We Are For Good Podcast - The Podcast for Nonprofits

613. A Community-Centric Approach to Philanthropy - Rachel D'Souza

• We Are For Good

Share episode

What does it mean to truly center community in philanthropy? 

Meet Rachel D’Souza, Founder and Chief Purpose Officer of Gladiator Consulting. 🤝 A leading voice in the Community-Centric Fundraising (CCF) movement, Rachel shares her perspective on systems change in resource development, balancing donor expectations with equity, and how to drive long-term systems change over short-term solutions.

In this moment of unprecedented challenge for social impact orgs, Rachel offers a roadmap for survival, collaboration, and meaningful change. Nonprofit leaders need a new approach—one that centers community, embraces vulnerability, and dismantles outdated systems. Listen in for bold insights, real talk, and a call to action for the future of fundraising. 🎧

 Key Takeaways:
✔ What Community-Centric Fundraising is and why it matters
✔ How nonprofits can own their narrative in donor conversations
✔ Creative approaches to self-funding and collaboration in the sector

Resources Mentioned: 


Learn more: www.weareforgood.com/episode/613 

Support the show

Become a Member and Get All-Access to Everything We Are For Good!
Experience the Impact Uprising Membership by We Are For Good: an ecosystem to learn, connect + grow in the power of a value-aligned community. Members gather monthly with Jon + Becky at exclusive members-only meetups + get video access to all new podcast episodes in an ad-free experience + so much more! Learn more + join us at weareforgood.com.

Say hi👇
LinkedIn / Instagram / Facebook / YouTube / Twitter

Speaker 1:

Hey, I'm John.

Speaker 2:

And I'm Becky. And this is the we Are For Good podcast. Nonprofits are faced with more challenges to accomplish their missions and the growing pressure to do more, raise more and be more for the causes that improve our world.

Speaker 1:

We're here to learn with you from some of the best in the industry, bringing the most innovative ideas, inspirational stories, all to create an impact uprising.

Speaker 2:

So welcome to the good community. We're nonprofit professionals, philanthropists, world changers and rabid fans who are striving to bring a little more goodness into the world. So let's get started.

Speaker 3:

Becky, it's finally happening.

Speaker 2:

John, you know that phrase like don't ever meet your heroes because you will be let down Like. I met one of my heroes. She's on the podcast today and it was one of the most magical connections ever. I'm so excited for the community to meet Rachel D'Souza. If you have heard that name, which you probably have in our practice and in this sector, it's because Rachel is one of the founders of the community-centric fundraising approach and today we are about to have a fiery conversation because this is such of the moment and Rachel is just going to lead us through this equity conversation.

Speaker 2:

But I got to give you some background because she is also one of the most interesting human beings. She is also the founder and chief purpose officer of Gladiator Consulting, and Rachel was born and raised in St Louis as a daughter of two Indian immigrants and she experienced that otherness of growing up in a place that was really defined by a black and white dichotomy, and so her identity as a justice seeker and a community connector really started at home with her immigrant parents and was cemented during this experience she had in her teens, where she went to the National Conference on Community and Justice's Anytown Youth Leadership Institute. I wondered if I was going to be able to get that all out, and she attended that when she was 17 and it just created this shift. And now she's leading this beautiful boutique consultancy that has this holistic and community-centric approach to nonprofit organizational development and capacity building. And the thing that I love so much about Gladiator is they believe that the power of community-led initiatives are going to disrupt and dismantle systems so we can achieve equity. She's also a member of the inaugural CCF Global Council and has facilitated all these extensive trainings and workshops on implementing community-centric fundraising into modern nonprofit and foundation practices, and so Rachel's going to guide us through all this.

Speaker 2:

She is so funny, so wise, so much fun, but she has this really formative story and, rachel, I know you'll probably go into it, but in 2011, eight days after the birth of her first child, rachel survived a rare heart condition that those of us in the healthcare industry know it's called the widow maker heart attack, and Rachel has this really authentic story about the choices that she was required to make as a SCAD heart attack survivor and as a young mother. She has got so much lived experience, joy, empathy and justice in her heart. We are so excited to learn from you, rachel, and thank you for also being one of the founding members of the Impact Uprising membership. So get in here, come teach us all the things and welcome to the we Are For Good podcast.

