Organizations Are Speaking Out Against Racial Injustice. What Comes Next Will Be Crucial.
This moment presents an opportunity for businesses to defy expectations and meaningfully advance racial justice.
Topic: Business Case
S3E03: Delores Morton, Step Up
Growing up, there weren’t any women around me who had taken the same career path I did, but what they did do was instill in me a belief that I could aim high, and these Black women are still a part of my life and my story.
Charles Schwab Pro Bono Challenge 2020 Champions Financial Literacy for Social Justice, COVID-19 Relief, and Military Communities
Charles Schwab’s annual skills-based volunteer event taps into employees’ professional expertise to build nonprofit capacity and create long-term community impact.
S3E02: Mei Cobb, United Way Worldwide
If we really believe in creating lasting change, we have to find ways for everyone to be part of that – not just our friends, not just the people we know, and maybe not just doing the things we can think of… 2021 is a great time for that to happen.
S3E01: Vu Le, NonprofitAF
[There is] this narrative of ‘This is not who we are,’ when a lot of us, and I think a lot of folks from marginalized communities – Black, Indigenous folks, etc. – are saying, ‘This is exactly who we are, who we have been.’ I think about it like a twelve step program where you cannot really heal and change if you don’t go through the first step, which is to admit you have a problem, and we just haven’t done that. We as a nation just have not acknowledged that we have a problem here. This is who we are.
S2E27: Reflections on a Challenging, Clarifying, Transformative Year
There’s been an intense focus on getting back to normal, but what this year and our Pro Bono Perspectives guests have highlighted is that normal is not okay and we don’t want to go back there. That to me is the light that is shining through the cracks: we are coming out of 2020 with a new and clear mandate for social and racial justice and a renewed sense of purpose.
S2E26: Tom Crohan, John Hancock
It’s really important for those of us in a position of power – as a funder with nonprofit organizations especially – to be very transparent about it and not allow it to be a barrier for meaningful partnership. We’re not going to have the impact that we want to have if it’s us telling you exactly how we want you to run programs for us; it will be far more fruitful for us to have a conversation about the outcomes we seek to achieve – ideally together – and then to think about resources we have or you have and hopefully align on the impact we can have together.
Make an Impact in Just One Day
“This experience helped me realize that things I see as core to my daily job or skills I employ day-to-day are still new, thought-provoking, and helpful for others to recognize the true assets that exist within their organizations.”
S2E25: Shalu Umapathy, IDEO.org
How do we put the [communities] in the driver’s seat? When we’re investing our time and our resources and our energy, how are we shifting the power that may have sat with funders who might have pre-determined what those criteria were, and create a new set of criteria around investments?
S2E24: Edgar Villanueva, Schott Foundation
I don’t think that any foundation has the right to go into a community to say, ‘This is what needs to be here and how you need to be doing your work,’ when they’re not from that community and don’t have relationships with that community. It’s just about trust. The least that a foundation can do is move funding and support nonprofits in a holistic way, understanding that there’s no price tag that can be put on the interventions and services that are being offered.