Category: Local

Resources to Support BIPOC People, as Recommended by NationSwell Council Members

Posted on by Anthony Smith

Amid the dual pandemics of racist violence and COVID-19, leaders in the NationSwell Council have recommitted themselves to the fight against white supremacy. We’ve asked our members what resources have helped them support their BIPOC team members and stakeholders. Below is a running list of what they’re sharing, updated as they continue to share them.

The Opportunity Network’s Anti-Racism Resources and Tools

“The Opportunity Network is committed to our Active Core Value to Center Social and Racial Equity Relentlessly through our pedagogical practices, engagement activities, and programming. We recognize our country’s long history of structural oppression and deeply rooted racism and brutality, and have compiled the below anti-racism resources for our students, families, and fellow educators. We’d be happy to have information about these shared in the article NationSwell is posting on the website in May to support or inspire others to use their platform to speak out against racially based violence. 

Zenit’s BIPOC Journal for Healing & Liberation

Member Alina Liao shares, “This journal has sections with guided prompts for processing racism and racial trauma, affirming our humanity and innate self-worth, deepening our connection with our ancestors, and taking steps toward healing and liberation.”

Journal for Aspiring White Anti-Racists 

This journal guides aspiring white allies in doing the important reflection needed to unlearn old beliefs and learn new beliefs that advance racial justice and equity. Alina says, “I figure this can be something BIPOC folx share with white friends/colleagues who keep asking them, ‘What can I do?’ which can be quite tiring.”

A podcast episode on Octavia Butler and her Legacy, by NPR’s Throughline

Author Ramtin Arablouei writes, “What Butler saw in our future matters more today than ever. She saw a world headed toward collapse. She saw a Black, female prophet who understood that nothing was inevitable, that we have the power to change things and change course. On some level, as a 13-year-old, I understood that Butler’s work was not just a warning but also an invitation. It invites us to let go of the conventions that can lock us into a destructive future and to embrace our greatest power, to change. She introduces us to a humanist vision for the future that makes space for metaphysical spirituality without the need for a traditional, omnipotent God-figure… Butler, who died in 2006 at age 58. is remembered as one of the greatest American science fiction writers. As we celebrate Black History Month, we should also remember her as a prophetic visionary like so many before her. She imagined worlds like the one we are living in, but encouraged each of us to dream our own dreams and to respond to the fear of uncertainty with creativity and bravery.”

Vox, The History of Tensions — and Solidarity — Between Black and Asian Communities, Explained

An article explaining the history of how “white supremacy tried to divide Black and Asian Americans — and how communities worked to find common ground.”

Policing in America, by NPR’s Throughline

From NPR: “Black Americans being victimized and killed by the police is an epidemic. As the trial of Derek Chauvin plays out, it’s a truth and a trauma many people in the US and around the world are again witnessing first hand. But this tension between African American communities and the police has existed for centuries. This week, the origins of policing in the United States and how those origins put violent control of Black Americans at the heart of the system.”

Screams & Silence by NPR’s Code Switch

From NPR: “Asian American organizers and influencers have been trying to sound the alarm over a dramatic spike in reports of anti-Asian racism over the last year, and have been frustrated by the lack of media and public attention paid to their worries. Then came last week, when a deadly shooting spree in Georgia realized many of their worst fears and thrust the issue into the national spotlight.”

Nikkolas Smith

An artist whose art and activism has been shared on social media by has been shared on social media by Michelle Obama, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, Van Jones, Shaun King, Rihanna, Colin Kaepernick, Janet Jackson, Viola Davis, Jamie Foxx, Erykah Badu, Lupita Nyong’o, Kendrick Lamar, Tracee Ellis Ross, Ava Duvernay, Common, Simone Biles, Miley Cirus, Mark Ruffalo, Amy Schumer and many others.

Samasama

An Artist Collective endeavoring to shine a light on amazing creatives within the Asian American and Pacific Islander community and fellow artists of color.

If you’d like to share a resource, please get in touch.

“Stuff Is Broken. Let’s Fix It”: Sandra Goldmark on Why We Need the Circular Economy

Posted on by NationSwell Team

Every day, the average American produces five pounds of trash a day.

It’s a number that might not seem like a lot, but at scale, it’s staggering: By the end of one year, America as a nation has produced 268 million tons of new trash — enough garbage to fill 12,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

And of those millions of tons of new waste that end up in our landfills, less than a third of it is recyclable. That means that solving this problem will take so much more than just recycling better, and more often — it’ll take radically rethinking our relationship with how we purchase, what we purchase, how frequently we purchase, and perhaps most importantly, what we do with the things we have when we’re ready to throw them away.