Speaker 4:

I am so happy to be here with you today, becky and John. I also would love that kind of intro. When I ask my children to clean their rooms, they're like what is this? If you could be like my hype woman.

Speaker 2:

I'd be really great.

Speaker 4:

I'm like, that does sound pretty impressive. I wish my kids were here to hear how great their mom is, instead of, you know, thinking I'm a drag. So thanks, thank you for that.

Speaker 2:

You are amazing. I just I've just followed your movement and it's rooted in all the things I believe in and I just want you to take us back to that formative story like little Rachel growing up in the heart of St Louis, like, talk to us about like that and how it led you to this moment today where you're leading this beautiful movement.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, you know, st Louis is the home that my grandfather chose when he brought my mom and her brothers here back in the 60s.

Speaker 4:

He actually remarried a woman who was going to nursing school at St Louis University, so this was sort of an easy landing point.

Speaker 4:

And I remember growing up hearing stories about how when my grandpa came to St Louis, he had been a chemist for decades in India and he couldn't find work here because he had an accent, because he had brown skin, because he didn't have relationships, and wound up as a 50-year-old man going door to door, knocking on people's doors, knocking on small business doors, until he finally made a connection with a small business here in St Louis and was able to find a job.

Speaker 4:

And I remember thinking like what kind of audacity and persistence must it have taken for him? He had lived a whole lifetime already right and he had come here and he had to start over because he didn't have that community, he didn't have those relationships and if it was going to happen he was going to have to build it himself. And so I think about my grandpa's persistence in my own life, growing up in a suburb of St Louis. St Louis is a very Black or white community and to be something else here meant you had to navigate a lot of things that were understood more explicitly and things that were sort of assumed right, that informal culture that you know where you go at night and where you don't go at night, or who you hang out with and who you don't hang out with.

Speaker 4:

And when you're in a community where nobody looks like you and they're not eating the foods that you eat at home, that gives you a choice, right. It feels like you have to pick and you know, as a Gemini, I've always had sort of a lot of multiplicity in my life and I didn't want to pick. Like what if there's more that we have in common than what divides us? Like what if we have the opportunity to learn and to be uncomfortable? And I do believe that when we're uncomfortable we stand the best chance of growing and organizing the resources we need to be successful. And so that's kind of the approach that I had to take to like making friends and to connecting with, you know, kids in my Girl Scout troop and eventually, as I got older, like building volunteer relationships.

Speaker 4:

And then, you know, as you shared, I had the opportunity to attend this youth leadership Institute that really presented the the concepts of institutional oppression, from sexism and racism to ableism and classism, to a bunch of high school kids, right and for better or for worse, high school kids, like we're not ruined by the world yet, like the world hasn't like crushed our little souls, we think that we're, you know, able to do anything and conquer anything.

Speaker 4:

So, you know, you learn about these systems, you learn about how entrenched they are. And I thought, yeah, like I'm going to dedicate my life to fixing this and it's going to be great. And you know, dedicate my life to fixing this and it's going to be great. And now here I am, like 25 years later, realizing that I am building a world I may not ever get a chance to see, and it actually doesn't matter, because I need to know that I did everything that I could do so that two or three or seven generations from now, our community is thriving and they're not suffering from the same problems that we're tackling now. And that's really the philosophy that I bring to my work with Gladiator. We're planting seeds, we are creating fertile ground for the people and the initiatives and the work that will come after us, but we may not be around to see and experience and enjoy that goodness. So I'm all about enjoying the journey honestly.

Speaker 3:

Rachel, oh my gosh. I'm on the edge of my seat with your story and I want to honor your grandfather. I mean going door to door setting this legacy. Will you share his name so we can honor him in this podcast?

Speaker 4:

His name is Ed D'Souza, everyone called him Uncle Eddie, and he never met a person who didn't become his friend.

