Episode Notes

This bonus episode of Dreaming in Color is part of Building a More Equitable Future: Tools and Inspiration for Philanthropists, Nonprofits, and Others Working Toward Racial Equity, a Bridgespan compendium of knowledge content that shares a vision on pushing forward when it comes to equity.

Bridgespan partner and host Darren Isom is joined by a dynamic panel of philanthropic leaders: Don Chen (president of Surdna Foundation), Flozell Daniels, Jr. (CEO of the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation), Mayra Peters-Quintero (executive director of Abundant Futures Fund), and Vanessa Mason (principal at Omidyar Network). Recorded live at the Surdna Foundation offices in New York City during UN General Assembly week, the group dives into an in-depth discussion about building a more equitable world through racial justice, cross-racial solidarity, and community-driven solutions.

Join the conversation as the panelists explore the role of relationships in movement building, the power of joy and imagination in sustaining hope, and the importance of investing in intergenerational leadership. They discuss the challenges of systemic change, the need for incremental wins, and how to create space for collective healing and repair.

Episode Transcript

Darren Isom:

Welcome back to a bonus episode of Dreaming in Color. Today we have a special treat for you, a vibrant, in-person panel conversation with Flozell Daniels, Jr., from Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation, Mayra Peters-Quintero from Abundant Futures Fund, Vanessa Mason with Omidyar Network, and Don Chen with Surdna Foundation, our host for the conversation. As we celebrate points of progress and innovation and reimagine a more equitable world, let's remember it's a marathon, not a sprint, y'all. These leaders offer compelling visions for an equitable world that inspire us to stay the course and keep pushing for lasting change. This is Dreaming in Color.

You guys, very excited to have you here for this bonus episode of Dreaming in Color. I'm going to have my guests introduce themselves in just a bit, but as you guys know, I love to start with an invocation and so this one is a poem by Audre Lorde, “Coping.”

It has rained for five days
running 
the world is 
a round puddle
of sunless water 
where small islands 
are only beginning 
to cope 
a young boy 
in my garden 
is bailing out water 
from his flower patch 
when I ask him why
he tells me 
young seeds that have not seen sun 
forget 
and drown easily.

And so with that as our opening poem, and you can take what you want with it, I would love starting with you, Flozell, to have folks share who they are, what brings them to this room from a work and thinking perspective, and more importantly, in this world of sunless water and puddles, what's bringing you sun in this moment.

Flozell Daniels, Jr.:

Oh wow. Flozell Daniels, Jr., CEO of the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation. I am the son of Betty Singleton and the grandson of Sadie Mae Hathorne, and a line of people who imagined possibilities for which there was no evidence, and I'm really grateful to be able to be in this work with community from a deep racial equity perspective. This question you ask about what is bringing me sunshine, that's an incredible one. We were talking before we recorded about this grandchild of mine who will make two years old soon, and she is a remarkable reminder of the things that have been invested in me and this incredible opportunity and duty that I have, to bring some sunshine to her even as she is shining on me. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking about when we talk about the sunshine.

Darren Isom:

Very beautiful, and we'll talk a little bit later because we talked about the optimism needed to bring a child into this world right now, and so hopefully they're returning. Mayra.

Mayra Peters-Quintero:

That's a tough act to follow. I'm Mayra Peters-Quintero. I am at a place called the Abundant Futures Fund which is a newly formed donor collaborative really focused on trying to bring in new partners, new allies, new ideas on the tough issue of immigration. Before that, I was at the Ford Foundation, and I've been in the immigrant rights movement for a long time. I'm originally from Panama, then we moved to San Diego, and now I'm here, and I'm here at this table. As much as I talk about the need to break down silos and think more expansively, in my day-to-day work I am in an onslaught of attacks on immigrants and refugees in this country, and it's sometimes hard for me to really do that, pulling back and thinking and connecting with other people. So I was so happy and thrilled to be invited into this conversation to step away, dream, and hear what you all are dreaming about.

Don Chen:

I'm Don Chen. I'm the head of the Surdna Foundation here in New York and we are in our wonderful offices in Midtown. Surdna Foundation is a 107-year-old family foundation established by John Andrus, and today has a mission of advancing racial justice in America's communities. I'm here every day because I like to be in New York City and love it when folks come and use our office space because, what's the reason for having some real estate in Manhattan if you can't use it and make abundant use of it? And I feel very lucky to be doing this important work every day. The thing that's giving me sunshine on this occasion, I think two things I can think of off the top of my head is number one, being with old friends in new and shared purpose. This is what we get up in the morning every day to do and what gives me a guiding light. Secondly, my wife's coming home after being away for a month.

Darren Isom:

Oh wow.

Don Chen:

Coming back from Sri Lanka, where over the weekend they just had an election that ended up turning out not so badly. So I hope the rest of the world can emulate that.

Darren Isom:

Fingers crossed for us all in the fall.

Vanessa Mason:

Hello, everyone. My name is Vanessa Mason. I'm a principal at Omidyar Network. I lead our cultivating repair work focused on healing the legacies of slavery and colonialism. I am also a Texas native that now lives in DC. I've traveled a lot and so really when I think about what I bring to this work, it's a lot of different, well, a lot of lived and also professional expertise. I'm a great deal focused on health and healthcare and thinking about equity and belonging through that lens, thinking about futures research and how do we hold the space for collective dreaming and collective imagination together so we can plan a better world, and really doing it through a deeply equity-rooted focus.

As far as what's bringing me sunshine lately, definitely this conversation. I love being in community with folks, especially funders who are trying to work through... if you look at the news headlines, there's a lot of reasons to be scared, but when we're together it seems like a really great time to come together. And then our Catalyst Initiative cohort is also bringing me a lot of joy. It's 10 organizations that are working on repair and healing from a lot of different perspectives all across the country, and they're just so brilliant and creative and caring, and love being with them.

Darren Isom:

I love being with you, all four of you. Vanessa, I want to start with you actually from a question perspective since I have you that people can't see but you're sitting right next to me as well, and to talk about the importance of relationships in the work and the thinking. I'd love for you just to take a second to talk about the role of centering relationships and building durable movements, how do you think about that, and particularly as we think about the future of equitable philanthropy, how do we build on those relationships and actually create a movement that centers those relationships to drive impact and just drive belonging and all the things that we care about? Easy question that I'm sure we can get through in 30 seconds.

Vanessa Mason:

Sixty seconds, we got it, we're done. I think the way that I think about relationships generally is that to be human is to need and to want to be in relationship, that at the end of the day, no matter what we do, where we are, and what we're trying to do, that we're doing it together and we're doing it with the support and care of other people. So specifically when I think about what philanthropy can do to strengthen relationships and movements, it's a lot around how do we shape enough care and support and well-being around folks who are doing this work? That's both in their personal lives, how are they caring for their bodies, how are they caring for their families, and how are they able to care for each other in a way that doesn't burn them out? I think about what our institutions are doing and how they're showing up for us.

It's not enough just to do good out in the world, the institutions that we all work for and the institutions that we're trying to build, that we don't just replicate the same sort of harmful dynamics, how do we sort of live into the institutions that are going to help us live into our values. And then funders really supporting a lot of this space like that we have now to be together, to dream together, to build a world together of what we want so that we're not just reacting to what's happening to us but really in a space of what is it that we want to be, what is it that we want to do, and how do we want to feel when we're there? So I think that's incredibly important.

