William Jackson Harper: “This collision between one’s image of oneself and what one actually is is always very painful and there are two things you can do about it. You can meet the collision head-on and try to become what you really are or you can retreat and try to remain what you thought you were, which is a fantasy, in which you will certainly perish.” – James Baldwin.
Kesi Foster: The silent work is really providing care to people in our communities that have been pushed to the margins. That haven’t and have never adequately received care from the state or from the government.
Maureen Sebastian: Kesi Foster, North Star Fund’s NYC Community Committee Co-Chair, in their COVID-19 and The Future of Fundraising Webinar, recorded in late April of this year.
Kesi: Our grantees have been doing that work. People come to their organizations looking for care, looking to build power. And I think because of that, the amount of trauma that comes with being left by the state to not receive care and then trying to set up the networks to provide care to hundreds of people in your community, just the amount of trauma that people are holding and walking with everyday to try to continue to support and hold everyone is something that really can’t be measured. Here is a trauma crisis that’s kind of on the verge of emerging and has already emerged in our communities. And our organizations are at the center of that. And the people working in our organizations are at the center of that.
Audio montage of North Star Fund mission and vision montage of grantees
Risa Sarachan: A GUIDE TO FREEDOM: A NORTH STAR FUND PODCAST
Maureen Sebastian: Episode Three: Meet the Collision Head-On.
Risa: March 1st: New York State had its first coronavirus case.
Maureen: By March 20th, the “New York State on PAUSE” executive order was issued, ordering citizens to stay at home, schools to close and all non-essential businesses to shut down.
Risa: In a single month, New York went from one case on March 1st to more than 83,000 cases statewide and more than 2,300 dead by April 1st.
Maureen: In the last week of May came the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, and the murder of Breonna Taylor; then, on May 25th, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the murder of George Floyd. His death and the countless black lives taken by state-sanctioned violence caused demonstrators to pour into the streets of cities all over the world to decry systemic racism and demand justice.
Risa: The inequalities and injustices exposed by the pandemic and the protests left people like me, a nice, upper- middle-class white girl from upstate New York, stunned. For the first time possibly ever, I couldn’t look away. But these revelations I was experiencing – that so many of us were experiencing – they weren’t breaking news for the countless people who’d been living in crisis every day of their lives.
Maureen: And the government response to these multiple, intersecting crises was…nonexistent. Which has us asking: what is the role of philanthropy in society, at times such as this? How are resources now deployed in order to meet the current crisis but also to create an America that is more resilient? How can philanthroy guide people like Risa and me, people with priviledge and good intentions, turn our heartbreak into something useful for the communities who need it most?
Risa: Jennifer Ching, North Star Fund Executive Director.
Jennifer Ching: What’s to pivot right now for North Star Fund in this time of urgency? I’m not sure that there is anything for us to pivot. I think more what we have felt as an organization and a community is that this is the time for us to sharpen and deepen our practice and our discipline.
Risa: So North Star Fund did a non-pivot?
Maureen: North Star Fund met the collision head-on. They doubled down on the work they had been doing since its founding and did it faster. Listening to the needs of communities and distributing resources to meet those needs was nothing new. Now they were just doing it over Zoom.
Risa: Here’s Program Officer Catherine Eusebio explaining the measures North Star Fund took to ensure that they were meeting the moment.
Catherine Eusebio: When we created our COVID response plan, it had a few elements in place. The first was for all grantees who are currently being considered for a grant. We just gave them the money. And we didn’t go through the process of evaluation or deep consideration, but really just allowed the money to go out the door. For all of our grantees, even ones that weren’t in consideration at the moment, we provided emergency grants to everyone. We did not request an application or request any reporting and just made sure everyone received funds electronically as soon as possible. And the third piece of this plan was to spend money from our reserve. Most of the money that goes out the door is generated through donations from the community of New Yorkers that support us. So it’s certainly not expected for community foundations to take on that kind of vulnerability.
Kesi Foster: My name is Kesi Foster, currently 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.
Maureen: Kesi talks to us about how one of the roles philanthropy can play is to transcend what we expect from the private and public sectors.