In honor of Earth Day 2021, NationSwell is launching a content series exploring solutions from the Circular Economy, which the Ellen MacArthur Foundation defines as “a systemic approach to economic development designed to benefit businesses, society, and the environment. In contrast to the ‘take-make-waste’ linear model, a circular economy is regenerative by design and aims to gradually decouple growth from the consumption of finite resources.”

To kick off this series, I spoke with NationSwell Council member Sandra Goldmark, Director of Campus Sustainability and Climate Action for Barnard College, who quite literally wrote the book on the Circular Economy. Here’s what she had to say.

NationSwell: Thank you so much for speaking with me, Sandra. To start things off, would you be able to define the Circular Economy for our readers?

Sandra Goldmark: A big part of what we do as humans is extract resources from the earth. We turn them into things, and use them, and then we’re done with them. Right now we operate in a linear system where those goods just go right back into the earth, in the form of landfill.

But a circular system, and a circular economy, are different. When we move towards a circular system, we harness those resources and feed them into new processes, products, or goods. And along the way, increase, access, health and benefits for the human communities working on those goods. There’s no material that is ever considered unused. Just like in the natural world, every by-product or outcome of any process gets fed back into another process.

Why do we so urgently need to shift towards a circular system as soon as possible?

Right now, thank God, we are really beginning to take some serious strides on climate change. Biden has laid out a really impressive infrastructure plan. We are all of a sudden looking at transitioning our entire car fleet essentially to electric vehicles over the next 10 to 20 years.

However, if we build all that infrastructure, build all those new cars, build all those energy efficient appliances with the old linear model, then yes, we’ve switched to renewable energy, but we have not eased the pressure on the natural resources, which is a huge problem. We can’t approach our new climate plans as though switching to renewables is the only thing we need to do to be truly sustainable. We need to adopt a circular economy by building new systems and infrastructure and objects with existing, pre-extracted resources — rather than extracting new ones.

In your book, you talk about how the Circular Economy advances equity. Can you talk about how?

My entree into circularity really came from thinking about waste and environmental impacts. But as soon as I began actually looking at it, I realized very quickly that you can’t separate the human, the social impacts and the environmental impacts of these broken practices. Not that they’re one in the same, but they’re so closely linked that you really can’t look at one without looking at the other.

Look at a garment that you might buy. If it is cheap and poorly made, that means that the person making it was paid very, very little. That means that most likely the community where it was made was facing some negative environmental impacts from the manufacturer of that garment. And that means that most likely it won’t last very long and it will go to landfill.

And so if you start thinking about a different kind of garment, one where the person making it was paid a fair wage, where the true cost of the materials and the distribution of it from an environmental standpoint was paid for, you might be looking at a more durable garment. One that is, for example, repairable, where all of a sudden, a local artisan where you live might earn some money fixing it and where it could be passed on to somebody else when you’re done with it — maybe at a lower cost than the original price for a new garment.

And so all of a sudden there are these cascading benefits to rethinking what we pay for the objects that we make. Can we pay a little more to have new objects that are higher quality? Can we pay to have things fixed? Can we pay to have systems for circulating things within the community? And thereby increasing wages for manufacturers, increasing access to quality goods at the local community level and creating local jobs… it’s all there as soon as you start to look.

And in fact, the roots of the problem are also all about how much we’re paying people. Like, there’s no way we’re going to have repair shops exist again in the United States in a robust way if we’re competing against these artificially low wages overseas. So fighting for fair wages overseas is actually, when you’re looking at a circular model, is also a way of fighting for local jobs. Those jobs can be in the reuse and repair sector. It doesn’t have to be an either or. It doesn’t have to be like overseas jobs versus ours. It can be both.

What are things that individuals can do right now to live with circularity in mind?

This is the easiest thing in the entire world. Every single person in the United States today can radically reshift the amount of used goods that they buy, decrease the amount of new goods they buy and increase the amount of used goods. When they buy new, they should make a real effort to buy things that are sustainably and ethically made. And that those new purchases can become much more rare and used goods should be the majority of your stuff diet.

What can businesses do to develop healthy models for growth? And what might you say to an entrepreneur who might be thinking right now, “Sure, circularity is great and everything, but isn’t this all bad for my bottom line?”

We need to rethink our business models for businesses large and small. Most businesses that make and sell stuff are locked into a model where their entire source of revenue is manufacturing and selling more and more new goods. Now, if those goods are green or sustainable, great. But if your only business model is always about selling more new stuff, it’s not going to work. We need to build business models that have some revenue from good new stuff, some revenue from reuse/refurbishment, some revenue from repair/reuse/recycling. We need to have a diversified business model where businesses are actually making money from something other than selling new goods.

What’s the policy side of this? What can we support at the federal or local level?