Darren Isom:

It's excellent starting point. Flozell, I'm going to throw it to you next. I'm sure you have some thoughts to build on there, but more importantly, I have a question for you as well. As we think about success, it's not only bringing people into the room, but bringing the right people into the room and giving people the space to really shine in the room and bring their assets in a way that's meaningful. You'll appreciate as well, I'm giving you a church reference to build on as well. I remember when I headed off to Howard, I came back for Christmas, Christmas break, and my grandmother being my grandmother had invited our pastor to dinner over the break, and the pastor asked the question, which of the sermons did I remember from growing up? A very pastorly question, right?

I remember two, one is about Tina Turner, I won't talk about that one on this episode, on maybe on another point, but the other was about literally the sermon he gave us before we left for college. It was a big group of us heading off to college, and he said that remember the Bible teaches us to love thy neighbor as ourselves, and embedded in that is our ability to love ourselves. You have to start first with loving ourselves from a work perspective, otherwise if you don't love yourself then you're going to hate your neighbors, you hate yourself, right? As I ask you who should we bring into the room, I want to ask what of us should we be bringing into the room as well? What should we be loving about ourselves that we bring to the room and that should feel important to the success of the work?

Flozell Daniels, Jr.:

It's so powerful. I came from New Orleans last night, and we are in the process of getting ourselves ready to commemorate 20 years after Katrina next year, and you can already feel the thickness in the air, not only about sort of what has happened, but what are these lessons and how are people thinking about it. Darren, your question makes me think about it because what we saw in that experience and we've seen in so many now, experiences, a need for us to understand how we're showing up and can show up so that we can be with each other. I think there's something really potent about this point about being together. Back when I was running the Louisiana Disaster Recovery Foundation and then Foundation for Louisiana, we had initiatives. One of them was called The Together Initiative because it really was sitting with the community wisdom that we learned, that we had to come with each other and that we really didn't have the option, especially in the space and place that most of us consider the Blackest city in America.

Folks want to debate these things and that's fine, and that means all of the wonderful things from a culture perspective and what we have meant to the entire country, but it also means that we've been at the epicenter of the oppression, this creed of violence and this insistence on putting our foot on people's neck which is such an important part of how power moves in this country. And so we've been really thinking a lot about, I certainly have been, about what it has meant for us to make sure that we were not just including everyone because it's the right thing to do, but including everyone, at least as many as we could bring along because it is the smart thing to do. Time and time again we find community is bringing forth the most thoughtful, innovative ways of building community and building out a future that makes sense for folks, and it's been really potent and powerful. This Bible reference that you make, it's been hard.

Darren Isom:

For the record, I've referenced the Bible all the time. I grew up in a liberation theology church.

Flozell Daniels, Jr.:

We are here for it.

Darren Isom:

Yes.

Flozell Daniels, Jr.:

But I think it's really important because that really gets tested time and time again for us, especially in movement spaces, right? If you're not careful, you'll say, "Well, we're going to keep to the narrow space and we're not going to because of violence, because of past harms be more inclusive." We are finding that there's a commitment that we have to bring more people into these conversations and to find ways to resource it, not only with money but with tactics and processes and strategies that help people find each other and stay connected to each other. It's been part and parcel of what has created space for me to stay in the work, as difficult as it can be, and what it means to actually find answers to some of our most entrenched challenges, I think.

Darren Isom:

I'm going to come back to that in just a bit because I'm going to have Don talk about it as well, but I want to go to you next, Mayra, because as we talk about making spaces for folks in a sense of belonging, I mean the immigration justice movement is all about this in a really meaningful and powerful way. Just recently, I was lucky enough to read Isabel Allende's book Island Beneath the Sea. I don't know if you read it at all, and it takes place in Saint-Domingue, so pre-Haitian Revolution, Haiti Cuba, and New Orleans. Beautiful book, but while there's so much that's moving about it, but this idea of immigration as a way of bringing people in, creating new narratives, creating new stories, but also the importance of how do you bring people in in a way that makes them feel powerful and important as they come in. And so your day of immigrating shouldn't be the worst day of your life. It should be one of the better days of your life, and how do we create a narrative around that?

So I would love just to make space for you to talk about the work that you're up to and the parallels that we can learn from a racial justice perspective around that work and how we create communities that offer people a sense of belonging and allow us to demonstrate the best of who we are.

Mayra Peters-Quintero:

Oh, thank you for that question. I mean, I guess I'll start with thinking about how, until now, the immigrant rights issues that you raise haven't been situated in a racial justice frame, and those were, I guess, movement-based decisions that predate me, and I understand the calculus. We had advocates and leaders who made what was probably the right call when they were advocating to not center this on race, but I lately have been dreaming and thinking a lot about what if we had done that differently? What if from the outset we had named what is obvious to all the people in this room and who are listening that are immigration rules and how they're applied and everything stems from a very racialized, racist perspective.

And so our failure or decision as a movement to not own that explicitly has left us a little on the outside of the racial justice movement. And so that is both something that, it makes me very anxious, but it also brings me a lot of hope because I feel we are getting there. I hear what you all are saying, and it is relationship based and that it's also politically based. We are all confronting so many similar struggles, similar opponents, the same people who... I'm a very practical person, so I think a lot about our opposition and how to beat them…

Darren Isom:

I'm glad somebody is.

Mayra Peters-Quintero:

I don't mean in a…

Flozell Daniels, Jr.:

We're starting already. Let's go.

Mayra Peters-Quintero:

I mean, I don't mean in an electoral sense. I mean really the people who are waging campaigns to change the narrative and the policy. They are unified, and we are not. And so that is my hope, is that our movement grounded in the belonging that we seek as immigrants, also extending that same sense of belonging within a movement family and learning how to do that when everybody feels they're drinking from a fire hose. Everybody's issue's in crisis in the fund where I sit because we are thinking a lot about how to raise more resources for this issue. It's what we hear, is a lot of scarcity from everywhere.

I know immigration has to do with education, but do you not see the attacks on public education? I got to put that fire out. Immigration is very gendered. It's connected to women and repo and everything else, but that's on fire. And so that scarcity mentality takes over, and that's what I'm hoping for, is that we can break that open in terms of abundance for us as funders. There's an abundance of resources in this country to cover our issues, to cover our work, to take care of our people and really try to socialize that.

Of course, the obvious is, I hope that Americans who are not recent immigrants learn how to live into their best values, which, I just came from a presentation where someone shared with me, in 13,000 zip codes Americans have privately signed up to sponsor immigrants and refugees from abroad in the last year, and those are diaspora folks, so our own people and it's also Americans. And so we know that we can be a belonging place, and what the people who participate report is that they love the feeling of welcoming someone once they are given the chance to exercise that. So we need to spread that.

Darren Isom:

That's what's already there, we just have to recognize it and celebrate it as well, right? Don, I'm going to go to you next, and firstly, thank you so much for so graciously hosting this conversation.

Don Chen:

Pleasure, it's a pleasure.