Kesi: You know, it was really in a lot of communities, people were struggling to survive through this, and the government left and abandoned a lot of folks. And I think there’s only so much that philanthropy can do. And philanthropy is not going to save us. But I think North Star recognizing what it can do, which is to get some funds out to people which could help some organizations and some people in the community, is make that as easy as possible for groups and to do it as quickly and effectively as possible. And that’s what North Star did in the moment.
Maureen: Here’s Kofo Anifalaje, Development Director, on how North Star Fund showed up.
Kofo Anifalaje: What happened during the pandemic, it was really actually eye-opening for me because especially once the city went on lockdown, it felt sort of immediate where our donors knew to respond. Our donors knew that the groups that North Star Fund funds, were sort of the key support for communities. There were so many emails and so many, you know, requests for meetings and just requests for information on how they could help. We were actually in the middle of planning our annual gala, which is our main fundraising event for the year. We were in the middle of doing fundraising for that, and we had to scrap that. We had to reimagine the fundraising budget, and we shifted all fundraising to go toward COVID support in coordination with our program team, who were actually hearing directly and in real time from our grantee groups about what they needed. We just knew that we were gonna need to move money quickly. That’s really what we did. We organized donors. We told them how they could support and give to North Star Fund. We created a COVID-related sort of rapid-response fund called The Future of Organizing Fund, and we fundraised for that. We were able to move about 1.7 million dollars out to grantee groups and that was the fastest we’ve ever moved any money, at least as long as I’ve been at North Star Fund.
Risa: By pausing their traditional decision-making process, North Star Fund was able to raise and disseminate an enormous amount of money for its grantees, who were tending to the needs of their communities. 1.7 million dollars in merely two weeks is a testament to their staff, to the community they’ve built and to the spirit of giving that New Yorkers have in them.
Maureen: And because crises exacerbate existing inequities, the organizations which The Future of Organizing Fund supported were able to fill the void that wasn’t being addressed by the public or private sectors.
Risa: Catherine Eusebio, again, talking to us about how Damayan, an organization which organizes Filipino low- wage workers, did exactly that.
Catherine Eusebio: I attended a community meeting with one of our grantees, Damayan, who organizes nannies and domestic workers, all of whom are Filipino immigrants. And so, nannies in particular don’t have the traditional kinds of labor protections as [the people] working in our office, for example. And so, nannies have been fired. Domestic workers have been cut off from traditional support. And one of their leaders said the government has really left them to die, because they haven’t been given any formal protection. So, when I think about what the grant provided to them – it was distributed back in the form of food and stipends that enabled these people to survive. And nowhere else could they have benefited from a government relief package. I think the role of grassroots groups is to keep people engaged and alive and also to advocate for better conditions for their people overall.
Maureen: And one of the ways these grantee organizations expand their reach is through mutual aid.
Risa: So I had to Wikipedia search “mutual aid” because, well, I basically had to Wiki every other concept brought up so far. Maybe Catherine can explain?
Catherine: Mutual aid is a tradition longstanding in communities of color where people in the community are providing for their own. When I think about mutual aid’s connection to organizing, it reminds me of ways that communities might bring people in for food. For example, the Black Panthers provided breakfast for free. And this was a tool that helped politicize people to understand: why is it that their community is receiving or needs this kind of support, where others have more than plenty? So, I think mutual aid is a tool to bring people in and also politicize them to think about the conditions that they’re facing and what needs to change.
Risa: Why use wiki when you can just ask Catherine?
Maureen: Not only are North Star Fund grantees filling in the gaps where they’re needed most; they’re also holding these sectors accountable, advocating for issues and giving voice to their communities. And one of the most impactful ways we’ve learned that North Star Fund grantees were doing that during the crisis of COVID was through coalition building.
Risa: Kesi Foster again.