Speaker 2:

I feel that I feel that through his friend Bless the, person who opened the door and said yes, that's all I'm thinking.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, how beautiful. I mean, you're talking about stuff that's so core to how we want to show up in this world too, my friend, of just playing the long game and not creating more harm with our work, but that this recognition that how we do is everything, in the same way of like trying to heal some of these like deeper systemic issues, the how is everything you know, and so I think I'd love to create space to talk about the CCF movement, specifically community-centric fundraising. If this is new for you, there is some guiding principles that we felt a kinship around really quickly when we first discovered Jill's work, but I would love for you to kind of like lift the veil for those listening today that are like what is this? I know maybe I've heard a piece of it. Can you give some context around this movement and what are some of the pillars that you would like to lift specifically about it?

Speaker 4:

Yeah, so I'll first share um. When I started my consultancy back in 2015,. Um, one of the first things I realized very quickly was that every nonprofit leader I talked to was dealing with some version of the same problem. Right, like the board was overactive or underactive. We, like weren't really sure if our programs were hitting metrics. We were making promises to funders that we weren't actually getting enough money to figure out if we could resource Right.

Speaker 4:

And so it very quickly became clear to me Organizations aren't necessarily dealing with a leadership problem or a talent problem or a mission problem. Like, we're all functioning in a system that wasn't sort of set up to serve us. And so, as I started to sort of figure out what is Rachel's approach right? What is Gladiator's approach to this systemic problem going to be? It was we have to do things differently. Right, because doing the same things over and over again is the definition of insanity. And what I learned really quickly is that people are a lot more comfortable with being insane than they are with change. And so how do we? Right? It's true, it's true.

Speaker 4:

And we're like, yeah, I know we did this last year and we failed, but we're going to do it again the exact same way. Maybe we'll add a table or we'll change the color of the linens. I'm like what is happening, the color of the linens, and it's like the failure we know is somehow more comfortable than the failure we don't, right. And so I really sort of set out to say, okay, how do we listen and learn to and from the people who are most impacted by the thing that we are seeking to tackle? And a lot of organizations think that they are doing that and they're not doing a good job. Maybe they're listening, but they're not doing a good job of then taking what they heard and adapting their strategies, fundraising tactics, their trainings to what they're hearing right from community. The people that tend to have the best information, the most usable experience, are the people who are impacted, right. Not the people that have an opinion about it, not the people that wrote a book about it, not the people that studied it in school. I wish those things were true, but at the end of the day, we find that some of our most successful and lasting movements in the United States were led by people who weren't academics, they weren't the CEO, right, they were people who saw a problem in their community and they needed to fix it, and so our work really has been this sort of community asset based framing. Got to add in that sort of anti racist lens as well, because we do have to acknowledge, right, that the philanthropic system that we were set up in is a racist and patriarchal system. That does not mean that, individually, all of the players right are intentionally racist, but it does mean that the system overall has disparate impacts between people who identify as white or white passing and people who don't Right. And so, to take all of that into account, you then have a group of people of color fundraisers up in Seattle thinking this sucks and we're tired of working in it and we're tired of perpetuating it. So what do we do? And back in 2020, the community centric fundraising movement was born, and really the goal of the movement is to say look, we've all been fundraising a certain way for the last 30, 40, 50 years and none of us have solved the problem. So maybe we need to think about the root cause of what we're grappling with and start to think about what we can embed in our fundraising practices and our strategy and planning practices right, and our programmatic and evaluation practices that get us closer not to mission but to the vision that we're seeking to achieve with community.

Speaker 4:

And one point I guess, john, I will also throw out there now is that a lot of people tend to put things in dichotomy.

Speaker 4:

So community-centric fundraising must be the opposite of donor-centric fundraising.

Speaker 4:

One is good and one is bad, or one is better and one is worse, and I want to like dispel, dispel that binary thinking. We need everybody to be a part of the movement, and one of the things that community centric fundraising is asking is for people in this work to be treated equally. So we're not giving donors more power because they have access to financial resources or to different kinds of institutional power, right. We're not privileging them over the community members we're working with, or the staff that's doing this work, or the volunteers that help build our organization. And so I just I want to be really clear about that that, like, donor centric fundraising is a practice and it's not bad. Sometimes people do it badly, but it is not inherently a negative or bad thing. What we want to do is a better job of saying we need the power of everybody, activated as possible, to advance the work of this organization, to advance the work of this collective, to advance the goals and the dreams that we have for our community.

