Welcome back to another episode of the Awakened Heart with hosts Bill de la Cruz and Guadalupe Gaujardo with special guest Sharon Benson. We hope you enjoy this podcast episode and be sure to like and share it with your friends.

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The Awakened Heart

You’re reading the Awakened Heart: Rehumanizing Our Connections. This is an offshoot of the show that many of you have been reading. It was Guadalupe’s brainchild where we talked a lot over the years about all the issues that are going on in our country and communities around race, especially. We started to talk about how White people are, in many ways, maligned because of their race. People look at them as though they’re the problem or if they would just change. We kept having these conversations about, “What can we do to shift that narrative?” There are people in every racial category who are having various impacts on these conversations, and you can’t just focus on one side of it.

Guadalupe came up with this idea because of the diversity of people that she knows. She knows a lot of White folks who are doing great work, both personally and in their communities that don’t speak up because then the communities of color look at them as though they’re trying to elevate themselves or, “I’m a good White person,” rather than, “I care about my community.” A lot of what we’re doing is breaking down some of these stereotypes and saying that we’re doing this approach because we realize that we are a pretty divided country and communities in this conversation. Continuing to blame or shame a group is not going to pull us any closer together. Our hope in your reading to this is that you realize that everybody plays a role in the changes that we have to make.

It doesn’t matter your race, age, religion, or political ideology. We all play a role. This idea of The Awakened Heart is about everybody opening their hearts and creating these relationships with people that we don’t currently have and rehumanizing our connections. We’ve been socially and stereotypically isolated. We’ve been socialized to be afraid of each other. We have to get over that if we’re going to shift the tide and become more engaged as a community. We have a great guest for our conversation. I’m going to turn it over to my friend and co-host, Guadalupe, who will say a little bit about herself and what we’re doing, and then introduce our guest. Guadalupe, it’s all yours.

Thank you so much, Bill. I want to say a couple of things. I always want to let people know that I’m a Roman Catholic nun and that I believe that we’re spiritual beings having a human experience. That always motivates me to see the good in everybody. Over the years, I have seen how much my White friends do much good in the world but feel like they don’t share it with each other much less with anybody else, fear that they’re bragging about each other or something. Before I got into organizational development, I used to do fundraising. I did fundraising because I believed that when people raise their own money, they’re not beholden to anybody else. They can direct the passion for their mission.

It’s been decades since I met Sharon. I met her through an initiative, through the Nonprofit Association of Oregon. Sharon was able to put into language so much of what I hoped to do but didn’t fully understand and know how to do, which was essentially to make sure that fundraising is mission based and that it’s everybody’s responsibility, that because of people’s impressions or baggage about money, we often want to hire one person whose job it is to raise money so nobody else has to think about money.

Sharon’s a major contradiction to that. It’s like fundraising is everybody’s responsibility. What I learned was Sharon’s thinking about money and that you’re a critical thinker around money. Sharon would say things, and these are the things that have made and given you a special place in my heart. Sharon, you would say things, and I’m like, “This white person gets it. I don’t have to explain racism to them. This person gets it. Why there aren’t more people of color in philanthropy?”

It makes it a joy to have a conversation with you because I feel you are already an awakened person. I want to make sure that other people get to know how you got there and what you do with that awakeness that you have. As Lisa Miller says in her book The Awakened Brain, it’s about altruism, love of neighbor, oneness with humanity, and some moral dimension in this. I feel like your work encapsulates all of that.

Everyone, I want to introduce Sharon Benson, a longtime colleague, a brilliant woman, passionate about redistributing wealth and power in this country in a peaceful way, and a dear friend. Sharon, tell us about yourself. Sharon’s one of the few people who have chosen to have a prepared statement to share with us. I completely trust you to tell us a little bit about your origins, your story, your journey, and where you find yourself.

Thank you for having me. That’s a generous introduction because the story I’m going to share is about my awakening. I don’t feel very awakened sometimes. I feel like this is a journey that I’m on that has been many years in the making. I’d like to share a story about my realization of what if I got it wrong. Spoiler alert, I did get some things right and got a lot of things wrong. We can unpack that a little bit. I’ve been working in education and social services for many years as a fundraiser and trying to level the playing field. I can tell you about many successes. I feel good about getting kids access to education, kids on all levels, and higher ed.

