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Tuesday, July 21, 2020
Nominate a Change Maker. Deadline: Monday 3 August 2020
This should be interesting. Water and Sanitation. Thurs 23 July 9am EST
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Cities
on the Frontline Speakers Series #20
Thursday, 23 July 2020, 09.00 AM EST /
09.00 PM SIN-KUL time
Please join us for the 20th Session of
Cities on the Frontline, jointly organized by Global Resilient Cities
Network & the World Bank, which will focus on Water, Sanitation and
Hygiene in Crisis and Recovery. We will be joined by Japheth
Habinshuti N, Chief Resilience Officer (CRO) City of Kigali and Michael
John Webster, Executive Director: Water and Waste, City of Cape Town.
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After registering, you will receive a
confirmation email containing log-in info and a calendar detail that can be
added to your system.
Missed a session? For access to
the previous sessions' materials, visit our Speaker Series webpage for full
access to the presentations & recordings: https://bit.ly/citiesonthefrontline
For questions about the Speaker's
Series or additional registration requests, please send an email to our team
at media@resilientcitiesnetwork.org
Lauren N.
Sorkin
Acting Executive Director
Global Resilient Cities Network,
pioneered by The Rockefeller Foundation
London | Mexico City | New York
| Singapore
T: +1 732 718 5650 M: +65 9727
1371 Skype: lauren.irg T: @LaurenSorkin18
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Climate Change: Register for August 6, 2020 12:00pm - 1:00pm. Russell Strickland Executive Director Maryland Emergency Management Agency
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Climate Change: Register for July 24, 2020 12:00pm - 1:00pm with Ben Grumbles Secretary Maryland Department of the Environment
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Monday, July 20, 2020
Jul 29, 2020 12:30 PM. WPEC, AIM, UN Woman and AWLN Webinar
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0ocu2orTkvE9WMVluH-JjwLefsb6VxCXET
WPEC, AIM, UN Woman and AWLN Webinar | Building back a resilient post-COVID-19 economy: How to empower women businesses within a balanced ecosystem?
Worldwide, COVID-19 exceeded the level of global health emergency to become an unprecedented phenomenon of socioeconomic damage and regression.
Globally, 6.2% of women entrepreneurs own established businesses, about two-thirds the rate of men and although they are known to be ambitious and resilient, they have been literally tortured by the COVID-19 pandemic harmful consequences. The already existing challenging barriers to business that they had to overcome were overloaded by the pandemic tremendous effect that impacted society and economy worldwide.
Entrepreneurs are most successful when they operate in a well balanced ecosystem in which they have a direct and free access to financial, technological and economical resources whereas with the world devastation by the COVID-19 pandemic, all entrepreneurs need a support especially women. In this webinar, the focus will be on how can women owned businesses/entrepreneurs preserve their health and wellbeing, recover from the pandemic’s negative outcome and continue to lead the kind of lives that they value.
Globally, 6.2% of women entrepreneurs own established businesses, about two-thirds the rate of men and although they are known to be ambitious and resilient, they have been literally tortured by the COVID-19 pandemic harmful consequences. The already existing challenging barriers to business that they had to overcome were overloaded by the pandemic tremendous effect that impacted society and economy worldwide.
Entrepreneurs are most successful when they operate in a well balanced ecosystem in which they have a direct and free access to financial, technological and economical resources whereas with the world devastation by the COVID-19 pandemic, all entrepreneurs need a support especially women. In this webinar, the focus will be on how can women owned businesses/entrepreneurs preserve their health and wellbeing, recover from the pandemic’s negative outcome and continue to lead the kind of lives that they value.
Sunday, July 19, 2020
Philanthropists Bench Women of Color, the M.V.P.s of Social Change And we all lose out.
[...The impulse to gentrify. Philanthropists are
noticing the success of strategies innovated by women of color. But instead of
funding them at the source, they are writing checks so that larger, white-led
nonprofits can replicate their work. I refer to this trend as the
gentrification of social change movements.
