The Transformative Capacity of Narrative and Cultural Strategy
Youth Organizing and Cultural Strategy
With Mandy Van Deven, Angeles Solis, and Nyoka Acevedo
In this GIA podcast episode we hear from guests Mandy Van Deven, Co-lead of Elemental, Angeles Solis, Director of Impact and Innovation at The Action Lab, and Nyoka Acevedo, Fund Director for the Youth Organizing and Culture Change Fund. The trio explores the transformative capacity of narrative and cultural strategy, drawing from Mandy's insights in her GIA Reader piece, ‘Cultivating the Conditions: Philanthropy’s Role in Fortifying the Infrastructure for Narrative Power.’ This conversation aims to enhance funders' understanding and support for practices that empower organizers to build narrative and cultural power, fostering meaningful and durable transformation. Tune in for a deep dive into youth organizing, relational organizing, and innovative philanthropic practices.
Recorded on August 1, 2024
To listen to the full episode, click here.
Jaime Sharp: Hello, everyone. And welcome to a podcast by Grantmakers in the Arts, a national member association of private and public arts and culture funders. My name is Jaime Sharp and I'm the program manager here at GIA. I use She/They pronouns and I am located on the unceded territories of the Three Fire Peoples, also known as Chicago Illinois. While this is an audio medium, I do want to take a moment and provide a visual description of myself. I am a light-skinned Black femme with shoulder-length, dark curly, natural hair. Thank you so much for listening in today.
In this GIA Podcast episode, we hear from guests, Mandy Van Deven, co-lead of Elemental, Angeles Solis, director of impact and innovation at The Action Lab, and Nyoka Acevedo, fund director for the Youth Organizing and Culture Change Fund. The trio explores the transformative capacity of narrative and cultural strategy. Drawing from Mandy's insights in her GIA reader piece, Cultivating the Conditions: Philanthropy's Role in Fortifying the Infrastructure for Narrative Power. This conversation aims to enhance funders' understanding and support for practices that empower organizers to build narrative and cultural power, fostering meaningful and durable transformation. Tune in for a deep dive into youth organizing, relational organizing, and innovative philanthropic practices. I hope you enjoy.
Mandy Van Deven: Yeah. So my name is Mandy Van Deven. My pronouns are She and Her. I am an American who grew up in the Southern part of the US, moved to New York City, where I lived for 20 years, and then moved to the Netherlands about four years ago. I'm a white woman and middle-aged, I guess you could say at this point in my life, but very much young at heart. And I thought that I might just kind of start our conversation with a bit of contextual grounding on where progressive philanthropy is with regard to resourcing narrative power building, and then also ask us to share a bit about how each of us made our way into the roles that we're in today. So for myself, for a little bit more than a decade, the narrative field has been deepening, expanding, and gaining more visibility among social justice funders, not just within the US, but also globally.
And as someone who's been working at this intersection of narrative philanthropy and social justice movements for more than 25 years, often when I hear people in the philanthropic sector talk about narrative change, their focus is on things that are happening outside of philanthropy. And while I think it's important for grantmakers to have a keen understanding of what success looks like for the individuals and the groups that they're funding, I also think that when funders get too fixated on the ways that movement leaders and artists and narrative practitioners are operating, we can become confused about what our role is as a resource steward and sometimes overstep into agenda setting. So one of the questions that I've been exploring for the past few years is this one of what are the narratives that govern philanthropy? And what are the ways that our sector needs to identify and rethink some of the assumptions that are embedded in the ways that we operate?
And what the research that I've been doing has found is that in many ways the norms of philanthropy both reflect and perpetuate the very narratives that our sector seeks to change. And many of the sectors' common practices are rooted in narratives about scarcity, individualism, meritocracy, presumed expertise. And one of the concrete ways that this shows up in a lot of foundations is that folks will be operating through strategies that have been developed without the guidance of the communities that they say they're serving through narrowly defined grantmaking priorities that often focus on a particular issue or identity or geography. But when it comes to things like narrative, when it comes to sort of broad scale social change, we know that this work is cross-cutting and it's not confined by artificial boundaries like national borders or even time frames. For example, the same narrative strategies and social inequities that allowed for fascism to emerge and take hold in Europe in the 1930s have been used to erode democracy and expand authoritarianism globally today.