Kesi: Coalitions can bring large organizations into relationships with smaller organizations that are fighting around similar struggles. And so, one for me that kind of stands out that North Star supported is the Housing Justice for All Coalition in New York State, which brought together folks that are organizing around housing justice, around rent laws, not just for folks in New York City. Oftentimes people think of, you know, renters in New York State and think, oh, that’s only an issue for people in New York City. No, you know, there are people that are renting all over New York State. And the Housing Justice Coalition brought together large and small organizations organizing around housing justice from across the state and change in New York State rent laws for the first time since like the 1970s. And I think even right now, right, are creating the pressure around, evictions and rent relief for the most vulnerable communities during this pandemic. So, I think creating a coalition that brings people together around a shared issue and creates a shared space so small and large organizations can move together, can be incredibly impactful.
Maureen: Elz Cuya Jones, about a coalition making a tremendous impact during the COVID pandemic.
Elz Cuya Jones: So right at the start of the pandemic, housing activists and affordable housing activists and homeless organizers got together to protect folks who are renters and folks who did not have permanent housing.
Public News Service: Housing justice advocates fear that without action from Albany, New Yorkers who have lost their jobs during the COVID pandemic could be at risk of losing their homes.
Risa: Public News Service.
Public News Service: Even before the pandemic, many tenants were just one paycheck away from eviction. In March, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced a 90-day moratorium on evictions. But Cea Weaver, with the Housing Justice Alliance, says more needs to be done.
Cea Weaver: We’re asking the state legislature and the Governor to pass legislation that would suspend landlords’ ability to collect rent for the duration of the crisis. Our goal is to rehouse 92,000 homeless New Yorkers and to make sure that everybody is living in homes that are safe and that they can afford. Whether we act or not, millions of New Yorkers cannot pay the rent and they have a critical role to play in stabilizing the situation and passing sensible policy that can both support small landlords and support renters.
Maureen: Which brings me to this larger question of how philanthropic organizations can not only provide short- term relief for communities most affected by the pandemic, but help build long-lasting change to help them weather crises in the future. Elz, again.
Elz: You know, in February, people didn’t hear about Defund the Police. They didn’t even-they thought that was a completely radical, impossible thing. And then come June, we saw across the country, school boards deciding to not have police in their schools, and we’ve noticed city councils deciding to pull parts of their budget out of the police force. So, it went from something that was super-radical and an impossibility, to something that was actually happening across the country and made movement here in New York City.
Maureen: North Star Fund, since its inception, has been working with communities in crisis. So, the crisis of COVID and the crisis of systemic racism were not new to them, not new to the communities they’ve been championing for so long. Not new to the movement which those communities were creating from the ground up. What was new was everyone else’s response.
Risa: The Defund the Police movement Elz is describing, had a major breakthrough with communities United for Police Reform, a coalition which North Star Fund supports and is the fiscal sponsor.
Public News Service: Civil Rights Law 50-a has been on the books for 44 years, but the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the protests that have followed have given the effort to repeal that law added momentum.
Maureen: PNS News Service again.
Public News Service: According to Katurah Topps with the WCP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and a member of Communities United for Police Reform, the signatories to that letter are not the only ones calling for action.
Katurah Topps: It’s New Yorkers from every borough, it’s communities all across the country, and people from all over the world calling for a full repeal of this law. Making sure that the public has an avenue to ensure that when police officers misconduct themselves, they are fully held accountable, disciplined proportionately. And it’s not a secret from the communities that they’re going to be serving. Why would a public servant, who is fully armed and has the power to arrest people, take their liberty away? Why would those members of society be exempt from being completely transparent and accountable to the public?
Risa: I was going to look up CPR, but then I remembered to just ask Catherine.
Catherine: We have been a longtime supporter of Communities United for Police Reform, also known as CPR. There is such a powerful coalition, because they are led by different community-led grassroots organizations. And so, it’s exciting to see them really take power in this moment. CPR’s coalition has led to a really exciting moment when it came down to the city budget negotiations and whether de Blasio would defund police or cut the police budget at a time where every other city agency budget had shrunk. But because we’ve been a long-term supporter of CPR, because they have built up the infrastructure to take on massive campaigns and be successful, also at the state level, they are creating a political opportunity and a moment for change that is meeting the headlines.
Maureen: North Star Fund’s Let Us Breathe Fund, the only New York City-based fund led by and for Black communities organizing around police reform and building Black liberation, is a prime example of how philanthropy can provide both short-term relief and long-term building.