This happened to the
hugely successful Black Mama’s Bailout campaign, which began in 2017 and has
freed hundreds of black women in dozens of cities nationwide. The brainchild of
Mary Hooks, a black lesbian organizer from the South, the campaign was brought
to life by community-based groups like Southerners on New Ground, of which she
is co-director, as well as the Movement for Black Lives.]...
Philanthropists Bench
Women of Color, the M.V.P.s of Social Change
And we all lose out.
In May, volunteers from
the #FreeBlackMamas bailout campaign rallied outside of a detention center in
Maryland.Credit...Michael Mccoy/Reuters
By Vanessa Daniel
Ms. Daniel is the
executive director of Groundswell, a foundation that supports grass-roots
organizing by women of color and transgender people of color.
Nov. 19, 2019
November begins the peak
season for charitable giving in the United States. Over the next several
months, donors and foundations will allocate billions of dollars to progressive
causes. And this year, the stakes are higher than ever: The future of the
climate, of abortion rights and of our democracy are on the line.
I run a national public
foundation, and I see up close that the people who are overrepresented in
success at social change — women of color who lead grass-roots nonprofits — are
wildly underrepresented in funding. Only 0.6 percent of foundation giving was
targeted to women of color in 2016. The record for individual donors is not
much better.
Our misdirected
philanthropy is costing us beyond measure. A mountain of evidence shows
progressive victories are surging up from groups led by women of color,
particularly black women, that build power on the ground — not trickling down
from large Beltway organizations headed by white men.
Consider the New Virginia
Majority, which orchestrated a nearly decade-long campaign to restore voting
rights to 173,000 people with felony convictions in that state under the
leadership of Tram Nguyen, its co-executive director. The group proved
instrumental in winning the expansion of Medicaid to nearly 400,000 people and
in turning the state blue in early November.
Or look at the National
Domestic Workers Alliance, run by Ai-jen Poo along with Alicia Garza and Jess
Morales Rocketto, which has wielded the power of its formidable membership base
to push nine states and Seattle to enact domestic worker bills of rights.
(Disclosure: My foundation awards grants to many of the organizations mentioned
in this essay.)
We could see many more
of these victories and on a larger scale. But the standard practice within
philanthropy is to favor mainstream white-led organizations while benching
women of color, including transgender women of color, the bold M.V.P.s of
social change. They go beyond asking for incremental gains to demand the full
scope of what all communities deserve. Unless something changes, this is how we
will all lose in 2020 and beyond.
Here are the main
reasons women of color are shut out of funding:
The false notion that
bigger is better. While most self-identified liberal philanthropists reject
trickle-down economics, they buy into “trickle-down social change,” a phrase
used by my colleague Carmen Rojas, the founder of the Workers Lab, which funds
ideas that build power for low-wage workers. This is the false belief that the
way to achieve the greatest impact is to invest in large, prominent, national
nonprofits that promise to deliver “at scale” despite having little organizing
heft at the local level.
This approach benefits
the mostly white-led groups that have, for decades, received generous support
to grow, while groups headed by women of color have been systematically locked
out of funding. The latter are then trapped in a cycle in which their budgets
are never large enough to qualify them for the funding they need to increase
their budgets.
Instead, more donors
should follow the example of the Funders for Reproductive Equity, a network of
grant-makers whose increased giving to grass-roots groups run by women of color
has helped win eye-popping victories. That happened in Oregon where a coalition
of local groups delivered the country’s best law on reproductive freedom in
2017.
The impulse to gentrify.
Philanthropists are noticing the success of strategies innovated by women of
color. But instead of funding them at the source, they are writing checks so
that larger, white-led nonprofits can replicate their work. I refer to this
trend as the gentrification of social change movements.
