In 2023, the Steelcase Foundation and several area foundations partnered with A New Hope Consulting to facilitate four community learning sessions to provide nonprofits insights on the different structures for powerbuilding through their work. These sessions sparked additional curiosity for shared learning and led to monthly convenings spearheaded by the Urban Core Collective’s Co-Directors Raven Odom and Alicia Lauchie’. Hear their insights into this work and their hopes for how it will advance racial, social, and economic justice in our community.
Name: Raven Odom and Alisha Lauchie’
Organization Name: Urban Core Collective
Brief overview of your organization and what you do.
The Urban Core Collective (UCC) exists to support the self-determination and agency of historically marginalized communities by engaging in advocacy, community organizing, and leadership cultivation. We do this to transform our living conditions and the distribution of power in the Greater Grand Rapids area.
We currently advance our purpose through four core focus areas—Education Justice, Climate Justice, Democracy, and Emerging Leaders. Across all of our focus areas we are committed to building people power, incubating ideas, and disrupting systems. UCC is also a Community of Practice which means that we learn and work alongside community members, partner organizations, and social movements.
Part 1: Understanding the Rules of the Game
Please provide an overview of the C3/C4 work you have engaged in.
“Either you play the game or watch the game play you.” – J. Cole
The message conveyed in the lyrics above are not unique to sports games or board games—the same can be said about the nonprofit sector. Understanding the rules of the “game,” in this case 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) organizations, is useful to maximize our power. When learning the ins and outs of a game, one often begins with questions. We started with a few wonderings:
- Across our local nonprofit ecosystem, is there clarity around the capabilities of 501(c)(3)s and a 501(c)(4)s?
- How could a 501(c)(4) arm strengthen organizations’ advocacy and organizing efforts?
- What constraints/barriers prevent us from maximizing our power and advancing community-led advocacy and organizing?
- What powerbuilding tactics could aid our local advocacy infrastructure?
Contending with these questions prompted a group of folks from Corewell Health Healthier Communities, Grand Rapids Community Foundation, Steelcase Foundation, Wege Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and the Urban Core Collective to offer a learning opportunity aimed at exploring different forms of power building, examining c3/c4 strategies, unpacking risk and legal compliance, and engaging in action planning. Together, we hosted a four-part learning series titled, “Building Power Through Advocacy: Learning the Capabilities of c3s and c4s,” which featured three sessions hosted by Esperanza Tervalon-Garrett, Founder and CEO of A New Hope Consulting.
Since then, we’ve continued to host monthly convenings for organizations to build relationships, explore the local political landscape, and share information about the advocacy and organizing initiatives that they are currently involved in across our community.
Part 2: Game Recognize Game
Why is it important for nonprofits?
Nonprofit organizations can assume various roles—from providing direct services to engaging in advocacy and community organizing in pursuit of systemic change. Across the spectrum of social change, nonprofits have the opportunity and responsibility to leverage their power for change. However, if you internalize beliefs about your power and capabilities from an incomplete rendering or worse, from people who oppose the freedom you seek, it’s possible that your vision and actions may be stunted. A common tactic used by those who oppose racial justice and the distribution of power is to utilize misinformation, retaliation, and competition as a means to keep us from realizing the full power we have as nonprofits. As a result, among many nonprofit organizations in West Michigan, there is often a spirit of risk-aversion or trepidation as it relates to utilizing the full array of our power. While we acknowledge that said risk-aversion can be and often is the product of witnessing leaders in the nonprofit space experience retaliation for challenging oppressive power structures, sometimes risk is inherited (from board members, staff members, funders, etc.) or perceived when it does not have to be. Said fear can be harmful to the extent that it gets in the way of advancing racial, social, and economic justice.
On the contrary, fearfulness may be unavoidable no matter how much clarity or accurate information you have. Sometimes, the best antidote to fear is external support, as folks are generally more willing to push through perceived or actual risk when they know they aren’t doing it alone, when they know there are people who are in cahoots with them, people who have their back. Regular convening/space for organizations to discuss the strategies they are using and engage in collective learning aids us in combating fear and isolation. The gatherings help us to push against our disparateness/working in silos which can contribute to unknowingly duplicating one another’s efforts and/or not mobilizing in support of one another due to lack of awareness of our work.
