NCRP Unveils Refreshed Logo & Website

“When health is measured not just by a lack of diseases and illness, but by access to opportunities, we see that some populations have greater access to opportunities than others. When we move toward a society committed to health equity— we work to ensure that everyone, regardless of race, neighborhood, or financial status, has fair and equal access to a healthy community of opportunity ”

– Policy Link

Like many cities, Boston is amid a housing crisis, one that the COVID-19 pandemic has significantly exacerbated. The situation is particularly acute in East Boston, a gentrifying neighborhood, where centuries of immigrants are being priced out and displaced due to the overdevelopment of luxury condos and apartments.

Housing is integral to our collective wellness and overall public health, as is the food we eat. Food and housing are the two most significant social determinants of health and wellbeing. However, while social services that mitigate food and housing insecurity are essential, these services alone will not resolve our problems. In order to create the kind of healthy ecosystem of humanitarian support necessary for long-term community success, we need to move out of service silos and centralize decision-making relationships with movement builders, artists, advocates, direct service providers and other community partners who bring a fuller perspective of issues and solutions. That alone requires a paradigm shift that fundamentally alters the way we work together to solve seemingly intractable problems.

Building a Culture of Deep Care

Boston Housing Support volunteers operating a housing defense station at work duuringthe Eastie Evolution Exhibit, an annual local outdoor event in East Boston. Credit: Boston Housing Support

The current pandemic has brought many problem-solvers out of our silos. This process encouraged working with new partners to address the pain and disruption in our communities. Those of us who choose to stay together and work collectively for the common good understand why we must continue to do so.

We must not go back to sleep. What can we learn from global movements that profoundly impact and connect our survival during this pandemic and future crises? At Maverick Landing Community Services, we are building an intersectional coalition that uses a social ecology framework. In a social ecology framework, people, organizations, institutions, and our natural environment are interdependent. That awareness translates into collective action. Movements are the most resilient and interdependent in this framework model. The fluidity of their structure makes them adaptive and vital vehicles in moments of massive collective change, such as the one we are in now.

Today, our working definition of housing equity includes health, race, disability, and other measures of equity and justice, centering on the people most impacted by a lack of access to housing and health equity. Our political frameworks and understanding of this moment offer an opportunity to deepen our intersectional analysis and collective memory on amplifying collective wellbeing, care, and safety strategies that have worked in our past and that can strengthen our futures. The political frameworks that fuel our vision of Health Equity include Economic Justice, Racial Justice, Language Justice, Disability Justice, Healing Justice, Holistic Security, Transformative Justice, Reproductive Justice, Racial and Gender Justice, Trans Justice, Environmental Justice, and Climate Justice.

All must guide our collective future.

Together, our coalition builds collective power that supports what it takes for people to survive and thrive in East Boston. A core value of that work is a commitment to using our collective knowledge and resources to create the world we want to see—that means folding together community-based arts programming, learning circles, youth engagement in the arts, and advocacy. Our combined efforts will continue to build community understanding of gentrification by utilizing skills and culture to address gaps in knowledge regarding the inter-relatedness between housing insecurity, food sovereignty, systemic racism, and other systemic inequities.

We believe that culture contributes to the connective tissue in local communities that supports and builds a sense of community, belonging, and resilience. Culture in this sense is about working with local residents to build, design, organize and create local solutions through art. Grant Makers for the Arts defines Culture Organizing as “the action of placing culture at the center of an organizing strategy. It can be done to unite people through the humanity of culture and the democracy of participation.”

Leading with Knowledge & Action
Pandemic disruptions have created an opportunity for us to define what constitutes a healthy community ecology collectively. These disruptions have also deepened our perspectives about root causes of disease and have shed light on the entrenched historical and current systemic inequities that limit resources and opportunities for many community-responsive groups and networks.

Many have come to know what advocates have long preached: our social fabric is worn painfully thin, and our democratic institutions are frail and risk ceasing to exist. A true and equitable partnership between service, arts, and culture, academia, and movement—one that translates to resourcing local movement builders, creativity, democratic values, and sustainable community stewardship – is crucial for our shared success.

Health equity means that everyone has a fair and just opportunity to be healthy. Moving forward, what we do with this knowledge is on us.

Rita Lara is the Executive Director of Maverick Landing Community Services (MLCS). In June 2019, she participated in an Ayni Institute workshop on movement ecology. It expanded her perspective and sowed a seed essential in supporting her response to the pandemic in East Boston. She received the 2020 Community Champion award from the City of Boston for that work, her incredible team at MLCS and East Boston partners, and her organization’s engagement in the maker space movement. In 2021 she was also recognized with the William L. Boyan Award for her work in the community.

Jules Rochielle Sievert is the Creative Director, NuLawLab, Northeastern University School of Law. Jules Rochielle Sievert works at the intersection of art and activism. In 2020-2021 Jules was an Ambassador of Health Equity at Policy Link. From 2017-2019, Jules was a Creative Placemaking Policy Fellow at Arizona State University through the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. At NuLawLab, they are currently working on a project known as Stable Ground. Stable Ground addresses the complex relationship among chronic housing insecurity, its psychologically traumatic impact, and municipal housing policy through participatory community-based art and culture programming.