This happened to the
hugely successful Black Mama’s Bailout campaign, which began in 2017 and has
freed hundreds of black women in dozens of cities nationwide. The brainchild of
Mary Hooks, a black lesbian organizer from the South, the campaign was brought
to life by community-based groups like Southerners on New Ground, of which she
is co-director, as well as the Movement for Black Lives.
Mary Hooks, co-director
of Southerners on New Ground, developed the bailout campaign.Credit...Lynsey
Weatherspoon for The New York Times
But foundations run by
white people bypassed these alliances to pour millions of dollars into their
own campaigns in 2018. If this money had gone to leaders like Ms. Hooks, it
could have strengthened efforts to build power in the communities most affected
by the predatory cash bail system, a base of people that could be mobilized
again and again on other issues.
Adding insult to injury,
often a small grant will be offered to the woman of color’s nonprofit that
created the innovation to go teach a white-run group that has been awarded a
huge grant on how to adopt it. This lets philanthropists feel that they are
checking off the “people of color box” without having to change to whom they
are writing their checks or confronting their discomfort with trusting people
of color with money.
The proliferation of
smart strategies is a good thing. But the appropriation of work without proper
credit or compensation in ways that reinforce the exclusion of their creators
from resources and decision-making power is not. Moreover, most of these
strategies don’t deliver the same impact when executed by institutions headed
by white people that lack relationships and trust among people on the ground,
even when these institutions hire people of color to run programs.
There are movements in
this country, from excluded worker organizing to reproductive justice to
environmental justice, that were created by people of color who were unable to
be bold, authentic and accountable to their communities from within white-led
organizations. Gentrification should no longer be acceptable in philanthropy.
Implicit Bias.
Philanthropy is still overwhelmingly controlled by middle- to upper-class white
people, even though the numbers of donors and foundation staff members of color
are growing. Implicit bias affects which prospective grantees they deem risky,
credible, trustworthy or innovative, and gives a great advantage to leaders and
nonprofits that conform to their cultural norms. Facility in academic English,
slick marketing materials and connections with prestigious people and
institutions make it more likely that certain groups will gain funding.
I’ve seen repeatedly
that it’s far easier for a young affluent white man who has studied poverty at
Harvard to land a $1 million grant with a concept pitch than it is for a
40-something black woman with a decades-long record of wins in the impoverished
community where she works to get a grant for $20,000. This, despite the epic
volumes of paperwork and proof of impact that she will invariably have to
produce. She reads as risky, small, marginal. He reads as a sound investment,
scalable, mainstream.
Similarly, nonprofits
with glossy proposals are often seen as bankable even though some of them have
terrible reputations in the communities they serve, while groups with excellent
reputations on the ground and less slick proposals are often seen as risky.
Risk. With a few notable
exceptions, philanthropy is the white woman grabbing her purse when a black man
enters the elevator. People of color applying for funds face an immediate
presumption of unreliability. I’m often asked by donors how they can manage the
“risk” of funding grass-roots organizing headed by people of color. I ask them
to examine how they are managing the risk of not funding it.
A growing number of
foundation staff members are admitting the risk in their inherited white-only
grantee portfolios that have failed, for decades, to move the needle on the
issues their organizations care about. The good news is that there is a new
generation of foundation officers, many of them white, who are challenging the
prevailing notions of risk and transforming their lists of grantees.
Facially neutral rules.
Philanthropy’s eligibility criteria and metrics for impact often reinforce the
inequities that are at the core of the very problems it is trying to solve.
Many of them are “facially neutral”: never mentioning particular groups and at
first glance nondiscriminatory, but producing stark racial and gender
disparities in giving.
For example, most
reproductive rights grant-makers for decades limited their funding to
protecting the legal right to abortion. That was sufficient for most middle-
and upper-class white women, but sadly lacking for women of color, who face
numerous barriers to access abortion care that the legal right alone does not
remove, along with myriad attacks on their reproductive freedom. This had the
effect of cutting out women of color.
