kids, my community, my family, and for everyone. Really fighting for racial justice and not be whoo about saying we’re going to do it, and then not putting gas on the pedal. Now a year after, so I have accepted the position. I feel like everyone is really working towards a more equitable community, and that inspires me every day. I am so thankful that I’m here, and I continue this work because I feel that it really resonates with who I really am deep down. Nathan: That story is such a great transition to the next question, Sonia. I just want to echo a couple of things that I heard one is that I, Vicky so resonate with this idea that as very emotionally intelligent creatures, human beings, that the idea of being in a relationship with somebody when you’re perceiving them as some–with through a lens of objectification, right, when it’s a financial target, I think that as much as this experience may be healing for us in the profession. I think it’s also very healing for donors to be able to sit across the table from you and not feel through that emotional intelligence, the objectification of them as a potential financial gift. I think that’s such a powerful idea in moving not just our profession, but the philanthropic sector at large. Celia, I just wanted to celebrate what you shared. I have skills. I can do this. I think that we sometimes forget that our profession has so much influence and so much power that we are culture maker. We are movement builders. We are Vanguards. We don’t have to do things the way we’ve always done them and we know best relationships. Your point though, about, how do we measure love? I shamelessly borrow from the Broadway musical rent the lyric. How do you measure a year? What about love? That is in fact the name of our workshop today. We’re often asked about the technical realities of measuring love and the handout that we provided to attendees give some examples of assessments we’ve created focused on staff and donor, excuse. Those are just two of myriad ways we’re measuring love. I’d like to ask you each, this might be a hard question I’m going to push you. I’d love to hear from each of you about one way, each, that we’re measuring love that most resonates with you. Celia: I love how we change up some of the framing of the question sometimes in the conferences that we attend. Something popped in mind, something really popped in my mind, and that is having difficult conversations with long time donors who don’t see the same tactics despite the same strategies. As an example, the Oregon Food Bank as with most of the corporate partners that we manage believe in economic progress and resilience. Now, how that looks like may look very different from your vantage point. For us, sometimes we support bills that we think would be favorable to our constituents, that would even the playing field, that would challenge the systemic racism that we are experiencing. Some of our corporate partners might not agree with that and so love for us would then mean have a conversation with us, if you decide to use money as a source of power and thread and to pull out, that’s your decision, we will respect it. If we have been long-term partners, then talk to us, explain to us where you’re coming from. We’d love to tell you also of our position because it’s a relationship and the financial gift is just one expression of love. The conversation is another. Continuing or discontinuing the relationship is another measurement of love. Vicky: Thank you, Celia. I want to piggyback on that as well. All of you are my muse, so I’ll just share that, get so inspired by you and the work that we do collectively. One of the things that we’ve highlighted this year and lifted up is a really important aspect of our work is collecting stories, lifting perspectives, and voices that for whatever reason we haven’t lifted before. We haven’t necessarily tracked and followed up with and prioritized adding it to our efforts to change the narrative of hunger and its root causes. A lot of our language and our work is talking about equity and racism. If you don’t know what that has to do with hunger, I encourage you to read some of the materials that have been provided, no judgment, no shame. It’s an opportunity for us to know more and do better. I love that we are– Originally, we call this mission moments. We are collecting stories that represent the true narrative of hunger, represent the true obstacles and barriers that stand in the way of people thriving, of communities thriving for generations to come that stand in the way of building generational wealth. We’re acknowledging that talking about it and that is allowing us to engage in hard conversations as well that Celia alluded to. I love the fact that we are focusing on love through changing narrative, through storytelling. There are so many causes here in Oregon. It’s hard to sometimes wrap your arms around what to do first, how to help how to get involved. I strongly believe the way to build a movement the way to create relationships that are built on trust and strength is by listening and sharing and using our power that each of us have to lift up our brothers and sisters and fellow humans in our community. We can’t do that if we try to simplify the stories that we think we’re hearing, or if we try to add our perspective on what is the truth for someone with lived experience of hunger. I love that that is a key component to our work. We’re tracking those stories through many different how do I say it? Through many different ways. It’s also being tracked in terms of how do we add an affinity rating for a person who has shared their story, that