William Jackson Harper: “The function of freedom is to free someone else.” – Toni Morrison.
Jennifer Ching: This is an important crossroads in New York history.
Maureen Sebastian: Jennifer Ching, Executive Director at North Star Fund.
Jenn: And the question that really has been guiding North Star Fund is, we will not return. We will not accept a return to the normal. We will not accept a return to operations as before. We see more clearly now, that in order for us to come out of this crisis with a transformed New York, we must fully fund grassroots power to mobilize and build the New York that we not only know is possible, but truly essential for our community to thrive.
Risa and Maureen:
Our Mission: We are a social justice fund that support 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.
An audio montage of protests related to housing justice, incarceration, and low-wage worker organizing in different settings and multiple languages.
Risa Sarachan: A GUIDE TO FREEDOM: A NORTH STAR FUND PODCAST.
Maureen Sebastian: Episode Six: Freedom.
Risa: Maureen, I feel like we’re learning all the different ways people can take part in social justice: as donors, healers, organizers, front line workers, as ambassadors, and for us, as storytellers. I’m starting to think of social justice itself as, not just a movement, but as a philosophy of compassion and a continued practice. That’s what all these conversations with the folks at North Star Fund have got me thinking about.
Maureen: Absolutely. And what’s really been resonating for me is reconciling that while justice feels so active – we fight for it, we battle for it, we serve it – self-reflection can feel…ephemeral. They seem opposed to one another, but what I’m learning is that you’ll never know what justice you’re looking to uphold if you haven’t reflected on the values that guide you. I mean, it’s hard because the immigrant daughter in me is like, stop sitting around thinking about your life. There’s work to do.
Risa: But remember lessons from Adrienne Wong. In addition to everything else, we’re also learning not to beat ourselves up about just entering this journey now. After all, the important part is that we are entering in and doing so thoughtfully. North Star Fund will meet us where we are.
Maureen: Totally. And if I’m being honest, it’s not as if I’ve never participated in social justice. It’s just that now I’m doing it with a more critical mind and a deeper understanding of what “freedom” means — for me and for all of us.
Jennifer Ching: And what does that world look like where dignity and self-determination belong to everyone?
Risa: Jennifer Ching during the “Future of Organizing, Explained” webinar recorded this past August.
Jenn: It means that as a community, we have a lot to dismantle and practice ourselves. And the first for us, is that solidarity is an everyday practice. I can’t think of another time in which this value is more applicable. I can’t think of another time that demonstrates more how our lives and our futures are interconnected and North Star Fund is itself a community of practice. And so, our value here is a shared responsibility to dismantle white supremacy, to dismantle systems of oppression and to work towards collective liberation.
Elz Cuya Jones: My hope and vision is that our community of North Star Fund donors, grantees, staff, board members, Community Funding Committee members, we all step up and support the work of the grantee organizations that we support.
Maureen: Elz Cuya Jones, Deputy Director at North Star Fund.
Elz: And what that looks like is: they stay in community with us, that folks don’t get zoomed out or peace out of the community that we’re trying to build online now that we’re in a pandemic. That they continue giving so generously of their own wealth, and our mid-level and entry-level donors continue giving at the level that they can. You know, to be sensitive to folks who have lost work or are unable to work, are in community with us through our online events or in conversation or connecting us with people.
I’ve been so inspired by our community supporting this work. Since the pandemic, our organization has grown. We’ve never made more grants than we have now. And for me, there is no turning back even when this pandemic is over, whenever that may be. I don’t want to go back to pre-pandemic levels where we were before COVID hit. I just can’t. We need to continue at these fundraising levels, sustain it and then grow it even more. And if you ask me, like, how we’re going to do that, I’m not sure how, but I also know that we have to.
The movement is calling for us to do that, to be that, and so we will.
Risa: As much as I’m completely on board with donating my money to North Star Fund’s work, it’s hard not to feel the pull to instead invest my money into election work.
Kofo Anifalaje: The election is definitely front of mind for all of us.
Maureen: Kofo Anifalaje, Development Director at North Star Fund.