Fortunately, many
reproductive rights funders have since broadened their giving after realizing
that their single-issue focus was creating an anemic, racially homogeneous
movement that lacked the resources and people power to win legal rights or
anything else.
Elitist ideas of social
change. Philanthropy tackles the most difficult problems of our day but seeks
to involve the people most affected by them as little as possible. People with
race and class privilege often believe in fairy tales about where power comes
from and how social change occurs. When they sit down to write checks, they
express those beliefs.
In the sector, there is
a strong belief that more research reports would surely compel elected
officials to take action (missing the fact that credible reports on everything
from climate change to racial disparities in maternal health outcomes have
existed for years with little result). Or if only a fancy communications firm
could come up with a winning message and broadcast it via an aerial campaign,
that it would change behavior (even though the most trusted messengers come
from our communities). There is a belief that policy written in a vacuum by
well-paid lawyers in Washington is the way to win social change.
But affected communities
must have a hand in shaping a policy for it to be relevant, and in building the
community engagement necessary to pass it, defend it against repeal and watch
over its execution. In philanthropy, there is little belief in the efficacy of
collective action led by those most hurt by problems.
Once, in a meeting with
a multimillionaire, I made the case for funding grass-roots organizing, headed
by women of color, because they face the greatest barriers to reproductive
freedom. Sure, she responded, but who is going to tell them what to do?
Instead, donors should
listen to these leaders. They know what to do.
Every foundation ought
to shift a majority of its giving to groups headed by people of color. We must
write checks that support multi-issue organizing led by women of color on a
large scale. And instead of awarding grants for individual projects, donors
need to move toward multiyear, general-support funding so groups can expand.
This is how we build the power of communities to win, defend victories and win
again.
We funders ought to use
our access and relationships within philanthropy to open more minds and coffers
to this kind of work. With year-end giving approaching — and the future of our
planet, our reproductive freedom and our democracy at stake — there is a chance
to do just that.
Vanessa Daniel
(@vanessapdaniel) is the founder and executive director of Groundswell Fund and
Groundswell Action Fund, which support organizing led by women of color.
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A version of this
article appears in print on Nov. 20, 2019, Section A, Page 27 of the New York
edition with the headline: Philanthropists Bench the M.V.P.s. Order Reprints |
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National Latino
Farmers & Ranchers Trade Association
1029 Vermont
Avenue, NW, Suite 601
Washington, DC
20005
Office: (202)
628-8833
Fax No.: (202)
393-1816
Email: latinofarmers@live.com
Twitter: @NLFRTA
Website: www.NLFRTA.org
Food Security. Reflections from Feb 2020 thru the COVID-19 Crisis.
Change is coming soon
for struggling family farms | Jim Hightower
Jim Hightower
February 13, 2020
 |
Change is coming
soon for struggling family farms | Jim Hightower. By far the most abundant
commodity produced under corporate-centric agriculture policy is not corn,
cotton or cattle ,but stupidity.
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As we hurtle into the
2020s, the future of our food economy (and food itself) remains a fiercely
contested competition between diametrically opposed visions: a negative pole
consisting of the concentrated forces of corporate agribusiness, which view the
dinner plate strictly in terms of their own profit margins, and a positive
polarity of family farmers, consumers, food artisans, environmentalists and
other grassroots advocates of agriculture, who envision our food future from
the ethical perspective of sustainability and democratic control.
Of course, in this
Time of Trump, the corporate interests rule national policy. If there ever was
any doubt about which vision the Trumpeteers would push, it was erased by the
little-known fellow he appointed to head the Department of Agriculture: Sonny
Perdue of Georgia. Hailing from the No. 1 peanut-producing state in the
country, Sonny has proven to be the biggest goober of all. As chief of the
agency created by former President Abraham Lincoln specifically to assist
America's small farmers and rural communities, Perdue has been AWOL, blithely
reclining in his ornate Washington office while farm prices have continued to
plummet, bankruptcies have soared and farmer suicides have surged.
