William Jackson Harper: ‘Well, one works at it, certainly. Being free is as difficult and as perpetual–or rather fighting for one’s freedom, struggling towards being free–is like struggling to be a poet, or a good Christian, or a good Jew, or a good Muslim or a good Zen Buddhist. You work all day long and achieve some kind of level of success by nightfall, go to sleep and wake up in the next morning with the job still to be done. So, you start all over again.” – Maya Angelou.
Adrienne Wong: One of the things that I feel like it’s so important that the pandemic has showed us is how truly connected we all are.
Risa Sarachan: Adrienne Wong, organizer and writer.
Adrienne: And how wealth and class privilege makes us feel that we’re not, right? Wealth and class privilege isolates us and makes us feel like we have control over everything. And also that we are not connected to those who have much less than us. But I think what we’ve seen is that we are in fact all connected and the choices that we make affect everybody.
Multiple speakers: Our Mission: We are a social justice fund that supports grassroots organizing led by communities of color, building power in New York City and the Hudson Valley. We organize people across race and class to give in support of these movements.
Our vision: We envision a world in which resources and power are equitably shared and a future where everyone can live with dignity and thrive.
Audio montage of protests related to housing justice, incarceration and low-wage worker organizing, in different settings and multiple languages.
Risa: A Guide to Freedom: A North Star Fund podcast.
Maureen Sebastian: Episode Four: As Difficult and As Perpetual.
Kesi Foster: My name is Kesi Foster, currently I’m the co-director of the Youth Power Project at Make the Road New York. With North Star, I am a member of the board and I’m also a co-chair of the Community Funding Committee.
Risa: You are the one with the new baby at home?
Kesi: I do have a new new baby at home.
Risa: In the past six months of your work with North Star, obviously everyone’s had to make this major pivot. What’s something that you’re most proud of that you’ve worked on in that in the past six months?
Kesi: Definitely the baby. No. (All laughing)
Risa: Was that part of North Star Fund? Was that a North Star Fund baby?
Kesi: Like the past six months? I’m like, uh… (All laughing.)
Maureen: North Star Fund gives grants and babies.
Risa: Wow, they’re that good.
(Sounds of sirens and chanting).
Kesi: I live in in Brooklyn, in Fort Greene, not far from the Barclays Center. And my partner and I just had a new baby, so we were not in the street, but there was a moment when pretty much every day and every night we were inundated with ambulances and police helicopters through our neighborhood. Which was, you know, on the one hand, that was a sign of the trauma that our communities were going through because of the global health pandemic. And on the other hand, it was a sign of the trauma that our communities are going through because of the ongoing pandemic of anti-Black racism and white supremacy. And it felt almost like it was on an endless loop. But there’s something about the fact that so many people during that moment took to the streets that it felt like we could be in a seminal moment in the struggle for liberation and the struggle for Black liberation in American history. It felt like it could be a seminal moment. But I hesitate to say that just because when we’re in it and really in it, I just don’t know if you really know exactly what we’re in. And 2020 has kind of felt like that every day.
Risa: For me, time, feeling like an endless loop was the thing that resonated. I had a hard time through the quarantine being alone. And honestly, I’ve known a lot of people who have slipped through the cracks during the pandemic. Speaking for myself as someone who lost two family members during this time–one of whom I believe was failed by the mental health care system in our country and the lack of affordable health care–not being able to gather together with family and friends to find community makes it almost impossible to process, let alone heal from these traumas. But North Star Fund has shown me the power of something bigger than myself and my own pain during this time.
Maureen: What do we do with the pain of trauma? Well, I tend to focus it into action, into surviving, into moving on. That action doesn’t allow for the surrendering to the pain, the understanding of it. So it begs the question, how do we move from loss to strength, from pain to power?
Jillian: I think that over the 40-year history of North Star Fund, we’ve built a lot of trust with our donors. And I think we have also built a lot of trust with our grantees. And so people turn to us as people who can be steady and who can be present and can be adaptive and can respond to the moment alongside them.
Maureen: Jillian White, North Star Fund donor organizer.
Jillian: We definitely slowed down because you know, where people and you know, I was a person who actually I got COVID and I got it early into the pandemic and it was, you know, really, really scary. And I felt super supported by the organization in slowing down and taking care of myself. And at the same time, we have really incredible focus on on our bigger goals and on liberation. And so the work itself never stopped. We just found more sustainable ways to do it. We encouraged our grantees to also take care of themselves. So I think that we were providing a lot of different types of just community support, like showing up and saying, like, we’re in this with you. We’re in the exact same place, like we are New Yorkers, like we live here. We’re also invested in, you know, in our long-term success of our movements.
But we have to take care of ourselves right now. And I’ve never worked at an organization where I think that there was so much mutual respect and real care woven into the very fabric of the organization. And that’s not to say that there aren’t spaces where North Star needs to grow and where we need to ask ourselves hard questions. It’s more just that the hard questions actually are being asked.
And we are thinking through, you know, what are the most thoughtful and appropriate ways for us to answer those questions.