So when philanthropy invests with this kind of short-term thinking that's driven by a sense of scarcity, what we're doing is creating a context that sets us all up to fail. So when I wrote the article that Grantmakers in the Arts published, my motivation was to provide an in-depth analysis about the things that we've all been observing and to answer some of these common questions that funders ask me, which range from what is narrative, what is narrative infrastructure, what is narrative power? To more complicated questions like, why are social justice movements being outmaneuvered and stuck point defense? Or what are the myths and operational norms and philanthropy that are standing in the way of more just and transformational possibilities? So a core part of my work has been about cultivating the conditions in the sector to resource narrative power.
And often that happens through a community of practice that I've been leading for narrative funders called Elemental. And one of the parts of our work is by lifting up the folks in the philanthropic sector and on the front lines who are identifying and unpacking the ways these faulty logics have created habits that don't actually serve us, and highlighting the people in the organizations that are opening up the possibility of embodying ways of thinking and being that are rooted in integrity and rigor, and that allow us to imagine and live into the world that we want while also encouraging us to let go of these operating ways of being that are just not fit for purpose. So that's a little bit about what brought me here. Nyoka and Angeles, can you say a little bit about what brought you to this work of narrative power building and culture change?
Angeles Solis: Hey, all. Angeles here. I can go first. Pronouns, She/Her. I am the director of the Impact and Innovation initiative at the Action Lab, and I am a young Latina in my 30s and I'm wearing gold hoops and I have brown curly hair. So to answer your question, my first experience with narrative power was during the Fight for $15 campaign nearly a decade ago. It was my first organizer job. I was at SEIU in Seattle, I was organizing fast food and retail workers, many who were working multiple jobs and supporting entire families. Fast food workers were striking across the country, and this message of 15 in a union was spreading like wildfire because the demand was bold, it was unpredictable, it was controversial, and workers were organizing in states with minimum wages as low as $6 or $7 an hour.
So what this fight did was challenge the status quo of entire institutions across industries, governments, unions, civil society had to reckon with this rising movement of low-wage workers taking on billionaire franchises. And I mean, this was the topic of conversation from the White House to the dinner table, family and friends were debating concepts of deservedness, of dignified labor, of wealth redistribution without maybe not even knowing it. If y'all recall, talking points in the movement were transforming assumptions of who the people who flipped burgers were, heads of households working multiple jobs burdened with rising cost of living while making these corporations millions every day. The narrative work had an intergenerational impact. Young people in their first job were walking out alongside workers of all ages, backgrounds, languages, building solidarity, and a mainly immigrant-led worker, low-wage worker movement.
And this is also a moment notably not long after Occupy, where the spotlight was shifting onto the billionaire class. If the demands of the workers were to be so audacious, we'll just take a look at the system enabling CEOs to hoard wages while communities starve. These workers weren't just taking on their bosses, they were taking on the economy, and that message worked at scale. Fast food workers across continents were organizing against shared targets, there were global strikes for $15. This was a moral and economic crisis. And lawmakers, this message forced lawmakers to act. It became an election issue, it rose to the top of the agendas, and we saw this rolling effect of minimum wage increases across cities and states.
And just to wrap, here we are years later with widely accepted norms around $15 an hour or more and it's due to the brave efforts of fast food workers that we have stronger precedent to build from, both in policy and in organizing. The seeds those stories planted continue to influence the narrative within the emergence of worker organizing across so many industries. So that was a major lesson for me. It's the lesson that I've taken with me in my career, it's the mandate of the left to really question our narrative right now and ask, what is the work that must be done to sustain a winning message and bring forth changes in the conditions of our lives?
Nyoka Acevedo: Thank you for that, Angeles. Hi, everyone. My name is Nyoka Acevedo. My pronouns are She/Her/Hers. I am a Nuyorican woman in my 40s with my hair pulled back, I have dark hair pulled back into a bun, and dark framed glasses. Thank you so much for this question and this conversation, Mandy.
How do I come to this work? I started organizing as a young person with the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement in the '90s, and at that time we were working to bring awareness to political prisoners being held in the United States. These folks were former activists in the '60s and '70s, former Black Panther Party members who were victims of the FBI's Counterintelligence Program. And one of the ways the organization sought to raise awareness about the plight of political prisoners was to throw an annual concert called Black August in honor of the Black August movement, which was started in the prisons, and honored as a month of study and discipline of liberation movements.
