Impact on local partners, national philanthropy and the field of art and social change

IMPACT ON LOCAL PARTNERS AND NATIONAL PHILANTHROPY AND THE FIELD OF ART AND SOCIAL CHANGE

In the impact assessment process, we looked at how Leeway’s local and national partners would describe their learning from Leeway, and if Leeway had helped to shape the field of art and social justice philanthropy.

“The funny thing about Leeway is they’re a regional actor, as are most foundations, but they’ve always felt very present in the national dialogue.” (national partner)

How do others learn from Leeway?

All the categories of people we interviewed or who contributed to the ripple effect exercise said that they had learned something from Leeway: artists, cultural producers, teachers, activists, local nonprofit leaders, and local and national partners working in philanthropy. They learned from Leeway by:

Taking part in the grantmaking panels Attending events that Leeway put on — particularly the 25th anniversary exhibition, Making Space: Leeway @ 25 Reading the products Leeway has produced — particularly “TransForming Inclusion: An Organizational Guide” Working directly with staff members on both grantmaking and programming Learning directly from the executive director — particularly local nonprofit leaders and local and national partners working in philanthropy

Leeway has had an impact nationally on the field of art and social change whereby the executive director has built community with, and influenced, peers who are working to change philanthropic practice. Leeway has also had a bottom-up effect, as artists and cultural producers learn from Leeway as a result of being grantees, panelists and partners and take that learning to organize change in their own spaces, philanthropic and otherwise.

“[Leeway has made me] reassess what equity looks like when it exists from top to bottom. … [It has] transform[ed] the way I approach curation and deliberation processes when I work with other organizations, having more language to talk about why certain processes are crucial to complete a project that is focused around community and engagement.” (former intern)

“As a maker and reviewer, [Leeway has made me] rethink which aesthetic values are ingrained through institutions that are built on supremacy and colonization. How do we engage in conversation about art without submitting to those dominant ideas of

what good art is? What is the most gracious approach to engaging artists about their work?” (former intern)

Partners are clear that the executive director’s leadership has been crucial to Leeway’s impact. They described her as thoughtful, humble yet influential, and generous with her insight, time and experience. This was the case for local and national partners who came from peer organizations that were working in similar ways to Leeway and had the same political orientation and partners who were working in more conservative philanthropic environments. The impact assessment process also showed that the executive director’s prominence as a leader is made possible and supported by a board that fully enacts its responsibility to challenge her and have her back. She is also supported by Leeway’s staff team members, who embrace and animate Leeway’s values and culture.

“Both in her work at Bread & Roses and in Leeway, she has a humility to how she does her work. It’s not all about Denise. It’s about the impact she’s trying to have. Her particular leadership style invites in participation, and gives voice to those who don’t normally have voice, and gives over power to people who might want to shake up the organization and her being all right with that.” (local partner)

“I appreciate Denise’s leadership, insisting on high quality and rigor, but also connected, relationship-based — and it’s hard to hold both of these high standards, and those things really feed each other.” (panel facilitator)

“Leeway made a huge leap for the field. Denise has walked that talk out there. I have seen her a million times in conversations in philanthropy and the cultural community talking about Leeway’s story and also exerting a lot of thought leadership from the experience she’s had, challenging the thinking of people who are really struggling.” (national partner) What do partners learn from Leeway?

Participatory grantmaking — Both local and national partners have looked to Leeway as a model for how to develop more effective participatory grantmaking processes. This included national partners who have asked the Leeway executive director directly for advice as they were attempting to redesign grantmaking processes in their more traditional foundations. It also included artists and cultural producers who had sat on Leeway grantmaking panels and were taking those insights to local foundations in their region or building their own participatory processes. For example, the Trans Justice Funding Project (TJFP), which was co-created and is led by a former Leeway staff member, looked at Leeway’s grantmaking model as one model for how to design TJFP.

“One of the things that happens in the field is that people say they want to do something different, but then they say they don’t know how to get from here to there. … We don’t have to as funders hold control so tightly. We can partner with grant seekers and stakeholders. What would that look like? And Leeway shows us one way we could do that.” (national partner)

Becoming a trans-affirming organization — Local and national partners and artists and cultural producers were emphatic that Leeway had been a leader in getting organizations, including foundations, to work toward becoming trans-affirming. They were also clear that Leeway had done a tremendous amount of internal work on becoming a trans-affirming organization (including the recruitment and retention of trans team members and creating an office and community space that is affirming for trans people), and that this had been a successful process.

“Absolutely, definitely in Philly Leeway’s leadership in gender identity conversations, gender identity politics and the inclusion of trans folks has been really central to that conversation. [It] has had an impact on individuals, organizations and the programming that happens, on language, on bathrooms. It’s had an enormous impact in Philadelphia. That’s been really important work. It’s evolving work, and nothing finishes. But that’s an important contribution that the people at Leeway have made, helping people to rethink and act after.” (local partner)

“In my office we have different generations represented on the staff, and some of us are more aware about trans inclusion, but our executive leadership is not and struggles with pronouns, what they are and sharing them. And so, the “Transforming Inclusion” guide is so useful. It is beautifully produced and captures amazing ideas, and it’s the artists who led the process. Denise sent copies for me to share with our staff and board, who are all artists and arts leaders, and they are all intending to take it to their organizations.” (national partner)

“I didn’t know that an organization like [Leeway] existed like that. Adding pronouns to emails — yes, that’s a super awesome thing you can do — but [Leeway has] a whole booklet laid out. I want to share it with all these organizations in San Antonio. … It’s down on pen and paper, worked into the veins and roots of your organizations, not just an idea. Inclusiveness is very real there. That’s not something you see anywhere else.” (panelist)

Racial equity — Nationally, where the philanthropic conversations on racial justice are slower and more cautious, Leeway’s decade-long practice and leadership in racial equity is an advanced model for partners. Partners have not only learned from Leeway’s focus on racial equity when it comes to grantmaking and organizational processes, but also in their transition away from being led by a white founder family to becoming led by a multiracial community board. Locally, for artists, cultural producers and local partner organizations, Leeway’s actions to implement its values on racial equity are familiar and expected. There is an ongoing pressure from community members to ensure that Leeway is always pushing itself to live these values to the max.