So the policy part of that is huge. I always like to think about it as small and big. On the small level, there are local municipal level policies that can make a big impact. Pay-as-you-throw waste pickup, mandatory composting, all of these kinds of policies that will incentivize the right behavior. We could begin to be giving tax breaks to repair service providers, to reuse businesses. That’s more like at the city or state level. At the federal level, in this new infrastructure bill, we need to be plugging a huge amount of money into circularity, not just green manufacturing, green remanufacturing. And at the global level, the number one thing that we need to do is demand better international labor standards.

Sandra Goldmark is Director of Campus Sustainability for Barnard College.

The Freedom, Power, and Space to Lead: A Profile of Jonathan Jayes-Green

Posted on by NationSwell Team

Perched at the top of Jonathan Jayes-Green’s professional biography on the Marguerite Casey Foundation’s website, there sits a small quote from Lucille Clifton, former Maryland Poet Laureate, which reads: “come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed.”

It’s not your typical professional first impression — especially for a top leader at an organization that disperses millions of dollars in grants a year. But then again, Marguerite Casey Foundation is far from your typical grantmaking foundation, the sort that tend to be progressive in their desire for change but conservative in their attempts to actually enact it; the sort whose fundraising efforts correctly identify the urgent, life-or-death stakes facing our society’s most marginalized, only to end up grantmaking through the traditional, risk-averse methods that predate their new rhetoric.

Jonathan Jayes-Green, Vice President of Programs at Marguerite Casey Foundation

Marguerite Casey Foundation actually walks the walk, and a new wave of top leaders like Jayes-Green, its Vice President of Programs, are a big part of how the foundation is making good on its commitment to “support leaders, scholars and initiatives focused on shifting the balance of power in society — building power for communities that continue to be excluded from shaping how society works and from sharing in its rewards and freedoms.”

For Jayes-Green, that commitment spans their entire career. An activist, strategist, and organization builder, in 2016, they founded the UndocuBlack Network, a “multi-generational network of currently and formerly undocumented Black people that fosters community, facilitates access to resources, and advocates to transform the realities of [Black] people.” Its services to its community include support with applying for DACA, the establishment of a mental health initiative “to underscore and address the trauma that [the undocumented Black] community experiences,” and creating local meetups as “safe spaces for attendees to develop kinship amongst other Black undocumented immigrants.” In 2019, Senator Elizabeth Warren hired Jayes-Green to be the Director of Latinx Outreach for her presidential campaign.

Throughout their career, Jayes-Green has seen some of the biggest problems affecting our most marginalized communities up close and personal. In a Zoom interview, they tell me that one of the biggest challenges they face as an activist and a philanthropic organization leader is the deluge of money the activist right pours into fighting national battles across multiple local fronts.

“We in the progressive movement are not that clear about the role of money in the fights that we’re fighting,” Jayes-Green said. “When it comes to radical organizing, the resources are just not there. And then you look at the right, and the amount of resources the right has, and the amount of institutional power the right has — it’s just not a fair fight.”

Jayes-Green hopes that Marguerite Casey Foundation can be the model for a new and urgently needed era of philanthropy, a bold approach that uses smart systems-building — which Jayes-Greens calls “the radical act of process building” — to counter the activist right’s deep pockets. 

“Philanthropies and foundations spend the bulk of their time focused on due diligence,” Jayes-Green explains, “but what the f*ck is a safe investment in a crumbling system within a crumbling global economy?” 

“Our job at Marguerite Casey Foundation is to give our grantees the freedom, power, and space to lead,” they say. “We can be thought partners to them. But it’s also asking ourselves, how do we encourage the rest of our field to operate the way we operate?” 

One key way Jayes-Green helps to encourage their foundation — and by extension, their field — to operate: funding leaders in traditionally underfunded fields with life-changing, no strings attached grants. Such was the case with the foundation’s Freedom Scholars, twelve experts who received $250,000 to pursue their radical ideas. 

“Freedom Scholars reflect the commitment of Marguerite Casey Foundation and Group Health Foundation to work as partners in service of these scholars and their work — to help these leaders be freer,” Marguerite Casey Foundation and its partner said in a joint statement. “We know if these scholars have resources and support, they will shift the balance of power in this country toward economic and social justice. The awards honor the long arc of freedom organizing by and for Black, Indigenous, queer and poor people, migrants and all People of Color.”

That last part is personal for Jayes-Green, a queer undocumented Black leader in a position to push for paradigm shift.

“We can have a country and a world where people have their human rights respected and their basic needs met,” Jayes-Green affirms. “My message to other funders is to stick it out. Double down on investing in communities of color, in work that’s more clearly ideological. There is no economic justice without racial justice, without trans liberation. We can track, record, envision, and transform what democracy actually looks like.”