And so in the early years, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement partnered with Stress Magazine, which at the time was a major independent hip hop publication. And together they brought some of the largest hip hop acts to the stage for the purpose of raising awareness and raising funds. So artists such as Nas, Common, Fat Joe, The Roots, and the list really goes on. And so this is really one of my earliest memories of how our community was able to harness the power of culture and narrative to build power. And so what we see 30 years later, many of those political prisoners have been able to be freed and spend a senior year at home liberated. And so again, this is really the groundwork of what was happening back then in terms of raising awareness and really working in conjunction with art and artists and hip hop publications.
And so fast-forward, after many years of crisscrossing the youth development and youth justice sectors, I found myself working in philanthropy at the start of COVID. And the truth is, our movement partners were holding up the sky to provide basic human needs to member of their communities while young people were holding down the front lines of protests across the nation, and they were demanding that police dollars be directed and be redirected to meet the very needs of their community. And so the narrative of defund comes to light. And so this is a moment where, and Mandy, you referenced this in your article as well, where we see the failure of public systems and we really see community step up in such a way, which brings me to this other narrative of like, "We keep us safe," which we hear throughout our communities. And so we really saw this narrative of both the demand for defunding the police and also we keep us safe, live and in action as folks move to provide mutual aid for one another, organize around rent moratoriums and more.
And so as we were sitting in philanthropy figuring out how to meet the need of the moment, there was a lot of internal organizing that happened to pull down additional dollars in the philanthropic sector. And the reality is many of those dollars have been contracted. And so what that does to movement is it leaves movement unprepared and unshielded as we try to hold the gains made over the last 15 to 20 years. And so that contraction of those philanthropic dollars have caused serious, serious harms to our movement.
I currently serve as the director of the Youth Organizing and Culture Change Fund. The fund was founded by an organizer and a musician who happened to work in philanthropy. So Javier Valdes at the Ford Foundation and Katy Clark at the Kornfeld Foundation had a conversation about the gaps in funding they experienced and the difficult of securing funding at the intersection of this work. They contracted with Cristina Jimenez, formerly of United We Dream, to lead a field scan. And the field scan she conducted showed what many of us knew, youth organizing is underfunded and arts and culture sector's underfunded, and the intersection of that work is hardly funded at all. And so we don't have the resources and the investment needed to build long-term sustainable power for our movements. And so the fund was really founded to take and ecosystem approach to support youth organizing at the intersection of culture narrative change.
And so in addition to grant resources, we provide technical assistance training in the area of narrative strategy, which is something we heard loud and clear from our movements in terms of what it is that they need to sustain and build long-term power. Our movement partners include a spectrum of organizers and organizations that includes faith-building youth organizers and youth-serving arts organizations. And so through the fund's cohort model, what we're seeing is greater alignment in the use of shared narratives such as we keep us safe, we're seeing strength in relationships amongst movement partners, and just the greater desire to collaborate across sectors and issue areas. And so as a young person, I witnessed the power of alignment between arts and organizers to move the needle forward on the issue political prisoners.
And today I continue to witness it through my work with the fund as our movement partners align on creating collective narratives that resonate across issue areas, seek to collaborate, and really push forth collective demands that center art and culture as a base-building practice. And so for me, supporting this work is vital. It's truly vital to how our communities survive and live and thrive beyond this moment.
Mandy Van Deven: Yeah. I appreciate hearing a bit about the path that y'all have been taking to get to this place and also lifting up that the sort of history and lineages that are brought into the moment that we're all in, and that includes the way that resource mobilization is an organizing endeavor within the philanthropic sector.
So, Angeles, you just talked a little bit about what narrative power building looks like in an organizing context, and I wonder if you can expand upon that to talk about how it creates an enabling environment for the types of social, political, and economic transformations that we need.
Angeles Solis: Absolutely. Angeles here. And to answer your question, building power with narrative is about the stories that we tell and the questions that we ask. I recall a conversation with a mentor a couple years ago that although it was a small shift, it had a significant impact on how I saw my own work. And she said to me, "We as organizers, we don't empower anyone. I'm not giving someone power. My role as an organizer is to facilitate and to help people see the power that they already have or are denied from using." So what is the message that you embody as an organizer? How do you uphold your own and our collective power with that reframe? And the pandemic presented this unbelievable battleground for organizers where the dominant narratives were forced into the light, concepts of deservedness, of interconnectedness, meritocracy, like you mentioned at the beginning of the show, were challenged by the reality of mass inequality, the broken safety nets, the danger of essential work, and the exclusions of entire communities.
