Watering the Garden
By Sahar Driver
This week Color Congress announced its inaugural cohort of organizations that will receive unrestricted, two-year support. Our goal for this fund was to resource some of the most vulnerable, but vital, organizations that serve people of color in the documentary field, and help ensure they can continue their important work despite challenging economic conditions and historical disinvestment. We are over the moon excited to offer these 17 grantees between $45–90k each. Altogether they represent the breadth of efforts and interventions that exist to strengthen nonfiction storytelling by and for people of color (POC) in every corner of this country.
Arriving at this final cohort was a journey and the result of a four month process, designed to help us live into our values of increasing accessibility, centering trust and lessening the burden on applicants, and flattening the hierarchy. As part of that commitment we want to share a bit about the process we undertook.
PRIORITIZING ACCESSIBILITY
This fund and the work of the Color Congress is about bringing the field into balance by addressing the systematic marginalization of people of color so we can tell our own stories, on our own terms. But we also want to make sure we pay attention to other varied and interlocking forms of systematic marginalization. To that end, we committed to make it possible for organizations to apply for funding in Spanish, a native language in the U.S. and its territories. Grantees will also be able to submit all of their written reports in Spanish. Color Congress has a very minimal operating budget but we aspire to raise the funds we need to eventually ensure language accessibility across the entire grantmaking process. While addressing the ongoing effects of colonization is an ever-present challenge, this is one small way to at-minimum acknowledge its ongoing legacy today and build for the inclusion of the people whose stories and perspectives should be centered but who are too often overlooked when it comes to opportunities like these.
In our early engagements with the field, we heard loud and clear that not all the POC collectives, working groups, and other entities that contribute meaningfully to our field aspire to become 501c3s. Many wish to remain small and nimble, without the pressure to scale or dilute their theories of change. So we were pleased to be able to offer this funding opportunity to groups that are not formal 501c3s, or fiscally sponsored by one, but which are nonetheless doing charitable work. We were able to consider these candidates by allowing eligible applicants to go through an Expenditure Responsibility process; essentially they agree to respond to a series of questions and reporting requirements that enable our fiscal sponsor to confirm the resources will only be spent on charitable purposes. This means that these groups can do the work they set out to do without wasting time establishing a structure they don’t otherwise need. In fact two of our grantees in this year’s cohort fall under this special category.
CENTERING TRUST
We have been deeply inspired by conversations in the nonprofit sector that interrogate power imbalances between foundations and their grantees, and uplift practices that build greater trust, accountability, right relationship, and mutuality. So one of the first things we did was run our open call and grantmaking plan through a Trust Based Philanthropy audit. (Trust Based Philanthropy is a project of the Whitman Institute where Sonya sat on the board for many years.)
That process and our commitment to supporting –rather than burdening– leaders in this ecosystem, led us to streamline our application process. Color Congress is a data driven effort based on research that pointed to this ecosystem of POC-led documentary organizations as one of the most powerful and strategic investments a funder could make toward building a more equitable documentary field. So the last thing we wanted to do was force these organizations to jump through a bunch of hoops to prove to us what we already knew. We decided to own our part to find out what we could about potential grantees, since they were already doing their part: strengthening the power of people of color in the documentary field. Anything nonessential that we could find out on our own, we decided to remove from the application process.
Our open call involved two phases: first we allowed four weeks for applicants to submit Letters of Inquiry (LOI) to help us assess an organization’s eligibility to apply. This step would ensure applicants did not spend needless time on an application they were not eligible for. And we hoped this low barrier to entry would make it easier for time- and resource-strapped organizations (our focus) to apply. It involved three simple questions: 1) A very brief description of the organization’s mission, 2) a statement on the demographics of the organization and its commitment to POC leadership, and 3) the organization’s most recent operating budget with a simple narrative to orient us to it. The second phase was a formal Request for Proposals (the RFP), which we sent to eligible applicants.
Perhaps as a consequence of lowering the barrier to entry, we received LOIs from over 120 applicants -many more than we anticipated. For context, the research I conducted in 2019 for the Beyond Inclusion report surfaced about 90 POC-led documentary organizations total. Because we were focusing on only the organizations with the smallest budgets and little to no national funding–paying special attention to those outside of major markets that have experienced marked disinvestment–we had expected a much smaller subset of this 90 to apply. However, we have since learned that an estimated 88% of this POC documentary ecosystem has budgets under $500k and many, including the most vulnerable, have received some national funding -even if modest.
