“...it's really hard to promote the history of Black people and not address the inequities being experienced by Black people…it just felt disingenuous to not find a way to bring these things together.” Nneka Allen joins Michelle, to talk about her essay in the newly released book Collecting Courage for which she is co-author and co-editor. In this episode, Nneka shares the deep and meaningful work of saving one of the Underground Railroad sites - the Nazary AME Church (part of the Amherstburg Freedom Museum) learning her ancestors were leaders in that movement, and the failure of a Board of Directors, to center the current-day struggles of their community. We talk about aligning ourselves with the demands of love, forgiveness, the power of storytelling, and attachment styles! Don't miss this!

The UK has had a foundational influence in building the problematic philanthropic and nonprofit sectors (Third Sector) in the US and other countries, which is why we are so happy to go straight to the source! Host Michelle Muri talks with Andy King and Tom DeFraine of UK podcast Fixing Fundraising! From topics like Captain Tom and the injustice of fundraising for government programs that should be funded by taxation, Brexit, the political nature of any nonprofit, dog whistles, the role of patronage in the UK, Prince Andrew’s fall from patronage, Prince Williams, a brief word about drones and fireworks, to the terrible practices the UK is adopting from the US...we promise you’ll chuckle or even laugh out loud! Yes, even in a pandemic.

“...the processes we’ve used in evaluation are perpetuating a lot of the harms we thought we were helping with…” “we’re all using data problematically!” In this season finale, host Michelle Shireen Muri talks with Anna Rebecca Lopez and Vu Le about how the traditional ways that data has been collected and used can be harmful - causing misrepresentation, oppression and erasure. Anna Rebecca shares her personal journey with deep academic cred as a data nerd and disruptor and the three talk about what questions we must ask to truly center our communities.

“...as activists...we really need to undertake our own healing as a way of transforming society. If we try to transform society from the level of consciousness that’s still traumatized and it’s reactive, then we are recreating the same patterns that have oppressed us.” In this episode, Michelle talks with Victoria Santos, a deep healer, community organizer, and brilliant facilitator who shares her self-healing journey after trauma and burnout. Listen as she shares wisdom around what we need to release and practice to serve a better society.

Episode Summary

“Faulty.” “Problematic.” “Racist.” In this episode, we talk about why these terms are now regularly used to describe the foundations that the nonprofit and philanthropic systems were built upon. Guest Christina Shimizu, a co-founder of Community-Centric Fundraising, briefly explores the relatively recent history of how these systems came to be, why they are built on deep injustices and how philanthropy and nonprofits are actually a political and economic system.

Unpack all of this with us! If we don’t examine how these things came to be, we can never hope to reimagine them, improve them or do better, to benefit the communities we are trying to serve.

“...while we know that systemic racism is real and we know that funders aren’t really supporting and investing in brown and black communities, when you see the data, it's staggering. And it's amazing to me how complacent we can get sometimes, even in our advocacy.” Community foundations are supposed to serve their communities! But many community foundations use the same donor-centrism philosophies that our nonprofits do, centering white communities and wealth. In this episode, Heather Infantry, a fundraiser, executive director and organizer, tells us the story of how she called out her local community foundation and started a huge transformational shift in her community of Atlanta, Georgia.

In this episode, we’re dipping into the world of kink, and BDSM - and specifically consent. With so much awful news, subjugation, disaster, political oppression and disempowerment, it is easy to brush past some of the day-to-day tools we can use to regain power. In this episode, we explore the framework of consent, applied beyond the kink world, with kink-trainer and activist L.T. We’ll talk about boundary setting, renegotiation, clear communication, power dynamics in npos and more. So buckle up and get ready for juicy, beautiful content. “..we know we have a culture that is at best, murky around consent. None of us has ever lived in a consent culture, so we don’t know what to model it after, so we are all building this together.”

From tokenism to using community as unpaid consultants, from structural oppression to...more gatekeeping, and identity-based privilege, former City Councilman turned DEI consultant, Chuck Warpehoski, talks with Michelle about the common and -tired- ways in which institutions perform or attempt to work with the community and common pitfalls. Chuck also shares personal stories of mistakes he’s made while working to serve the community as a white man.

“A lot of us, white women, are coming to our work with some deep martyrdom as the motivator. And this equation of ‘my worth is dependent on how helpful I am…’ well, helping is just the sunny-side of control.” With white women as the primary demographic of the nonprofit workforce, this episode begins addressing white women in their role as gatekeepers. In this episode, Fleur Larsen, a DEI consultant and a white woman, talks with Michelle to answer questions like: Why are there so many white DEI consultants making money off of racism? What does gatekeeping look like? How do you know you are gatekeeping and what should you do when you are called out? How do you call out a gatekeeper? Our attached bonus episode covers the elements of her life and history that have shaped her work.

During a double pandemic and a recession, hear a powerful story about how and why one organization decided to make the somewhat radical decision to retain all staff and give raises. This inspirational story comes from Ananda Valenzuela, Interim ED of RVC, who talks with Michelle about how these decisions were made and how their family and personal history have shaped their work and worldview.