Women of Color: The MVPs of the Social Justice Movement with Vanessa Daniel

Episode Notes

Transcript

Vanessa Daniel:

There’s a lot of kind of self-reflection about the movement in this book. We have these moments like after the election where we have these kind of circular firing squad dynamics that happen in the left that are not very constructive, but there’s a big difference between a circular firing squad and going onto rough terrain and pretending that there aren’t flat tires in the car, we have to fix the flat tires because they are a big part of what’s holding us back and hindering our ability to win.

Announcer:

That’s today’s guest on SideBar. Vanessa Daniel, A leading light in social justice movements for 25 years as a labor and community organizer, writer and funder SideBar is brought to you by Monterey College of Law, San Luis Obispo College of Law, Kern County College of Law, empire College of Law, located in Santa Rosa and the colleges of Law with campuses in Santa Barbara and Ventura.

Welcome to SideBar featuring conversations about optimism in action with lawyers and leaders inspiring change. And now your co-hosts Jackie Gardina And Mitch Winick.

Mitch Winick:

Jackie, I’m very excited to have our guest today on SideBar, Vanessa Daniel, as we are going to learn shortly. Vanessa is a successful author, has been working for more than 25 years in the labor and community organizing world. She’s also worked as a funder to help get these activities off the ground. We’re very excited to learn more about her recent book, which is called Unrig the Game, what Women of Color Can Teach About Winning, and I suspect there’s a lot they can teach us about winning and also about her experiences as volunteer advocate within the communities. Vanessa, welcome to today’s SideBar.

Vanessa Daniel:

Thanks so much for having me.

Jackie Gardina:

Welcome, Vanessa. As I said when we started, I’m really excited to talk with you and learn more about what your experience has been like and I think my first question is, you talk about growing up in a social justice movement. Is this something that is your family of origin got you involved or how did you end up becoming an advocate and activist in the way that you are?

Vanessa Daniel:

I grew up as a mixed race, half Sri Lankan, half white queer kid in Seattle, Washington in the eighties and nineties. I was pretty active by the time I was really in middle school, I was interested in, I was doing stuff that was related to the anti-apartheid struggle at the time, and then by high school I was organizing for ethnic studies and by college I was sitting in economics classes with professors who were really irritated at my questions about neoliberal economics and handing me flyers to say, you should go work for the labor movement and maybe not come back to this class.

Mitch Winick:

Vanessa, one of the things I find unique about your experience is that you very early moved into the finance and economic side of justice, particularly as founder and director for 17 years as executive director of Groundswell Fund. How did you veer into the finance and economic side? I mean, a lot of people march in the streets, A lot of people volunteer in organizations, but you took a different path that’s been very effective.

Vanessa Daniel:

I feel like I was told to go into that direction interestingly by people in movement. I mean, I came in initially wanting to be a writer and a journalist and I couldn’t quite figure out how to make that work when I first came in. Economically, it’s a hard field to go into when you’re just out of college and have a lot of loans, but I wanted to write to support social justice movements and I wanted to understand how power was built on the ground, so I ended up becoming a community organizer and then a labor organizer, and then after kind of hitting the 10 year mark of doing organizing from the time I started as a campus organizer, people started encouraging me to go into philanthropy because we needed more folks in philanthropy who understood how power was built on the ground, who valued the wisdom the communities of color were bringing and who could unlock resources.

And so I ended up getting sent this fellowship job description. People had to send it to me multiple times. I said, philanthropy, it seems so stuffy. They’re going to hate me. I’m going to hate them. This is not going to work. They said, no, just give it a shot. Do it for a couple of years. We could use someone on the inside. And so I went into a fellowship and I thought, well, this is not going to last long and let me just see how much money I can move out the door. And then I found that I had this really the world’s most bizarre superpower of really being able to bridge from mostly white liberal donor class communities to very left people of color communities on the ground. It felt like this is a place I could be useful. I parlayed my organizing skills into philanthropy. I wasn’t afraid to get fired. I’m sitting here next to the lever of all this money, let me pull it down all the way and if I get fired, I’ll just go back into organizing. I didn’t get fired and I founded a foundation and ran that for 17 years.