And it was April of 2020 when undocumented immigrant workers began organizing further right to unemployment benefits. We formed this powerful statewide coalition, and I got to give flowers to Make the Road New York, New York Communities for Change, Endelon, the Street Vendor Project, Desis Rising Up and Moving, Worker Justice Center in New York, Columbia County Sanctuary Movement, the list goes on. But all these groups were representing day laborers, domestic workers, sex workers, farm workers, people recently released from incarceration, and all of them were denied unemployment. Despite being billions into it for others, they didn't have the option to stay safe at home. So this campaign kicked off in the middle of the pandemic in New York City in the epicenters where we were losing folks every day with this message of essential and excluded. We didn't call it the Undocumented Workers Fund, but the Excluded Workers Fund. And we put the onus of responsibility on the state for failing this population.
And again, that reframe just like an earlier reframe in my own life, shifted the way that our campaign was seen, shifted the way that people saw each other, how they related to the safety net as a whole. And that transformative organizing you asked about started in pantry lines, hundreds of people spanning blocks. And we went person to person with our signup sheet and our camera and our flyers, and we asked them, "How long have you been in this country? How does it feel that you worked so hard and so long and you still have nothing, but the billionaires are making millions? How is it that our communities are dying, our public hospitals are overwhelmed, and thousands are going hungry, but the profits are skyrocketing from these billionaires in our backyard?" And because people didn't have anywhere to go, it was a perfect agitating moment. And the narrative that we were bringing to them, I could see people the way that they answered the question, something was shifting.
Having worked with this population for over a decade, there's already a very challenging internalized belief that has been conditioned that immigrant workers or undocumented workers are only deserving of their value because of the labor that they bring, the contributions that they bring, that because of their immigration status, they aren't entitled to the same rights or benefits as other people or citizens. But in this crisis, we were able to agitate, point to a shared target, and reframe how people saw themselves in this fight.
And for those in the arts listening, this campaign centered joy and massive art installations to visibilize those whose labor saved lives and also billionaire wealth. And one example that conceptualizes inequality, it was my favorite, it was December, it was snowing, it was so cold, and a bunch of us got together and we rolled out this massive art installation. It was a three-block-long scroll in the middle of Central Park and half an inch on that scroll represented $100,000. And as you walked this scroll, as participants were just walking down this long art installation, you would pass certain milestones. You just funded public schools for the next 10 years. You just funded state hospitals for the next three decades. You hadn't even made to pass half the scroll and you were able to resolve hunger in the entire state for several decades just by passing taxes on these billionaires just on their gains for a couple years.
So it was because of participatory mass direct actions like those that we were able to bring in and convene not just directly impacted workers, but strategic allies, even patriotic millionaires joined the fight to push for this demand, this bold demand. We were asking billions, not charity, I'm talking about billions in emergency income for our people, tax the rich to fund the poor. That was our opening. In a moment of crisis and suffering, we brought people together in joy and determination. We agitated, as I said, towards the real target, shifted paradigms at scale. We challenged those internalized beliefs and people took risks. With nothing to lose, excluded workers gave it their all. After major bridge shutdowns and a 23-day hunger strike, New York passed the Excluded Worker Fund. At $2.1 billion, it remains the largest cash assistance program for undocumented workers in the history of this country. Participants got a $15,000 check, allowed them to pay back rent, debt, bury loved ones, start businesses, and so much more.
This campaign continues to thrive now with freelancers and formerly incarcerated people also leading the fight to close the gaps in the safety net and pass permanent programs for excluded workers. And just to speak to the power of the narrative and the story, 11 states are running similar campaigns with that umbrella term of essential and excluded, or excluded workers in general. And that just goes to show that it clicked. Now, that narrative won't hit the same way if we try it now. That's another lesson for us as organizers. We have to be willing to adapt our communication strategies to the conditions that we are in and the ones that we want to build.
And, Mandy, I really appreciate the framing you've shared around liminality and the space between what we're moving from and moving into, and that's the space as organizers where we can really get to work.