A Note From NationSwell on the Surge in Violence Against AAPI Communities

Posted on by NationSwell Team

a supermarket snack run with my family. Ahead of me in line was a very nice lady who was having a very nice conversation with the cashier, also very nice.

As I bagged my groceries next to her, this very nice lady looked over at me, leaned in and said, “If you don’t know how to behave here, then maybe you and your family should go back to your country.”

It wasn’t the first time I’d experience racism in public for being Asian, nor would it be the last. But it’s the one that’s stuck with me while all the others blur together — how in one moment, a moment to which I bore witness, this person was so very kind and warm; and then, in the next moment, so cruel. 

I write to you, a little more than a decade later, amid a surge in targeted violence against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders that shows no signs of stopping; one that seemed to start last year, around the time our former president started referring to COVID-19 as “the China virus.” I’m writing to you just one month after a Filipino man was slashed on a New York City subway train, his cries for help ignored by his fellow passengers. I’m writing to you the morning after a gunman opened fire at an Asian-run spa in Georgia, killing eight people, at least six of them Asian women who worked there. According to a witness, the gunman screamed, “I’m going to kill all Asians.” While in custody, the suspect told police that he was driven not by racial animus but by a drive to “eliminate… temptation.” 

And as I write to you today to tell you that I am afraid, that I am grieving, and that I share in your fear and your grief, I am also thinking about that moment in that supermarket. I am thinking about how these problems may have been exacerbated by our last president’s rhetoric, but they didn’t start with him. And if they didn’t, then the solution cannot be short term, either.

Building it back better for all of us means that the solution must advance justice for every last one of us. The solution must start with acknowledgments, at the federal and state level, of the centuries of racism and systemic violence against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. 

We cannot fix this if we do not name it first.

It’s Time for Philanthropy to Be Brave

Posted on by NationSwell Team

“In an age defined by a chasm between those who have power and those who don’t, elites have spread the idea that people must be helped, but only in market-friendly ways that do not upset fundamental power equations,” Giridharadas writes. “By refusing to risk its way of life, by rejecting the idea that the powerful might have to sacrifice for the common good, it clings to a set of social arrangements that allow it to monopolize progress and then give symbolic scraps to the forsaken — many of whom wouldn’t need the scraps if the society were working right.” 

Amid the dual pandemics of COVID-19 and racial injustice, we’ve seen how untenable and inequitable our society’s way of life has become. If we are to truly build back better — a phrase coined by disaster relief experts and championed by many, including President Joe Biden, during 2020 — then we must also build a better, braver philanthropy: one that eschews tinkering around the edges of a broken system, for supporting ambitious new solutions that shape new systems where everyone has a right to security and happiness. 

Leaders and luminaries within the NationSwell Council are already making the case for this new, sometimes provocative approach to philanthropy — and pushing their peers to join them in working towards that seachange.

“As a leader of a corporate philanthropy, I experience this moment of reckoning from a unique perspective,” Paurvi Bhatt, president of Medtronic Foundation, said in Stanford Social Innovation Review. “Like me, many of my colleagues in corporate philanthropy and global health are compelled to reflect: Are we truly considering how systems in our societies are driving our divisions? Are we tapping into [our] full potential … to deliver social impact that achieves real change? And specifically, are we as leaders taking the time to appreciate our own history, our role and influence, and how we need to evolve as stewards of resources in this time?”

During a digital convening for NationSwell’s #BuildItBackBetter initiative, Wes Moore, CEO of Robin Hood Foundation, asked big funders to rethink their role in society: “We have to remember that our job [in the philanthropic sector] is not to make pain tolerable. Our job is to break down why the pain exists in the first place, and make sure people don’t have to keep going through it. There is actually a unique role that philanthropy can play. It can be the seed capital, the risk capital, the thing that’s able to address and come up with things that have the potential to be scalable, show how to be scalable and pass them on to our governmental partners to address it in the long term. Philanthropy should not be thinking about itself as a line item.”

In 2020, NationSwell institutional member Marguerite Casey Foundation, an organization committed to the belief that “working people should have the power to shape our democracy and economy,” joined with Group Health Foundation to create The Freedom Scholars Award: an annual $250,000 award to each of twelve of “the nation’s boldest scholars [standing] at the forefronts of movements for economic and social justice… creating the catalytic ideas for transformative change.” 

“Freedom Scholars reflect the commitment of Marguerite Casey Foundation and Group Health Foundation to work as partners in service of these scholars and their work — to help these leaders be freer,” the foundations said in a joint statement. “We know if these scholars have resources and support, they will shift the balance of power in this country toward economic and social justice. The awards honor the long arc of freedom organizing by and for Black, Indigenous, queer and poor people, migrants and all People of Color.”

Recipients of the award include Dr. Megan Ming Francis, an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Washington, Dr. Barbara Ransby, a historian of the Black Freedom Movement and political activist and Dylan Rodriguez, a professor in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside.