Speaker 2:

I mean, that is what thriving community looks like, when there's equity for literally every single person who is in the community. And so, when I think about this movement, I want you to just kind of set some tone for this convo, because I'd love for you to give a glimpse into your perspective on systems change and resource development. I mean, it feels like this is such a moment in time to discuss that Break it down for us.

Speaker 4:

You know I've gotten a chance to travel over the last few weeks and you know the spring conference circuit is getting going and you know having conversations with folks. And you know one thing that feels really important to me is that to be able to sort of talk about the uniqueness of the moment we're in, you kind of have to look at history, right. And so we go back, let's say, 150 years. Andrew Carnegie is writing his classical of wealth right, and it informs how philanthropy in the United States has essentially grown, evolved, come into being over the course of the last 150 years. And at the time that that was written the only people who were considered people in the United States were white landowning Christian men. So that letter about philanthropy was to those people, the idea that those people would have the blessing to earn money through abusive capitalism of the Industrial Revolution and then had a responsibility to put that money back into community. That's the grounding. And so over the course of the first half of the 1900s you see the income tax pop up and then, in response to the federal income tax, you see community foundations pop up. And this is really the struggle of as people white, christian landowning when are building wealth. How do I keep more of my wealth away from the government? Right, and so it's not until 1954 and 1969, that we have the sets of legislation that really create what we know now is like sort of the 501c structure and sort of the ability for organizations to have this sort of tax-deductible status.

Speaker 4:

It is not an accident that we have policies and laws created around social movements in what we all know is a civil rights era. It's not an accident, right, because who are those people that are fighting for rights? Right, they're not those people I just named. They're women, they're people of color, they're people living with disabilities, they're members of the LGBTQIA population, right. And so we see these sort of policies starting to say, well, you can't move money there unless you have a board of directors, and you can't have that money there, you can't get a benefit from that, unless they're following these rules. And so you see our system start to evolve, not just to protect wealth from those who were people who had acquired wealth, unless they're following these rules. And so you see our system start to evolve, not just to protect wealth from those who were people who had acquired wealth, but also to control the ability and success of social movements right. Then we get into the 80s and I think we've all heard about trickle down economics. Did that work out for y'all? Yeah?

Speaker 2:

I don't know that it worked out for anyone except for the people at the very top. Yeah, I don't know that it worked out for anyone except for the people at the very top Yep, right, right.

Speaker 4:

And so back in the 80s, we now then see government saying actually we want to do less, so we're going to start pushing out money to nonprofit organizations to pick up the work of the social safety net. Okay, so we're still going to have grantsgov and we're still going to do these things, but we're really going to look at nonprofit organizations to sort of pick up the slack here. And so over the last 40 years, you just see this massive proliferation of nonprofit organizations. I think here in the St Louis region alone, we have something wild like 13,000 registered nonprofit organizations right now. Are all of them in good standing? Who knows? Are all of them actively fundraising? Who knows? But I'm sorry, 13,000 organizations for an MSA, that's about 3.2 million. It's a lot, right, it's a lot.

Speaker 4:

And so we get into this sort of modern period where policies and laws are starting to change again. And so we see the Citizens United case that happened at our Supreme Court back in 2010,. I want to say that makes corporations people and we start to see the way we think about money and the value of entity shifting. And then in 2017, we have the Tax Cut and Jobs Act, and we now know that. The fallout from that right, we changed the rules of the standard deduction. We now know that that represents a $16 billion drop in annual giving year over year. It's a permanent annual drop and you can look at there's a nonpartisan report that came out of the let's see the National Bureau of Economic Research that study the impact. Right, they're nonpartisan, they're not taking sides, but they are saying a lot of people decided to file their taxes differently, which means by household they gave about $880 less per year, and most of that money impacts place-based organizations. So it's not the hospitals or the universities or the national networks, right, that are experiencing the impact of this change in individual giving. It is your organizations in your community that are doing that grassroots work on the ground.

