Our Deepest Fear: Part I - The Organizing & Collaboration Gap

It is the the crisis of black leadership. There is a critical shortage of effective black leadership in America. Simply put, we have too little of it, particularly in our organizations. Across the board, black led organizations seem almost incapable of exercising principled, effective, strategic leadership. This phenomenon holds true across the spectrum of black organizations, from churches, to national service organizations to community development corporations. Whether you're talking about homeowners associations, civic organizations, block clubs, local chapters of national organizations, black greeks, or political organizations, effective, accountable, strategic leadership is few and far between.

The result of this is underperformance at the local and national level by african american led organizations. I see it every day. What am I talking about when I say a lack of leadership? Organizations that operate without a budget. Organizations whose board members can't coherently tell you what their organizations do and why, verbally or in writing. Organizations that don't systematically and routinely assign people to tasks and require accountability for those tasks to be accomplished. Organizations that are dysfunctional as hell, but think that a funder, or investor will give them major dollars to support their organization. Organizations that have no strategic plan or have not or cannot chart a future course for their organization 2-5 years out.

Three overarching issues top my list of stuff we are getting wrong at the neighborhood level. You tell me if the following rings a bell for you when you examine what organizations are doing at the grass roots level in your town.

• We don't organize or collaborate effectively with each other
• We have low levels of organizational capacity
• We do not practice disciplined, strategic thinking and planning

Right at the top of the list of things we do that are keeping us down is a failure to collaborate. We appear to have lost the ability to get in a room, find common ground and develop an effective plan of action to solve problems in concert with one another. We fail to do it within organizations and we fail to do it across organizations. Two examples generally speaking:

In the faith community: black neighborhoods are typically home to large numbers of churches who are routinely touching the lives of hundreds of people, but we fail miserably at harnessing that people power effectively. Ministers have personal leverage that they wield to lesser or greater effect to advance church goals. Sometimes they even band together to combine their personal leverage and manage to have some effect, but this is rare. What you almost never see them do is truly mobilize the people of their congregations to effective political action and when it does happen, its a march and my loyal readers know our stance on marches.

Here is an experiment in congregational organizing I'd love to see: take your average black neighborhood and you can probably find 10 churches. The ministers from those churches all establish an Neighborhood Policy ministry in their church or whatever you want to call it. Each church gets 5 people to commit to it. That's 50 people. Each month, those 50 people do three things, in concert: they write a letter to a public official or corporate decision maker on an issue that affects the neighborhood. They make a phone call to a public official or corporate decision maker about a neighborhood issue and they each donate $5. In twelve months, that's 600 letters, 600 phone calls and $3,000. That's not a huge amount of activity or very complex organizing, but its way more than happens in our communities now and would yield tangible results. That's just a small step towards greater effectiveness. The reality is that most black neighborhoods are home to more than just 10 churches. Increase the number of churches involved to 20, 50 or 100 and do the math. Mobilizing in this fashion yields results, but we don't do even in this minimal amount, yet we are mad when our neighborhoods get passed by for investment over other neighborhoods.

Our grassroots organizations: Most cities with a significant presence of african americans are home to a variety of african american organizations, like Jack & Jill, 100 Black Men, the NAACP, the Urban League, BDPA, Urban Bankers, Greek letter organizations, etc. Those organizations are typically engaged in a variety of activities and almost without exception, they have some level of involvement with youth (potentially an ineffective duplication but thats a differrent conversation). What you don't see happening amongst these organizations is collaboration. I'm willing to bet you in most urban areas that the leadership of these organizations have never gotten in a room with each other to talk about mutual goals and objectives. Here's an experiment in collaboration. The leadership of local organizations should be intentionally talking to each other once a month. Keep it simple, lets start with a brown bag once a month, where people start sharing about what they are doing, how they are supporting it and how they could work together to accomplish something larger and more powerful than they can separately. If you really wanted to be ambitious, you'd make it a facilitated process. The bottom line? Black organizations are not working together anywhere near as much as they could and should and we are experiencing underperformance in service to our communities.

Why is this is a problem? Because in a world where resources are scarce and becoming more so, collaboration is the name of the game and organization empowers neighborhoods to obtain the resources they need. Organized neighborhoods will obtain resources for development, unorganized ones will not. Organization is critical because the kinds and levels of resources necessary to impact our neighborhoods across the country are resources that are delivered by institutional partners like city, state and federal governments, corporations and foundations. Institutional actors like these cannot work with unorganized entities. They require some structure at the neighborhood level which operates at a high enough level of organization to interface with them, and to use the type of resources they provide including being able to account for how those resources are used (this gets to the issue of organizational capacity, which I'll talk about in Part II). Collaboration is essential because you can attract more resources when you are operating in partnership than when not, because you leverage more resources for greater results and that makes your efforts more competitive when evaluated against competing efforts by the public and private sectors that provide capital and financial support to neighborhood efforts.