Now I’m working with little kids and children’s literacy. There are so many successes when I got it right helping people that were less fortunate than me. Through my equity journey, which I’ve been working on more diligently these past couple of years, thanks to my employer and the work that we’ve been doing at work, I’ve begun questioning everything personally and professionally. I started to say, “What if I didn’t get it right?” More importantly, what if instead of doing good, I was doing harm? Harm is a powerful word that’s being used a lot now in the BIPOC community. It’s effective because it cuts to the chase. That’s why I’m choosing that word. Personally doing harm as well as the institutions I represent and the systems that I’m upholding is a harm I’m talking about.

I might be an expert fundraiser and I’m good and Guadalupe knows that, but what does that mean? Moving forward, I’m trying first to be a student of community-centric fundraising. It’s turned my world upside down in a very good way. Here’s the bottom line. It’s been my experience that White saviorism is prevalent and persistent in nonprofit work, and it’s the responsibility of White professionals to dismantle this. That means using my power as a White woman, sharing my power, and sometimes giving up my power altogether.

White Saviorism is prevalent and persistent in nonprofit work, and it's the responsibility of White professionals to dismantle this. Share on X

Before we started this, we talked about going down rabbit holes. In that statement, I got four of them we could go down. I want to start with this one. You talked about systemic harm, which as a person of color, I understand what that is. I’m curious how you see it from your lens. When you hear that frame around systems and then harm, what does that bring up for you?

I work for this wonderful children’s literacy nonprofit. We’ve been around for many years. We help kids enjoy and have fun with reading. We give them access to books and pair them with volunteers to read. Until a few years ago, all the books that we send out, hundreds of thousands, and we’re talking about millions of books, all had White characters. Forty percent of our students are students of color. We were intending to do some good with those books, and many people would say, “Any children’s book is a good book,” but in fact, the research now shows that when kids have characters that look like them, live like them, and have shared experiences, is helpful to them. Other books might not be harmful, but they might be perpetuating some stereotypes. That’s a very tangible example.

 

The idea of seeing yourself is important. How did you all figure out that wasn’t the impact that you wanted? Did people tell you? Did your families of color say, “I love the books, but they don’t reflect my child?” I’m curious how did you come to the conclusion, “This isn’t the impact that we thought it would be,” or however you all frame it.

I’ve only been with the organization for several years, but I would imagine that before that, many communities were telling us, but we didn’t hear them. Several years ago, we went through some equity training, and that’s when we started unpacking this and diving into the research about the importance of getting books with characters of color. Now we’ve completely revamped our book collection with these so-called windows and mirror books because we are on the equity bandwagon, we wanted it to relate back to our mission, and we had this very tangible example to work with, meaning books.

How does your group define equity? That’s like a hot-button word all across this country. It’s been politicized. I’m curious how you all are approaching that.

We are in 28 of the 36 counties. Anybody who’s lived in Oregon for a number of years knows that we are a red state. We’re blue in the valley and Portland, but everywhere else in the state is very red. Regardless if it’s red or blue, equity is a charged word. We did an experiment. We took the word equity out of some of our literature. We talked about removing barriers because we found that some of our volunteers would shut down when we tried to talk about equity.

It was all the volunteers and the rural areas, but that’s not true. It was in Portland as well. We start talking about poverty and removing barriers to poverty and what is it that we need to do to get the kids and their families out of this circle of poverty. That was one example of how we didn’t use the word equity, which was kind of an interesting experiment.

I found across the country that some people are like, “Why should we not say it?” I said, “If it’s a trigger word that drives people out of the conversation and you want to keep them engaged, then maybe you ought to think of something different like what you all did.” For me, what I’ve framed it as is equitable outcomes for opportunity access and inclusion. We shift from talking about what equity is and what it means to have opportunity access and inclusion. You framed it beautifully when you told the story of the books that you provided an opportunity and you were inclusive. The access piece was a little missing because kids of color didn’t see themselves in it. Now you’re differentiating, which is the process of being equitable is to differentiate based on needs.

You can still do all those things and not say the word. I work in a couple of states that have CRT and anti-don’t offend people legislation. As you all did, I’ve figured out how I reframe the conversation so I can still talk about things that are personal. We just have to go around in a little bit and be more adaptive. Guadalupe, I am sure you have some questions or thoughts. I want to take over the whole thing here.