Darren Isom:

And it's so wonderful to be in conversation with you and just be a partner in crime around the thinking and the work in general. And folks can't see, this is a beautiful space. It's quite ideal in many ways. The question I have for you is just building on the other questions earlier. I mean clearly, this came up in a conversation we had in Martha's Vineyard earlier this summer, the need for cross-racial solidarity and carrying out this work, and not as a “nice to have” but really this work cannot be successful unless we have cross-racial solidarity.

And so there are a few things I want you to talk about a bit and would love others to join in as well. One, I think that we're at a space within the movement where we recognize in part the role of cross-solidarity in driving success, but we don't know how to do it, right? We've just, we've not practiced it. In fact, to some degree I think of it as almost like a, sorry, put on my Bridgespan partner hat and get a little wonky, but when you think about organizational development, success at the early starts is working in silos. As long as the silos are working really well, your organization's doing well, and at some point you're like, "Okay, we got to work together here. We can't stay in silos." And so, one, would love to get your thoughts on how do we normalize cross-racial solidarity as really something that's necessary for us to carry it out, and also what are the narratives we need to adopt to make it easier and more practical and more necessary and more doable?

Don Chen:

Well, it's a great question, and it's really relevant to my experience at Surdna. I was still a relatively new staff person here at The Surdna Foundation in 2021 when there was this horrible shooting and killing of eight people in Atlanta, six of whom were Asian American women, and it created a global outcry, tremendous grief, and outrage about the treatment of Asian Americans in this country, and led to really a wave of efforts to try to stop AAPI hate. Immediately we found ourselves in a moment of not just crisis and grief, but also opportunity where Asian American organizations, folks working on Pacific Islander, Native, Hawaiian issues, were banding together as a coalition to try to really understand how we could combat a lot of the narratives that have been spread about the kung flu and the China virus and things like that. But it actually goes back centuries and many, many generations where Asian Americans have been regarded as outsiders, perpetual foreigners, et cetera.

As the community started to come together to grapple with this huge challenge, there were divisions and tensions, some who thought we need to band together so that we could protect our own, we need to stop AAPI hate, we need to buttress the organizations that work on those issues, and others who really saw our liberation in the liberation of others as well. Because this moment, it might be us who are being scapegoated and targeted in the midst of a global pandemic, the next moment, the next year, it might be another group, whether it's immigrants crossing the southern border or another racial group or an ethnic or religious group or what have you, other forms of identity, and because I think we have a lot of experience in this country of this type of scapegoating, marginalization, and experience of our communities being used as wedges against each other.

I think the Asian American, Pacific Islander, Native Hawaiian community has experienced this a lot because we're considered the model minority in some ways which, as I explained to my kids when they're a very young age, it doesn't mean you're a model minority, oh, you're so good. It's more like you're not going to cause trouble. You're going to blend in. You're not going to cause trouble. Screw that. We are going to cause trouble because we again can't be free unless everyone's free. So that I think has been such a galvanizing force for many of us who really want to get to the root causes and attain some long-term, sustainable, durable solutions for a future where we can all feel unfettered and protected and safe. That's why I think cross-racial solidarity is really the only way to achieve that, otherwise everything else is temporary until the day when they decide to come after you again. So it's more of an essential as opposed to a “nice to have.”

Darren Isom:

Yeah, as my daddy always says, the train's always on time and never misses a stop.

Flozell Daniels, Jr.:

That's right.

Darren Isom:

So be careful your stop may be the next one. You got to stop it earlier, right?

Flozell Daniels, Jr.:

Wise.

Darren Isom:

Vanessa, I would love to throw it back to you as well to talk about how do we do that within organizations, and I'm sure, I know you don't have the answer, right? Or maybe you do, I don't know, right? But would love to get your thoughts on, as an organization, as you're building an organization that's dealing with issues across racial issues, giving people different sense of belonging, and also just confronting the fact that there've been racial tensions, right? Historical racial tensions, and we see how issues are used, the oppressor knows how to divide us. They're really good at it, right? How do you model that from an organizational perspective, or what steps are people taking to model that?

Vanessa Mason:

Yeah, I mean it's a very big question, and no, I do not have the singular answer, one because…

Darren Isom:

Yes you do, come on.

Vanessa Mason:

...I don't think that there is one, but to say that this is how that I, meaning we at Omidyar Network, are trying to approach doing this. One is trying to approach this work with a lot of care. For us as we have started this, it's really been thinking about how do we visibilize the good work that is already happening. We're not showing up as a funder and saying that we have the answer. We're saying that the answer already exists, and how do more of us see this work that's happening. So that's a lot why we started our work with an open call for submissions. We got over 700 submissions, which is both delightful and surprising given the volume, but a lot of it was how do we visibilize this work so that it seems more accessible to people so that more people choose to engage in this work and they see ways for them to participate and see their way into it.

I think that has helped folks understand a lot of what we've tried to bring to this, like how do we build an organization. Well, firstly, it's like acknowledge the diversity of things that are already happening. A lot of times I'll talk about this work in terms of four dimensions of repair. So it's like we've got material repairs, so that might be things that are restoring housing and wealth and assets. So like our organization like Equity and Transformation in Chicago, our grantee partner there that is bringing together justice-impacted people around power-building work, focused on things like guaranteed income and reparation for the war on drugs. It might be the relational repair work, so how do you sort of move through conflict, how do you move through loss? We are supporting work around the radical loss movement building project, which is how do you do grief work instead of social movements such that you're caring for people who are actively, again, being attacked from the outside, dealing with their own historical and intergenerational trauma, and still use it as a way of kind of catalyzing and moving toward collective action to really begin to heal.

It's also acknowledging cultural repairs, so how do we reclaim arts and creative expressions and cultural practices that we've had that make things stronger, and so folks like IllumiNative, who are bringing together visibilizing native people in film and TV. And then spiritual repair, how are we building together spiritual practices, spiritual and really beginning to make a sense of the larger “we” of all of this in the larger world that we're in. And so I think of one of our catalyst initiative cohort partners like an Inverse Surveillance Project, which is using art healing and technology around helping American Muslims heal from the collective trauma of state surveillance. So I think from an organizational perspective, it's like, start from where you are and really focus on how you care for folks, and then have a more like a learning posture to this too. Know that you don't have all the answers. Communicate that you don't have all the answers because it will help people, and again, invite people into this process of working through this together.

Darren Isom:

Mayra, I want to go to you next because I think that a lot of this is modeled actually within the immigration justice movement. And so one of the things that I'm impressed with your work and also just in maybe areas of more generally speaking is their ability to think really thoughtfully about or intentionally about how you might fund different groups that are doing work in a different way, how do you get at people that have different political angles around the issue, and how you create a larger conversation around the issue that everyone feels a part of. Can you talk a little bit about, in your work, how you've been able to bring different folks together who may have competing perspectives on the value of this issue to them?

Mayra Peters-Quintero:

I mean, I guess I would start with saying that, building on what Vanessa said, which I think was so powerful, is that in coming into the work as a funder which is my primary identity, for better or for worse at the moment.

Darren Isom:

For better, for better. Give yourself some credit. Give yourself grace. Goodness.