Mandy Van Deven: Yeah, I appreciate that. And Nyoka, Angeles just lifted up this campaign that achieved such a massive success through a coalition of organizations with deep roots in community. And the intention of many philanthropic institutions is to contribute resources to these types of collective formations in ways that move us toward that just and joyful future. So at the Youth Organizing and Culture Change Fund, your grant-making strategy was designed to reflect that reality, that large-scale durable change is not accomplished by one individual, one organization, or even one movement. It's an interconnected ecosystem of leaders, organizers, narrative practitioners, culture bearers that are taking action together. So I wonder if you can talk some of the principles and practices that guide your grant-making to enable that these folks are able to build that narrative and cultural power, and what motivated the fund to design itself in that way.
Nyoka Acevedo: Yeah, thank you for that, Mandy. And thank you, Angeles, because really what it lifts up is the need for philanthropy to interrogate our strategies and ensure that our philanthropic strategies are meeting the movement in this moment and beyond. And so when we founded the Fund, we were really intentional about developing values and practices that were aligned and co-created with young people and movement leaders and artists. And so we understood that it was critical for us to de-silo funding and take an ecosystem approach. So the story that Angeles just shared and all of the organizations she named, that's what power looks like when organizations work in coalition and collaboration with one another. And I think as funders, what does it look like to fund beyond your strategy? What does it look like for arts funders to fund beyond youth-serving arts programs and understand the importance of how art and culture exists at an intersection?
And so not only does art and culture exist at the intersection of life, but what does it mean when we can lean into the express purpose of long-term power building? We don't live siloed existences and nor do our movements operate in siloed manners. Young people are inherently intersectional, innovative, and open to experimentation. We believe that young people need spaces to learn about test intersectional creative and diverse approaches to achieving scale and building power available to them by centering culture, art, and story. We also recognize that young people are the vanguard of our movement and have been critical in exposing injustices and building community power and really capturing the public's imagination about what's possible when we come together and organize it.
And this work is not new. Youth organizing has historically embedded arts and culture into the work. And however, I'd say that philanthropy has historically siloed funding and inadequately resourced cultural arts and strategies within youth organizing. And so for us as a fund, our mandate is really clear that we must invest equitably in young people to continue to implement and test the strategies that they seek to win to fundamental scale. And so we know that long-term investment in young people, long-term investment in youth organizing is critical, it's truly critical for us to win.
Mandy Van Deven: Yeah, this piece about the work is not new and also the interesting piece around, but the funding is in many ways, right?
Nyoka Acevedo: Right.
Mandy Van Deven: At least in terms of institutional philanthropy, because folks have been finding ways to fund movement work for quite a long time with or without billionaires.
So, Angeles, I wonder when a funder goes off script and embodies the practices that Nyoka just talked about, what does it make possible for movement organizations to achieve that traditional grant-making practices does not? And how does this approach to grant-making, how is it experienced by folks on the front lines?
Angeles Solis: I was just discussing this question this morning with my boss and to answer how embodied philanthropy can really influence our power on the left, I think we also need to assess our opposition. If you assess the opposition, especially right now, you can see that right-wing foundations and philanthropy dangerously trust their grantees. There's consistent major grant-making to conservative think tanks and organizing to experiment and execute multi-year campaigns to protect their interests. However, if you look at progressive philanthropy, which oftentimes tends to be more fragmented, they're more cautious with their grantees, and this is because they may be more centrist than the organizations that they fund. So although the intention may be shifting power at scale, the impact of a more tenuous issue-based funding approach ultimately constrains our capacity as a movement.
Trust-based philanthropy means resourcing innovation and creativity with large-scale general operating grants from multi-year campaigns. And just recently The Action Lab released a report, Power to Win. It was based on a hundred interviews of organizers and leaders across the country. And when asked about grant-making in philanthropy, 95% of organizers felt that progressives need independent non-philanthropic revenue streams. And a majority, 95% of them also felt that philanthropy needs to ship their funding to power-building with 86% agreeing that there needs to be funding for political education, 80% agreeing that there needs to be funding for mass coalition building, as Nyoka said. So those numbers speak for themselves. The headline takeaway of that report is that if we keep doing the same thing, we will lose. We need trust, we need stability, especially with funders, not at tenuous relationships where we're tasked with charming funders year after year, to be frank. Power building is a multi-decade process, and we need to start approaching it in that arc.