You’re helping unpack some of Sharon’s conversation. Sharon, please continue with your prepared outline because it is very exciting what you shared with us.

I’m a fundraiser. love doing the work because the whole thing about fundraising is giving people an opportunity to get involved in solving a problem and being a part of their community. Not everybody can volunteer, but some people can give money or other resources. It’s lovely to be able to facilitate that. I was classically trained in higher ed. I did all the traditional fundraising types of activities with all the traditional groups. That’s fine because I learned how to do a lot of different things. It turns out that a lot of what I learned could be done differently. Most of the people in my profession as fundraisers are White and happy women.

A lot of women are fundraisers, and that’s nice, but very few people of color, and why is that? What are we perpetuating as a profession that’s keeping other people out? That’s when it goes back to the equity work and this lovely movement called community-centric fundraising, which is about putting the community first, not yourself as a fundraiser, not the donor, and not even your nonprofit. What is best for the community? How do we come together as a community to support each other?

Community-centric fundraising is about putting the community first, not yourself as a fundraiser, the donor, and even your nonprofit. Share on X

“Fundraising has become very much like the Hunger Games,” was one of what my gurus wrote. We are competing against each other for funding. It’s ridiculous how competitive grant writing is and other things. Instead of being competitive, what if we tried to revamp some of the guidelines and processes with the foundations, but also what if we said, “We’ve already met our fundraising goal this year. We don’t need to apply for this grant. Let’s call one of our BIPOC-run partner agencies and encourage them. Let’s endorse and help them apply for this grant because we’re serving some of the same kids anyway.”

It’s this whole notion of coming together as a community and putting people of color in leadership roles. One of my goals professionally when I move on to the next thing is to hire someone who looks different from me, and maybe who can bring some different types of strengths and types of donors that don’t necessarily look like me. That’s one little part of my journey.

That whole idea of being community-centric is fabulous because it changes the dialogues that you’re having and to be able to say, “We have plenty right now. Why don’t we figure out how to support somebody else?” The nonprofit pie is small, and we’re all wanting to get a piece of it. If your piece is good enough to make you full, then why do you have to keep going after more? That’s a mindset. It sounds like you’re having to do some mindset shifting as well from that old paradigm of, “Let’s go after as much as we can get.” Is that something you’re talking about?

The stats show that less than 2% of all the money that’s being donated is going to BIPOC-led organizations. They’re less than 2%. That’s why we’re seeing a real need for people of color to be leading organizations or White people paying attention to leaders who have been doing this work in the trenches for decades and who have not been acknowledged or recognized. Finally, you see some of these folks getting some pretty powerful positions in Oregon, which is largely a White community.

It’s lovely to see and challenging too because of other issues, especially in fundraising, but everywhere, “How do we retain these folks?” I’ve had successes and setbacks with bringing people that look different from me or have different experiences from me into nonprofit work and they don’t stay. Who’s that on? Another initiative I’m working on with the Willamette Valley development officers is, “What we need to do not just to get more people into the profession, assuming they want to do this? How do we retain them? What are some of the strategies around retention and helping move people of color into more positions where they can be leaders and lead the work?”

I want to jump in and make three points here. You’ve touched on three things that I’m going to try to remember. One of them is people of color and leadership. If someone says to me, “We don’t know where our racism is,” I say, “Who do you have in leadership? All you have to do is look at your manager, director, and deputy directors. At least 25% of them need to be people of color if you’re going to ship the organization’s culture.”

Sometimes that scares people. If you want to go after institutional racism, put people of color in leadership. The other piece is you shared a dynamic in there that I would call, “What if we thought more in terms of there’s enough for everybody, a sense of abundance instead of the scarcity and shortage that keeps us in this competitive mentality?” The example you gave was, “We’ve raised all the money we need. Who can we give a hand to?” It is an example of there’s enough for everybody. Earlier, I talked to you about leveraging your power and agency. That’s a good example of that. My third point was along the lines of leadership and abundance.