Speaker 4:

So we have a shift in the way that individuals in the US are giving.

Speaker 4:

We also know that because of the pandemic, we experienced this increased social isolation or whatever, and so now you also have less donors and less volunteers, who are still giving more money and more time to causes, but they're not as many people.

Speaker 4:

So you pair that with the reality that our federal government is taking a sledgehammer to federal grants and the two pillars right that fund our sector. The federal grant making right government grants and our charitable giving are changing rapidly and I believe that because our organization I'm sorry, our sector experiences scarcity of resources, has decided to do its work, sometimes in a silo, sometimes feels very competitive, that we've lost our ability to imagine how to get ourselves out of it, because it's not. I'm going to be real honest philanthropy is not going to be able to pick up the slack for changes in federal giving and philanthropy is not moving that fast either. So, even if they were going to, there are going to be organizations in the next year, three years, five years, 10 years that aren't going to exist, and that is a reality that we need to start really pushing on now. That's where we are.

Speaker 3:

I mean, wow, right, thank you for breaking that down. I feel like you've stitched together a lot of history and a lot of pieces that are often not presented in context to show the kind of growing mounting pressure of the moment.

Speaker 3:

And I really appreciate your thoughtful kind of unpacking there. So I mean, I I gotta like just kind of go a little off script, because you know we're focusing as a community around this idea of hold fast and that's like, honestly, the only words we could think of when it feels like everything is changing around us and we're having to like get back to like the core and figure out resource development and figure out who's going to be around our mission. What do you say, I mean, to these nonprofits that you work with? How do you look at them in the eye and knowing that the reality is going to be really hard for so many people, where do you start right now? What do you say to somebody that is feeling the overwhelm that you just described?

Speaker 4:

Yeah, I mean, our clients are in this space. Right now, we're working with a LGBTQIA advocacy organization in Red Missouri. We are also doing work with an organization that supports children who have been in the foster care system, who, you know, potentially experienced trauma. These organizations rely on local donations to be able to thrive, to be able to do their work, to be able to serve their community, and I think the first part is that we have to listen to the realities of these situations. Right, you have organizations that have tried to contort and like squeeze themselves into whatever funder is looking for, whatever you know a donor might want to hear, and we got to take up more space. I think that's the first thing is that I really work to get our clients to talk about who they are, to talk about what the actual work is, to talk about where they actually need the chance to fail so they can learn enough to go out the second or third time and fix it or figure it out or solve it or win it. Right, and so I think I think that's the first part.

Speaker 4:

The second part is is we are stronger together. There is not one organization, there is not one superstar fundraiser, there's not one awesome ED, right, that's going to solve it, fix it, save us. There is nobody coming. So if we want to survive this moment, it means that we need to get real uncomfortable and lean into radical collaboration, and I think that's the part that's really hard for folks right now. They don't want to talk to that other organization that's doing parallel work, or we don't want to talk to this, this organization that serves the same population but in a different way. I don't really care what you like anymore, because you have a community that needs what you do. So you either are going to figure out how to do it or you're not going to exist anymore.

Speaker 4:

And I don't say that to be scary or threatening, but there have never been enough resources in the way the sector has proliferated to fund every organization to the point where they've been able to solve the problem. That's been true forever, and if now we're seeing that there's even less financial resources on the table, we see that people are leaving the sector because they're burnt out. We do not have the resources to sustain at the volume right. So what does merger and acquisition look like? What does self-funding look like? We just had an incredible essay shared on the Community Centered Fundraising Hub by Maria Rio on self-funding, and I think organizations are going to have to start getting really creative about what we're going to do in this moment, what partnerships we're going to forge and who we're going to be willing to work with right, because it will only be together that power together, that we are able to make it to the next chapter of our story.

Speaker 2:

I feel like Rachel just took so much of our impact up like keynote that we are going to talk about and she just integrated it right there.