Kofo: We have, you know, for the past year, honestly, you know, we’ve been hearing from donors that, you know, they are upping their support around election work, you know, around the country, and that’s necessary. The reason why it’s important to continue to support North Star Fund in what we do, is because the impact of the election is being felt now, obviously before the election, and it will continue to be felt, to reverberate, you know, after Election Day. And what is important about that, is to know that it’s our grantee groups that are meeting the immediate needs of communities, especially in New York City, and the Hudson Valley.
The work that North Star Fund does is all about supporting grassroots change within local communities. Right now, more than ever, with the multitude, the multi-layered impact that COVID-19, as well as the – I was going to say unprecedented, but I guess it’s precedented – the continued killing of Black people in New York City. The multiple layers of impact that this is having on individuals, the needs are being directly met by our grantee groups. The organizing that is happening, especially in New York City, but also nationally due to coalition groups that many of our grantee groups are a part of. That work is happening.
Maureen: The grassroots organizations that North Star Fund champions are protecting and holding up communities that have been forgotten, abandoned or worse, marked for destruction. Adhikaar, an organization supplying direct food and financial relief and services, community education and advocacy to a largely Nepali-speaking community in Queens consisting of low-wage and essential workers, is one of the grantee groups that embodies the importance of this kind of work. The resources Adhikaar provides to the people in this community, who don’t necessarily have access to stimulus or unemployment checks or even medical insurance, both before the pandemic and now during it, are essential.
Risa: Another grantee group demanding we pay attention to a community being ravaged by the pandemic is the Release Aging People in Prison Campaign. They work to end mass incarceration and promote racial justice through the release from prison of older and aging people and those serving long and life sentences. Prisons are amplifiers of infectious disease, and with over 1,400 positive cases among prisoners and 18 deaths, they’ve been working tirelessly to demand New York political leaders grant immediate executive clemency, without broad categories of people being excluded based on their criminal convictions, to avoid mass deaths in prisons.
Maureen: Kofo again.
Kofo: If you care about the election, if you care about how New York City, in particular, is impacted, then it’s important to continue to fund these groups because they are on the front lines, you know, pushing and trying to hold our senators and our electeds accountable for the work.
Risa: But what about donating? If we have to give money, which do we choose when both causes feel so critically urgent?
Maureen: Jennifer Ching.
Jenn: It’s not an either or. I would never say to someone, this is the year where you must give to grassroots movements and ignore elections, or this is a year where we must just like focus -elections, elections, elections. Unfortunately, our tendency to see things as an either or is exactly what got us here in the first place, right? Our collective inability as a society to focus on multiple points of change as being essential to overall systemic change. It is, I think, a core reason why we have lost the narrative control, why there is a Trump in the White House, why there is a Mitch McConnell in the Senate.
If anything, this time shows as we’re in the middle of a global health pandemic, we are on the precipice and in the center of a really significant economic crisis. We have exposed and are experiencing mass mobilizations around deep racial injustices, all amidst the West burning, the South having hurricanes. So, we’re experiencing and living in a time of incredible intersecting uncertainties. And it’s for that reason that we can’t actually afford to just think that there is one single strategy that will see us through.
But there is, I think, one very significant approach that we need to support all throughout. At the end of the day, I believe in grassroots organizing because you need a healthy grassroots organizing ecosystem to secure a healthy democracy. You need grassroots organizers and community members, unfortunately, putting their bodies on the line and in the streets in order to make governments accountable around police brutality and racial injustice.
All of this is the work of organizing, but that’s the visible work of organizing. The invisible work of organizing is just the day-to-day relationship building, the meetings in living rooms, in diners, in parking lots, people to people, identifying injustices, talking about what solutions are available, and developing strategies to reach those solutions.
That kind of work is the work that builds the future political leaders of tomorrow, the leaders of today that we’re so excited about. But everyone has their roots in a healthy grassroots organizing ecosystem. So, I think it’s a both/and question for this November, I’m certainly supporting candidates, but I’m also doubling down on my support of grassroots organizing and grassroots groups who are out there doing things like providing essential services during the COVID era, getting out the vote. But who will also be around when the election is over and who will then be around to build, you know, in the next election and in the next crisis and will be there 24/7 because that is the work that they do.