“When organizations are talking about how do we go from being an all-white or majority-white organization that isn’t addressing diversity, equity and inclusion, how do we make movement on that? Leeway and Denise are a stellar example of how that transition happened. For many people, having some kind of vision of how it could happen is really helpful in making movement.” (national partner)

“Leeway [has] gone to the far reaches of arts grantmaking: fund individuals only, and queer people and a lot of queer women of color. Intersectionality not being about diversity but being about the piling up of identities and how those can lead to further oppression. They were working on that a long time ago and thinking, if we move this group over here, that will move more. They had a theory of change about what is the most powerful level — and that’s smart, because they don’t have a lot of money. They have targeted impact and singularity of theory of change, and so they have a huge impact for their dollars.” (national partner)

Supporting individual artists — Leeway has also been a model for national partners for how best to directly support individual artists. One person noted, however, that this conversation has some way to go, with some foundations remaining resistant to giving money directly to artists.

“I’ve always known Leeway as a leader in three or four spaces at once — first, as a leader of supporters of individual artists, which is relatively unusual. Even grant makers who value individual artists, even most of them do so through other organizations, so Leeway holds a fairly unique space in the national field of practice and in the national dialogue.” (national partner)

How a family foundation can change when the family gives up power — As noted above, there was a strong appetite among the national partners working in philanthropy to have Leeway share more information about this change process in family foundation spaces, and so contribute to the emerging conversation about white families letting go of their historical philanthropic power and influence.

“What I’ve learned from Leeway is a way of decentering whiteness in philanthropic practice. In this country, the majority of wealth is held by white people for a number of extremely problematic and often horrific reasons. And Leeway was a foundation where there was a shift from the original family that held the wealth to moving towards a more equitable distribution with community…” (national partner)

Detail of the ancestor altar from the altar room installation dedicated to Ana Guissel Palma (LTA ’17; ACG ’17, ’15, ’11). The altar room was designed by Erika Guadalupe Nuñez (LTA ’17; ACG ’17, ’15) for the Making Space: Leeway @ 25 exhibit at Moore College of Art & Design. Denise Brown 2018.

25th anniversary case study — Leeway inspires action

Making Space: Leeway @ 25, Leeway’s 25th anniversary exhibition, inspired a Moore College of Art & Design student to challenge the college’s admissions policy for nonbinary and trans students. The student visited the exhibition on opening night and was struck by the work exhibited, by Leeway’s name tags for attendees, which included pronouns, and the sense of community that was palpable at the opening.

The student curated an exhibition in the hallway beside the Leeway exhibition, and beside the admissions office, that described some experiences of nonbinary and trans students at Moore, and a zine that listed the admissions policies of 37 women’s colleges in North America including Moore. As the student said: “The exhibit was up for two months: the last month of Leeway’s exhibit and a month after theirs came down. I wanted them to be compared to each other, because Leeway has such an inclusive policy. I wanted people to see this, to open up the zine to Moore’s policy. Moore is hosting this show, but they aren’t as inclusive.”

The student was not aware that Moore had been prompted to act in response to the exhibition. After the administration carried out listening sessions, there was a next step to “to explore the possibility of expanding our admissions policy to include as admissible nonbinary students who were born as women.” The student said in response: “That’s good, but also that’s essentially what they already do. To me, accepting nonbinary people who are assigned women at birth, and nonbinary people who are assigned men at birth, then the school is still treating them as women. The school is clinging to its identity as a women’s college. Should it let it go and open up their policy to accept all trans people? They were set up to include women because they were marginalized, so accepting all trans people would be supporting them because of their gender, which makes them marginalized.”

However, her professor said that her exhibit “[served as a reminder to] the administration to revisit that conversation … and also got a lot of students feeling like it was urgent and that the school needed to be more responsive. And a lot of people from the admissions office said they needed clarity on those policies going forward. ...” Her professor is clear that “she would not have mounted that exhibit if Leeway hadn’t been in the main gallery. She used it as a way to instigate a conversation. That hadn’t been a goal of having Leeway’s exhibit at Moore. It’s not appropriate for Leeway to instigate those conversations. But it was appropriate for Leeway to inspire the people who are part of Moore to instigate those conversations.”

Image of Kavi Ade (LTA’16) from a design mockup for the One Is Part of the Many installation, created by Anula Shetty (ACG ’15, LTA ’07, WOO ’04, HG ’02), Betty Leacraft (ACG ’16, ’14, ’09; LTA ’11; WOO ’99), and Michelle Angela Ortiz (WOO ’17; ACG ’13, ’12, ’05; LTA ’08) for the Making Space: Leeway @ 25 exhibit at Moore College of Art & Design. Michelle Angela Ortiz 2018.