is also a donor. Oftentimes, I have thought about donors as only giving of a certain level, but anyone has the capacity to be a donor. Many times, the funds that are hitting our Oregon Food Bank account are from people who get it. They either have lived experience of hunger. They either know someone in their community that has lived experience of hunger. They either know or have of experienced communities being marginalized and put aside and being told that, you’re just lazy. That’s why you’re, that’s why you’re in poverty or that’s why you’re dealing with hunger and to be able to be brave, to lend your voice, to be able to stand up and say, that’s not a true representation of many situations is just a powerful moment. It’s a powerful thing to be able to do. That is largely due to trust-building people don’t share stories unless they trust. I view the sharing of stories as a way to measure how much love we are infusing into this profession, how much love we’re sharing with the community and how much love the community is responding back to us with. I just appreciate, again, the space to be able to do that and to work so closely across our team because the other thing I’ll notice is sometimes like when you work for organizations, there can be silos and not a lot of conversations between those who may be having conver conversation with different stakeholders in the community. I really love how we work collaboratively to share what we’re hearing, what we’re learning from community members and help it to inform every aspect of our work. Vivien: That’s amazing Vicky. We’ve given this presentation a couple of times and every time it still gives me chills. It’s so inspiring. I joked with Nathan when we started to really develop what it meant to measure love. I was like, Nathan, I think this broke my relationship with the database. Measuring love is such a nuance thing. What is it even? The database is like ones and zeros and binaries. I was like, “How do you make those two things meet? How do you honor the experiences that our developers are having in the field?” Those types of really meaningful relationships, they’re building those conversations around equity and going along their journey of understanding of what the root causes of hunger are. Something that I’m super excited about is that we just, this year rolled out a process for coding our contact reports along various indicators of love. so that as the developers are entering information into the database, they’re taught they can code actions if they’re really having deep discussions about equity, if the donor or even Oregon Food Bank or the developer went along a journey of growth in their understanding of the work. If there was a moment where there was really shared deep values that were built between them. These different ways of bringing qualitative information into a quantitative database is something that I’m really excited about, that by the end of the year, we’ll have this information of all the different ways. Love is showing up in our communities in our donor relationships, and it will allow my team to think about portfolio optimization and realignment in a different way, focusing less on money and more of the quality of the relationship. Something that’s super interesting about it too is that, we’re giving the developers a lot of freedom to interpret what those indicators mean for themselves. It becomes less of a metric to measure performance and more of a metrics about how the person is experiencing the work. That’s so different, right? Like a lot of the reports that are created are trying to drive behavior. Whereas, these reports, the hope is that it is a chance to reflect on your relationship with the work and your relationship with the mission. That is something that I’m super excited about. Nathan: Okay. A couple of thoughts. I think the way I measure love most is, through the stories of our team members who are typically experiencing philanthropy in a more just way, and experience the work in a more just way which may get into our next question, but there’s a question in the chat, and I think it’s kind of relevant to a point that Vicky was making earlier, and the question was about how this theory of change is transcribed into an experience of donors giving at any level, like monthly donors or maybe grassroots-giving donors. I often talk about bell hooks’ definition of love as the extension of oneself for one’s own or another’s spiritual growth. We often talk about love in the context of political journey. To me, bell hooks’ definition and the political journey are very similar ideas. That, I think, is how the philosophy of decentering money to center love and equity, can be felt through programs on our team that particularly engage grassroots donors, that we may not be able to manage, as we manage major donor relationships through one-on-one relationship building, that may not be feasible at a scale where we’ve got 63,000 annual donors. The question is, how do we create a different kind of experience for grassroots-giving donors within the context of this theory of change? We may not be able to treat them all like major donors, but we can definitely treat them differently. That may look like increased engagement opportunities, civic engagement opportunities, increased action-taking, education cultivation, but we want is, for our donors not to feel as though we’re asking them for money every time we connect with them, but that we’re creating an experience that is equitable across our many giving programs. That said, I want to shift to this idea of a more just experience of philanthropy for staff and