Dear friend,
Since stepping into the Co-Presidents role nearly a year ago, we’ve engaged in dialogue with our members and movement partners to analyze the political environment we’re in and assess the field to help shape our vision for Neighborhood Funders Group.
Some of what we heard includes a need to emphasize community and the “neighborhood” part of NFG and the creation of intentional spaces for philanthropy to grapple with hard questions and challenge each other. From these conversations, we also heard a desire for NFG, as a political home for progressive funders, to cultivate a network that is nimble enough to block fascism from gaining ground in our communities, while also building (and investing in) a 50-year plan that reimagines power, governance, and community care for the long-term.
So what does this mean for NFG? Our belief in the power of community organizing to create the conditions for durable change remains steadfast. And we are taking inspiration from the block and build framework to co-create a space for philanthropy and movement leaders to strategize together around a 50-year liberation journey that is aligned around shared values and leans into principled struggle.
We know that it will take 25 years to repair the current harms happening today and another 25 years to build new systems that work for all people, especially those at the sharpest intersection of marginalization. For this to happen, we must start collectively planning, strategizing, and seeding implementation now. We see NFG as the container for philanthropy and movements to exercise imagination, wonder, and dream about what is possible as we build new systems that care about all people.
We’ll do this by:
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Intentionally gathering our members and movement partners together through place-based, intimate-setting Salons and upcoming convening, Junction.
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Creating opportunities to support funders in building meaningful relationships with NFG’s movement partners and organizers to ensure that their vision for the future is fully represented in philanthropy’s priorities and grantmaking practices.
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Cultivating a sense of belonging through our programs, where members have spaces for authentic partnership with NFG staff and funder peers to organize philanthropy toward making investments at the scale needed to resource the generational work.
In the coming months, we’ll share more about each of these aspects of our 50-year liberation journey work and what it means for philanthropy. We also invite you to join us at Junction, October 27 and 28, in Durham, North Carolina to engage in the co-strategizing to build out what it will take to resource and move this generational work forward.
In solidarity,
