Should nonprofits shift practices to meet our current political climate?

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With time passed after this election, I am ready to stand up, wipe the tears, dust the dirt off my knees and build again. With newly elected officials both nationally and locally, many nonprofit executive directors like me are trying to wrap our brains around where we are headed and wondering if we may need a new strategy to support our theories of change.

Organizations like the one I lead aim to change the social and political rules by ensuring that those most impacted by community challenges are leading the solutions. Research strongly supports the idea that people most directly affected by a policy should be actively involved in developing solutions. Yet those most impacted by oppressive policies often have urgent and compelling needs in front of them, and I fear these needs will grow exponentially in the coming months and years.

I spent my first years in the nonprofit world acting as the community organizer. In fact, I even went to “organizing school,” and yes, that’s a thing. It profoundly impacted me.

As a community organizer my job was to meet parents where they were, share our current policy initiatives and invite them to a meeting. The problem was, most caregivers had immediate concerns limiting their ability to visualize an impact on a long-term policy.

How was I to get parents to think about teacher turnover in a high-poverty school when they were frustrated because their child’s bus hadn’t shown up in three days? How could I build access to a school and educators if they were too exhausted to attend a virtual meeting after a long teaching day? The answer showed itself to me in the form of an ask from a principal.

“Our staff lounge is so bleak. I wish I had a space where my teachers and support staff could really rest during their breaks.”

This moment was a turning point for me. I scoured Facebook Marketplace, hunted at thrift stores, gathered friends, and we made the lounge shine! Since then, we have managed to create several more staff retreat spaces for those teaching in high-poverty schools.

I have served meals in staff lounges and listened while educators shared policy and practice ideas they thought would actually work, and the thoughtful solutions posed by teachers during their lunch breaks never cease to amaze me.

Similarly, I started a homework club for students of color at a school because students told me they were tired and unmotivated once they got home. So, we serve a full meal once a week to students, and we have learned a lot about the barriers students face within public schools. Our group expanded slowly. Kids told other kids. I raised more money, cooked a little more food and invited people to help us. But in the meantime, we were teaching the students about power, policy and the school board. We even attended a school board meeting together.

But here’s the problem. System change necessitates building a movement. And this takes time. It’s slow, and it requires resources. And with the changing political landscape, these needs will only continue to increase in the immediate future.

We are living in a moment when the strategy of system change cannot be divorced from the strategy of direct service. Now is the time to invest in our communities, wrap our arms around them, and lean into relationships.

This is the crux of community organizing. People show up when their self-interest aligns with our mission.

Is it possible that we can care about hungry kids, feed them and then work on the policies they care about with them? Nonprofits need the flexibility to work on the policies impacting those we care about while also being able to meet them where they’re at.

After all, relational organizing moves at the speed of trust.

Heather Anderson is the parent of two public school students and is the executive director of the Advancing Equity Coalition in Minneapolis.