Mayra Peters-Quintero:

Stepping into this work as a funder, and I've been a funder for a long time now, is also seeing myself within the movement. This is my lane within the movement, is to be a funder, and please don't send Darren hate mail for inviting me into some of this. I'm not pretending that I'm an organizer and that I'm something that I'm not. I'm saying that the way that I'm contributing to our movement is through the philanthropy lane, and I really see myself that way, and I behave that way, and I treat my grantees this way, I think, or I strive to. Part of that means providing, sharing the privileged position I have of sitting on my perch and seeing and knowing Don and talking to Flozell, all these spaces, the work I see, the proposals that come my way, the projects, the conversation I was just in at Clinton Global Initiative, and in these spaces really adding value to the movement by sharing out and giving perspectives and having the confidence in my relationships because I come out of that movement, and I'm an activist at my core.

So I feel that I have developed the trust and the partnerships and behaved with integrity for long enough that now, to your question, as I'm starting to think about how do we build a bigger table and how do I fund outside of our traditional movement partners because I know that there are people who share our perspective, who want change, who want a more hopeful view to where we can be on immigration, and we need to bring them in. And so, step one, I think in this kind of thing, is making sure that your existing movement partners understand why you're funding that work and trust you that you are strategically because everybody is scraping around for money. Everybody is struggling to raise their operating budget every year.

So a grant that you gave to a business organization or a veterans group or an evangelical women's society who wants to take up... so I come from a place of abundance, but there is a need to really understand and really understand strategically what that's adding and what it's adding up to and how you build that. So it first starts with building a good foundation with the movement that you're trying to support. And then I have to tell you that for a long time, and Don knows this since I was at Ford, I am really extremely open to talk to anybody from any background, any organization. There is nobody who I won't meet with if you want to talk about this, and let's grapple with this, and people come. Once you build relationship to a theme that's coming out here, even people who are opposite you can share their apprehensions.

My own family in Panama where Venezuelans are arriving by the millions in Panama, they say, "I'm pro-immigrant. What is the limit? We can't actually feed all these people." So you get to a place where people can share that very real fear, break it down, and start thinking about who you can partner with, and it's been incredibly successful. We've put a lot of money into the American Business Immigration Council that funds business leaders around the country who share a belief at their core. Probably they are pro-immigrant because it is the workforce they need, but actually the politicization that's done by the organization in bringing people in and committing only to business leaders who will stand up and say, "There is no reason that undocumented people should not have status and work permits," and this is what they say.

So we fund groups like that, or veterans organizations who are really, really deeply affected, Black veterans organizations, white American organizations. The fact that there are groups of deported veterans really hits people and they want to work on this, and they don't believe it's possible, and the sorrow and the rage that it brings for our veterans' community to know that veteran immigrants can't get status or are deported. So these are important allies for us. We are not going to cross the finish line ever just by ourselves. Even with all the communities we represent at this table, we're not going to cross the finish line. So that work has been very special to me, and it's opened my own mind. I've had to really open my mind and understand now for when I'm sitting across from people, we don't actually share, we don't align on everything, but that's okay because we're getting practical.

Darren Isom:

I would love for both Don, you, and Flozell to tag team this one. I think that one of the things that I, and I've shared this with the group more broadly, you talk about this positionality from a philanthropic perspective, and I think that leaders of color bring such a world of experiences and perspectives into this work and thinking to make it successful for a number of different reasons. We've navigated oppression in ways that are meaningful and powerful, and we know what it looks like to have power or to take up space or leverage power when you actually don't have much of it, right? I joke all the time that this idea of being able to bring people to the table and have conversations, the biggest marker for me of white privilege is being able to make it through life without social skills. I'm like, "How'd you get this far not being able to talk to people?" That is some privilege, right? But one of the things that I also worry about, and worry, small W, because everyone knows I sleep really well at night, is…

Flozell Daniels, Jr.:

We are certain.

Darren Isom:

First off, I really do. I think that one of our assets, professionally speaking, can also be one of our liabilities. I think that as people of color, and I'll speak specifically for me as a queer Black guy, I'm used to looking at broken systems, assessing them very, very quickly, and then figuring out how to navigate the broken system. I can navigate the hell out of a broken system, loopholes, all the things, right? At some point you realize that that navigation in some ways enables the system to stay broken, and you become part of the problem. That's a longer conversation here that we can have over cocktails later about the various systems that we've enabled with workarounds. But the question becomes, when do you come to the point where it's like, okay, how do I use my positionality, my privilege, to actually build something new, to change the system and to say, "This isn't what, we're not going to work. We're not going to work around this one. We need to fix it." How do you make that happen within a philanthropic world?

Flozell Daniels, Jr.:

Well, it's fascinating. I mean, I think to the point that was made earlier, we get to do almost anything that's legal in the confines of these spaces, right? And so I think…

Darren Isom:

And even illegal, I mean, let's get the right lawyer.

Flozell Daniels, Jr.:

Well, we are in America, legal by whose standard, right? I think there's something really potent to your point, Darren, about I'm raised in this country, the son of a seventeen-year-old mom, born and raised as a Black boy, becomes a Black man. I navigate these spaces, happen to navigate them well, and along the way I get carried by people who saw it as their duty and responsibility to be able to help me get from one, right? I always talk about men on milk crates and women on porches, and in the community that made and raised me, and you do get into this space where you get really good at navigating systems. I've worked in the public sector for the city of New Orleans, I've worked in philanthropy, I've worked in higher ed. If you want to talk about “small P” politics…

Darren Isom:

Just make a space for the public sector in the city of New Orleans. I mean navigating broken systems, that right there, yeah.

Flozell Daniels, Jr.:

That right there, what was I going to grad school and how to navigate these things, and a lot of what we're thinking about at the Babcock Foundation is, again, trusting our people, what does it look like for the groups that we are funding on the ground really trying to support networks of people that are building power toward greater racial equity outcomes. They're making decisions about what it means to either interrogate systems and operate within them and improve them as much as they can, and also folks who are trying to blow them up and push them off the cliff because that's the only thing that's going to work, and really making space for that and figuring out the challenge of what kind of scale is necessary for people to be able to do that successfully.

Everyone at this table knows, the South is disproportionately underfunded, and so there's a real challenge with getting the resources in place to actually support those strategies in a way that actually works. Part of what we're doing in listening to people, they're telling us, "We understand how we want democracy to work, and we understand how it can shape to show up for people." What they haven't quite figured out is how to deal with the machinery that's been built to oppose their lives, and they know that folks, there's someone sitting in a room just like we are right now, having a conversation about…

Darren Isom:

A very different conversation.

Flozell Daniels, Jr.:

... about how to kill these people, how to deny us our humanity. To your point, they have many more resources, or it feels like they do, but the scarcity is a lie, and the truth is we learn that from community every day. I think that's something really important for philanthropy to think institutionally about something I do personally, and that is being a radical imaginary, right? Just like the folks who came before us, they decided we would sit in this room one day doing this work together and learning from each other when there was no evidence that it was possible. We get a chance to do that for generations that come after us, and we have the resources, both financially as well as the positionality and the power if we choose to use it, to push that.

Darren Isom:

And we definitely have the intellectual capabilities.

Flozell Daniels, Jr.:

Oh, absolutely. We have more of that than you can shake a stick at.

Darren Isom:

What you got, Don?