Bizarrely, this
no-show even has found great hilarity in his constituents' crises. In August, when
producers began publicly protesting the increasing financial pain that
President Donald Trump's trade games with China were inflicting on them, their
ag secretary responded with snark.
"What do you call
two farmers in a basement?" he asked at an ag industry gathering. "A
whine cellar," he guffawed.
More:A bountiful
harvest takes work | Jim Hightower
Then, in October,
Perdue suddenly bared his corporate soul by impersonating Earl Butz. You might
recall that Butz, former President Richard Nixon's secretary of agriculture,
had infamously commanded family farmers to "get big or get out,"
warning them to "adapt" to the corporate-dictated food economy he was
promoting, "or die." Likewise, appearing at a Wisconsin dairy industry
expo, Perdue rose on his hind legs and smugly lectured the state's hard-hit
farmers on the theoretical framework of Trumpenomics: "In America,"
he icily instructed, "the big get bigger, and the small go out." So
there you have it — the Sonny and Donnie farm program boils down to two words:
Adios, chumps!
By far the most
abundant commodity produced under the corporate-centric agriculture policy
that's been in place for 50 years is not corn, cotton or cattle, but stupidity.
While some years have been worse than others, Washington's overall policy
approach has consistently exploited farmers, our land and water, agricultural
workers, taxpayers, food quality and rural communities — all to further enrich
the handful of monopolistic profiteers that now control both the policy and
policymakers. And we're presently in year six of the worst farm crisis since
the disastrous 1980s.
But hark! What light
is this that glows on yon horizon? Why, it's some new policy ideas that are
emanating not from corporate front groups, Congress or other bastions of the
status quo, but from the grassroots. Family farmers themselves have coalesced
with other political outsiders and victims of Big Ag to put forth a complete
overhaul of industrial agribusiness policies, supplanting them with sensible,
democratic approaches to serve the common good. The most cohesive and
comprehensive compilation of these solutions has come from Sen. Elizabeth
Warren's plan for "a new farm economy," which offers the big
structural changes necessary to, in her words, "break the stranglehold
that giant agribusinesses have over our farm economy." Her proposals
literally have percolated up from the grassroots, for her ag "brain
trust" primarily consists of dirt farmers and rural advocates. In dozens
of small gatherings across Iowa and elsewhere, these ground-level, hands-on
experts have hammered out pragmatic ideas that really would work to produce a
democratic and sustainable farm prosperity.
Building on the
successful "supply management" approach of the New Deal, Warren's
proposal stops the constant "overproduction of commodities," which
keeps busting farm prices and is drastically straining our environment; cuts
billions from taxpayer subsidies that mainly go to wealthy agribusiness
operations; provides effective incentives to get farmers to convert swaths of
their land from intensive production to conservation practices that mitigate
climate change; strengthens and enforces anti-trust laws to break up and
prevent ag monopolies that are bilking farmers; provides hands-on assistance to
help farmers, workers and rural communities build local and regional systems to
free them from dependence on multinational food giants; and purposefully
expands opportunities for beginning, female and racially diverse farmers.
Jim Hightower
Just as corporate
powers have spent half a century rigging the food economy to serve their
selfish interest, so can we create a new one to serve the common interest. The
place to start is with a plan: Visit Warren's website for her full farm plan.
Populist author,
public speaker and radio commentator Jim Hightower writes "The Hightower
Lowdown," a monthly newsletter chronicling the ongoing fights by America's
ordinary people against rule by plutocratic elites.
National Latino
Farmers & Ranchers Trade Association
1029 Vermont
Avenue, NW, Suite 601
Washington, DC
20005
Office: (202)
628-8833
Fax No.: (202)
393-1816
Email: latinofarmers@live.com
Twitter: @NLFRTA
Website: www.NLFRTA.org
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