Jun
26
2024
After more than eleven years on staff at the Building Movement Project, my last day is June 28, 2024. I transition out of BMP proud of the work we have done and excited for the leadership that Janis Rosheuvel will bring as BMP’s next Executive Director.
In the years since I joined BMP, Frances and I have worked together – and with BMP’s incredible staff, advisory board, and partners in the field – to inform critical conversations in the nonprofit sector. The body of work that people will likely most associate with my tenure is the Race to Lead initiative. I’m certainly proud of the dozen reports and briefs that we have released since that first survey launched in 2016, and there’s another report coming next month! One of my big accomplishments – supporting the development of Building Blocks for Change, our race equity assessment – came out of the Race to Lead research. The data collected will provide insights for nonprofits trying to be more equitable and inclusive workplaces, and for the sector as a whole.
As I wind down my time at BMP, I want to reflect on some of the other work that has been more under-the-radar.
One of the first things I worked on was the release and webinar for the At the Crossroads report that Frances wrote with Gigi Barsoum and Barbara Masters. That project provided an opportunity to integrate my identity and professional life in a way I hadn’t before. Having never worked for an LGBTQ organization or on LGBTQ issues, it was exciting to take stock of the insights gathered from leaders in the LGBTQ movement in the months before the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.
Five years later, I worked on a documentation project on organizing campaigns to advance state policies using inclusive definitions of family. The Recognizing All Families to Expand Our Movements report highlighted the importance of a strong alliance between national organizations and state/local coalitions to move progressive public policy. But it also helped to illustrate how initially opening doors for recognition of LGBTQ families expanded conversations about who was affected by the limits of public policy, and the intersections between issues of immigration, incarceration, disability, poverty, and more.
That report also focused on two state-level campaigns, one of which was a policy win in Albuquerque, New Mexico where BMP worked for a decade. During those years of work with partners in New Mexico, we surveyed nonprofit leaders across the state, convened cross-sector meetings to lift up promise of collaboration between service, organizing and advocacy groups, and facilitated learning cohorts for organizations that informed the Security to Wellbeing framework that was the basis of one of BMP’s latest cohorts with partner organizations.
BMP’s other long-standing local partnership was in Detroit, Michigan, where our sibling organization the Detroit People’s Platform has grown into a powerful organizing group working with everyday Detroiters to fight for racial and economic justice. Linda Campbell, DPP’s Director and one of the founding members of BMP’s Advisory Board, was hugely influential in developing BMP’s work with social service groups in the years before I joined the organization, and we have continued to learn with – and from – her organizing in Detroit, the largest majority-Black city in the U.S.
BMP’s deep relationship with leaders and organizations in communities across the country is key to our approach and process for making change in the sector. Everything at BMP starts with a commitment to listening to, and learning from, people on the ground. We conduct interviews, hold focus groups and facilitate cohorts because we want to lift up lessons from the field and shine a light on the brilliance of advocates, organizers and service providers who are making real change. When we produce reports, case studies, and frameworks based on the insight from one group of leaders and organizations, those products are just a vehicle for connecting with new people on the ground. It’s this cycle of listening and learning from the field in order to influence and engage the field that keeps BMP’s work relevant.
I will always be honored and grateful that Frances invited me to go on this journey. As BMP celebrates its 25th year and continues its leadership transition process, I invite you to give to BMP’s Futures Fund to invest in the organization’s next chapter.
As I move on from BMP, what will stick with me most is all of the relationships with leaders across the country that were forged because BMP’s approach has always been to listen to their wisdom, not to impart our own.
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