Jackie Gardina:

You built groundswell to be a different kind of organization. I want to give you an opportunity to talk about how is groundswell different than the Gates Foundation or another foundation that someone might look to?

Vanessa Daniel:

What set Groundswell apart is that we had a unique governance structure with super majorities of women of color who were former or current grassroots organizers at every level of decision making. That was the majority of our staff. It was the majority of our board, it was almost all of the executive committee of our board. So really baked into the model itself was a primary accountability, not to the donor class, but to the most vulnerable communities that were on the front lines that produced a kind of grant making that looks really different from most private philanthropies. I think that the trust that we put in grassroots leaders who were not only coming onto our staff, but we also had funds we ran where we had advisories of people who were leaders currently on the ground who would advise, and we had to sort of eyes and ears at the grassroots level.

That is really important. I think in philanthropy, and this is part of the challenge of what happens in the relationship between philanthropy and the movement building sector is that you create this triangulation, which has become more acute as philanthropy has grown. So in the past when they used to have community organizing shops that were mostly funded through membership dues, there was a primary accountability to delivering for the people down the block of material changes in their day-to-day lives. And if you didn’t deliver that, the funding was cut off, you had to be accountable to those folks. With philanthropy, there’s the capacity to really produce glossy proposals and reports and snow funders who don’t have a direct sight line into communities and who may not because many people working in philanthropy don’t come out of organizing in particular when they’re funding that kind of work, don’t really understand the mechanics of how it works. They don’t know how to tell the difference between what is real and what is smoke and mirrors. And so I think what the model at Groundswell enabled us to do was to have a greater degree of accuracy in actually funding things that had high impact.

Mitch Winick:

Jackie, I want to take a moment to reflect that as we’re talking about optimism and action. Many of our guests say that they first started thinking about a career in public service while they were still in law school and schools like yours and mine, Monterey College of Law provide an affordable, convenient way for working adults to attend law school and pursue these interests. Classes are taught by practicing lawyers and judges who prepare our students to serve their community in many of the same areas that we are discussing here on SideBar. For more information, go to monterey law.edu.

Jackie Gardina:

It sounds like with groundswell you asked what the community needs or you get information directly from the community about what they need and aim funding those needs and you’re accountable to the community that’s being served rather than to the donors that provided the funding.

Vanessa Daniel:

When we think about our daily lives or just how people are experiencing the world, we’re not experiencing it in issue silos, which is how philanthropy is structured. So the same person that needs to access healthcare also cares about their kids’. School also cares about not being discriminated against at work. Also cares about the asthma from environmental pollution in their community. I mean, we are holistic beings. As Audrey Lorde once said, there are no single issue struggles because we don’t live single issue lives. I cut my teeth as an organizer. Now I organized in many different sectors before I came into philanthropy, most of it in economic justice through labor, through community-based organizations. But I also spent a little bit of time in immigrant rights. I spent time in L-G-B-T-Q spaces in spaces around that were broadly feminist. I fundamentally feel that the best vehicle to be able to do community organizing is one that gives the community the ability to work with the greatest degree of latitude and flexibility.

You may have a core commitment to immigrant rights and that may remain the same, but if there is a huge environmental crisis in your community, you are going to need to pivot to that without all of your funders saying, you know what? We can’t actually deal with that. You can only deal with the initial issue. And so I think groundswell initially started within the silo of reproductive issues, which because we funded women of color who had founded the reproductive justice movement and because people of color are hit with so many intersectional types of oppression, the work from those movements tends to be more intersectional anyway. So reproductive justice wasn’t just talking about abortion or family planning, which is what the Mainline reproductive rights movement was talking about. They were talking about all the different facets, the right to parent, the right to not be poisoned by environmental toxins.