Risa: One of the most striking qualities I hear over and over again about North Star Fund is their focus on active listening, constantly asking these larger questions to the communities they want to support and really listening for their answers and then providing whatever was asked for.
Elz Cuya Jones: You know, it is going to require that kind of deep listening and deep learning together because what we do isn’t necessarily an easy sell.
Risa: Elz Cuya Jones, deputy director at North Star Fund.
Elz: Grassroots organizing, and the change that we are hoping to achieve takes a lot of time. What we are trying to do doesn’t always win. So for example, the fight for police reform and the fight to hold police accountable is a decades old fight that we are making progress in for sure. But it isn’t anything that we can promise a funder or a donor that by next year these things are going to happen because we know that politics are involved. Different lobbyists, different interests are pouring in their money to fight the things that we want.
And yeah, we don’t always win and we can’t promise that.
Maureen: North Star Fund’s patients for the long game is necessary for the sustainability of the work they do and that patients can only be fostered with daily practice. The patients isn’t the only thing North Star Fund practices.
Jenniver Ching: To me, all of this is part of what it means to practice solidarity.
Risa: Jennifer Ching, North Star Fund executive director.
Jenn: Practicing solidarity really means taking yourselves out of your comfort zone. And for many of us, our comfort zone is the space where we control our money. We decide the sort of intricacies of where all of our resources go. Our view of sort of sharing resources means it’s our expertise and our time and at North Star Fund, we are organizing people from all backgrounds to come together and to think and act more collaboratively to, through your philanthropy, divest power.
Because that’s what this all really comes down to, you know, North Star Fund is trying to build a different relationship between money and power. That relationship is very clear in the social justice movements that we support, right, it’s very clear that immigrant workers are fighting for a different type of power. It’s very clear that formerly incarcerated folks who are, you know, fighting for all different sorts of criminal justice system interventions and ultimately who are fighting for abolition and just new definitions of community safety and community safety strategies.
Yes, those are all very specific forms of reshaping power that feels very abstract and out of hand, I think, for many New Yorkers. And so I often suggest one big step forward you can take is to think about how you divest power from a simple gift that you make and move that money back into the hands of community organizers.
Risa: Giving in the time of Coronavirus and the widespread protests surrounding Black lives taken at the hands of police spurred a tremendous amount of giving. By April 24th, Americans donated more than $5.3 billion dollars in grants to more than 1,200 organizations worldwide. But can organizations expect that kind of giving from here on out? Again, the question of sustainability.
Elz: Unfortunately, with the tragic and highly public death of George Floyd that also increased our fundraising in that many of our donors stepped up and gave toward Black-led organizing, which I felt a couple of ways about it.
Maureen: Elz Cuya Jones again.
Elz: One, super grateful to our donors who understand why this is important and why supporting Black-led organizing is important. But also, questioning why it required the death of a Black person in order to step up and give in this way. My wish is that people continue to give even when there isn’t a highly publicized death in the headlines. And when people aren’t talking about Breonna Taylor every day, and people aren’t talking about George Floyd every day. We want this kind of support to continue because Black leaders are working and fighting for justice, regardless of whether or not people are giving money to it. And they need those resources. We need those resources. And if folks were as supportive of Black-led organizing ten years ago as they are today, then many lives could have been saved.
Maureen: I sometimes feel guilty of this.
Risa: Same.
Maureen: I didn’t make a point to consciously invest my money into Black organizations and communities and artists and thinkers until this year.
Risa: But as we’re learning, donating and investing money doesn’t mean you’ve finished the work.
Maureen: No, it means your work’s just beginning. Elz again.
Elz: Ash-Lee Henderson of Highlander Center said, “Fund us like you want us to win.” I think a lot of times people will throw money and donate because it is the glamourous thing to do right now and to be able to use the hashtag and to say publicly that they’ve donated or rage donated to a particular thing and that absolves them of any kind of work or any change that they also need to make happen. Any kind of transformation that happens from within, for people who who want to be more involved now, it will take will and action on your part.
Risa: Kofo Anifalaje, development director at North Star Fund, speaking to those of us who are just now coming around to these movements on how we begin.
Kofo Anifalaje: You have to educate yourself. And some things that North Star Fund in particular does–especially now that everything is virtual–we’ve been trying to put on or produce a lot more donor programs. These are primarily donor education opportunities where you can join us to talk about learned about various elements of the organizing work that North Star Fund supports, including our own work. As you start to sort of envelop yourself or include yourself in these conversations, you start to learn how you as an individual can magnify your impact. On some of these webinars, you will come in contact with our grantee groups who are sharing direct updates about what’s going on, where it’s happening and how it’s happening. That in itself, right, is equipping you with more information to take back to your own circles to share that information. But there are so many ways that people can get involved right now. But it is and it does sort of at its core, rely on individuals taking individual responsibility to do action.
Maureen: Sometimes I get overwhelmed because there’s so much to do to be done. It just feels like it’s never enough.
Adrienne: My name is Adrienne Wong. I got involved with North Star when I joined the Giving Project. And since then I’ve been involved as a donor.