Maureen: Jenn’s right. In this moment of intersecting urgencies, it is not an either/or. It’s a both/and. All of this work is intertwined, so every little bit helps. What we’ve been seeing in government over the last four years and what we’re fighting against in this upcoming election are the forces that are pushing even more people out to the edge of survival.
Kesi Foster: So, I think we’re organizing not for the democratic system that we had before.
Maureen: Kesi Foster, Lead Organizer at Make the Road New York and North Star Fund Board Member. Speaking for North Star Fund’s “Future of Organizing, Explained” webinar.
Kesi: We are organizing for a more democratic system and during the crisis we are seeing that constrict. Folks that have been organizing the work that we’ve been doing before this has been imagining a society that doesn’t exist. And so, I think we are organizing to take society and take everyone in our community to a portal in which everyone is able to live with dignity and support. But it’s going to be – we have to fight like hell because there are others that are organizing to leave many of us behind during this time.
Risa: Looking past the election, then, what do the people at North Star Fund see as the future of their organization, of New York City, and of the communities they represent?
Jillian White: I think that this is a moment where between COVID, the uprisings, the elections, we’re seeing people activated in a way that I have personally never lived through before.
Maureen: Jillian White, North Star Fund Donor Organizer.
Jillian: We are seeing people really searching for ways to make radical change. Radical change suddenly is not so radical anymore. It’s not so niche. Everyone is really waking up to this idea that, like, we are really battling for our future. We are battling for our liberation right now. So, my hope for the movement broadly, is that we find ways to funnel people in. We find ways to invite more and more people in and that they can find a political home. And I think my hope for North Star is really quite the same, is that we keep finding ways to build real rooted and visionary community with our donors and with our grantees.
Maureen: Kofo again.
Kofo: North Star Fund is going to be, I think, in constant evolution. We’re going to be evolving based on the country’s political positioning and how that impacts our groups, I think that we will always want to be in a place where we can move money as quickly and efficiently as possible, and we will always want to be in a place where we can educate and encourage individuals as well as foundations and philanthropic institutions to see the value in supporting grassroots organizing and to funding grassroots organizing.
Margie Fine: We have to use this time to prep for when we will see each other again, when we will be able to hug each other again.
Risa: Margie Fine, Board Chair at North Star Fund.
Margie: When we will be in person again, to not give up on that. I don’t know if it’s going to be next year, when that’s going to happen, but I believe that that time is coming. So, we want to use and utilize how to stay in touch with each other now, how to hold each other up and not give up on change.
Risa: I think this time has been challenging: to stay in touch with people and not feel disconnected, but I’m also hopeful that it has been a time for many of us, for myself definitely, to look at the state of our country and ask: how did we get here? And what can I do to move the needle in the direction of a more just and equitable world?
Maureen: It’s also been a time, I hope, that we’ve all taken to ask ourselves, not just how did we as a country get here, but how did I as an individual get here? How did I arrive at the crossing of social justice and philanthropy? And which direction do I move from here?
Adrienne Wong: I think in a lot of the organizing that I’ve done, we often tell our personal story. And I think that’s where a lot of organizing comes from.
Maureen: Adrienne Wong, writer, organizer and North Star Fund donor.
Adrienne: So I grew up in New Jersey, in a suburb outside of New York. I’m Chinese-American. Both my parents are primarily Chinese-American. And it really wasn’t until after I graduated from college and a partner of mine got involved in anti-racist organizing and introduced me to it. I went to an anti-racist organizing workshop run by the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond. And I remember the first time I went to the workshop, I actually left. I couldn’t handle it. It was so raw to me to realize that so many of the experiences that I had had throughout my life, I had attributed to individual failings. And they were actually, a lot of it was due to institutional racism. And I think realizing all of that was really difficult for me in the beginning, because I had grown up with parents who sort of taught me that everything is within your control. Everything is within, like, if you just work hard enough, if you just are good enough, then you can do anything.
But I think realizing that systemic racism existed and that it had affected my life and affected the lives of the people that I loved, that was a huge revelation to me. And so, when I actually went back to the training, I think it took me like a year or two to go back. And then, from there, I kind of became more aware of wealth and class differences within anti-racist organizing and, you know, within social justice in general. It became something that I couldn’t look away from anymore and that I really needed to understand, how the wealth that I had access to was connected to all the other systemic oppression that I was witnessing and that I was trying to fight.
