This Labor Day, Neighborhood Funders Group is honored to share with our members and friends that we have the opportunity to live into our values and theory of change through the process of bargaining in good faith with Communication Workers of America (CWA) Local 9415, our employee union. NFG formally recognized CWA Local 9415 on July 14, 2022, and is in the process of learning and preparing to negotiate a first Collective Bargaining Agreement. Management and staff join together in our enthusiasm around this process and the ways we envision it will strengthen our organization for the long term.
To commemorate Labor Day in 2021, we published a conversation with Larry Williams Jr., co-founder of UnionBase and former President of the Progressive Workers Union (PWU), who shared a belief that people make our communities and lives better by organizing our workplaces. A core value at NFG is that our work is grounded in the histories, strengths, and struggles of Black, Indigenous, and people of color and movements for social justice. Guided by these experiences, we have a deep belief in the power of collective bargaining for all workers, and we see the process towards our first Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) as a way to further democratize our workplace.
Many nonprofit and philanthropic organizations are currently recognizing staff unions and engaging in collective bargaining for the first time. NFG is proud to be among the organizations in the philanthropic sector who are committed to supporting unions as a form of workplace democracy that will improve our work, collective resiliency, and relationships. Bargaining towards a first CBA gives us the opportunity to dig deeper into actualizing our values as an organization of people who matter and who care deeply about social justice. We hope it also allows us to be in right relationship with one another and with the communities that philanthropy seeks to support.
We are leaning on the foundation we have built at NFG that is marked by shared trust, collective care, transparency, and accountability. We anticipate discomfort and unfamiliarity in this process and welcome this as part of our commitment to a culture of care, unlearning racial capitalism, and co-creating new possibilities in our work and sector. We hope this Labor Day announcement will be a spark for organizations in the NFG community to consider how they might also move towards greater collective awareness and accountability in decision making and to improve working conditions in philanthropy. As NFG embarks on this journey of workplace democracy, we hope to share our reflections with you, our members and friends, along the way.
In solidarity,
The NFG Team