Risa: Adrienne taught us a lot about how to create practical expectations when entering into the world of social justice.
Adrienne: One of the attitudes I’ve witnessed in people who are now sort of waking up in this moment is this sense of urgency and this sense of perfectionism. Right? I think one of the things that we have to remember is that perfectionism is actually a product of the capitalist consumer mindset, that we have this idea that we must be perfect in order to be worthy. This idea that, like, we have to get everything right the first time and also that everything is urgent. You know, I think one of the things I try to remind people is that a lot of people have been doing this work for a very long time. And unfortunately, it’s not going to change overnight. But also, like take heart, because people have been working on this for a very long time. And so the key here is sustainability. And not, you know, burning out like not holding yourself to an impossible standard that makes it really hard to keep going.
At the end of the day, we want to be able to be in this for that, not just for the next few months, but for the next five years, 10 years, 15 years beyond.
Maureen: Compassion, fatigue, mental exhaustion. In my best intentions of trying to keep up with the movement, my anxiety can turn to anger, which can then turn into depression. How do we stay in the movement and not get burnt out?
Adrienne: I mean, I think the number one thing that I recommend with burnout is.
Risa: Adrienne Wong, again.
Adrienne: It’s so important to have a community that you can trust and that you feel you have strong relationships and that helped keep you accountable, because I think that burnout often occurs. At least I know for myself when I put a lot of pressure on myself as an individual, and I believe that my individual actions are super, super important, possibly overly important. And a huge part of combating the individualism that we see is remembering that we’re all connected, remembering that we’re all supposed to be in community together. That’s like in itself, a huge way of kind of refuting the system that we live in.
Marjorie Fine: I would say if you need to go in a room, some place with somebody you trust and love and scream and holler and shout and be really furious, get off all the feelings you feel bad about the state of where we are right now.
Maureen: Margie Fine, board chair at North Star Fund.
Margie: Go do that and then pick yourself up, brush yourself off and get back in the stream, get back into doing social justice work. We are making differences. We are doing stuff–the wide circle of social justice, the wide circle of human rights is getting bigger and stronger, even in this time of a blip with a horrible person in the White House. Even with that blip, it’s getting stronger and better. And there is a role for you, a role for the donor, a role for the activist, a role for all of us.
Maureen: I’m literally crying right now.
Risa: I know, me too! I’m so inspired. (All laughing.)
Margie: I’m so passionate about this!
Risa: Please take my money.
Margie: Gladly and I’ll put you in touch with the people at North Star.
Maureen: In trying to understand where I should begin my journey in the social justice movement. I did some research.
Risa: Didn’t you hear Adrienne? As I always say, Maureen. Get some sleep.
Maureen: Soon, I promise. So there was one person whose work I kept returning to: Dr. Howard Thurman. For those of you who don’t know him or his work, he was a theologian, a mystic, a spiritual teacher to some of the most prominent leaders of the civil rights movement.
Risa: Martin Luther King supposedly always carried with him a copy of Thurmond’s book, “Jesus and the Disinherited,” along with the Constitution and the Bible.
Maureen: Now, there was one passage I kept coming back to. It emphasizes the connection between one’s inner life and one’s outer actions. And the place to find that connection was called the Inward Sea. And Thurman talks about this island that everyone has in their soul. And on the island is this altar, which has an angel armed with a flaming sword. And you’re supposed to put the thing that is the most important thing on the altar. But before you even do that, you have to find the sea, you have to travel to the island, you have to somehow get past this angel with a flamethrower, basically, and then you’ll be able to connect with this thing that wakes you up and you find out what you were always meant to be doing.
Risa: So to distill the flaming sword and angel metaphors, you’re basically saying I have to understand myself first before trying to affect change out in the world.
Maureen: This is going to require a lot of therapy and maybe a meditation app.
Risa: I think for you it’s “slow down.” And for me, it’s “activate.” But for both of us, it’s a daily practice of self-reflection.
Maureen: Right. I hear you. I promise to get to bed by 9:00 p.m. tonight. But maybe we wake up early and learn about North Star Fund’s tools for giving?
Risa: I guess that’s a start.
Maureen: Thanks so much for listening. If you’d like to learn more about North Star Fund and the incredible work they do, please go to www.northstarfund.org. We’d like to give a special thanks to Jennifer Ching, Kathleen Pequeño and Angbeen Saleem for their guidance and support in creating this podcast, and to all of our interviewees–Jillian White, Adrienne Wong, Kesi Foster, Margie Fine, Catherine Eusebio, Gabriela Quintanilla, Kofo Anifalaje, and Elz Cuya Jones. For additional audio, we’d like to thank Walter Hergt, the Release Aging People in Prison Campaign, Damayan, Adhikaar, Right to Counsel, Worker Justice for NYC, and Public News Service. For lending his immense talent (and dulcet tones): a huge thanks to William Jackson Harper. We’d also like to thank our magician of an audio technician/editor/sound mixer Dan Crowley.
The North Star Fund podcast was created by Maureen Sebastian and Risa Sarachan, and produced by Maureen Sebastian and North Star Fund.