Capacity Building

Intermediary organizations are vital and funders need to increase funding going to them

Posted on November 27, 2023 by Vu

[Image description: Beautiful bluish/purple mushrooms growing out of the ground, shiny and almost translucent, like jellyfish. They have gills, a ring halfway up a slender stem. In the background is taller white mushroom, blurred. Image by adege on Pixabay]

A while ago, I wrote about how intermediary organizations are like mycelium, which is the rootlike structure of mushrooms. Like mycelium, these orgs are vital to the nonprofit field, as they provide several critical functions, including bringing funding to other nonprofits, connecting orgs to one another, disseminating vital information, fostering communication, and mobilizing orgs for advocacy. And they even help organizations at the end of their lives to exit gracefully, the way mushrooms help break down decaying matters and return them to the earth to feed and generate new life.

Yes, that was a very nerdy post, even nerdier than my piece that employs Star Trek analogies to talk about the future of the nonprofit sector. (Nerd alert: one of the newer Star Trek shows, Discovery, has a technology that uses a vast invisible mycelium-in-space network to warp its eponymous spaceship instantaneously anywhere in the universe, and one of its main characters is named Paul Stamets, after the legendary mushroom expert).

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Funding and the flawed notion of nonprofit “readiness”

Posted on May 29, 2023 by Vu

[Image description: A little baby deer (a fawn), their head bent down, nibbling on a leaf they found on the grass. Image by NickyPe on Pixabay]

Hi everyone, you may have heard about MacKenzie Scott’s new funding initiative, Yield Giving, which will be giving out 250 million in $1M grants. The catch is that organizations are only eligible if they are between $1M to 5M in budget size for two or more of the past five years.

Scott has done some cool stuff, cutting through the BS and giving away billions of dollars with few hoops to many great orgs. So this eligibility criterion in her new grant is disappointing. As many colleagues have pointed out, the vast majority of nonprofits are less than a million in budget size, and organizations led by and serving marginalized communities are more likely to fall within this category. Having this budget threshold as an eligibility requirement ensures many vital organizations led by and serving people of color, rural communities, disabled people, etc., will be left out of accessing this fund.

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Nonprofits: Get over learned helplessness and stop standing in your own way

Posted on July 31, 2022 by Vu

[Image description: A pug shrouded in a beige blanket, just their face peeking out as if wearing a hooded cloak, looking tired or maybe just unimpressed. Image by Matthew Henry on Unsplash. I love this picture. It’s creative commons, so feel free to use it]

Hi everyone. I’m back after taking the month of July off from writing! During these past four weeks I took the kids on trips, attended a wedding (outdoor) for the first time in years, read some books in a hammock, removed the (probably sentient by now) leftovers from my fridge, and watched “The Bear” and “The Old Man,” which made me very glad I’m in nonprofit, a field that can be very intense but usually not deadly intense like international espionage, or, worse, the restaurant business.

I’ve missed you all and hope you’ve been finding time to relax and recharge as well. Apologies in advance for the roughness of this post. My brain is still on vacation mode, so it may take a few weeks before I am at 100%.

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Stop expecting nonprofits to merge. It’s annoying.

Posted on February 15, 2021 by Vu

[Image description: Five grey-striped kittens in a round brown wicker basket. Four of them are facing the camera, looking into your soul with their greyish-blue eyes. Image by noly at Pixabay]

A long while ago, I directed a small nonprofit that focused on supporting the Vietnamese and other immigrant and refugee communities. A question that I got asked constantly was “Why aren’t you merging with the other nonprofit that is focused on supporting the Vietnamese and other immigrant and refugee communities?” Right, because having TWO whole organizations focused on these populations, even though these orgs are geographically separated by miles and do different things, is one too many in a tiny village like Seattle.

Fast forward a few years, I am now having coffee with a program officer, trying to convince this funder to give more money to organizations led by Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and POC communities. “I am not sure that aligns with our priorities this year,” said the program officer, sipping coffee slowly while the laughter and chatter of folks around us reverberated as golden afternoon sunlight streamed through our windswept hair (This was before the pandemic, so I might be romanticizing it a bit). “But, we are open to supporting nonprofits if they are thinking of merging.”

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Capacity building’s necessary existential crisis

Posted on October 12, 2020 by Vu

[Image description: A fly agaric mushroom with a white stem, bright red domed cap with white spots, growing out of the mossy ground. Image by cafepampas on Pixabay]

Hi everyone, in observance of Indigenous Peoples’ Day, here is a great list by Cultural Survival of events happening all over the country, including important conversations on doing land acknowledgements right, supporting Indigenous folks who are LGBTQIA, decolonizing the classroom, and more. Check out this Activist’s Guide for Supporting Indigenous Peoples’ Day from IllumiNative. Here are five more ideas.

Meanwhile, we should all remember that less than one half of one percent of total philanthropic funding in the US goes to Native communities, according to Native Americans in Philanthropy. Foundations, you can do better. The rest of us who are non-Native, donate to Native/Indigenous organizations, pay rent for the land we’re on (such as through here if you’re on Duwamish land), and support local Native/Indigenous artists and businesses, such as Eighth Generation. And let’s not allow this day to be the only time we learn about, make reparations toward, and support Native communities.

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Last week I was asked to present at the Alliance for Nonprofit Management’s conference about the future of capacity building, and what capacity builders can learn from Star Trek. The team at RVC, meanwhile, wrote a really important article on Transformational Capacity Building, exploring the ways that traditional capacity building tactics have often actually been harmful to organizations led by and serving Black, Indigenous, POC, and other marginalized communities, and presenting a new framework. And here’s the article I wrote on the Mycelium Model of Capacity Building, where I lay out what mushrooms can teach us about capacity building.

It is really exciting to see that we are starting to look at this area with a more critical lens and evolve it to work better for the organizations and movements led by communities most affected by systemic injustice. Given the events of this year, including the pandemic, the protests against racism, and our last-ditch effort to prevent the US from sliding deeper into fascism, our sector really needs to further reexamine our perspectives on capacity building.

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