Building Leadership and Organisations for the Future We Need
by Kavitha Mediratta
Four years ago, I wrote about what can be learned about supporting racial equity leaders from leaning in. Engaging with conflict and difference, I argued then, is vital to the growth and effectiveness of social movements and broader change. As we at the Atlantic Fellows for Racial Equity (AFRE) sought to connect social justice leaders, we needed to focus on vision, be vigilant to our blind spots, reach beyond the usual suspects in our network-building efforts, and listen and learn from difference.
These insights from Fellows helped us to redesign almost every aspect of our program, resulting in a growing and vibrant network of 105 Fellows and dozens of creative racial equity projects. Now, as AFRE completes a year of self-reflection under new leadership, I write to share lessons on leadership and organisation-building from this work.
AFRE’s Founding Executive Director Kavitha Mediratta speaks with 2020 Fellow Pinky Mashiane and AFRE Executive Director Sebabatso Manoeli-Lesame.
Network Building for Social Change
There is a growing focus in social justice circles on the importance of building the relational infrastructure among those working both inside and outside of political systems and institutions of power. While the attention is welcome, in practice these efforts are often tenuous and vulnerable to conflict and division along lines of political and social identity. Too few opportunities exist for individuals and organisations to connect in ways that will develop the trust, shared identity, and interconnection that is so essential to sustained collective action.
In 2017, I founded and, for five years, directed AFRE, a $63 million initiative to intervene in this reality by building cross-sectoral, multi-racial and interdisciplinary communities of leaders dedicated to dismantling anti-Black racism and white supremacy in South Africa and the US. In an under-resourced field with many under-leveraged assets, we wanted to strengthen existing networks of social action while catalyzing new ones that would accelerate the impact of racial equity work. But as is so often the case with good intentions, we ran headlong into unforeseen challenges.
Conflict and distrust surfaced almost immediately in our work, as participants questioned our —and each other’s— motivations, beliefs and commitments in ways we were ill-prepared to meet. In a context of increasing polarization and unequal power relations, we had not given sufficient attention to helping participants develop understanding and trust across the range of differences in the programme. The experience affirmed the importance of our mission but made clear that we needed to figure out how to exemplify the capacities we strove to foster.
Our journey of listening, learning and redesign surfaced five important themes about leadership and organisation-building that may be helpful to others.
1. Start with Purpose
The purpose of leadership shapes the form of leadership appropriate in any given context. What kind of leadership is needed to advance racial equity? How can we live this vision of leadership in our work? What will these ideas mean for who we support and how we support them? Our early experience showed us that, if the world we seek is one in which each of us is seen in the fullness of our humanity, then AFRE needed to live this vision in its work.
First, we needed to embrace vulnerability, care, connection, and a deep belief in each other’s humanity and capacity for growth and change. And second, as an organisation, we needed to be capacious and compassionate in our interactions, developing our work in a facilitative, inclusive and deeply relational way. Next, we turned to updating our mission and values to clarify AFRE’s purpose. And we dedicated significant time to making sure everyone understood them. Flexibility was essential to foster new thinking without imposing the frameworks of one community, sector, generation or discipline on others. Discussion proceeded over several months and was heated and uncomfortable at times as we navigated differences in politics, experience and culture. But the result was a deeper and shared appreciation of what AFRE was trying to build as well as a collective commitment to an ethos of compassion, caring, curiosity and openness. We didn’t always implement these principles perfectly, but we all understood that everyone involved in AFRE’s work needed to embody them.
2. Live this purpose in structure and relationships
Our next step was to operationalize our purpose in how AFRE functioned. How would we live our mission and values in our work together? This was not an invitation to practice doctrinaire thinking —a path that too often replicates the patterns of domination we reject in our social justice visions. Rather it was an invitation to see our work as an evolving project of learning, growth and change. This required attending to the operational and relational dimensions of organisational development.
There is a great deal of debate about what equity looks like in organisational practice. Of course, practice should be shaped by purpose and context. What is appropriate for one organisation may not be for another. For us, defining roles and responsibilities and establishing decision-making authorities was essential in a complex, transnational web of institutions and partners. Often the egalitarian promise of democratic practice leads to a conflation of organisational hierarchy with domination, and indeed there was much debate about this within AFRE. Yet hierarchy can co-exist with a practice of collaboration and participation. As the political scientist Jo Freeman points out, not naming actual differences in levels of experience, authority and accountability serves only to mask the realities of unequal positional power. Clarifying these issues within our transnational team helped us to move collective processes forward productively.