Speaker 3:

It was so beautiful, so much better than what we're going to do.

Speaker 2:

I know it was way more articulate. We'll quote you and we'll copyright you on any of those things. Great, excellent, all right, I'm into it. I mean, you're right. We are sitting in what is such a watershed moment, and the thing that keeps me up at night is thinking about how the most vulnerable among us they were vulnerable before this funding was pulled out and now they're in a class that is going to have to struggle to get that funding even more. And so I say this with so much love and compassion to each of you out there that if you are someone who can be the community for a local organization who is struggling, if you can bring your gifts to the table and I'm not just talking about money, but I'm talking about advocacy, awareness, opening doors, expanding network I 1000% agree with you that the only way forward is locking arms for impact.

Speaker 2:

And we talk about this often because when you do that and when you can look up and look around, you see, oh, somebody's doing something cool over here and maybe we could collaborate on that. Or oh, why aren't we sharing these resources? I think it's going to take an incredible amount of creativity, humility, and I would say that we're going back to the grit, like the grit to know that and I want to say release for you all, that it's not on your shoulders, that if we can activate community into this, there is a purpose. So please go, my friend.

Speaker 4:

Oh yeah, no, I was just going to say. There's one other thing that I'm going to add to this, and it's that we don't have to be friends, we don't have to be besties, we don't have to hang out. We do have to care about the other person's success. We'd have to care about the other organization's success, and so I think there's also this weird reticence of well, they won this grant and they didn't write us into it. Or we went for the same job and I didn't get it. Or we had this board member like y'all, it's petty, it's petty and we got to leave it in the past.

Speaker 4:

And when I say radical collaboration, I mean pulling up a chair at a table with someone who might really be a person that you disagree with, right? I'm not talking about hate, I'm not talking about harm. Those things are off the table. Right? We're not going to create harm in these partnerships, right? No, but let's be a little uncomfortable and give ourselves a chance to learn from and listen to people who we may not like but who have been doing good work in the same spaces that we're doing. Right, that's hard, and if we could even do that with 1% the amount of change and potential for collaboration. It just, it multiplies.

Speaker 2:

Yes, step one curiosity. Step two compassion. Step three get active. So, I just think about this through the lens of just values and I wonder what advice you would give for how nonprofits can navigate the sort of intentional and honest conversations with donors that we want them to have, or with their community, while still staying true to that value. How would you encourage them to position that and move forward in that?

Speaker 4:

Yeah, you know, so it's. It's, first of all, my hope that that's already happening, right, that organizations are moving in values, alignment, and the reality of the situation is that fundraisers have a really hard job and a job that has been made to be linear when it's actually not right. There's a target that is set, you have 12 months, hopefully, to reach that target and then the clock sets over. That's not how the human experience typically works. Relationships move at the speed of trust, not by anyone's clock, and so you know, I think that I think that we have to take that into consideration. So what is true is that relationships move at the speed of trust, and so we need to be willing to be honest about what's true for our organization. If we're scared, if we're worried, we need to say that we're scared or worried. That doesn't mean that we are only relying on our donors to solve our problems with contributions. It means that we're honest with every member of our community, and what I have often found right and, becky, you said this is that there are marginalized groups in this country who've been dealing with this for decades, centuries, right, so we might have something to learn from them about how we weather this movement and this moment in community, and that's okay. What if we brought together a group of our community members and our donors and we let them organically have their own conversations and form their own conclusions about what our organization might benefit from? Right, like, there are so many ways to be curious right now and to learn, and if we can hold space for that, then the next piece is deciding that we have the courage to try to take that risk and we know that it might be possible, because it's not just my ideas, the development person, it's not the conversation that me, the board chair, the ED, had, right, it is now different segments of our organizations with different roles, with different experience, with different power, who have all said what if we do this? What if we try this?

Speaker 4:

And I'll be honest, a lot of organizations are like we need to change and it's like cool, here's how you're going to do that. They're like I don't think so. That sounds awful. So I would also say this isn't something that you do alone. This is something that you want a partner for, you want a Rachel, you want somebody, right?

