Funding justice: how local community leaders tap into resources to fuel their work

When it comes to enacting change in a community, who better to take the charge besides the leader who lives in that very community?

At United Way of the Greater Triangle, the nonprofit organization is funding local leadership and community solutions in order to address issues that affect Triangle-area residents. One of the intended investment areas of United Way's Anti-Racism Community Fund is in local leaders of color and organizations doing anti-racism work, helping them to build resource capacity and establish environments where residents have the power to create community-level change.

To date, the Anti-Racism Community Fund has raised over $583K thanks to individual donations and grants from corporate sponsors including John Rex Endowment, Pinnacle Financial Partners, Google Fiber, AJ Fletcher Foundation, Triangle Community Foundation, The Duke Endowment, Corning Life Science, Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, and Pacific Western Bank.

Additionally, United Way, with key support from Raleigh mayoral candidate Terrance Ruth, is convening a community leader design campaign of local community leaders to address and reduce systemic injustices by designing new solutions

"You will see traditional philanthropy follow the leadership of community leaders at all levels, so there is an advisory group that is filled with experienced community leaders from across the Triangle, that same advisory group, selects 10 community members to join the design committees for the systemic change process, which is guided by the stories, experience, and advocacy of people who are embedded in the community," said Ruth. "For community members who have traditionally sat outside traditional philanthropy, we're now providing the guardrails by which solutions are birthed and funded."

Through the advisory council's guidance, they're identifying individuals for the community leader design campaign with the potential to make the biggest justice-focused impact on communities in need. According to Ruth, the main goal includes elevating the voices of individual leaders who are members of a collective movement to address any systemic injustices in their communities. As these communities have been historically exploited and suffered from divestment, these leaders are not just experts in the problem, but also in the solutions.

One member of the advisory council, Rev. Jemonde Taylor, has already started sowing these seeds for solutions in his own community.

"Many times philanthropic organizations are great service providers, and I will put churches in that category. But there are very few philanthropic organizations that really deal with the larger system. It's not necessarily about providing a service, like feeding the homeless, but actually working to create a system in which homelessness and food insecurity don't exist," said Taylor. "I'm always reminding my parishioners that there are thousands of children who go hungry in Wake County each year. We can still give out meals, but we cannot give out hundreds of thousands of meals. What we can do is work to change the system, so that food insecurity doesn't exist."

In his role at Saint Ambrose Episcopal Church, Taylor has several areas of focus regarding community change. One of his passions lies in environmental racism, or the intersection of environmental injustice and racism.

"Saint Ambrose is in the Walnut Creek wetland area and in an area that has historically experienced flooding. It is one of the first black neighborhoods sown by the City of Raleigh during segregation for Black people to live, and Saint Ambrose built a church in that community," said Taylor. "When it comes to dealing with an issue, who knows better about flooding than those people whose basements have been flooded? Those conversations on the ground are extremely important. It's certainly one of the principles of grassroots organizing to ask people in the community what their problems are, and many times the best solutions come from the people."

Through the work being done with United Way and the Anti-Racism Community Fund, community leaders like Taylor can help identify these community-level issues and give a voice to those affected by them.

For Taylor, short-term service like providing meals is important, but it's also crucial not to lose focus in addressing the system issues that create that food insecurity.

"We need more organizing providers, because it is through organizing that you change the system that makes the service necessary. Getting funding to organizing groups is challenging, because it's very appealing for companies to be able to say in their annual report that they delivered 1 million pounds of food — the curb appeal of organizing, at least from a feel-good standpoint, is not always as attractive as providing a service," said Taylor. "Of course, delivering a million pounds of food is fantastic, but what about dreaming of a world in which you didn't have to deliver food?"

Taylor is excited about the work that United Way is doing to empower local leaders in defining what's right and wrong in their communities, designing the solutions, and making the final decisions. Moving forward, he hopes to continue addressing the systemic issues that affect communities and encourage funding to accomplish these community-driven goals.

Already, the efforts are growing and impacts being felt, but further funding can help increase the reach of the community leader design campaign.

"What we have found is that that need is great. Community leaders are thirsty for a funding stream that would support them as human beings and invest social capital in their communities. Right now, what we need is collaboration around these community leaders and individuals that are willing to walk with them for the long haul," said Ruth. "We're excited to see the Triangle start to lean that way. This is creating a different funding relationship, and it is empowering community leaders to move from advocacy to solutions."

"We're seeing very large tech companies — your Red Hats, your IBMs — they're leaning into communities have been historically exploited more heavily than they were previously," he finished. "We don't know what the future will look like with this fund, but what we do know is that the future is leaning into this funding strategy to promote these outcomes."