EMPOWER: Community Foundations & Resilia Come Together to Co-Design Equitable Capacity Building Solutions

Strengthening BIPOC & Grassroots Communities in Pursuit of a More Equitable America

Did you know that only 10% of philanthropic funding goes towards leaders of color? Of that, only 2% goes towards Black leaders. BIPOC-led nonprofits earn less grant money with more strings attached, and receive an average 24% lower funding and have access to 76% less unrestricted net assets. 

Resilia is on a mission to change that.

Our work has always been centered on strengthening grassroots organizations, especially those led by and serving people of color, and now we’re digging deeper to discover how we can support them with new capacity-building resources. 

Resilia recently hosted EMPOWER - a workshop that brought together funders from across the country to engage with our team and co-design solutions to serve grassroots organizations. We set out to answer critical questions surrounding the top challenges BIPOC-led and serving grassroots organizations face in their communities, and pledged to rapidly transform learnings into resources for our nonprofit community. 

We were joined by guests Aeriel Ozuzu, Director of Grants and Initiatives and the Community Foundation of Greater Memphis, Charisse Grant, Senior Vice President and Strategy Advisor at The Miami Foundation, Amber Brown, Program Officer at Coastal Community Foundation of South Carolina, and Amina Iqbal, Senior Community Investment Officer at The Ann Arbor Area Community Foundation. 

Resilia was grateful to connect with these thought leaders in philanthropy. But conversation alone doesn’t lead to change: Resilia will transform learnings from EMPOWER into actions within four weeks. We’ve captured some of the highlights of EMPOWER for you here. 

We gathered for EMPOWER with three objectives in mind:

1. To elicit capacity needs of BIPOC-led/serving grassroots organizations 

2. To collectively identify needs with “biggest impact potential”

3. To co-design capacity building services to fulfill priority needs

Ultimately, our discussion led us to several areas of need for nonprofits that we’ve listed below, along with some insight from our guests.

Board development. “A lot of small, grassroots organizations don’t have the network to go out into corporate spheres and recruit board members. Many of their board members may be coworkers, friends, or family. They need help developing the people who are on their boards.” - Charisse Grant. 

Storytelling. “I know so many organizations have great stories to tell, but they just struggle to tell them,” shared Aeriel Ozuzu.  Amber Brown agreed:  “If you can tell your story, and you can tell why it’s important, you can fundraise with anybody.” 

Fundraising. Navigating power structures and foundations, helping nonprofits have a more level playing field with everyone else, educating nonprofits on the notion of cultivating relationships. Resilia’s guests noted that they need to be equipped with the tools to fundraise powerfully.

Evaluation. Many grassroots organizations aren’t able to identify data that really help communicate their impact.

Budgeting. Small organizations struggle to build and manage a budget, and find it challenging to navigate the financials required to run an organization. 

Managing Volunteers. Many grassroots, BIPOC-led, and BIPOC-serving organizations are volunteer-led. How can they manage volunteers and figure out how to continue to use their services long-term? 

Preventing burnout. Burnout is a common and widespread problem among nonprofits, especially small and under resourced organizations. 

Spreading awareness of available resources.

As the discussion continued,  these areas of capacity-building support were prioritized into three areas: 1) Storytelling 2) Fundraising and 3) Board Development

At the end of the workshop, our guests shared some of their biggest takeaways and left us with these words to inspire our next steps: Resilia committed to immediately actionalizing learnings from this workshop, and will deploy resources informed by the cohort’s insight through Resilia’s platform, coaching sessions, and peer-to-peer learning. 

“To have a company built on how to use simple, user-friendly technology to connect with people and build them up is refreshing,” shared Charisse Grant. “Something designed with equity in mind. Kudos to what you’re doing and the multiple points of entry.”

Our team is excited to put the valuable insight we gained into action for our nonprofits. Stay tuned for highlights from our next series in EMPOWER.