Rodriguez still remembers the moment he realized the full extent of the generosity of the grant. 

“I remember being on the call and thinking, wow, the twelve of us get to split $250,000, that’s so incredible, we can do so much with that money,” Rodriguez said. “When I realized we got $250,000 each… I still can’t believe it.”

Rodriguez’ incredulity comes from within a decades-spanning historical context. He said he’s been so used to the “non profit industrial complex” ignoring or eschewing academics in fields like the Freedom Scholars’, whose work is drastically underfunded when compared to other academics whose work largely supports the status quo of society as we know it.

It’s a sentiment echoed by Erica Kohl-Arenas, a fellow Freedom Scholar and a professor of American Studies at the University of California, Davis.

“My scholarship often critiques the ways in which institutions, philanthropy and professionalization have compromised poor people led movements — something I also personally experienced while working in the field,” she said. “While I am donating some of the funds to radical social movement organizations that I believe in, the unrestricted individual award has truly unlocked my thinking about how I might best use these unexpected one-time resources completely outside of the academic university framework.”

That’s how Kohl-Arenas found her way to reviving an education center in the Mendocino County redwoods that her parents founded in 1979.

“I aim to restore the center to offer as a resource for radical educators, scholars, organizers and artists in the years to come,” she said. “I never dreamed of having the resources to do this.” 

Rodriguez is optimistic that if more foundations follow Marguerite Casey’s model of funding radical thinkers, then philanthropy can actually fund equitable change, catalyze the urgently needed shifts in the balance of power and catalyze the activists, organizers and scholars who are pushing for this change.

Learn more about Marguerite Casey Foundation and the Freedom Scholars here.

An Interview With Shelly Bell, Founder and CEO of ‘Black Girl Ventures’

Posted on by NationSwell Team

The Kauffman Foundation works together with organizations that share their vision and passion for education, entrepreneurship and the Kansas City community. NationSwell spoke with Kauffman grantee Shelly Bell, founder and CEO of Black Girl Ventures, a company that “funds and scales tech-enabled, revenue-generating businesses (under $1M) founded by people who identify as Black/Brown and woman” to talk about the solutions she’s pioneering and the opportunities Kauffman has been able to help unlock for her along the way.

NationSwell: Tell me about Black Girl Ventures.

Black Girl Ventures’ Founder + CEO Shelly Bell: I started Black Girl Ventures because I wanted to help Black and Brown founders. Black and Brown women start businesses at six times the national average, yet we receive less than 1 percent of venture capital funds. 

I wanted to get capital to the entrepreneurs who wanted it and needed it. As an ecosystem builder, I wanted to show that I could do something, that the community could do something. That instead of the community just being consumers, they could donate, become economic catalysts for these women.

“Ecosystem builder” is a term Kauffman coined, in which you understand that everything plays a part. if we think about entrepreneurship that way, a financial institution plays a part, the government plays a part — all of these pieces create the right environment for growth. And so as an ecosystem builder, I view myself as moving towards actions and effort. I create the right environments for Black and Brown women entrepreneurship to thrive — I pull in governments, pull in corporations, I make an on-ramp that has destinations and exits.

This started as a brunch, where people would come and pay at the door. While you ate, you’d listen to Black women entrepreneurs make their pitches for their business. If you liked their idea and wanted to fund it, you’d put a marble in a coffee mug, and the founder would receive dollars in proportion to the number of marbles they received.

So this all started in 2016 as a local brunch, and suddenly, we were doing them in Chicago, Atlanta, New York, Detroit, Baltimore, Philly — even SXSW, one year.

My first hypothesis was: Can I get a bunch of people together to give to Black and Brown women founders? And then I thought, “Can I activate women on the ground to be active in this?” Because if we can activate women on the ground, if we can activate people in their own communities, then we can see an immense impact and trajectory in the shift of Black and Brown women’s business

Over the course of four years, we’ve mobilized $1.4 million and directly funded 104 women to date.

NS: What are some the unique ways the Kauffman Foundation has helped support you and your efforts? 

SB: I don’t know that i understood what it meant to build a relationship with a foundation. I didn’t know that I was supposed to ask for money. I was so green at one point as an ecosystem builder: I had no idea about metrics and how to communicate them for what makes sense to a large funder.

[Senior Program Officer for Kauffman Foundation] Andy Stoll never skipped my emails. He always answered every email I sent him. That level of relationship building was integral to me: That a prestigious foundation would answer my emails and respond to my questions that way, it really created a unique relationship between me and the organization.

NS: What are some of the challenges Black women founders face?