donors. We aspire to build a more diverse team and profession that we talk about as valuing the integrity and well-being of staff and donors more than the financial outcomes from our relationship building. We’ve linked in our handout to the community philanthropy staff bill of rights as one example. We’ve created standard operating procedures to try to make real that intent through the community philanthropy staff bill of rights. Some of our work includes safety planning templates for staff to prepare for experiences with donors, a strategic decision-making framework for ending relationships when that makes the most sense, and we’ve even begun to contemplate how to integrate restorative justice processes into our interactions with donors when harm has occurred. Those are just some examples and all of those examples can be linked to through the handout that we shared. From your experience, Vicky, Celia, Vivien, in no particular order, is our theory of change facilitating a more just experience of philanthropy for you, or based upon your insights for our donors, and if you think that’s true, how is it creating a more just experience? What does that look like? Vivien: For myself, I think that it’s a different kind of pressure, right? Instead of the pressure of raising financial goals, the pressure becomes to do right by your community, which is the type of pressure you want in this work. I think it’s true that leadership is, it takes vulnerability to try something new to put yourself out there, but in that vulnerability, we can learn about one another more authentically, and really make those connections and relationships that sustain us in this work. It therefore feels more collaborative, right? Vicky was talking about working within silos. When you’re working within this theory, you are more willing to be in relationship with your colleagues because you’re not feeling like you’re in competition with them. For me, it’s an opportunity to build community with one another, to build community with our neighbors, to build community with the larger ecosystem of organizations that are working towards social justice, because we’re operating in this theory of abundance, right? Like it’s not our donors, it’s not Oregon Food Bank donors. It’s our donors, it is our community and we are working toward the same vision. I hope for our donors that it, what it feels like is, that the relationships aren’t there just for relationship’s sake, it is relationship with purpose. Our Assistant Manager of Prospect Research, Brandon Baez, he’s so great at saying like, “All right, how is this relationship going to dismantle white supremacy?” I’m always like, “Oh, yes, such a good framework to bring into these donor conversations.” Right? It’s really like, it’s connecting our donors to meaningful action and meaningful steps to ending hunger and its root causes. Celia: I can go next. I’m already almost sad that we only have 15 minutes, [laughs] because there’s really so much to talk about that. I want to share what the Oregon Food Bank is really focusing on, and these are, a new leadership, a new story, a new bounty, a new local focus and a new wave. A shout out to Nicole, because she said or they said- sorry, I don’t know your pronouns- You know that you’re a visual learner and you want to be able to visualize what we’re doing. I’m going to try to give you a bit of visual examples for a new leadership. How has our theory of change shown in our new leadership? In recruiting for people to work for the food bank, it was important for us in this point of growth as we hire and recruit people, to find people who really understand what it means to be hungry, to have that lived experience. In the absence of lived experience, to really understand people who experience hunger are going through. We need to put them as leads in this. They can’t just be soldiers doing the task. They need to lead us because they know the best way to move us all forward. That’s an example of how we practice a new leadership. A new story. We live in a world that has been dictated by white supremacy and racial injustice for so long, that we felt the need not just to bring people along with us into our journey, because there’s a shift from equality to equity and how we view that is, instead of just rallying people along, we really need to put people who have been in the margins for so long at the center of our work. That is the story that we want to share, that is the story that we want people who believe in this journey with us to co-create with us. A new bounty. We want to operate in the spirit of abundance. As an example, when we have big partnerships, we feel like, maybe we can share some of those dollars with local partners who are not as big as the Oregon Food Bank but who are in partnership with us, not just financially but values-wise. Do they help us make calls to Congress when there’s a bill that needs to be pushed? Do they help volunteer with us? Looking at the new bounty, we share with them our resources and our heart. A new local focus. One of the big shifts that happened during COVID is that, we shifted food drives from being centralized to our headquarters, to sharing them directly to smaller pantries because it takes us about four to six weeks to actually process food before we are able to fully distribute them to regional food banks and different pantries. We felt, instead of routing all these food drives to the headquarters, especially with COVID and the challenges of not having volunteers to do repack shifts, why don’t we shift the focus to introducing smaller food pantries and also regional food bank directly to the