 

I understand what you mean. I’ll say two things, and then I’ll say one thing and get to what I want you to talk about. One is that in organizational culture, and a lot of organizations I work with, they say, “We want to diversify our board. We want to diversify our workplace.” They hire somebody who’s different and have the expectation that that person has to assimilate into their culture. To your point about how we keep them, I worked with a lot of organizations. I’ve worked for one that didn’t have any problem hiring people of color and people who are different. They couldn’t keep them because they still walked into a pretty much White Eurocentric culture that didn’t value what they brought.

It’s not to say that the White Eurocentric culture is something bad. It is what it is. It didn’t make any shifts to welcome and create a sense of belonging for somebody who had a different perspective. That’s what we need to do. That’s the conversation about retaining people who are different. Even if you as a woman went into an organization that was 80% male, it would still be a similar type of culture because they’ve created their own culture, and now someone different is coming in, “We’ll let them adapt,” versus us changing because that’s the big work.

The connection that I want to make and a rabbit hole we can go down is how all this is connected to that notion of White saviorism. When I hear that word, I think about a culture that wants to perpetuate the status quo, help those poor people, or something along that line. I’d be curious to embark on that little topic.

Sharon, you respond to that, but I want to also add to the whole issue of retention.

How deep do we want to go down this rabbit hole? I could spend hours talking about this. My mind always jumps to two different sides. It goes from the fundraising, the community outreach, and the program side, the people that are on the ground doing the work. Forty percent of the children that we work with come from families of color or are children of color. They look different than me. Is 40% of our staff people of color? No, but we’re getting there. We’re getting better. Here’s why it’s fascinating to me. For years, we kept trying to recruit Spanish-speaking volunteers, but we didn’t have anybody on staff who spoke Spanish. Now, we have seven people on. Do you see the irony here?

We kept beating our heads against the wall. Why can’t we get any Spanish speakers? It’s because we didn’t have ins into those networks. We didn’t have any authentic relationships. Now we have seven people on staff. They’re bringing in all of these different volunteers and have all of these authentic and very real, robust, and grassroots connections into the Latino community, which are beautiful. That is going to pay off in spades for our families. Why did it take us long to get here? Who knows? We keep perpetuating the same, “We do it this way because we do it.”

Another example of White saviorism is that many of our volunteers look like me, and they are retired teachers. They’re lovely people, and I love working with them. They mean well and do good, but every once in a while, having a White mentor for a kid of color is not a good fit for a variety of reasons that I won’t go into and also things need to be done the way the teacher wants it to be done.

Our program is child-led. The child chooses the book and if they want to read or have the volunteer read. The child sets the pace and the tone. What I find, because we’re all readers as well, is I learn a ton from these kids. I learn more from the kids just listening to them talk about their families than I’m “teaching” them about the love of reading. That type of exchange can be rich, but there’s still a lot of, “It has to be done a ‘certain way.’”

We need to let go and, and move away from that. We’ve introduced equity work to our volunteers. We’ve lost some volunteers over it, and that’s okay. It makes me a little bit sad, but that’s okay. We need to move on, which is a whole other thing, which is tying the dots between equity and what that has to do with children’s literature. Guadalupe, do you want to ask something?

We need to move and connect the dots between equity and what that has to do with children's literature. Share on X

I love where this conversation is going because it’s taken us a while to realize that you can bring diversity at the front end, but if the diversity is going out the back door, then we need to take a closer look at what’s happening here. I wanted to tell a couple of quick stories. I remember talking to a nonprofit executive director. She didn’t quite say, “We’ve stopped hiring for diversity,” but what she did say is, “We hire and train them, and then they leave and go somewhere else.”

When I had an opportunity to interview young professional women of color, I go, “How would you respond to that executive director?” It’s to Bill’s point. They said, “If we felt we were treated with respect, we might have stayed.” If you’re not going to get treated with respect and seen as an equal, or your ideas aren’t going to be integrated or affirmed, then you are feeling tokenized. We’re either fulfilling a requirement or we’ve got window dressing now. That was an important point.

The other one is a story of a turning I did. I shouldn’t name the foundation. There was a very prestigious judge that is training in the Southwest. He said he would hire these very gifted young Latinos. He’s a White judge. In those days, only men worked in law firms. Women weren’t hired. He said they would work there for 1 year or 2 and then they would leave.