SL: On the investor side, the bottom line is bias. People find people in power who look like them, talk like them and act like them. On the part of the founders, historically, black people have only been able to be in business uninterrupted sixty years. That means the right to own a home, the right to a bank account, to build wealth and equity, to use that equity to start a business — because it’s only been that amount of time, there hasn’t been enough time to built wealth generationally, and because of that, there’s no rich uncle to give us the funds and the space for experimentation — and that experimentation counts.

Kauffman was the rich uncle willing to take chance on us. Because of the funding that we got from them, we were able to show that we could handle six figure donations. And that was so important for our journey because it wasn’t that we couldn’t handle six or seven figure funders — we could — but until someone actually gives you that funding, the funders believe that you can’t handle six or seven figure funders. 

Kauffman’s grant was a signal. It was more than funding. I was going to make the impact that I was going to make with that money anyway. But it’s so key to an organization with under-represented founders to get that level of funding from someone as prestigious as Kauffman because it’s a signal to the rest of the funding community that you’re rocking to them. 

We needed that signal because we had the impact, we had the numbers on the board, we just didn’t have that signal. And that signal from Kauffman created more opportunities to come our way. And I think that this is so key to this experience. It unlocked more funding, and it allowed me to be able to pilot my hypothesis to inspire + activate women on the ground, expand vision further. It gave me space and room to do that. 

And it’s worth noting that Kauffman’s funding has not caused a burden on us at all.

So I’m calling on all the wealthy uncles out there who are giving their nephews $20k and $50k to give that to black and brown women founders with no returns. How about that? 

All we need is for you to fund us, and get out of the way.

Produced in partnership with the Kauffman Foundation. To learn more about their grantmaking, visit their website. 

A Note on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

Posted on by NationSwell Team

To Our Community,

This year, as we reflect on Martin Luther King Jr’s legacy, we are thinking about the painful gap between the world as it should be and the horrors we witnessed during the January 06 insurrection. We’re thinking about how, as NationSwell speaker Clint Smith wrote, “a new iteration of white supremacist violence” reared is ugly head on that day. 

At the dawn of a sacred national holiday, we are deepening our commitment to dismantling the structures and cultural strains that perpetuate racial injustice in all of its forms. We are proud to stand with those who unequivocally denounce white supremacy. We join them in demanding accountability for last week’s acts of violence and terror — and for the leaders and organizations who fuel, abet or enable such acts. 

The past year has shown us too many searing images of racial injustice in all of its brutality and impunity. In those images and in this unprecedented time, however, lies the hope that we might finally do what we’ve not yet done: squarely and collectively look at the legacy and plague of racism, reckon with its toll and work together to realize the promise of a truly free nation.

Historians will consider the significance of January 06, 2021 for centuries. May the story they write be about how we seized one of our darkest days to begin a new chapter of reckoning, healing and progress. May we each, in our own way, marshal the will and resources to contribute a verse to that chapter.

Yours in solidarity,
The NationSwell Team

Lessons From the Pandemic: Rethinking Community Design and Investment

Posted on by NationSwell Team

COVID-19 is causing professionals in the built-environment sectors to rethink how we design and create the housing and communities where we live.\ AARP’s Equity by Design global dialogue series, which continues with monthly sessions through February 2021, is generating solutions-oriented conversations among a few thousand built-environment professionals from around the world. Based on an age-friendly framework that tackles health disparities, the dialogue series is intended to lift up critical lessons and opportunities as we emerge from a tragic pandemic, and to catalyze action among professionals in the fields that shape the physical housing and communities where we live.

How COVID-19 Exposed Existing Health Disparities

The pandemic has exposed how policies and practices that physically segregate people in the U.S. by age, race or ethnicity, and the systemic disinvestment in the places where marginalized or vulnerable people live, have led to significant disparities in health and longevity. 

“Many of the comorbidities that COVID preys upon are tied to built-environment features,” Mariela Alfonzo, founder and CEO of urban design data analytics company State of Place, said during an Equity by Design dialogue. “Many of those features that would promote healthier behaviors and health outcomes are often missing from vulnerable communities.” 

Beyond safe housing, such features might include safe streets, well-maintained sidewalks, well-placed benches, good lighting, healthy food options and parks or other walkable destinations that provide people with opportunities to form social bonds — with the additional necessity to physically distance. 

In order to alleviate some of these disparities, we must prioritize improving the physical environment in disproportionately impacted communities.

The pandemic has also caused a disproportionate number of coronavirus fatalities in long-term-care facilities. While this is alarming on its own, it also illuminates another reality: We do not currently have a good alternative to such facilities, and consumers lack options. The design of housing and communities across the country is ill-suited for the rapidly increasing share of an older population that, as AARP research repeatedly shows, wants to age in their homes and communities. 