Don Chen:

I think the history of this foundation, The Surdna Foundation, and Surdna got its name because it's Andrus spelled backwards, our founder is John Andrus. He was a relatively modest guy, didn't want to put his name on the door, and it carries forward in terms of, I think similar to what Vanessa said, we don't show up and pretend we have all the answers and tell people what to do. I think we really, our role is to partner with folks, be in deep relationship with folks, and then also help them have the capacity and the resources to be able to come up with creative solutions to various issues. This question that you're asking about broken systems, I think has been at the core of The Surdna Foundation since we started to have professional staff, which was back in the 1980s. So even though we've been around for over a century, it was a family foundation, run out the family, not even the family office. It was literally one of the descendants writing checks, and then in the 1980s hired professional staff.

From the very beginning of that era, the Surdna board and staff agreed that it would be a foundation focused on systems change. In other words, not focused on immediate needs or direct service, which obviously is very important in our society because people need help today, but to really have the patience because we're so long-lived, we've been around for a century, we can actually be patient, support the things that a lot of others including government agencies and other folks can't do, and focus on that long-term change.

So these days when we think about broken systems, there are so many, of course, and I think one thing that I always look for is who's out there, who's really putting forward that positive vision of racial inclusion, gender inclusion, all types of positive things in our society, and can also chart a path between here and there and identify the steps. Those steps, if you look at them individually, they may look like incremental change, but we got to have some building blocks, some steps to achieve along the way to get to that vision. The folks who can kind of connect those dots, and get from point A to point B, I think are in particularly good position.

I'll give you one example, and again, this is thinking about broken systems. We have a fund within Surdna called The Andrews Family Fund which focuses on youth justice, and that program has grappled with the notion of abolition, and abolition sounds like a big idea. It's obviously… abolishing youth incarceration has been the focus of the program, and what we really mean by that is how can we envision an alternative to putting young people, minors, in adult prison, in incarcerated settings. Young people commit crimes, that has been an issue, but how can we envision something better where we apply all the tools that we have seen work in society, like restorative justice, counseling, interventions that support families and meeting their needs, dealing with the stresses of poverty and other challenging conditions so that incarceration is really the last resort, and have a bias towards those types of priorities as opposed to incarceration, which is often fast-tracked in so many communities.

So we have been supporting visionaries who have identified broken systems, again, that feed a pipeline, unfortunately, of folks who not only end up being young people in incarcerated settings but often end up in adult prison as well for much longer, and interrupt that cycle with these interim steps where we can work with local communities, build trusting relationships between folks in the community where the solutions are born out of the communities and with local officials and in a lot of cases scholars who are measuring and studying the problem and can find those identifiable solutions. To me, that is a way in which you're dealing with the short-term, immediate impacts of the challenges, but also trying to support folks who are trying to aim for that long-term vision.

Darren Isom:

This is a great thread that I'd love to stay on for a little bit and would love for folks to jump in where it's helpful for them, and you already started talking about this, Flozell. I think that my team, I joke all the time about the generational shift that we're living through, all the time. I'm sure everyone's sick of hearing it. I feel like I turned to everybody's grandpa. I got like five stories I can tell over and over again. But the baby boomers are stepping down from a power perspective, and I joke that millennials are stepping into power because Gen X, we don't want to be here. We're just here because for 10 years, someone's got to hold the line.

Vanessa Mason:

Millennials don't really want…

Darren Isom:

Please, someone. Millennials either, right?

Flozell Daniels, Jr.:

It might as well be…

Darren Isom:

But please somebody forget about us anytime soon. Please forget about us, right? I mean, that said, I joke that I used to say that we were just here for 10 years to hold, but I'm realizing, I was like, "Oh my god, we have to come up with stuff because if we got to do a little bit more because it's 10 years, we can't hold the line." But that's another conversation for another day. As I think about the generational shift, one of the things that I think of is really powerful and meaningful in that shift is not just a shift in thinking from a how the world works and how people work together and what right looks like. It's also behavioral shift, and I'll use myself as a personal example.

Early in my career, nonprofit sector, consulting sector, I was that guy that if the deck had 10 slides, I could zero in on that one bullet on slide three and tell you exactly what was wrong with it and how everybody was going to go to hell for it being wrong, right? I was going to critique it. I critique anything. I could figure out what was wrong, what was broken, and for many ways I saw power as critiquing, right? There was a power in being able to say what wasn't working, what was broken, right?

At some point, I don't know when that shift happened, and you realize that actually your power flex wasn't in breaking things apart, but actually in building things. You're at the table now to work, yeah, it's broken. This has been broken for a while. What are you going to imagine in its place? That's a very different orientation around thinking. That's a very different power flex, and it requires a whole different set of muscles to make it happen, right? I think so many of us have built our careers in tearing things apart in a way that we don't even have the muscles to build, right? And so I mean, my question, as we think about this new generation that's ripe with all the things that we care about and love, how do we encourage, support, enable the power switch to actually get them to be builders in the work to make the work happen and to actually bring their best to build something new? Because clearly if it's the way it is, it's because we haven't thought about anything else, another way to do it. Any thoughts?

Flozell Daniels, Jr.:

I think there's something really powerful, and this touches on a few of the things that we've discussed, especially around the making of a true multiracial democracy, what it means for us to be with each other. I think it's really important for us to figure out... there is no evidence, in this country at least and maybe across the world, that anything potent or powerful has happened in society without young people making it happen, right? They're always at the cutting edge of imagining and pushing for and envisioning, and typically there are some elders and some wise folk who are at their backs or on their side saying, "Okay, this is what we learned. This is how we know. Go forth and create space."

It is not by mistake that the oligarchs of the world, if I want to use that word, or powerful interests are trying to destroy society as we understand it and democracy as we've been trying to make it, and that is because it has the potential to bring us in the collective action in a way that truly does represent the hearts of this nation and our communities. I think it's important for us to help young people see and understand that and to support their work in being able to take over the spaces.

We chuckled earlier about me working in the mayor's office. One of the things that I learned in that space was, I was given responsibility for things for which I had not earned the right to have dominion over. My mentor at the time, a woman named Thelma Harris French, my boss and mentor, she said, "You will do these things because you must. We need you to be able to show up for community this way." We need to do more of that, and I feel like we're struggling a little bit because we're seeing the young people now, I hear this from my daughter who's a 29-year-old professional in the world that, well, I have to earn my way to get to the thing, but she can't get to the thing, Darren, unless she gets the experience and can actually get her hands and sort of get her hands around it and get her feet dirty, if you know what I mean, and get our hands dirty as we say.

I think it's really important for us, especially for us in philanthropy, to be able to figure that out. Babcock, we're in our 71st year of work in the American South, and one of the most potent parts of our investments has been investing in leadership development and bringing up the ranks of young people who now span the world in the country and certainly across the South in their leadership profiles in being able to advance the work. I think it's important for us to figure out how to do that more and how to do it better.

Vanessa Mason:

I think this is where maybe where generational impacts kind of show up, because when I think about millennials, we were the generation that's like, "Get all the good grades in school, go to college, do the right things, and you will get paid off." And so I think when they think about Gen Z and Gen Alpha coming, they're seeing the errors of that, and obviously millennials lived through the failure of that not working.

