Blog Relaunch, Grantmakers in the Arts Conference and Emergent Strategies
Blog Relaunch, Grantmakers in the Arts Conference and Emergent Strategies
By: Justin Laing | October 24, 2018 | Diversity Inclusion Equity, What Are We Working On
Welcome to the relaunch of our blog! I will be using the blog to post reflections, suggestions, questions, book reviews, updates, aspirations, recipes, what are we working on and so on, so please follow, come back and leave comments. This first post is of the what are we working on/update variety.
I just am leaving the 2018 Grantmakers in the Arts Conference (GIA) in Oakland, CA where I got to moderate a session on The Twin Cities Theaters of Color Coalition (TCTOCC)/Racial Equity Funders Coalition (REFC) collaboration that is happening in Minneapolis, MN. TCTOCC, which consists of five theaters of color, New Native Theater, Pangea World Theater, Penumbra, Teatro del Pueblo, Theater Mu and REFC: The Bush Foundation, The Jerome Foundation, The McKnight Foundation, Propel Nonprofits & The St. Paul & Minnesota Foundations . People were very interested in the work of the Coalition and this was my first time being a part of workshop that used a Long Table format, so appreciated the chance to reflect on that as a tool to hear and build group dynamic.
I left a few other reflections on this year’s GIA on my IG page @hillombo @jdlaing and twitter @jdlaing and you can follow the hashtag #racespaceplace to see other attendees and blogger’s comments on the experience. One of the bloggers is Lara Davis whose perspective I really like to hear and her twitter is @audioblakk. If you are interested in doing better with grants and foundations and don’t have a lot of White institutional power, reading and listening to the industry’s discussion is one way to become more comfortable and familiar with the language and concepts its using and relying on.
In sum, really appreciative and fun to have been invited to participate and spend time with TCTOCC/REFC Collaborative and get the chance to be in the GIA space again…
Soon, I will be going to spend time learning and practicing something to which I’m a new jack and that is Emergent Strategies (which was referenced throughout GIA) in a workshop led by adrienne brown, author of the same titled book. Much appreciation to Sage Crump, Program Manager of the Leveraging A Network for Equity Program (LANE), a program of the National Performance Network, who invited me to participate in an Emergent Strategies book club a year ago and paved the way for me to attend this workshop. As a consultant of the LANE program, I have been writing a strategic plan for a different theater organization, which also finds inspiration in Emergent Strategies, and framing the plan in many of its themes. Reading it almost completely this time (40pp to go!) has been inspiring as the book opens up my own thinking on the possibilities for strategy, gives me language for feelings and ideas I held, and shows me possibilities for other concepts frameworks I value. One of the concepts/phrases I most appreciate is “small is all” or fractals or the idea that creating a change at the smallest level has reverberations and implications across many levels and so is where we should focus.
Emergent Strategies is also very interested in showing/finding the relationship between strategy and nature and very cooly and uniquely for a book that deals with the nonprofit or nonprofit adjacent world, it also draws on a number of spiritual systems throughout the book. It’s inspiring to see a repudiating of the almost hegemonic nonprofit/philanthropic concept that “strategic best practices” are firmly rooted in White ideas of “reason” and “logic”.
brown’s Strategies also invites us to play with and adapt it and its strong emphasis on nature and quoting of a priest of Yemonja (I don’t believe the book says what religion the priest is, though I imagined Lukumi) sparked in me a yearning to hear even more of a conversation of strategy through the words of people initiated in African spiritual systems like Lukumi or Ifa, systems that as I understand what i’ve been told, an uninitiated, are holy interwoven and expressed as nature.
Will keep aiming to be 500 words or less. Thanks for reading.