More about the Boston Housing Support Coalition
Boston Housing Support is a Boston-based coalition working to fight displacement and eviction during the COVID crisis and beyond. This effort has resulted in a rich collaboration among the NuLawLab at Northeastern University School of Law, the City of Boston Artist-in-Residence program and Office of Housing Stability, Maverick Landing Community Services (MLCS), City Life Vida Urbana, Mutual Aid Eastie, Tufts University/School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Suffolk University Legal Innovation & Technology Lab, Ropes & Gray, and Runcible Studios to introduce housing stability stations in East Boston.

“Our coalition built on what we have learned through our collaboration on a project known as Stable Ground. Stable Ground is an initiative funded by two rounds of grants by The Kresge Foundation’s Arts & Culture program. We focused on these issues through participatory community-based art and cultural programs structured to inform the work of the City of Boston’s Office of Housing Stability (OHS). This project began as a residency program that embedded artists, legal designers, and trauma experts into community settings that hosted local visual/performing arts exhibits and art-making events. COVID-19 pandemic significantly impacted the second phase of Stable Ground but as a group quickly pivoted efforts toward strengthening our response to the emerging community needs in East Boston.”

Editors Note: Readers interested in financial supporting this model of engagement and organizing can directly donate to the coalition by clicking here. 

Let’s start with the brutal truth. The way we fund social change is horribly broken. Knowingly or not, we have built a dysfunctional structure of restrictive norms, demoralizing messages, limiting beliefs, and unfair regulations that impede the work of those who philanthropy claims to be investing in – our social change leaders. These are the people working on the front lines to bridge our political divides, lessen wealth inequality, create more equitable systems, heal our sick planet.

The dysfunctional structure that I’m referring to includes:

•  Legal regulations that limit nonprofit political activity much more than that of business.

•  Restrictive norms that say nonprofits should keep their overall costs (and overhead costs especially) much lower than businesses do, while nonprofits should also hold fewer reserves than businesses.

•  Demoralizing messages that permeate our society, like “Nonprofits aren’t as financially savvy, competent or worthy of attention as businesses.”

•  Structural limits that impose a de-facto ceiling on the level of investment nonprofits receive (in 2019 only 10 nonprofits received gifts of over $100 million, while in the technology space alone, 500 for-profit startups each received $100 million or more).

These kinds of restrictive regulations, norms, messages and limits aren’t nearly as present in the for-profit sector. In fact, the for-profit sector and its leaders are often heralded as “innovative,” “disruptive,” “game-changing”, and are thus afforded a runway of capital and patience that nonprofits rarely receive. The bottom line is that we, as a society, believe that nonprofits should be managed, regulated, and funded in much more restrictive ways than businesses.

These unnecessary limits make our social change leaders question their own value and worthiness (and often their own sanity) and minimize their social change efforts while ensuring that our current inequitable, broken systems stay in place.

Is that really what we want?

It’s time for philanthropists – and certainly those philanthropists who are committed to creating a healthier and more equitable world – to take a hard look at how the social change leaders they invest in are being held back.

In order to solve the mess in which we as a human race now find ourselves, we must create a truly valued, effective and abundant social change sector, like this:

Eschew scarcity thinking
The belief that there isn’t enough money permeates both sides of the aisle – the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors. But it simply isn’t true.

There is more than enough money to solve what ails us. For example, billionaires have grown richer over the course of the pandemic, and the U.S. government has added trillions of dollars to the economy over the same period.

So there is plenty of money. It’s just not reaching the social change sector.

We can fix that. But only if both those with money and those requiring investment stop believing that money is scarce.

Create equality between funders and social changemakers
The normal operating procedure in the social change sector is for those who provide solutions to feel beholden to and hamstrung by those who provide funding for those solutions.

That’s Bull.

We no longer have the luxury of playing by those Downton Abbey rules. What we need right now (yesterday, actually) is money and solutions, in equal measure. And that requires that the possessors of each realize the tremendous value and necessity of the other.

Employ social change money in much bigger ways
We need to start thinking about money for social change – that powerful tool any philanthropist enjoys – in much bigger ways. Social (or impact) investing – investing in things that have both a financial and social return – has grown over the past decade.

However, it is far from the norm in the philanthropic community, let alone the finance sector.

The idea of a foundation pointing ALL money at its disposal to its social change mission appears to be incredibly radical, since only 3% of foundations in the U.S. currently do it. The worry is that social investments will yield a lower return, but the reverse is often true.

What if philanthropists not only pursued mission-related investing in big ways, but also helped our financial markets (in which, again, philanthropy is deeply embedded) reinvent itself to be more socially directed? For example, there is already a growing movement (interestingly enough among women investors, see here, here and here) for moving financial markets to balance both profit and social good. Who better to help lead a great migration of money from the ivory towers of the privileged few to the starving coffers of social changemakers than the philanthropists who straddle both worlds?

I believe the time is right for a complete reinvention of so many of the systems that hold us back. Chief among them is how money flows to social change. If you consider yourself a proponent of a healthier and more equitable world, take a hard look at how you are encouraging or impeding the flow of money to solutions. Because when we start to build a more abundant social change sector, we move closer to the healthier and more equitable world we all deeply want.

Nell Edgington is President of Social Velocity, where she helps create more strategic, financially savvy, and confident nonprofit and philanthropic leaders. She is author of the new book Reinventing Social Change: Embrace Abundance to Create a Healthier and More Equitable World.