Henry Cisneros, the former Secretary of US Housing and Urban Development and former mayor of San Antonio, shared how during many public meetings, “someone in the audience, when they got up to speak, was crying from the frustration they had helping their aging parents contend with the built environment.”

Reimagining Homes, Rethinking Zoning

The current need for most of us to function almost entirely at home has driven professionals in built-environment fields to rethink the ways we use spaces. “Housing is now health care; housing is now education,” Paul Williams, president and CEO of Project for Pride in Living, said.  

Housing is now also an economic issue. Counties are leasing hotels that have gone underutilized during the pandemic’s economic slowdown and using them to house homeless residents — which is proving effective. “We’ve known all along: if you get people safe, stable housing, they in fact will start to solve their own problems,” Williams said.

The flexibility needed in our built environments applies to both retrofitting existing housing stock and building new ones. Environmental gerontologist Esther Greenhouse pointed out that our current housing was designed based on the needs of the average-height male between the ages of 20-40 — leaving the rest of us to adapt. One solution proposed by Cisneros for making current housing stock more enabling for people of all ages and abilities is to use the existing Community Development Block Grant program at HUD, a strategy previously employed to promote energy efficiency through weatherization. 

“Let’s create the lifespan home, with assistance to people particularly who are poor, in retrofitting homes,” he said.

In addition to retrofitting homes to work well across the lifespan, we must also create appropriate and affordable new housing options. Local zoning, which Streetwyze cofounder Antwi Akom referred to as the “DNA of the built environment,” is a major contributor to the problem. 

Yet zoning codes and regulations can also be a critical part of the solution. Through changes such as eliminating minimum lot size requirements, increasing density caps, and allowing manufactured housing, local zoning has the power to transform communities. “Cities across the US have kept manufactured housing out; it’s a polite way of discriminating,” said Stacey Epperson, president and founder of Next Step, which has worked with numerous manufacturers to incorporate age-friendly features into their housing models. 

Finally, private housing developers must also be ready to make the shift to affordable lifespan homes. Cisneros was surprised, given the scale of the aging population, “that more in the building community have not embraced this shift, because it’s so clear what is needed.”

Rebuilding Around People

In discussing how to help guide post-pandemic rebuilding, Williams pointed out that past efforts to redevelop neighborhoods with high crime rates have often missed the mark. While crime went down and property values went up as a result of efforts in Minneapolis, disparities continued and even increased. 

“We’d done a great job on the bricks and mortar and places have prospered—but people have not,” he said.

Helping people prosper by fostering empowerment and self-determination among our most vulnerable populations is at the heart of Akom’s work. “We must bring everyday people from the margins to the epicenter of participatory planning processes,” he suggested. “The people closest to the problem are the people closest to the solution.”

Doing this demands two important undertakings: capacity-building and democratizing data. Teaching members of the local community the language of design enables them to “contribute their unique expertise in a meaningful way and really step up as community leaders,” Ifeoma Ebo, urban designer and strategist, said. 

Similarly, it is important to incentivize the utilization of local tradespeople and small businesses, including engineers, designers, and developers, and to invest in enhancing their capacity where needed.

The second necessary undertaking is investing in platforms that facilitate the generation of data directly from community members and ensuring that these community-derived data help drive local decision-making. Akom refers to this as “culturally community-responsive technology.” 

This allows the “design of places to be shaped by people to fit the behaviors that they want,” Alfonzo said. 

Dr. Bill Thomas, a gerontologist and social entrepreneur in the senior housing space who moderates the Equity by Design dialogues, pointed out that soliciting and using community-derived data is a great way for the community to drive demand for the enabling and safe housing and community spaces that they want.

Ebo sees this community-driven planning approach as part of a shift from the current digital era’s focus on smart cities—or using technology for efficiency, “toward a more thoughtful city.” 

“Community members should also define what success looks like and how it is measured,” she added.

Perhaps this is a key lesson as we embark upon post-COVID-19 rebuilding. Let’s strive for Ebo’s thoughtful city, where, as she puts it, “communities and residents are engaged meaningfully and are being integrated into both the process and product, the operations and maintenance of spaces—in order to achieve a more equitable outcome.”

You can watch recordings of these dialogues and register for upcoming sessions on AARP’s Equity by Design webpage.

GLG’s COVID-19 Response Exemplifies Its Commitment to Social Impact

Posted on by NationSwell Team

This article was written in partnership with GLG. 

The COVID-19 crisis is the most wide-scale disruption in modern history. In the U.S. alone, it has resulted in 242,000 deaths and 10.5 million infections at time of publication. But Americans everywhere are rising to meet this moment. Charitable giving was up 7.5% in the first half of the year, and according to a report from the Senate’s Joint Economic Committee, the percentage of Americans volunteering their time continued to hold strong throughout 2020.