To your point around giving opportunity, I think given the generational shift in that boomers are stepping aside now, that you have this ascendancy of millennials now being in positions of power and of leadership, we have learned through our own poor experiences how to better mentor younger people. I think that that's beneficial for movements, it's beneficial for organizations. I see that in the way that I'm seeing some of these new organizations coming forward with how they construct themselves. They think they're very sophisticated. It's not just about the work that they're doing, but it's about how they're put together, how they think about leadership, how they think about strategy, allowing more spaces for intergenerational knowledge transfer, intergenerational relationship building, whether it's memes or whether it's kiki-ing, where are there spaces for folks to really connect with each other.

Darren Isom:

The times are bad, but the memes are good.

Vanessa Mason:

The times are bad, but the memes are good. And so, especially when I think about the repair work, so much, just on the issue of reparations, folks have been fighting for reparations in this country pretty much since the beginning of slavery, but we've never been as close as we've been until now. So it's one of those things that if you appreciate the long trajectory of history, and you have folks who have been working on reparations for the last 50 years, and also folks who came out of 2020 and all the sort of reckoning around George Floyd, that that's really where the wisdom comes together of having the sort of frustration of being young and not having access to those opportunities to lead or having that access to opportunity to innovate or knowing that there's no point in doing the right thing because no one's going to honor it anyway because they want you to just sort of stay in your lane, your place, whatever it is.

And so I think the more, again this is more sort of transparency, the more that you acknowledge and say, "Yes, that's crazy that if you're young, you're living in places of economic precarity, that you don't have time for this, that there's less emotional bandwidth," and that while we acknowledge that we're trying to find inroads and ways, whether it's through technology, movement, spaces of gathering, whether we're acknowledging a lot of the sort of grief and trauma that's coming out of it and holding space for that, that we see the impacts of this. Basically that we see you and that we want to help and support you. I think that that's where you need to move.

Don Chen:

Darren, you and I both to quote, I can't remember the person who you will remember, but there's a wise person who says that cynicism is a tool of the oppressor.

Darren Isom:

Yes. Yes.

Don Chen:

Cynicism will do us in because it means that folks don't have faith in the system, they don't have faith in institutions, they will unplug and disengage and not, for example, vote, and they won't express themselves in the public square. They will just go along with whatever happens, and that is just something that we're experiencing too much of here. And so when I think of building, I think of our responsibility to build trust. Just going back to my background, I'm the child of immigrants. My ancestors were Hakka Uyghur and Han Chinese. My parents came to the United States because they were fleeing the Communist Revolution, and they really believed in what this country represents. I am grateful that they did, and I can be here in this country and have the relative freedom and all the benefits of being here as opposed to being in a place like China, and I think very often we take things for granted here.

We don't realize how, even though things are quite broken and imperfect and very challenging, it feels especially so these days, but we still are a model for other countries in the world for how to do some things relatively well and have relative strength in our democratic institutions, and building that trust in our institutions is something we have to work really hard at. When I think about the task of building, it's not just trusting the institutions, it's also building relationships so that people can be engaged. I think of the role of the community organizer as being instrumental to that because where people meet democracy, where they meet participation is really in their local community when they're thinking about the roads and the schools and the water supply and all the different things that affect them on a visceral day-to-day level.

I think about Alicia Garza's memoir, The Purpose of Power, where she talks about the task of community organizers. We can't just be content with talking with the circles of folks that agree with us all the time. This is how a lot of us live our lives these days, but how do we get out of our little bubbles and go out and talk to people who are very, very different from us and build that trust and power and build that understanding and relationships with folks who are really different from us. And then if we can get them in our orbit, like Mayra was saying, if you can just talk to people about immigration issues so that it's not all caricatured by what people see in the media, then you can really start to relate to folks and talk some sense into them, or maybe even have some sense talked into you or what have you. And so to me the task of building requires that kind of two-way street of trust building.

Darren Isom:

Yeah. I do wonder as well, I mean I think that one of our assets, generationally speaking as Gen Xers is that in many ways, we were the rogue generation. We were out there on our own. I don't know. Our parents were working, I guess. I don't know what they were doing. And so don't repeat that to my mother. But I do wonder, in many ways we have a lot of space to try things. We also have a lot of space to fail, and I worry that we've created a world where failure is not an option, right? We're all leading strategies. There's no space to fail. Every election is the worst ever and the most important ever. Everyone, everyone, right?

Mayra Peters-Quintero:

Consequential.

Darren Isom:

Exactly. So I think that you do in many ways learn so much from failure, and so how do you create space for people to fail generationally speaking, how do you create space for organizations strategically to fail, how do you create space as funders for people to learn, and how do we lower the risk profile. Everything's so risky.

Mayra Peters-Quintero:

We don't even have to get so far as making space for failure. At least on my issue, we've barely been able to recognize incremental change as positive. It's we want it all. We want to overhaul the entire system. It is a comprehensive restructuring that we need. And so, to this point about cynicism, part of what we need to fuel us, and data shows even Americans everywhere crave this, you want optimism and hopefulness, and we need moments of joy, and we need to celebrate victories. I worry that part of what we've done is not reinforced and created the appropriate space to recognize incremental change, and in the immigration context that means we have wanted citizenship for those who are undocumented, and we have lots of campaigns that say we will not stop short of citizenship. It is noble, it is the appropriate call.

But then what happens when all of the different ways when someone who has a very precarious life because they don't have a work permit, because they're deportable, because they can get picked up, what happens when you don't fight for them to get a temporary relief? What about something that is not full citizenship? I think that's some of the re-envisioning that we're doing within our own movement is thinking about why did we want citizenship, or at least this is what I shouldn't say the movement, at my job.

Why did we want that? If we're not going to get citizenship anytime soon, what was it that we wanted? Well, we wanted to send our kids to good schools. We wanted healthcare. We didn't want to be afraid to drive to the emergency room because we might get stopped for a taillight. What are all the things that we wanted that we can fight for in the meantime? And the systems change question was really nagging at me, what we were just talking about, because at an intermediary where I am now, at a collaborative fund, I am liberated in many ways from adhering to this long-view systems change language that you and I know for a long time from our different philanthropic spaces, and I'm a systems change person. I am not about “let's make immigrant detention more attractive.”

Darren Isom:

A little less bad.

Mayra Peters-Quintero:

A little less bad. I'm like, "No, let's get it. Why are we jailing people for civil offenses? What is wrong with this?" However, in the fund where I sit, I have had the opportunity to say, "Yeah, we need the systems change, but in the meantime, our issue is being held hostage by people who are weaponizing our issue. I don't want to now hold hostage the issue for people who today need something." I really am challenging myself now, all those years of systems change funding, shouldn't we be reserving part of our resources because if we know that systems change require people to engage and participate, you can't do that when you're not okay, when you are detained, or you are fearful, or you can't put food on the table, fill in the blank.

And so if you're not doing your part to fund kind of immediate needs, so in our case what that looks like is there are temporary different kinds of status that are given through executive action, not through legislation. Biden has given quite a few countries this ability to not be deported because they'll be deported to a country that has fallen apart for various reasons. Typically, then the immigrant rights infrastructure nationally is held up by a handful of national foundations. It's very little money. It's the same foundations funding the infrastructure, and they are all systems change funders. So that's amazing, right? They're all in it for that.