He was distraught and felt such a failure. I said, “What do they do when they leave?” He says, “They go and start their own law firms.” I said, “In fact, what you’re doing in your prestigious agency is you’re serving as an incubator for communities of color.” The expression on his face changed completely from, “I’m a failure,” to, “I’m doing a good thing.” Retention is important, but don’t hold onto it so tightly that you’re missing what could be happening.

 

That’s an important perspective to have because people will introduce me and say, “You’re an expert.” I’m like, “I’m an expert in myself, but this is so nuanced and adaptive.” I tell people we’re always going to make missteps. We have to give each other grace and be able to know that this road that we’re all on together in terms of creating different connections with each other is nobody has a playbook for it. We do what we think is the best, adapt, and do it again. It’s this constant iterative process. We’ve had many great topics. I want to try to wrap us up. Guadalupe, do you have anything you want to share? I know my question will take us into another conversation.

Go for it.

Sharon, I know you don’t have all the answers, but what do you think some of the answers are for somebody who might be reading who’s working in a nonprofit, who has that savior mentality, or someone who knows nothing about what it means to be community-centric? What are some suggestions that you might have for folks in terms of their own personal work and also for the organization?

There are some playbooks out there. There are a lot of good books on classism and racism. If you’re White, you need to read. It’s your job to read up on this, The 1619 Project. Isabel Wilkerson is writing some amazing stuff on Caste. There are all sorts of accessible books out there to read. Waking Up White is one of my favorites. It’s incredibly accessible in this whole equity journey. The other thing I would say is we’ve spent decades and centuries trying to end and fight poverty.

I have had these a-ha moments about we’re not even going to come close until we also tackle dismantling classism and racism. They are connected. I don’t think enough White people have connected those dots. Until we connect those dots and swallow that very difficult pill that we are all a part of this institutional racism, it’s going to continue to be tokenism. There are some pretty good resources and deep work that people have to do. I think that we’re ready. I hope that this is a movement that continues this education of White people. I hope it’s not a moment. We’ve made some great strides. I’m hopeful and excited. I don’t think I can retire anytime soon because there’s a lot of work to be done.

We will not come close to ending and fighting poverty until we tackle dismantling classism and racism. They are connected. Share on X

We’re glad that you’re willing to do it. Guadalupe, do you want to end with some closing thoughts, and then I’ll close this up?

Sharon, I’d like to have you back because this was the tip of the iceberg of what you have prepared to say, and there’s more you have to say and more I want you to say. We’ll probably have a couple more guests, and then I want to have you back. Hang on to your prepared notes because there were some very important and brilliant sharings that you had. Thank you for preparing and for being open and willing. Bill, I’ll let you have the closing words. Sharon might want to say any closing words.

Thank you so much for having me and for doing this show. I’ve enjoyed reading them, and I’ll be reading some more.

I appreciate you for being on with us. It’s been a great conversation. We could take any one of these and have a whole other conversation. Don’t throw away your outline because you might need it again. Thank you so much. It’s been great. For all of our readers, this is a series that we’re doing called The Awakened Heart: Rehumanizing Our Connections. It’s rooted in elevating White allies and folks who are doing their own work and moving into a place of partnership with us as we all work through these challenging times that we’re all living in around identity, perspective, and ideology.

My ask to all of you is to continue to do your own work whether you were inspired by something that was shared on this show or something that got you emotionally charged. Talk to somebody about it. Don’t go off and say, “That’s a horrible show because I didn’t like what they said.” That’s not what we’re working to do.

What we’re working to do is to elevate the conversation. Whether you agreed or got emotionally charged, have a conversation with somebody and talk to them about it. How we continue to rehumanize ourselves is to create connections and know that there are lots of perspectives out there and there’s room for everybody. If you have enjoyed this show, please share it, subscribe to it, and put it on your social media.

If you have a story, we can be reached at InclusionTalk@comcast.net. If you have any comments, you can go to our website. It’s called DelaCruzSolutions.com. Reach out that way as well and someone will get back to you. Thank you all very much for being on our show. Sharon and Guadalupe, it’s always great to co-host with you. Subscribe, share, and remember to keep growing.

 

Important Links

• Sharon Benson
• The Awakened Brain
• The 1619 Project
• Caste
• Waking Up White
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• Contact@DelaCruzSolutions.com
• @Bill.delaCruz – TikTok
• @BilldelaC – Twitter
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• Finding The Origination Point
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