The right for people who were incarcerated to access reproductive care, to not be shackled during pregnant during labor and delivery. It was very broad, but from there, I really wanted to expand it and we ultimately ended up being able to expand it so that the fulcrum was really the strategy of organizing and grassroots based building and with a focal point on some of the most marginalized communities, so women of color and L-G-B-T-Q people specifically. And then the issue, we could be almost issue agnostic. And so we ended up funding across every major social justice movement. And I think that’s the best way to go because I do believe that organizing and grassroots power is the engine of change and the best organizing isn’t found in any one movement. And when you lock it into that, you limit your ability to build a base. You actually need to be able to fund the best and the brightest in every single sector.

Mitch Winick:

Vanessa, what I hear in the background of that description and what you keep touching on are the individuals, the advocates, the others who’ve really marched down this path along with you. These are really challenging times for advocacy. Looking back over what has been a couple decades now, how did you keep your passion going, your interest? How did you receive encouragement and nurturing through this group that it sounds like you’ve assembled over these decades? It sounds like it’s not just a growing movement towards an issue, it’s a growing movement towards change, but it’s hard to keep that passion up. It’s hard to keep your hope up when it’s dashed so many times. What stories could you tell about the folks you’ve worked with along the way that allowed that passion and energy and movement to continue? I

Vanessa Daniel:

Think that my inspiration comes from ordinary people. One of my favorite places is still across the kitchen table talking with a worker, a neighbor down the block. And then my second source of inspiration is the incredible leaders that we have in social justice movements, particularly women of color who I’ve had great fortune of having a front row seat to seeing a lot of their incredible leadership over the years. And we have an embarrassment of riches in this country of ordinary people who agree with progressive values. People are with us on everything from abortion access to L-G-B-T-Q rights to curbing climate change, to gun control. I mean across the board, all of the polls show overwhelming support. We’ve also got these incredible leaders and women of color who have for decades, particularly black women, been the backbone of movements. I call them the MVPs and certainly I don’t want to centralize.

Not every leader who’s a woman of color is an MVP. Not every leader who’s not a woman of color is not one. But when I think about MVPs, people who are really, really putting points on the board for progressive movements, so many of them are women of color. And so I don’t actually think that we have a scarcity problem, and that’s part of what gets me up in the morning. I think that we have an abundance of what we need. I think we have everything that we need right in front of us. We just need to learn how to use it. We need to learn how to cherish it and value it. And when it comes to women of color leaders, and that’s what the book is about, there are so many ways that we are benching our best unnecessarily looking at how can we stop doing this so that the scoreboard can look better for all of us? Because when we empower our MVPs to really get out fully on the court, we all win. When we think about ordinary people in communities, how are we helping them to stay engaged? And a huge part of that is grassroots organizing. Do we have people with true skills in what that is? And that’s one of the things I’m most passionate about. It’s why most of the women I interviewed for this book are organizers. That is what I think we need to rebuild a severely eroded grassroots organizing infrastructure in this country.

Jackie Gardina:

And let me pivot to a little bit more about the book. So again, it’s called Rigged the Game. You started the conversation with us saying that you had hoped to become a writer. Not only did you get to write about it, but you got to interview 45 amazing women in order to create your book. What inspired you to say The time is now for me become the writer I always wanted to be?

Vanessa Daniel:

I really was so inspired by watching these leaders, and that’s where it started. It started from inspiration and wanting to kind of shout from the rooftops about this incredible work that I was seeing. I mean, this work is what built the foundation to defeat Trump in 2020 and Georgia. I mean it was women of color, black women organizing with strategies that were derided as marginal and too smallest scale by everyone from the electoral donor class to the Democratic party. Their organizing was just so phenomenal seeing the type of things that they were winning, seeing the domestic workers secure access to income and community-based care for 8 million families. Seeing folks in states like Oregon Pass bills like the Reproductive Health Equity Act, which is the best law that we have on the books in this country, securing reproductive freedom and access to reproductive healthcare. I felt like these were the unsung heroes and I wanted to talk about it.