And for what that means on the ground, I think that the Fund Excluded Workers campaign I spoke to is a perfect example. We were underdogs in an underestimated campaign organizing the most vulnerable, marginalized essential workers, and we were able to staff up about six months in when we got a $100,000 grant. And less than a year later, that materialized in a $2.1 billion fund. So talk about a major return on investment for the foundations on that original grant. And that happened because there was a willingness to invest in the experimentation of such a bold demand and it worked. And now we're seeing consistent funding for the states across the country also pushing this issue. When you have that win, it opens the doors for further experimentation and more risk-taking.
I've worked closely with funders who take on the role of strategic partner. They still follow their cue from us and from organizing, but they leverage their connections in their name to influence legislators, to convene movement leaders to saw that quilt across context, if you will, and that's been incredibly helpful and I believe embodies that trust-based philanthropy I hope to see more of. And I think that in this moment in history, we are witnessing major elections, not just in the US but across the globe, and we're about to hear and we are hearing the messages in real time that divide and unite people to policy platforms and to candidates, so the need for critical narrative infrastructure is more clear than ever. It will be obvious who is winning and who is losing based on the stories that are spreading around us and within our community.
So our organizations, we need real support to bolster a winning message, to protect a multiracial democracy, and to really unite the working class. And if voices like JD Vance and the opposition are not holding back threats, this is not a moment to clutch pearls, it's a moment to get in the ring.
Mandy Van Deven: Yeah. And philanthropy is more and more taking punches from the likes of the JD Vances of the world as well.
Nyoka, before we close out, I'm curious to know what you might have learned during your time as a grantmaker about how folks that are working in philanthropy can be part of this resourcing of the narrative infrastructure that we need to build the world that we long for.
Nyoka Acevedo: Yeah. I'm going to go off script a little bit, because I really want to respond to Angeles' comment around trust-based philanthropy, which is critical. And I know that funders think of, "We have a frame for trust-based philanthropy, that's like general operating support, multi-year funding." And I really want to challenge us to think beyond, to think beyond. When we say trust-based philanthropy, I want you to think beyond multi-year support and general operating dollars, I want philanthropy to take a listening stance, I want philanthropy to follow and to flank movement. So when we say trust-based philanthropy that we who are sitting in these seats in philanthropy or following movement, we're guarding movement, we're standing to the right, left, and front, and behind you, but we are taking your lead. We are taking your direction. We're not dictating strategies, we're not dictating movements, we are not resourcing, and then contracting dollars, which we know causes irreparable harm to movement. And so again, I really want us as funders to think beyond general operating multi-year support when we talk about trust-based philanthropy.
And so Angeles' point, and what you've also shared, Mandy, and what we know is that this moment requires long-term philanthropic investment. We need to develop and the narrative infrastructure needed to win. Again, I think about all of the dollars that came down in 2020 that no longer exist. And having had multiple conversations with colleagues about the impact that's going to have on movement organizations, very real material impact not only on our organizing work, but on people's quality of life. So I really need philanthropy to consider that harm that's done in real time and I also want philanthropy to consider what is our responsibility to repair that harm? How do we consider funding differently? How do we consider funding ecosystems? How do we consider funding at the intersections of movement? And again, how are we listening to our movement partners about where the support is needed to ensure that we have what we need for the long term? That this is a long term fight.
And so we've seen the right invest long term. And so when we made those gains, those policy gains in 2020, it's no surprise that we faced tremendous blowback. And so now we're not even at the starting line where we were in 2019. We're 10, 15 years behind trying to gain ground. We're in a space where young people, our daughters have less rights than our grandmothers. We're in this moment where young people's entire beings, their entire identities are being legislated upon with very little investment in youth organizing and youth voice. We saw during the pandemic the fragility of what it means to be an artist in this world.
And so here we are in the year 2024, but politically, we're playing a catch-up game of now 20 years behind. We're now 20 years from where we started. Why? Because the right has been invested in, and the right has been, in the words of Ash-Lee Henderson from the Highlander Center, she's like, "Fund us like you want us to win. Fund us like you want us to win." And so the right has been funding the opposition. And so as philanthropy, we need to get information. We need to get information because everything is at stake. Every single part of our being and our existence is at stake in this moment. And so, again, I challenge philanthropy to think about what it means to fund at the intersection of your strategy. I think what it means to fund ecosystem, what it means to think beyond your notion of trust-based philanthropy and following flank movement in this moment and beyond. This is about this moment and beyond.