At the same time, structures rest on human relationships. For a program like AFRE, focused on deeply painful injustice, a container was needed in which each participant could see themselves and be anchored emotionally as well as professionally. This meant starting with who we are as people before turning to what we would do together and how we would do it —getting to know the layers of experience and history that shapes each of us and our connection to AFRE’s mission before diving into the tasks we would do together.
Kavitha Mediratta (Right) with AFRE Facilitator Yasmeen Rubidge (Centre) and former AFRE Programme Manager Keyaria Rhodes (Left).
3. BUILD ADAPTIVE CAPACITY
Our early AFRE experiences provided great insight into the kind of space and content that racial equity leaders need and want. Fellowships often include training in hard skills, such as management or fundraising or communications. Yet as many of us know well, frontline leaders need respite and support for deep personal work so they can more fully and deeply embody the visions they seek to bring to life through their work. One of our crucial revelations at AFRE was that we had to offer —and model— this type of self-care and inner work ourselves in order to offer it to our Fellows.
In developing our leadership programming, it was essential to balance South African and US perspectives. And we needed to articulate a sequence of inquiry that allowed participants to explore themselves, get to know each other, vision-build together, and practice the skills of sharing and supporting each other through investment in each other’s success. Drawing on South African traditions, dialogue provided an over-arching container for collective sharing and exploration, laying the relational foundations for a tightly knit network to emerge.
Most critically, we realized our offerings have to to be fluid and evolving, responsive to the needs of participants and the communities around them. Thus, we focused on building design muscle on our staff, and on developing a stance of flexibility and reflection that would support ongoing adaptation. We also created additional support for fellow impact, such as convenings to maintain their connections and new field-focused initiatives for narrative change.
4. focus selection on impact
Selection is a central activity in fellowship programs and one we needed to rethink from our initial year. The work to clarify purpose, values and our organisational ethos helped us to see the qualities we were looking for in our fellows and the highly relational way in which we could engage them in our selection process. All candidates needed to demonstrate alignment with AFRE’s purpose, multi-racial identity and politics of progressive social change – in other words, that we were what they were looking for. But the selection criteria that proved most powerful were a track record of impact that demonstrated a real-world grappling with the complexity of social change, the dispositions of intellectual curiosity and emotional maturity, and the need and readiness for a pause.
At the cohort-level, individual-level characteristics needed to be balanced by consideration of collective needs and effective group dynamics. We aimed to make sure there was a mix of experiences and perspectives that would stretch participants in useful ways while providing enough common denominators for understanding and connection to emerge across their differences. Some challenge was required for growth whereas some familiarity was required for each participant to feel safe and seen. Fellowship cohorts therefore were constructed to be transnationally balanced, with broad sectoral representation and attention to racial/ethnic, intergenerational and geographic diversity.
5. ENCOURAGE ONGOING LEARNING
Evaluation is commonplace in start-ups, especially those initiated in partnership with foundations. But such evaluations often emphasize program fidelity and participant satisfaction, rather than theory-building through practice. As a program that straddles two distinct country contexts, as well as sectoral, disciplinary, identity, ideological and generational diversity, our frameworks and methods needed to emerge organically to authentically meet participant needs. Shifting away from a traditional evaluation approach to one that emphasized a collaborative inquiry methodology enabled us to develop more meaningful measures as we explored program implementation and progress towards goals.
Grounding our work in the future we seek
Much of the leadership development and organisation-building we see around us is rooted in an economic view of the world, inflected by centuries of racial capitalism and patterns of competition and individualism. The injustice and deficiencies in these models have drawnincreasing attention in recent years, with demands by young people and others to rethink and re-examine our beliefs and practices.
What would leadership and organisation-building look like if we grounded this work in the just and equitable world of our social justice visions? This question guided AFRE’s evolution. The answer for us was a human development approach that is relational, holistic, evolving and deeply grounded in social equity aims. Our task is to be nimble and adaptative, watchful for contradictions, open to complexity and accepting missteps as a calling-in to purpose and the opportunity they provide to deepen our understanding of what we are here to do.
Kavitha Mediratta is the founding executive director of the Atlantic Fellows for Racial Equity, and formerly chief strategy advisor at the Atlantic Philanthropies. She has more than two decades of experience supporting and leading campaigns on race and educational equity in the United States.