Increased understanding of c3/c4 capabilities, power building tactics, and regular convening spaces are steps towards better wielding of our power and exploring how we might do so through shared resources, thought partnership, and collective action.
Part 3: What’s Your Game Plan?
What learnings would you lift-up from the convenings that you’d like to share with broader nonprofit/philanthropic sector?
The learning series and convenings have been ripe with insightful information to aid organizations in assessing their roles and capabilities.
- Are you clear on your role? – Esperanza reminded us that it is important to understand your organization’s theory of change and role in the social change ecosystem. More explicitly, we need to be clear about what actions we’re willing to take in service of our organizational purpose and we need to communicate that to one another. She shared that some groups may be positioned to take risks that other groups may not, but we should think about how we show up for and shield one another. She also stressed that, “You can’t just ask one group to continue turning up.” Similar to a sports team or band that operates with a clear understanding of their roles in service of a shared goal, we too, can be more powerful if we have clarity of one another’s roles and operate in concert with one another.
- How are you assessing your power building efforts? – There are a myriad of ways to assess whether or not we’re actually building power—including via elections. Esperanza shared that, “elections are inflection points to test and assess if we are building power.” Beyond mobilizing people to vote, elections can help us gauge our influence among our base and elected officials. She also noted that when evaluating our efforts, it’s important that we not only assess external impact, but also our internal ability to carry out said efforts.
- What do you need to be more powerful? – Among c3/c4 participants there was an expressed need for support from the philanthropic sector that goes beyond funding. Particularly as organizations take the step to engage in more advocacy and organizing to challenge existing power structures, regular access to lawyers/legal aid to provide clarity and combat fear is necessary. It’s also important for organizations to connect with a lawyer that can advise on an array of possibilities-–not just the most conservative route.
Part 4: Game On
What do you see as the future of the work? What do you hope is its lasting impact?
As we continue to convene and learn together, we are excited about the collective impact that can continue to emerge.
- Diminished fear/Support to work through fear – While clarity around c3/c4 capabilities is a piece of the puzzle that can support us in maximizing our power as community members and nonprofit organizations, strengthening our network through demonstrated support is also needed to diminish fear. We hope that the learnings go beyond the folks who gather for the convenings, but are also shared with their board members, fellow staff members, and community members.
- Strengthened local organizing infrastructure – As we continue to assess our power building efforts, we hope that the organizations and groups engaged in the work will embody the spirit of collectivism by sharing resources, tools, thought partnership, learnings, etc. to support one another’s organizing and advocacy efforts.
- Experimentation + More coordinated efforts – Through ongoing relationship building and organizational role clarity, we hope that we will experiment with trying new things together for the sake of our liberation. We envision that organizations and groups will collaborate on more campaigns, ballot initiatives, and policies to ultimately contribute to material and felt change within our community.
- Stretching our Imagination + Innovation – Building a world we’ve never seen often means testing and trying things that have never been done. Our hope for this work is that as we continue to come together and discuss our visions and plans for a more liberated and just system, we can more readily and easily enter into a dream space with one another. Instead of meeting ideas with statements such as “We can’t”, “It won’t” and “That won’t work”, we’ll strategize with questions like “How can we?”, “What if?” and “Do you want to try that together?” We seek to push past the constructs of what is familiar and tap into the power of our creativity.
Understanding c3/c4 capabilities, interrogating our sources of fear, assessing our roles, and examining power building efforts are all essential to building our local advocacy and organizing infrastructure. C3/c4s are vehicles that we can utilize on the path to our ultimate/ongoing goal of building power—community power—in order to transform living conditions and advance racial and social justice. We’re committed to shaping the game for the sake of our freedom and we have plenty of jerseys and roles if you’d like to play the game together!
