Full-Moon Leadership: Reflecting the Brilliance of Community

“Everyone has the potential to lead, and leadership is about listening and being attuned to everyone else. It’s about humility. It’s about trust. It’s about flexibility. It’s about having fun along the way. It is about holding space for others’ brilliance rather than being the sole source of answers.”
—adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy

When I joined Akonadi Foundation in 2015 as a grants manager, I was excited to be working for an organization whose stated mission was to “eliminate structural racism.” I was committed to bringing my full self to propel this mission and build grantmaking practices that promote justice. Over the years, this has encompassed using my position to advocate for practices that more accessibility for applicants, reduce burden on grantees, and explore how we could do more to cede power and bring community partners into the foundation’s decision-making.

When I moved into a program officer role at the foundation, I found different ways to hold our core grantmaking practices accountable to our values. Through our new grantmaking program called All in for Oakland, I was successful in recommending five-year general support grants to reflect the long-term work at the heart of the program. While previously, Akonadi had only ever provided three-year grants, our board agreed that in order to make significant headway in ending the criminalization of young people of color in Oakland, we must provide racial justice organizations with the sustainable and flexible resources they need and deserve.

Since joining Akonadi Foundation six years ago, I’ve reflected on the concept of leading from any seat and how it relates to a vision of decentralized or decolonized leadership. In Decolonizing Wealth, Edgar Villanueva sees decolonized leadership as “moving away from a colonized hierarchical pyramid structure, with its command and control leadership, to a realization of how everyone has leadership potential.” In Emergent Strategy, adrienne maree brown discusses “decentralized innovation”—the idea of decentralizing “our idea of where solutions and decisions happen, where ideas come from.” For me, this type of leadership and influence does not come from position or title, but rather from radical honesty and the mindset we bring to our work with others.My mind set is guided by this mantra: those closest to the problem are closest to the solution. Philanthropy is a step removed—removed from the joy and the pain in the communities we care about, from their challenges, and from their solutions. Within our organizations, we need to create a more enabling environment to relinquish control, listen to grantees and community members, share their joy and pain, tell truth to power, and design solutions. It takes courage to do this in the field of philanthropy with its roots in white wealth and power; the practice of decentralizing decision-making and shifting away from hierarchy is essential if we want to align our institution’s values and practices.

When I was charged with developing an evaluation process for our All in for Oakland program, I used that opportunity to engage the expertise of the folks closest to the work. Grassroots organizers co-created the request for proposal document and learning questions and interviewed and selected the evaluation team. Engaging our community partners in this way helps to shift away from a white dominant perspective of evaluation in which the foundation defines success, to an approach that is more culturally valid and oriented to participant ownership. For the first time, the foundation will be evaluated by the consultants chosen by our grantee partners.

Philanthropy has long been a closed box to the communities around us, but Akonadi and other funders around the country are working to open up. I feel honored to play a part in that process through questioning current practice, advocating for removing barriers, and regularly holding up our values as a signpost for all we do.

My leadership symbol is the full moon: I hope to reflect the brilliance of my community to guide the path forward. I want my foundation and the sector to show courage, openness, deference and humility. And I want to lead not through the power of my position, but by using my position to move power to others.

Image: So Love Can Win by Timothy B featuring Isha Clarke. Courtesy of the Akonadi Foundation.