donors, especially when they’re centrally located. It makes geographic sense to just have them deliver the food directly there. By doing that, we’re creating a stronger community by introducing partners to one another, providing the toolkit that would help them actually do that effectively because that’s one of our stronger resources. We’ve been doing this food resourcing and distribution for so long, we pretty much know how to do it quite well and so we share those resources. Then also as a new wave. We ask ourselves, what do we need to do in order to really question and fight systemic racism? That’s how we try to do our work and that’s how we try to practice our theory of change. In all this, we welcome people who are working at the food bank to present themselves in their fullness because we are not just workers, we’re human beings. We’re mothers, we’re parents, we’re fathers, we’re brothers, we’re family members, we’re friends, we’re lovers. We factor this in everything we do because we know that that is what fuels our passion for the work that we do. Vicky: Snaps. Thank you, Celia. Thank you. I hate to go after these two amazing answers. The last thing I’ll share on this, because I believe that what was shared was so beautifully stated and so true from my experience and my perspective as well is, I think that we are focused on doing what is right. That doesn’t mean it’s easy. It’s not easy to talk with your staff about, because of the systemic issues we’ve all been birthed into, people of color are under attack. With our policies, with our processes, with just the way we think it has been right to go about our work. How do we put a stop to that, and how do we acknowledge the fact that it’s not going to be perfect how we move this work forward, but we are committed to doing what is right, and evaluating our intentions and putting our actions behind our words. That is not easy to do. That takes a continual commitment to adjust experience for everyone involved. I think one of the tangible examples for me is diversifying what our portfolios look like. To me, it is not fair to come and give of myself in a profession where I am told, “Only white people, only old white men are worth speaking to because they have the power and the money, and so, I need you to set up these meetings with old white men, Vicky, and be harmed in the process and ask them for money.” That’s not fair. [laughs] That’s not fair to me. What is fair to me is, to actually be in a situation, to actually be in an environment where we value people’s values. We question, how is this going to hurt or harm our communities? Is this conversation, is this relationship worth it? Are we a part of perpetuating harm? It is fair for me to be able to bring my Black and Brown sisters and brothers to the table, to not only engage in conversation that can help us be better, hold us accountable to what we’re doing, but also can have a chance to throw money on the table too. Black and Brown people, I don’t know where the perception came that these communities don’t have money, these communities can’t be donors as well and can’t be treated with the utmost respect, but many times that is an assumption that is perpetuated through sometimes overt ways of doing the work and subtle ways of doing the work. A just experience for me is, creating fair game for everyone to figure out a way to contribute to this mission of eliminating hunger and its root causes. We’re all not starting from the same place. The standpoint of pull yourself up by your bootstraps, some of us weren’t given boots or straps. That’s just being real right there. I am committed to trying to even out the playing field and also being equitable. That means equality is like inviting everyone to the party, but oftentimes we don’t go to the equitable side and say, “You know what, everyone at the party is not going to get the same food. Some people are going to get a bigger amount of food because they’ve got a lot more barriers that stood in their way and folks need to be okay with that.” We are not functioning from a deficit mindset. We are functioning from, there is more than enough and how do we make it right to share these resources? It’s extremely important to me, and it’s extremely imperative, I think, that all of us question what are we doing to contribute to making a more just experience for everyone we touch in this profession, for everyone we onboard and we train and we mentor, for everyone we attach ourselves to as to be mentored? How are we creating an experience that is better than the one that we’ve experienced? This is like a pitch. Some of us may do the donors. Don’t you want to leave the world better than where you found it? [laughs] That’s just low-hanging fruit for lack of a better phrase. That same question I challenge all of us to ask ourselves is, how are we creating a fair, equitable, just, experience for everyone that we have the privilege of touching and for everyone who has entrusted themselves into our care? The most, again, the tangible experience for me that I’m extremely passionate about is, making sure I see some faces in our portfolios that look like me, that look like Celia, that look like Vivien, that look like Nathan, and they’re not all looking one way. It’s just not– we can do better than that. I just want to share that’s my experience and that’s what I’m really passionate about in terms of what we’re doing at the Oregon Food Bank. Nathan: I do think that we’re creating something better than we’ve ever known. One of Celia’s earlier comments, we haven’t figured it out yet. We’re in this process. We have many miles to go, even acknowledging