There was a secondary piece about the barriers that I felt like they were facing, that I felt like it would lift all of us if we were aware of these. Now, in the course of writing the book, which I started kind jotting down notes in the book and putting things together in 2018 when I really sat down to write it in 2020, the movement had gone into a complete state of crisis in terms of the levels of conflict and chaos and infighting and the leadership jobs which had already been a higher degree of difficulty for women of color were becoming just completely untenable. And so where I had spent the first 20 years in my career witnessing the largest ascension of women of color into leadership positions and movements, I started to, one call I got on, somebody said, I’ve talked to eight different women of color and every single one of them is leaving their ed position and they say they will never take a position of leadership again. That is how battered people were. That also inspired me to hurry up and write this book. I think we need it and to be able to keep folks from leaving mid-career who we really need in movement, taking with them decades of skills and abilities and relationships that we sorely need and that we can’t afford to lose, and to hopefully stop some of the destruction of organizations which we’ve seen a lot of organizations shut their doors behind nonsense.

Jackie Gardina:

Like so many of the guests on this show, I went to law school because I wanted the tools to create change. If you have that same passion and you want to develop the necessary skills and knowledge in a nurturing environment built for working adults, join us at Colleges of Law with both in-person and online learning options. Take the first step to building a better future for you and your [email protected].

Mitch Winick:

Vanessa, in the book you talk about three superpowers. You’ve actually talked about the concept of superpowers a couple times in our discussion. Tell us a little more about that idea. If I’m listening, how do I know if I have one of these superpowers and what should I do with it?

Vanessa Daniel:

Well, these are three superpowers that I find disproportionately present among women of color leaders, but I think that other people can have them and anyone can adopt them. So this is one of the things that everyone can learn from these leaders. The first one is 360 degree vision. So this is the ability to strategize and tackle forces like white supremacy, patriarchy, extractive capitalism, colonialism, not just one at a time, but simultaneously. And that ability to really attack those interlocking forces of oppression that are hurting all of us is very, very critical in this time. If you use the metaphor of a house it this idea that if you’re trying to keep burglars out of your house and keep the house of the people intact, the house of justice and liberty and rights intact, we’re going to close the front door of economic injustice. Well, if you leave the side door of transphobia and the other side door of white supremacy open, the burglar doesn’t care what door they get in.

They’re going to get in and they’re going to get in and come for all of us. So that superpower is important. The second one, boldness. This is the determination to fight for the fullness of what our communities need to thrive and what our planet needs to be livable. And it is serious antidote to this timidity that fascists rely on to get all of us to obey in advance. It looks like Barbara Lee is the only no vote to the Iraq war. It looks like the squad is the left flank in Congress. It looks like when you look at Ilhan Omar or you look at a OC or you look at Jasmine Crockett, the energy with which these sisters are showing up in leadership is exactly what we need right now. It’s also an antidote to, I think, the worst of the Democratic party in terms of the compromising, compromising away the rights of working people.

The third superpower is generosity. And this is the conviction to fight in a way that doesn’t leave certain groups behind, that doesn’t throw anyone under the bus. It’s saying, we’re not going to leave our trans kids or immigrants or pregnant people or any group behind in order to win. And that’s really critical because divide and conquer, as we know, is one of the biggest tactics paired with fear that fascists use in order to advance. So when you can have this kind of solidarity and generosity in how you organize and how you move, it really jams the gears of divide and conquer, and that’s critical.

Jackie Gardina:

I do have a question about generosity. It comes from I think a personal experience that I’ve always struggled with. I was involved with the don’t ask don’t tell repeal movement a long time ago, and I was a part of an organization that was very big in pushing the legislative and court cases that were going through. There was a lot of discussion when drafting the original bill, not the bill that was passed, but the original bill about whether or not transgender military members should be included in the bill. The law itself only talked about lesbian gay service members. It didn’t talk about transgender service members. They were included in a policy. So the policy could always be overturned, but it was important that we get the law overturned because that was binding the military in a way that the policy didn’t need to, and the decision was ultimately made not to include transgender military members. So when we talk about generosity and we talk about compromise, when is it appropriate to say we need to take this step forward even though it means we might be leaving someone behind? Is it ever appropriate?