However, in June, President Biden announced two great policies that would allow people to get different kinds of status who are undocumented, if you're married to a US citizen, if you're in certain kind of status. Our philanthropic infrastructure is not equipped to implement the wins because you need local work. It is all local. And so there's both the idea that we orient our work toward these big goals and then we don't get the joy and the momentum that comes from the incremental wins and these moments where you are actually protecting and changing someone's life, and also as a practical matter, we're not there to implement the policy change that we invested in because it is a different skill set and muscle and partners, and now we start looking locally. And so there is something I feel like that needs to be massaged between this like false dichotomy of, oh, you just do direct services and oh, I'm here for the long haul, like where are we finding places to do those together in service of each other?

Darren Isom:

I think it speaks to many ways as well as this idea of how do we have an aligned strategy that we understand the role that we all play in that one strategy and something more short term than long term.

Mayra Peters-Quintero:

That's right.

Don Chen:

And I think it's forced us to be really pragmatic. If there's anything we as The Surdna Foundation have learned from the pandemic experience is that even though our board and staff agreed decades ago to focus on systems change, when the pandemic hit we realized some of our grantee organizations are really in the best position to deliver assistance, when people needed the most food assistance and access to resources and other things because they had built up so much credibility and trust within their communities, and that's not something we wanted to say no to. In fact, we encouraged it, and during that time we established a rapid response fund to help organizations respond to some of the immediate needs in the community because that's what they needed the most. You can't start to build the long-term future and the systems change plan unless organizations and the people that are served in those communities are really doing okay.

Nowadays, as we look back on the pandemic and just the state of nonprofits these days, we're learning a lot more about just how hard it is for nonprofit leaders. There's a lot of burnout. There was a new study out today from Independent Sector showing that about a fifth of nonprofit workers can't meet basic necessities. These are things that we should really care about from an organizational capacity and viability standpoint in order to hope that there is an opportunity for them to also be able to implement systems change.

Vanessa Mason:

I was going to echo too, I hear you on that tension. One of the both weird and also sad things I hear from potential grantees is, "We would like to do more of this work or expand in this way, but honestly, health benefits are the biggest struggle with this," which is such a quintessential American challenge to put forward. And so one of the ways that we've tried to do that because we are focused on repair and healing is we're thinking about this holistically again, that it's not just about the work that you're doing. But we gave wellness stipends to the folks in our Catalyst Initiative cohort, and we said, "We're technically dispersing this as general operating support because we don't want to restrict you, and we hope that you use this for however you define wellness. It can be time off, it can be a retreat, it can be massages, however you define wellness for your organization." I think having both that permission and that space for folks to prioritize what might be pressing needs and for funders to fund that is helpful for sort of resolving some of those tensions.

But I also think that those tensions are existing there because it points to both the reason for system change as well as where there might be gaps with alignment of strategy is where we could be collaborating and connecting more. So a lot of how we're trying to think about this in the long term is we're moving toward laying the groundwork for a collaborative fund because we know that resourcing around repair and healing has been one of the things that spikes with political will and then it goes away when it doesn't seem that there's a crisis. And so you have to address the resourcing of organizations such that they can grow, that the ecosystem can mature, so that you can have these relationships and connections and networks and knowledge so that more of this work can be more durable. And so I think that's at least how we're trying to do it, but it's certainly something from a future of equitable philanthropy… I think it begs how do we do this at a larger scale.

Darren Isom:

And with that, we are out of time. We're well over.

Vanessa Mason:

Oh no.

Darren Isom:

I know, right? As we get started, as you have more stuff to say, as we get started…

Flozell Daniels, Jr.:

Now that we're out of time.

Darren Isom:

I'll give you a question to close us out.

Don Chen:

Bonus round.

Darren Isom:

I know, right, bonus round, and at our Martha's Vineyard event, it's a wonderful event, one of our colleagues in the work, Amar Singh is over at Proteus Fund and made the point of how so often in the society that we're in, people think about culture building or understanding culture, it's made or created about this shared past. Our culture is based on a shared pair, what they shared from a past perspective, but we have the unique opportunity in our work to think of culture or define culture as what we share from a future perspective, what's the future that we share we're building together. And so with that as an opening and an entree, a beautiful one I hope, I would love to have each of you share, as you think about that shared future that we're building together, what would characterize that future that you're trying to create. You can throw out some points, some bullets, some thoughts, some love, whatever makes sense to you. And more importantly, what makes you hopeful that we will get there?

Flozell Daniels, Jr.:

I think it's important, and the thing I dream of is to be free and fearless. So much of my work and my thoughts and how I move through the world, I realize, is connected to how systems of oppression and colonialism still inform all of our lives at very deeply individual levels as well as at the systems level.

And so there is something really important about creating some north stars, if you will, around what it means to actually be free, free to engage, free to control your future, free to define the kind of life and humanity that you want to have observed, and what it means to be fearless because there are some things we are just not dealing with, strands of anti-Blackness that sit deep inside of this work. We live in a country that is aiding and abetting in the genocide in multiple parts of the world now, and it will cost you something, your job, your livelihood, your reputation, if you say something about these things sometimes. What is really important for us, I think,  is to build a culture, a culture forward that allows us to be free and fearless. That's what I pray and dream of.

Darren Isom:

Make sure we're going to get there. You got to give me some hope.

Flozell Daniels, Jr.:

Oh, folks are fighting for a future, and you see it in the streets, you see it in the boardrooms, you see it in the practical sort of steps that people are taking. I think about, in New Orleans when we were doing, it wasn't quite jail, prison abolition work, but it was really how do we strangle and starve this jail that at one point we were the most incarcerated city in the world. Inside the multi-year conversation, someone said, "Well, why would you put a bail fund in place when we're trying to close the jail?" And I'm like, "Until we close it or shrink it significantly, we have to make people free."

You can do both/and, and what we saw were people really stepping into those spaces, not only being creative but being fearless and brave and also interrogating. What always happens in movement spaces is like, are you legitimate if you are not so radically on one side or the other, and we don't have to live that way. We can actually meet people where they are, look at the complexity of issues and things that inform how people are living, and be responsive to those things even as we look forward.

Don Chen:

I think the way you asked the question, Darren, how do we get people to believe in a shared future, I think just the feat of getting people to understand how important a shared, our shared future, would be a great accomplishment unto itself, that our future is shared, our destiny is shared, that we're all in this together.

Darren Isom:

We all get free together.

Don Chen:

Yeah, we could say that at a community level, at a national level, at a global level because we do have a shared destiny together. Much as we like to think about stats and figures and various things, when I talk about youth incarceration, these are our children in our community who will be people in our community as adults, and we all are part of the same system. Same thing goes for our shared environments, the air we breathe, the environmental impacts that we will all bear. I think one thing that this crazy year, 2024, has brought us is a competition between visions, one that is very zero-sum, very us against them, versus one that is abundant and one that imagines us pulling together and growing the economy together and growing our sense of civic participation and belonging together. That is a stark choice, and I believe that more folks will choose the latter, the abundant future, the one where we have a shared future, a more prosperous and bright one, and that's what I'm hoping for.

Mayra Peters-Quintero:

I'm going to go back to this generational question in answering this, and I'm going to sound much older than I am. You can't see me in the pod because I'm really young.

Darren Isom:

You're really young, so young, so young. We got one Gen Z at the table. We got one Gen Z at the table. I think it's got her, we got her.

