Charles Schwab’s annual skills-based volunteer event taps into employees’ professional expertise to build nonprofit capacity and create long-term community impact.
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.
Skills for Cities Spring 2021 is dedicated to building the capacity of Midwest nonprofits as they continue to respond to COVID-19, racial inequity, and the digital divide.
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.
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.
“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.”
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?
Pro Bono Week 2020 came at a time of unprecedented difficulty, but in spite of that, it produced some of the most inspiring – and most necessary – cross-sector collaborations we’ve ever witnessed.
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.
In the middle of COVID and post-COVID, we have to have a lens of racial and social equity. We have to recognize the gaps and imbalances that exist in our community, the misdistribution of resources, and how that has disproportionately impacted the places and spaces where Black and Brown communities live and struggle to thrive.