Vanessa Daniel:

I think that in the place we’re at right now in this country, I think that movements have progressed enough. I mean, we’re not in 1950 anymore, or even the sixties. I think about Bayard Rustin and how closeted he had to be as the central organizer of the March for Civil Rights. You wonder what might’ve happened if there had been more solidarity between the rising movements around civil rights, racial justice, L-G-B-T-Q, rights, women’s rights. So I mean, one argument says that, look, the country wasn’t ready for it. We had to win things piecemeal and build from there. And then another argument is, well, if we had come together, might we have had the power to win more? I think that when compromises are made, I think there are compromises that can be made where communities who are not included are involved and they are involved as partners and they’re involved in a longer arc strategy that has an authentic commitment to fighting for their rights next.

And then there are ways in which they’re cut out just as an inconvenience and they’re not in the room. And I think that part of what we have seen happen, for example, with marriage, gay marriage, is we saw this sort of laser focus on this one issue that was a priority for middle to upper class white gay men, especially because there was this sense that once they won marriage, then they were equal with straight folks and they didn’t have to fight for other things. And we, I think, have seen the impact of that. So if we just follow the arc of that after marriage was won and a lot of people threw down on it, including people of color, queer folks of color, including trans folks, most of the funding walked away from L-G-B-T-Q rights. Okay, so then we have all these unresolved issues like the discrimination against trans people in hiring, in education, in we have the incredibly low life expectancy of trans people of color.

We’ve got all of these unresolved issues for queer youth who are more working class and queer youth of color. So you’ve left all these people behind with these unresolved issues. Well, what happens to those unresolved issues? Transphobia becomes the Trojan horse that Trump can use along with the Trojan horse of other communities that have been thrown under the bus like immigrants to now convince poor white folks and other folks throughout the country. But I think about the poor low income white person living in the middle of the country cut off now from access to labor unions because of the decline of the labor movement left there with talk radio that’s telling them that the reason for their economic pain is trans and immigrants. So we left the door open is my point. When you close the front door and you leave the side door open, they come in and now they are coming for all of us.

And so that is why it is not only to me morally bankrupt to leave certain groups behind. It is also strategically inefficient to do so. I think that we’re being tested in some pretty big ways, major civil rights laws and anti-discrimination laws that cover many groups are being taken down because they’re being taken down by attacking, using the specter of trans people in bathrooms. And you’ve got black church communities who don’t know how to deal with that. So then they back off of it and then the whole law is taken down that impacts their commuting. Flex women impacts other groups. I think that the dynamic around Gaza in this country and the bystander to this all fascism is it is like the ultimate test of how people walk with their fear. And can we walk with our fear without selling out our values or their people, what it is doing to the moral psyche, the way it’s advancing, divide and conquer, the stigma on speaking out as we are all watching a genocide in technicolor on our smartphones is doing something to us. It is not just about the people in Gaza. It is what it is doing to us. So what does it do to our souls when we leave people behind?

Jackie Gardina:

To your point about kind of the side door being open, you talked about I was a little bit older than you were when you were working on apartheid issues. I was in college when the shanty towns were coming up on the college greens and being a part of that, and that was in the eighties. And now we’re having the exact same conversation about South Africa and apartheid that it seems as if we’re going to be not just protesting GA on college campuses, but we’re going to be going back to need to talk about segregation and apartheid again. So yeah, that we need to constantly continue to work towards that justice for all or that more perfect nation and that we can’t stop just when we get ours.

Mitch Winick:

My origin in advocacy came from the south in a segregated town, watching schools be desegregated. My mother, as Jackie has heard me talk about many times, was an activist in used legal women voters in Texas as the vehicle to achieve many of the same things that the women you highlighted in the book have done. And she worked with women like that throughout her entire career. I’m listening to both of you talk about this sense of where do we go from here where we’ve had some strategic maybe errors, maybe mistakes, they were decisions that we now know the results and they aren’t what we expected and they’ve created additional problems. But what I took from your book, I was focusing more, and maybe it’s because as Jackie and I are trying our best to have this season be optimism and action even amidst these just really challenging times, but it’s your focus on teach everyone about winning, that it’s not just the silo of policy or the group that you talked about, that what my mom taught me was it was all of the women in the community when they stood together.