And so the mandate for philanthropy is like, "Step up. We don't have time. It is truly today or never. It's today or never." And so I feel really honored to do this work alongside Angeles, and you, and others that understand the importance of building a narrative infrastructure that's really going to support working-class people, support young people, and support the left as we seek to regain what was lost over the last four years and envision a world beyond, because the other piece about funding narrative infrastructure, as Fabiana says, it's not about the no, it's about the yes, it's about the possibility. And so narrative is also about placing us in the future and what's possible.
Mandy Van Deven: Yes, and what a powerful place to close. Thank you so much, Angeles and Nyoka, for taking the time today to have this conversation. Thank you so much to Jaime and Grantmakers for the Arts for the opportunity to share this work with your members. We're so grateful for your partnership
Jaime Sharp: To the Grantmakers in the Arts Podcast, if you have any feedback about today's episode or the podcast in general, please contact me at jaime@giarts.org. That's Jaime, J-A-I-M-E at G-I-A-R-T-S dot org. Or visit our website, www.giarts.org. Be sure to check out the other episodes of our podcast on reader.giarts.org. And find us on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram @grantmakersinthearts. Thank you again for listening.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Nyoka Acevedo brings more than 20 years of experience in the field of program development, management, grant-making and education, all in service of creating social change and advancing outcomes for our nation’s most vulnerable youth and communities. She has trained hundreds of educators in New York and Los Angeles on restorative practices through a racial justice framework. Her leadership has helped advance safety and healing while moving communities away from punitive practices that drive mass incarceration. She has worked with the Sadie Nash Leadership Project, Red Hook Initiative, Urban Arts Partnership and The Future Project. Nyoka also served as the Grants Manager for the Drug Policy Alliance, working alongside more than 30 grassroots organizations nationally to advance public policy that combats the war on drugs and ends the criminalization of Black and Latinx communities. A deep listener and life-long participant in the social justice movement, Nyoka believes that change starts by listening to the needs of those most impacted. Nyoka currently the director for the Youth Organizing and Culture Change Fund and holds a bachelor’s degree in sociology from the School of Professional Studies, City University of New York. A born-and-raised New Yorker, she likes to get away from the city sometimes to hike and explore nature with her son and extended family.
Angeles Solis is the Director of Impact and Innovation at The Action Lab. Formerly at Make the Road New York - Angeles helped co-found the Fund Excluded Workers Coalition and led major escalations to pass a $2.1 billion relief fund for undocumented workers. Over the past decade, Angeles has spearheaded campaigns to improve conditions for workers in Amazon warehouses, garment factories, campuses, restaurants and more. She has been recognized as an Edna Berger Marks Awardee, 2021 NYC Rising Labor Star, Bertha 2021 Fellow, CORO Alumni, Emergent Strategy Institute Fellow, and an member of the Workers Rights Consortium Board and Cornell ILR Worker Institute Advisory Council. -Nyoka brings more than 20 years of experience in the field of program development, management, grant-making and education, all in service of creating social change and advancing outcomes for our nation’s most vulnerable youth and communities. She has trained hundreds of educators in New York and Los Angeles on restorative practices through a racial justice framework. Her leadership has helped advance safety and healing while moving communities away from punitive practices that drive mass incarceration. She has worked with the Sadie Nash Leadership Project, Red Hook Initiative, Urban Arts Partnership and The Future Project. Nyoka also served as the Grants Manager for the Drug Policy Alliance, working alongside more than 30 grassroots organizations nationally to advance public policy that combats the war on drugs and ends the criminalization of Black and Latinx communities. A deep listener and life-long participant in the social justice movement, Nyoka believes that change starts by listening to the needs of those most impacted. Nyoka currently the director for the Youth Organizing and Culture Change Fund and holds a bachelor’s degree in sociology from the School of Professional Studies, City University of New York. A born-and-raised New Yorker, she likes to get away from the city sometimes to hike and explore nature with her son and extended family.
Mandy Van Deven is the founder of Both/And Solutions, a global consulting collective that draws on professional expertise and lived experience to provide strategic advice to individual wealth holders and philanthropic institutions, enable organizational and field learning, and design and implement funding initiatives that advance gender, racial, economic, and climate justice. She is also the co-lead of Elemental, an emerging community of practice for funders that seek to cultivate the conditions to resource narrative power, and is a board member at Puentes, a network that builds the narrative infrastructure of social justice movements across Latin America. Mandy also serves on the board of Thousand Currents, which aims to mobilize $250 million to frontline communities and grassroots movements in the Global South over the next decade.