Risa: Executive Director, Jennifer Ching.
Jennifer Ching: So, North Star Fund founded the Let Us Breathe fund in 2015, in the wake of Eric Garner’s murder by the NYPD. I was not working here at that time. I was just another New Yorker who was absolutely incensed and outraged by that act, an act that, you know, we witnessed on video and then saw over more than five years, a total failure of our government in any accountability for that death, for his death.
When I came to North Star Fund in 2017, Let Us Breathe Fund had already been in operation for a few years. It was living up to its promise of being led by community organizers and providing long-term sustained support for Black-led organizing and multi-racial organizing around these very issues and questions. But by 2017, there had kind of already been, I would say, a general public and philanthropic kind of abdication around supporting Black lives and certainly centering Black lives. And so as a fundraiser, as a resource mobilizer, as the head of North Star Fund and as someone deeply passionate about really trying to build a world that understands and is accountable to our legacy and our daily contemporary acts of anti-Black racism, I found myself in a lot of uncomfortable conversations trying to convince people to choose to support the Let Us Breathe Fund and to support this work around police accountability, in particular in New York City.
So fast forward to the pandemic, and fast forward to the incredible sea change and mass mobilizations of this summer. It was incredible to see so many New Yorkers come out and particularly incredible for us at North Star Fund to see so many New Yorkers support the Let Us Breathe Fund. So many folks found us online or heard about us on social media and came out and supported North Star Fund and this work. And it felt, for me, personally, to be able to now be in within an organization that has had this commitment and to be able to share our practices with other philanthropic organizations who are pivoting and thinking about how to build this work, to be able to talk to individual donors who have been activated and who want to want to really do what they can to dismantle systemic racism….It’s really tremendous and I’m hopeful. But of course, part of me is also deeply sad, deeply sad that it takes death, that it takes the murder and the loss of Black life, for our communities to pivot. And so, what I’m hoping for right now is that we as an institution can do everything we can to keep this movement, keep this work front and center, because it is in so many ways the core of what we must change within our society, particularly now as we are enduring the fourth year of a openly white-supremacist president and, you know, looking ahead to deeply uncertain times.
Maureen: I asked Kesi Foster, New York City Community Funding Committee Co-Chair, what his view of the future is in these uncertain times.
Kesi Foster: You know, it’s hard to explain. It hit differently for me. I think particularly around the Breonna Taylor decision. Coming into that decision, one, I was not hopeful for there to be any accountability in that decision, but, two, I don’t look for the courts to provide accountability and justice. They’re not set up to do that for Black people in this country. But I think the thing that was still incredibly hard and painful is the court just, you know, it reinforced that, it’s okay-and actually, it’s legal to go into a Black woman’s home in the middle of the night and basically shoot and kill her.
And, you know, at the time in my home, my aunt, my mom and my partner were here, as well as our new daughter. Right? And my aunt and my mom were helping us with the child care. And it really reinforced that Black women through patriarchy and racism continue to be caretakers in our communities and in other communities. And still, you know, this country has no problem snatching their lives. And it hit a little different for me. And, you know, I guess that comes with being a parent. At the same time, I know whether people have children or not, that these things hit us all and have an immense impact on us.
I think we’re fighting now. And folks were fighting before us. And the next generation is going to fight after us. My child and many other children right now will take up this fight. And I just hope that we’re able to organize now to create conditions so that the challenges are not as immense for them as they feel like they can be right now.
Maureen: How then do people like us, like Risa and me, who are exhausted and furious and confused, how are we able to find a place in social justice amidst the fog of chaos and uncertainty? How do we join the folks at North Star Fund and take up this fight-especially if we’re joining so late in the battle?
Risa: Yeah, it feels really overwhelming to just jump in. Like, I don’t want to be the “she joined this movement because at the moment it was trendy” kind of girl. Because I want to learn how to do it for the long haul.
Maureen: We have a lot of catching up to do. This is a race, right? And we won’t get to the finish line by sleeping.
Risa: But I’m already feeling somewhat exhausted.
Maureen: Meet the collison head-on!
Risa: Ok…
Maureen: Thanks so much for the 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 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.