Speaker 4:

You may have an informal group of people that you're working with, but you can't do meaningful change without someone to help with your guard rails, without someone to make sure that you're still looking in a particular direction or even being able to say hey, we decided on a set of green lighting criteria and these five things had to be true for this to move forward.

Speaker 4:

Only four of them are true, so we have to stop right. You have to have a person that is willing to say what we needed to be true is that. And now we need to redirect ourselves in a different way, because if you keep going down that path, right, we're comfortable being insane. We're comfortable going in that same direction, right. We have to be able to say this is not working. It's time for us to pivot and try something different. Here's what we learned from that, and this is how we're going to apply our learnings moving forward. And we have to be willing not only to give ourselves the flexibility to exist in this sort of nonlinear way. We also have to create that space for our organizations as well.

Speaker 3:

Finding, just like the wells of experience and kind of how you talk about bringing in your community because they've been through challenging things. I mean there's so much strength in this and it's so much better in doing this together that maybe we aren't even recognizing the resources of people and ideas and resilience that is already baked into connections of our mission. Like I love this so much. I think it points to just all the values that you stand for in this world, rachel. I'm looking at our clock. How are we already tucked this long that I'm going to ask you about a story?

Speaker 2:

Because I know you love stories. I have like 10,000 other questions.

Speaker 3:

I'm sorry.

Speaker 4:

So we were joking around about a part two.

Speaker 3:

But I think we both believe in the power of these stories, that really things happen in life that change us, put us on a different path, have us look at things a different way, and I would ask you about a moment of philanthropy in your life that maybe happened or you witnessed and it's not big P philanthropy around here, it's like everyday kindness or love of a fellow humankind that really stopped you in your tracks. Can you take us back to that?

Speaker 4:

Yeah. So I think for this I have to shout out a friend and colleague of mine. Her name is Tasha. She founded a small food justice organization that's based here in St Louis.

Speaker 2:

Oh, name it out. We want to give them a shout out, it's called Acres.

Speaker 4:

It's called Acres. Please check it out. Check it out. Tasha is.

Speaker 4:

All of her work is in service of the Black farmers that live in our North St Louis community, which is a community that has been deeply disenfranchised by policy, by people, by businesses. So Tasha grew up in the north part of St Louis and has dedicated her life to the idea that philanthropy is the love of humankind. Right, that's what it means a few things. Her community needed more resources than surrounding areas of power really to contribute, and so she was determined to figure it out and she forged relationships with national organizations, she got herself to different kinds of conferences and she brought those resources back to her community, not only to support other Black urban farmers, but created a publication that taught other people in the community how to begin their own farming. She has created these two community hubs that are farms, and she's in the process of building an outdoor kitchen so they can have pizza parties and bonfires.

Speaker 4:

And this is an area of our community that does not have a grocery store. Right, it does not have amenities because it has not been invested in, and this is a woman who does not have a lot. When we think about or measure wealth or worth. Tasha's name wouldn't show up on anybody's matrix or anybody's list, but she is the most philanthropic human being that I know and I feel so lucky to learn from the ways in which she pushes against our ideas of power, she pushes against our ideas of influence and she has taken everything that has been granted to her and has found a way to use it in service and in love of the community that she lives in.

Speaker 2:

I one. That story is so beautiful and it's got me a little teary because I just see the full circle nature of Ed D'Souza just walking on doors, anybody asking him, you know, asking anybody to give him a chance. And here's Tasha in your backyard Opening those doors for so many people feeding people. Opening those doors for so many people feeding people. I mean, I got to tell you I come from a loud Italian St Louis family and when you talk about the meal, that is how we gather.

Speaker 4:

That is how we connect.

Speaker 2:

When we break the bread together in ours it's a baguette with some pasta but when you break that bread together, when you open those doors, that is the agency that we're talking about. And I heard this quote I need to read it from someone the other day and it really struck with me. I've read it every day since I've heard it two weeks ago, and it says privilege isn't the presence of perks and benefits, it's the absence of obstacles and barriers, and that's something that's a lot harder to notice. So if you have a hard time recognizing your privilege, focus on what you don't have to go through and you let that fuel your empathy and action. And I think that is what Tasha is doing. That's what millions of people around the world who are working toward their mission are doing. They are opening the door to Ed and saying, yes, we have a way to get you onboarded, yes, we have a way that we can get you integrated, and that's, honestly, the world you talked about.

