I advised them not to do it, and told them that I’ve been to far too many summits that suck (See: “ Community Engagement 101: Why most summits suck.”) Next thing I knew, they organized the summit anyway, asked my organization to help with outreach, and asked me personally to translate their outreach material into Vietnamese! All for free, of course! (“Run, Timmy!!”) I was asked by a collective impact backbone org to be involved with planning a summit to engage communities of color. So they pester us smaller ethnic orgs to help. In every single issue, I keep seeing larger, well-connected organizations getting significant funding but are not effective at engagement. (See “ Capacity building for communities of color: The paradigm must shift.”) And then they can’t be as involved, which leads to ineffective efforts to tackle issues. This greatly affects organizations led by communities of color and other marginalized communities. The Capacity Paradox is when an organization cannot get significant funding because it has limited capacity, so it cannot develop its capacity, which leads it to not being able to get significant funding, which means it can’t develop its capacity. When people who are most affected by issues are not funded and trusted to lead the efforts to address them: Trickle-Down Community Engagement is pretty dangerous, for several reasons. Because of this well-intentioned mandate to engage with communities, we get bombarded with requests to do stuff for free. Every single week, we leaders of color get asked to provide input, to join an advisory committee, attend a summit, to fill out a survey. That is great and all, but it has only been leading to marginalized communities being irritated and frustrated. Organizations are scrambling to talk about these issues, to diversify their board, to get community input. Diversity, equity, inclusion, and cultural competency have risen to the front of people’s minds. Look, I’m not saying anyone is intentionally trying to discriminate against certain communities. Fifth, many funders and decision-makers focus on sexy short-term gains, not effective long-term investments. Third, due to existing definitions, many organizations led by marginalized groups “don’t have the capacity.” They’re “small and disorganized,” they are “not ready to be leaders in these efforts.” Fourth, community engagement has been seen as the icing on the cake, and not an essential ingredient, so it is always last to be considered.

First, the nonprofit sector has all sorts of unwritten rules designed to be successfully navigated only by mainstream organizations (See “ The game of nonprofit, and how it leaves some communities behind.”) Second, 90% of funding in the nonprofit world is relationship-based, which screws over marginalized communities, who have much fewer relationships with funders and decision-makers. There are several reasons why TDCE happens. This is when we bypass the people who are most affected by issues, engage and fund larger organizations to tackle these issues, and hope that miraculously the people most affected will help out in the effort, usually for free.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and have come up with a term to describe it: Trickle-Down Community Engagement (TDCE). This is why you should never take your kid down a dark alley in Seattle.Ī while ago I was talking to a friend (another Executive Director, since all my regular friends have abandoned me because I make jokes about compostable sticky dots), and he said, “Have you noticed that everyone is getting paid to engage us communities of color except us communities of color?” We need your voice.” “Daddy, I’m scared!” “Stay calm, Timmy don’t look him in the eye.” “Come on, help a guy out! Here, you each get some compostable sticky dots to vote on our top three priorities! You can vote on different priorities, or, if you like, you put more than one dot on-” “Run, Timmy!” In Seattle, if you’re a person of color and you walk down a dark alley late at night and you feel like you’re being followed, it’s probably someone trying to do some community engagement: “Psst…hey buddy-Go Hawks!-you want to attend a summit? It’s about economic inequity.

Psst hey you stop scrolling