Many businesses are also stepping up — and GLG, the global knowledge marketplace, is at the forefront of these efforts. In March, CEO Paul Todd wrote an open letter to GLG’s vast network of experts, clients — and to GLG’s employees as well — asking if they could recommend “non-profits, foundations and organizations on the frontlines of the relief effort,” and offering access to the company’s client service teams and global network of experts— all pro bono.

“GLG has hundreds of thousands of experts who have decades of experience in highly relevant areas of expertise — including healthcare, logistics, supply chain management, and transportation,” Todd wrote. “We deeply believe that we have an obligation to use our capabilities to get that knowledge to the people who urgently need it to fight this pandemic.”

The response was overwhelming. As of December, GLG’s COVID-19 relief program has supported more than 130 organizations whose frontline efforts impact the lives of over 100 million people in over 40 countries. GLG and its team members have offered their expert support to organizations in fields ranging from supply chain management and contact tracing app development to outdoor learning and food box delivery— all without charge.

Many of these efforts have directly helped those most affected by the pandemic. One organization supported by GLG provided relief to a marginalized community that was severely impacted by the pandemic: People in prisons. According to a report from the Marshall Project, there have been at least 227,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in prisons — a number that corresponds to almost 10% of the nation’s overall prison population.

“State and federal prisons have been hit incredibly hard by COVID-19,” said Morgan Franklin, a GLG Client Solutions team leader. “And because we know that most prisons are disproportionately filled with Black and brown people, these vulnerable populations are taking the greatest hit due to the virus and racial inequity.”

Franklin volunteered to join GLG’s pro bono COVID-19 response effort to support Recidiviz, a non-profit that builds open-source data tools to help criminal justice decision makers identify opportunities to safely reduce incarceration and monitor the impact of their efforts in real time (and which is one of GLG’s 2020 Social Impact Fellows). “To reduce prison populations and slow the spread of coronavirus, several state prisons partnered with the Recidiviz team and used their data infrastructure and platform to determine who might be a good candidate or eligible for early release,” Franklin explained. “GLG has been collaborating with Recidiviz so they can learn more about how to access and use public prison data, such that other corrections facilities can continue to successfully release and care for their population during this pandemic.”

“[GLG’s pro bono client service opportunities] are just one of a few examples of how we actively live out our commitment to social impact,” Franklin said.

That commitment also led GLG to support the GrowHaus, a non-profit focused on food scarcity operating during a time of exacerbated hunger.

“Amidst the pandemic, our weekly free grocery program shifted from in-person to home delivery and grew from about 50 participants to 550 participants,” said Emily Hoel, Director of Operations for the GrowHaus. “We saw 400% growth in one week. We could never have anticipated the enormous growth that the program would see in such a short time. We quickly needed to stabilize the program, restructure the operations, expand our purchasing processes, and update the staffing model in order to capture and maintain this growth.”

GLG connected GrowHaus with experts in the field of food retail to talk through key elements of their operations, financial modelling, and staffing. “We were able to talk to folks doing exactly what we are doing. They understood our pain points and had great advice on how to structure and improve our program,” Hoel said. For example, “speaking with the CEO and Founder of a large food relief nonprofit gave me incredible insights about how to structure our assembly line and technical operations.”

But GLG’s support gave Hoel more than insights — it gave her peace of mind.

“The expert understood the struggles we were facing and shared that they had been through many of the same challenges — and were able to overcome them!” Hoel said. “Their guidance came at the perfect time and was invaluable to our success.”

These projects are meaningful for GLG’s experts too. For example, entrepreneur and author Amy Neumann says she got involved with GLG’s COVID-19 relief initiative because helping people is one of her biggest joys.

“I was doing some pro bono social impact consulting locally, and jumped at the chance to help GLG — an organization I was already working with and impressed by — as soon as I learned about their social impact work,” said Neumann, author of “Simple Acts to Change the World.”

Through GLG’s initiative, Neumann offered a range of insights to organizations leading COVID-19 responses, from best practices on messaging and communications to strategic planning for rapid growth. She shared that her participation left her feeling “energized, excited and hopeful.”

“Hopefully, by eliminating the learning curve and trial-and-error elements many organizations normally go through during times of great change, I could jumpstart impact and help these organizations avoid a situation where they have their staff needing to figure out from scratch where to start and what to do next,” said Neumann. “Through those conversations, I think everyone involved felt more positive and ready to move forward and create positive change.”

In his most recent update, GLG’s leader echoed Neumann’s optimism but highlighted that the work is yet to be completed.

“GLG is proud to play a part in driving progress forward – but we’re not satisfied,” wrote Todd. “We want to keep finding new ways to help, with your partnership. Our inbox is always open, so please reach out.”

To learn more about GLG’s COVID-19 relief program, visit their site.