Mayra Peters-Quintero:

Well, I mean I sound like an old-timer with what I'm about to say, but I mean like our collective future, younger people see it so clearly, and what gives me hope that we're going to get there are those younger people.

Flozell Daniels, Jr.:

That's it.

Mayra Peters-Quintero:

I mean, honestly, all the thinking that we've had to do over a generation, over intersectionality, cross-movements, all that, they're there. They see it. They are kind to each other, they throw down for each other.

Flozell Daniels, Jr.:

That's right.

Mayra Peters-Quintero:

They understand what climate has to do with race, it has to do with economics. They understand it intrinsically in a very different way, and that gives me so much hope. I will say that, in my experience, I said it's also how we get things done. I know that in the immigration context, we have had no major positive immigration policy since Ronald Reagan in 1986 until the immigrant youth movement kicked butt and got Obama to give them DACA, and that they've been audacious and bold. They've changed the narrative, they've changed the policy, they lead the way, and as part of their natural orientation, they built a broad movement. I've had my friends who funded in like the LGBT space have gone to the United We Dream or young immigration events, they're like, "That's the queerest event I've ever been to."

Darren Isom:

It's also queer in the best way possible, queer as hell.

Mayra Peters-Quintero:

In the best way possible. And so these same folks, get out of their way, resource them robustly, and we will follow because it's not just the right thing to do, they are actually the only people achieving things at this moment. So that's where I end.

Vanessa Mason:

I think what's giving me hope is seeing the success of things that we never thought possible. So a lot of the reparations wins that we're seeing, like New York State, New York City, California, Evanston, already implemented there. So seeing those, the additional truth and healing efforts we're seeing around Native peoples, both in California and also trying to move forward at the federal level. We're talking about things that were literally… we could not discuss before, and we were both discussing them and documenting them and actually putting policy in place. We're bringing together coalitions around them. There's narrative work being done around culture change work, and I think that that is all this building on to your point around this generational and cross-generational energy. I think having young people come into these movement spaces, having movement elders say, "Here's what we've done, how can we do this together in different ways," I think are all such an amazing, hopeful sign and show that we can't do this alone, that we're doing it together.

What I think it shows for me from a future sense is that, wow, we talk about reparations and truth and healing in the sense of the past. It's actually showing us this is how we build our future because acknowledging that what we built before in the path both was harmful and it's not sustainable, and we need to actually sit down together and actually ask people and actually design the society, the democracy, the culture that is also involving repair and healing that says, "This is how we move forward," and how we move forward in a way that brings together all of us where all of us can live and thrive. Importantly, I think what you're highlighting around the queer spaces is joy. I cannot get enough of collective joy. I think that we need collective joy more than ever, and the more opportunity we have to celebrate the wins, to celebrate unique cultural expressions, to celebrate what's possible, to celebrate that we got something that we never thought was going to happen is what's going to leave us in a really beautiful future.

Darren Isom:

I love ending the conversation on joy. So I want to thank each of you for participating. Don, thanks again for hosting. So excited about the work ahead, and for me, what gives me hope is the joy that's produced in these conversations, and I say all the time, I lost my dad in 2019, my dad's big quote, whenever I come with him with a work problem, he'd always say, "Isn't this why you went to school? Go figure it out. You went to school." Right? But I mean, truly, I totally, whenever I'm in conversation with folks like you guys, and luckily I have you guys on email, on text, all the things, I am constantly relieved by just the level of intellectual thought and rigor and wisdom that we have within the movement. And so we have all that we need to get this done. We just have to make sure we keep the joy going to keep us fueled. So thank you, guys.

Our conversation was recorded some months ago before the November election, and I'm recording this postscript weeks after the election, still grieving the election's outcome and holding some anxieties about the months ahead. But in moments like this one, filled with disappointment, I think of the generations who came before, how incredibly dark their worlds were and how they managed in the darkest times to find hope, find joy, and imagine a different, more beautiful world, one worth fighting to create. At a convening some summers back, Maurice Moe Mitchell reminded the audience that while we should be sure to acknowledge as Black Americans the immense pain and hardships that shaped our experience, we must also celebrate that we are here because through those incredible hardships someone, somewhere conjured joy, found love, dared to hope, and here I sit, some seven generations into this casino we call America, the inheritor of an unyielding optimism forced through centuries of magical thinking and faith beyond measure, a beautiful, priceless legacy.

Easily one of my most prized inheritances, my grandmother's cookbooks have all of the New Orleans staples laid out in meticulous detail with edits, corrections, and updates developed over generations, but extra special in my grandma Lois's cookbooks, there are for-the-holidays recipe instructions, handwritten in perfect cursive in the margins of some of the Sunday standards that get gussied up for Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, and family celebrations. Savory dishes get a little richer, double the bay leaf, extra butter, ground pork added for flavor. Spices like savory celery seed and fresh thyme appear where they hadn't before, and any recipe involving shrimp gets “an add crab meat in good measure” addition. Sweet dishes get a lot more attention. Vanilla amounts are doubled, milk is replaced by heavy cream, cardamom replaces nutmeg, and everything gets an extra egg yolk and an extra pinch of salt.

Not written there in the margins, but implied with every extra ingredient and additional holiday instruction is a whole lot of love, a love passed on from many generations before that lives on in the dishes for generations to come. When I prepare the recipes, I feel like I'm in conversation with my grandma. I can hear her voice gently repeating the instructions as I cook, telling the story of how she learned to make the dish that way, from whom, and the holiday event in which that dish shined, each story punctuated with a warm laugh. And as I said in conversation with Don, Vanessa, Mayra, and Flozell, as they lovingly cooked up their visions for a perfect union, I felt like I was back in my grandma Lois's kitchen, exchanging notes on recipes, capturing wisdom from generations before, to inform instructions for a tasty New Orleans meal to be enjoyed by generations to come.

The ever-brilliant Ashindi Maxton, a guest on our first season, shared some post-election thoughts that I've been holding closely to these last few days. She wrote, "Something new will come next. I believe the next revolution we need is spiritual. Political strategies alone are not going to fix what is toxic at the heart of our country. We fight this next phase with the strength of our love and imagination. Ground yourself. Do what you need to do to be well and rejoin the fight when you can. Communities under threat need those of us leading with love to stand stronger than ever. Our ancestors have been through worse. They held a vision for a different future that is still ours to build." I'm thankful for the loving company of leaders like Don, Vanessa, Mayra, and Flozell, and others, fellow journeymen and builders of the beautiful world that awaits. My grandma Lois would be so proud of the feasts we're cooking up, new notes in less than perfect cursive in the margins, added with love.

Thanks for listening to Dreaming in Color. A special shout-out to all the folks who make this magic happen. From StudioPod Media, our wonderful producer, Denise Savas; audio engineer, Teresa Buchanan; and graphic designer, Diana Jimenez. And from Reel Works, our video production team, Jenny Loo and Stephen Czaja. A huge shout-out to our ever-brilliant Bridgespan production team, Cora Daniels, Christian Celeste Tate, Christina Pistorius, Ryan Wenzel, and this season's guest hosts, Jasmine Reliford, Nithin Iyengar, and Angela Maldonado, and of course, our fabulous creative director, Ami Diané. What a squad, y'all. Be sure to rate, subscribe, and review wherever you listen to podcasts. Catch you next time.