Speaker 2:

I may be building something for generations, but that's the world I want to leave for my kids too. So I just adore you. I love the way you see the world. Tie this up with a bow, rachel. I don't know how you're going to do it, but I know you will, and give us a one good thing. What's your piece of advice or life hack? What would you leave with the community today that could really boost us?

Speaker 4:

Um, okay, so I told you I was a Gemini, so you get two cause.

Speaker 2:

I can't pick one.

Speaker 4:

I wouldn't expect it. Okay, great, okay, great, um. The first one is um, I think that now's the time to really find your nonprofit soulmate, not just the people who cheer you on when you're doing well, when you walk off the stage, but the people who are going to rally and strategize with you in this hard moment, who you can be generous with, who you can be vulnerable with and who you know have your back in this moment. So that's, that's the one piece of it. Who are your people? And then the other piece is like y'all, we need to go like get some band-aids, because I need you to bust your knees, like I need you to try so hard that you bite it and it sucks. And you have to set up and clean, clean out, clean the debris out of your wounds and muscle up and keep going.

Speaker 4:

I think of my daughter just started playing ice hockey for the first time. She's nine, it's she's much more of a badass than I will ever be. That's a whole other thing. But I have watched these kids knock each other flat out on the ice. They lay there for like five seconds and collect themselves and then they get up and keep going and I'm like, okay, if they can do that, I can have a hard conversation. I can say something to someone that feels very vulnerable, right Like I need us to at least have one moment a week where we have the ick, we have the sweats, we're worried about pit stains, and then we do it, and then we go do it, and then we talk about what we learned from it and we figure out what the next step is.

Speaker 3:

I'm obsessed with this because the first one fuels the second one. If you've got your people, you've got a layer that keep you encouraged to go. I mean, my friend, you are a wonder. I've loved this conversation. I love the work that you're doing, the way you see the world. How can our listeners connect with you with Gladiator, with CCF, all the things?

Speaker 4:

Yeah, Okay. So communitycentricfundraisingorg go head over there, sign up for the newsletter. You'll get something in your inbox every Tuesday. There's also a whole community on Mighty Network, so you can check that out there to get in touch with me. Look, y'all millennial old over here, oh.

Speaker 2:

John, I'm going to start calling you that now.

Speaker 4:

No, okay. So you're going to come find me and Gladiator on LinkedIn. You're going to go to our website, which is gladiatorrds my initials, com, and you're going to sign up for our newsletter, or you can head over to Instagram. You can find, if you want to see pictures of me cooking with my children and the flowers in my list. You can follow my personal Insta and I also go work in Sun. Gladiator has a platform, but that's really where you're going to connect with us and we are. I will give one more plug. We are getting ready in May to host another cohort of our community centric fundraising peer learning network that is open to learners of all backgrounds. It's a six week program. We get you for two hours a week and we really do deep dives into the different components of fundraising and how you can begin to introduce practices of community-centric fundraising into your development planning. So we have a cohort that will start in May and then we'll have another one that starts in September. So you can find that on our website as well.

Speaker 2:

Amazing. Okay, we're going to grab that and put it in our show notes in case you want one-stop shopping here, because we would love more people from the we Are For Good community to get involved in this beautiful moment and movement. Because, my friend, I just think you're lifting and doing such important work. I am so glad that you were born. That's what I've been sitting here thinking. I'm so glad you exist.

Speaker 2:

I'm so glad your heart is in this and that you chose to follow that nudge into this work. Keep going. We are beside you, locking arms with you and getting our knees dirty and ready to survive and weather this storm, because our communities are going to be bigger and brighter and more beautiful as we come out of it. So thank you, my friend.

Speaker 4:

Thank you. I am thrilled to be in this work with you.