that it’s not a destination we’re trying to reach, that it is in fact a journey of liberation as we talked about in our purpose statement as a department. There’s one final question that I think is important that we answer. It’s been given seven up votes in the Q&A chat. The question is about how the transformational change was embraced by board and leadership, how it was rolled out. There’s also some extra question about nuts and bolts. I just want to say that there’s a blog post I provided in the chat that you can link to it through the handout. From my point of view, a lot of organizational culture work had been done prior to January of 2020, at which point we embraced this change. Vivien was leading equity and fundraising discussions within the department for years. I showed up, two weeks on the job, I sent an email to the team saying, “We will no longer be evaluated based on the financial outcomes of our work, instead we will co-create new metrics rooted in love and equity.” I’m not necessarily advocating that that is the best way to initiate change, although it was our way, and you might find your own way. I would say that the team has experienced it both, an unhinging of inertia, and for some people that change was very uncomfortable. In our process of managing change, we were intentional about lifting what is your fear, and what are your assumptions about the consequences of this change that drive your fear? We tried at the very least to be very open and honest about that. As we close our time together, because we just have like one minute left, I want to ask Vicky, Celia, and Vivien, in response to that question with the seven upvotes, what advice would you give, very briefly, to anyone who is interested in making this change in their organizations? Vivien: I think you touched on this, Nathan. I think it is one thing to say we’re going to do this, but if the culture isn’t supportive of it, then you’re going to hit many walls. It is still worth trying. That first small step you can do is, start building that culture through many different ways. You can start a book club, you can start a little group of folks who are willing to explore what this means, learn, create a standard way of thinking and talk that standard way, but a common language amongst themselves. There’s that first step, is just really like culture setting. That is something that you can do with just a coalition of the willing. You don’t have to bring everyone along. You have to just identify who your allies are, who your accomplices are, and partner with them closely in moving the work forward. Celia: I just want to share that love really rocks, that love rules. It is love that will allow us to be our stronger selves, our braver selves, despite the fear and the challenges and the uncertainties and the unknown. Be brave. What does that mean for us? Everything we do, every gift, every volunteer work, every challenging conversations that we decide to take on and have this fight, you know how nervous we are by doing it. Every change that would bring people in the margins closer to the center, or closely linked with one another, is a radical act of love. That’s what I’m gunning for. Vicky: I’ll keep mine short. Encouragement is, anything is possible. There’s nothing you can’t do. It’s a matter of challenging your own assumptions. It’s a matter of figuring out what self care you need to do to let go of fear, and it’s a matter of acknowledging what you can’t control. You can be completely honest with yourself. You can control how you want to show up in this work. You can control how you will respond when injustices rise their ugly heads, but I just encourage everyone to take time and do that self care to make sure that you can show up as complete and as authentic as you can in this work. Know that we cannot do it unless folks are really ready to be transparent and offer their slice of genius to this conversation. We’re just not going to move as quickly, as fast, as effectively, if you’re holding back and you don’t lean in. That’s my main thing. Challenge yourself, lean in, give yourself some grace and practice having hard conversations so that when you have to have a really hard conversation, you’re ready. Nathan: I think the real work in transforming philanthropy is in those hard conversations. Our communities are desperate for solutions. We are sometimes therefore desperate for money, and some of us don’t have any other choice than to be sitting across the table for the sake of our communities asking for those resources. Where you have power and privilege to be across the table moving the conversation, shifting perspective, you have power and influence. It’s up to each of us to understand our responsibility and accountability, to leveraging that power and influence for the greater good. I’ll say it again, this profession has power and influence, so use it. Thanks, DonorPerfect community, for having us here today. Vicky, Celia, and Vivien, you are such an inspiration to me every single day, every single day. I’m just in awe always. Shaun: Got it. From the chat, it’s good that you four are rock stars. Everybody loves this. I want to thank you on behalf of DonorPerfect and everybody that joined. To the audience, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy days to come with us. We’ve got about 10 minutes before the next session, so please, if you got the time, check out the booths, rooms, and lounges, to gather some more information and learn some more tools that can help your organization. [silence] Speaker: [unintelligible 01:06:57]. Speaker: All is in there? Speaker: Yes. [01:07:03] [END OF AUDIO]