It really didn’t matter the color or the ethnicity, the power of those women speaking up and saying, this is the direction we are going, made an impression on me that’s lasted my entire life. And it resonates in what you’re doing as well and the stories you’re telling that many times the males of the population fail miserably when given the leadership opportunity. And I love the idea that you’re reminding us that these lessons, that these powerful women, not just those you’ve talked to now, but the ones I met through my mom 40, 50 years ago, really set those lessons in place. And that’s why I wanted to highlight your book and have you talk about that book because I think we need, not necessarily a cookbook, but a reminder that your three superpowers reside within all of us. It’s reachable, and that’s what I’m grasping for in these times as we’re looking to looking for direction as to what we’re going to do next.

Vanessa Daniel:

I love that. I love that your mom gave that gift to you of being able to witness that organizing. And I left this process of doing these interviews, so hopeful, so energized, so fired up about rolling up my sleeves for the work ahead. And I know that many of us feel tired. I mean, we’ve been through a lot with going through the first Trump administration, but there is a lot of inspiration and strategies that are there for us to pick up and use in these times. And so that was my hope with the book. And these leaders are just in fatigable. They’re powerhouses. I mean, talking to Dolores Huerta who, they’re someone who’s older than all three of us, but just incredible, right in her nineties, still touring, speaking. And I think there’s something in that too. I joke because my daughter, all these kids are into skincare and all this stuff.

Now, this is the trend, but I’m like, I feel like living your values and being an activist and an organizer from the heart is the best beauty regimen and it’s the best self-help book. It ages us to feel like we’re witnessing some new fresh hell every day when we open the news and then to feel like we can’t do anything about it. So finding a way to participate and pitch in, and there’s many, many ways to do that. It doesn’t all have to look one way. Everyone can pitch in some way, and I think that it keeps us within reach of the hope of democracy. It helps beat back fascism, and it keeps our souls, our spirits, our minds and bodies more whole than they would be if we gave up. So to me, giving up isn’t an option. I feel better getting up each day knowing I can put my shoulder to the wheel in some way or other.

Jackie Gardina:

Vanessa, I think that’s a perfect place to end. So really appreciate you coming and speaking with us today. Good luck.

Vanessa Daniel:

Thank you so much. Thank you both. It was great to meet you.

Mitch Winick:

It was a pleasure to have you on, and thank you for your book and thank you for what you’re doing,

Jackie Gardina:

Mitch. I really loved the way that you pivoted the conversation back to optimism and really about how everyone has those three superpowers or can develop those three superpowers, and that’s kind of the approach we need to take during these difficult times, using those superpowers to bring people together and to build bridges between issues and communities so that we can all succeed essentially.

Mitch Winick:

I also like the fact that Vanessa talks to us about introspection, and it’s really policy and strategy introspection where some of the good ideas, you brought that up yourself, the good intent to move a mission forward, left, as she said, the side door open for what we’re seeing as challenges now. But I don’t see that necessarily as a failure at the end with the introspection she calls on us to consider. We can say, you’re right, and this is how we could move forward on those issues. And the stories she tells in her book on Rig the Game, what Women of Color Can Teach Everyone About Winning reminds us of the way to do that, of the stories that go before us, that we’re successful and that we can look again to now as we try to chart our path going forward.

Jackie Gardina:

Once again, I want to thank everyone who joined us today on SideBar, and as always, Mitch and I would love to know what’s on your mind. You can reach us at SideBar media.org.

Mitch Winick:

SideBar would not be possible without our producer, David Eakin, who composes and plays all of the music you hear on SideBar. Thank you also to Dina Dowsett who creates coordinates sidebars. Social media marketing.

Jackie Gardina:

Colleges of law and Monterey College of Law are part of a larger organization called California Accredited Law Schools. All of our schools are dedicated to providing access and opportunity to a legal education to marginalized communities.

Mitch Winick:

For more information about the California accredited Law schools, go to ca law schools.org. That’s ca law schools.org.