Because the pool of eligible applicants was so large, we considered our commitment to resource the smallest organizations and decided to lower the budget threshold even further: to organizations with an annual operating budget under $300k. While it helped to reduce the applicant pool to a more manageable size, it had the unintended consequence of increasing the number of newer organizations under consideration and reducing the number of the organizations that had been around a long time. This is a consequence we will be more careful to avoid in the future.
Within a week of receiving the LOIs, we invited formal applications from close to 50 organizations. There were about a dozen candidates who were eligible, but less competitive for reasons such as nonfiction being ancillary to their work. So we reminded them of our priority areas but told them they were technically eligible to apply should they wish to do so anyway. RFP applicants had five weeks to respond to two questions, which made up the sum total of the RFP: 1) a statement about the role their organization plays in strengthening and diversifying the nonfiction field and 2) a statement about their organization’s commitment to the documentary form specifically.
FLATTENING THE HIERARCHY
Color Congress is unique in that we hold both the role of funder and intermediary. This means we are leading from within, by facilitating connection and learning from and with our peers. But it also means that we hold positional power and privilege and the decisions we make have an impact on our members and grantees. To the extent possible, we have been consciously designing our efforts in community to share decision making power with the field in ways that are manageable but allow us to benefit from the collective insights of our peers. (You can learn more about our Design Committee, which is a committee of documentary field leaders who helped us determine the outlines of our field-led work later this summer.) To this end, the grantee selection process for the unrestricted 2 year funding was also by committee.
We formed a review committee of 8 leaders in the nonfiction space. These leaders were located in the southeast, in Texas, on the west coast, in the Pacific and in the Caribbean. They represented a diverse range of racial and ethnic backgrounds, and wide scope of expertise in the field, with many having themselves led or benefited from the kind of support these organizations offer at some point in their careers.
This review committee was tasked with closely reading all applications we received. For each they were asked to consider the strength of the organization’s intervention, the importance of its work for the communities they serve, and the significance of this grant to their efforts. What we quickly saw however is that the vast majority of applicants got high scores across these parameters. In other words, the entire applicant pool is doing powerful work, highly significant for the communities they serve, and any funding we could spare would be very meaningful to them.
We then convened online in May for a facilitated deliberation to discuss and consider a final cohort of grantees that would reflect the breadth, beauty, and power of this POC documentary ecosystem. It was a challenging conversation but a fruitful one. The group landed on a recommended cohort of grantees, which we then submitted to our Advisory Board for final approval and to determine the size of grants. The Advisory Board unanimously approved the review committee’s recommended cohort without changes. Because it is an impressive group of organizations.
Among the grantees are organizations that have been hard at work for decades and others that are newer on the scene. The cohort includes organizations that are set up to advocate for greater equity in the field, to train filmmakers of color, to bolster them and build community, distribute or promote their projects, with some centering audiences of color. A few focus heavily on community-made cinema and archiving, some center documentary in place-based journalism, and still others explore documentary’s intersections with the narrative form. Altogether they are supporting people and storytellers in communities that have historically been alienated from authorship and the documentary form, creating pathways into the documentary field in North and South Carolina, in New Orleans, in the Rio Grande Valley, in Arkansas, in Puerto Rico, on Hoopa Valley tribal lands, even in a long-term care facility on Roosevelt Island. We are inspired by this group of organizations and we are profoundly moved by the work they collectively do.
Throughout these two review phases, Sonya and I did our best not to tip the scales and to trust the process we had set up. We weighed in as people who had spent time getting to know these organizations and their work, we clarified the intentions of the fund and the review process when needed, but our own scores were not included in the final tally nor were they shared with the committee. Instead, we chose to trust in the wisdom and recommendations of our peers and in this way enact the will of the collective we serve. There are many ways our role and this process can be improved in the future and we look forward to raising the funds we need to expand support to more organizations in our ecosystem and keep this important fund going.
Because while we are proud to be able to offer $1.35M to this cohort of powerful organizations, these grantees and this number represent only a fraction of the resources needed. The truth is, selecting only a few from among many powerful organizations in this ecosystem was challenging because every single eligible organization that our review panel considered deserved to be resourced. We estimate it would cost $16.5M annually to resource the vast majority of the ecosystem we serve. And a budget closer to this amount would profoundly change the shape of the documentary field. While our current budget is limited, our vision and commitment to a more equitable funding environment remains.
So we hope this is just the beginning, because watering this beautiful garden of organizations will help ensure the documentary field is blooming with rich and nuanced storytelling by, for, and about communities of color. That’s the level of funding we aspire to offer.