Risa: Gabriela Quintanilla, Founder of Adelante Student Voices and North Star Fund Hudson Valley Program Coordinator.
Gabriela Quintanilla: I was born in El Salvador and I came to the States when I was 13 years old without speaking a word of English. I had to quickly get acclimated to the educational school system. And I learned while I was in high school that this country didn’t have many opportunities for students who were undocumented, which was my case at the time. And my dream was to go to college. And so, I worked really hard to be able to attend college. And I became more interested in the undocumented experience in the United States and also became interested in the work of farmworkers because my mother worked at a poultry factory for 12 years, and she was facing a lot of injustices. So, I was able to, due to the community support that I had with different non-profits that help me figure out how to apply to college, what scholarships to get, I was able to go to college.
I realized that there was a lot of elements involved as to why I was able to go to college under such circumstances. And one of the reasons was, you know, the endless sacrifice that my mother had made saving so that I could attend school and then the role that these non-profit organizations played in my life were crucial. And so, I decided that a program for undocumented high school students was needed in the Hudson Valley. And that’s when I created Adelante Student Voices.
Maureen: Kesi, can I go back even further in your life to ask you what motivated you and prompted you to work in organizing and social justice?
Kesi: That is a really good question. And I feel like over the years I answered differently all the time. I used to try to think about and point to something in the past in which, interactions with police or other kind of inequities–I think, for me, I think the way I feel about it right now is that all of my life experiences and the life experiences of the people that I love and being who I am, being Black in America, I think all of that culminated in moving me towards committing myself to organizing in my community. And that’s where I am right now in my life. I wasn’t always there. I wasn’t in high school organizing. But I think it is a culmination of my life experiences and those closest to me connected to what it means to be Black in this country. And so, there was something there that, I don’t want to say it was like innately pulling at me, but, I’m less and less, I think, pointing to any particular moment in my life. And I think it’s more of the culmination of many different factors.
Risa: Maureen, what draws you to this work?
Maureen: My family and I came to this country illegally. It’s not even something that we say aloud. I mean, just saying it now, my throat tightens and my whole body braces for impact because if this country can allow the state-sanctioned murder of Black bodies and can abandon communities already pushed to the margins, this country could toss my family into the Mariana Trench and check it off as business as usual. My parents have never come out and said we were undocumented immigrants, but I know how challenging it was for them. And this truth, which my parents worked so hard to hide, a truth that I’m just now trying to confront, is one of the many truths which ties me so inextricably to social justice.
Risa: Thank you for sharing that. I think we’re as ready as I’ll ever be. What I commit to is creating a Giving Circle with my network in Brooklyn, I’m looking at RadFundNYC as my model. I plan on guiding my friends and family who may be feeling overwhelmed right now, to North Star Fund, not only as a place to share resources, but to educate themselves. Hopefully, they will join me as I sign up for webinars that North Star Fund offers.
Maureen: I plan on being a monthly sustainer. I plan on setting up a Social Justice Book Club/Giving Circle within my network. And donor organizer Jillian White can expect my application to the Giving Project 2021. Now, lastly, Risa, I think we have one more test of skill by social justice Yoda Margie Fine that we need to have a crack at.
Risa: (clears throat) Hi Everyone. Yes, I’m talking to you out there listening. Can we talk about what brought you here? Can we talk about your last donation? You gave. Period. That is making an impact. Thank you. But now we’re going to ask you for more. A larger donation, possibly sustaining a monthly donation? Or a multi-year gift?
Maureen: We need your support now more than ever, to be there for the folks with their backs against the wall, for the folks who’ve been fighting for equality and justice, and for a world where everyone can live with dignity and thrive.
Risa: So, we’re asking now, in ways both large and small, can we count on you?
Maureen: Stuck that landing, girl! You are basically 1996 Olympian Kerri Strug.
Risa: That’s the only sports reference I would ever understand. (laughter)
Thank you so much for listening, if you’d like to hear 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 Saleen for their guidance and support in creating this podcast. And to all 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 Ogonnaya Newman, 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.