Black Food Fund: Power in Practice

Hi, we’re Hello Brave and Shift. We’re in the process of setting up a new experimental community-led funding committee called the Black Food Fund. This is a three-part blog about the start of this 2-year journey. Our second blog is written by Alisha Mulhall, portfolio manager at Impact on Urban Health.

Blog Two: Power in Practice

Hello Brave and Shift have written eloquently about the evolution of the Black Food Fund (BFF) over the last few years, and the messiness and the emotions this journey has evoked. We hope that through writing these blogs, we can pull back the curtain. We want to explore what it means to locate and address power. What does it look like, how does it feel in your gut, and what are the lessons you learn along the way?

Today I’m going to share what I am learning about power in practice, from within a philanthropic institution.

We talk about power a lot at Impact on Urban Health. We want to devolve it. Share it. Shift it. Build it. Wield it, flip it and reverse it.

But what is power? Is it money? Is it credibility? Is it influence? I could spend a whole blog talking about how we’re trying to define it at Impact on Urban Health, but instead of focusing on these abstract questions, I want to delve into the banality of power. I want to share what I am learning about the ways in which institutions calcify power, how I’ve upheld it, and how I’m trying to be in tune to those practices and unlearn them.

Here’s a moment I have held onto for the last nine months, which I reflect on often.

The setting: Zoom, early 2023

The topic: Planning the process to co-design a more formalised BFF

The participants: Shift, Hello Brave, members of the Steering Group (the previous iteration of the Black Food Fund), and me

I have just shared that I want to engage our Legal Director in the co-design process. This is met positively. One of the Steering Group members, Will, suggests I also bring in other senior colleagues. The Executive Director of Impact on Urban Health and the CEO are put forward. He speaks eloquently about his experience with these senior members of Foundation staff, and the role they must play to change how Impact on Urban Health operates if it truly wants to shift power. Will describes the myriad ways that organisational processes, paperwork, and norms obstruct true community empowerment.

He’s right, of course. I’m listening to him speak and I start looking through said colleagues’ diaries. My stomach sinks lower and lower as I scroll through a complex jigsaw of blue, yellow, and green meeting blocks with the odd 15-minute free on a Friday afternoon a month from now.

I giggle nervously as that most insidious chorus starts ringing in my ears: ‘Manage! Expectations! Manage! Expectations!’

“I’ll see what I can do!” I eke out through tinny laughter. “They’re very busy people — hard to get in their diaries!” I blurt out in knee-jerk fashion.

In this moment I’m feeling a heady mix of:

• A looming awareness of my non-existent internal clout and incapacity to encourage multiple executive team members into a co-design process;
• Guilt for disappointing the Steering Group because I know I can’t deliver on this sensible request;
• Anxiety that I’m biting off more than I can chew with this entire initiative and that by not getting executive-level colleagues in the room, I’m setting us all up for failure and disappointment.

I’m processing rapidly in the moment, and it all comes tumbling out in that one dumb comment. The discussion moves on, though it is notably quieter.

Will reaches out for a follow-up chat. We talk about the project and he is kind and gracious about the work I’ve done so far. He is even kinder and more gracious as he gently lets me know what a slap in the face (my words, not his) it was when I pointed to my senior colleagues’ busyness as a blocker.

“We’re really busy, too. And we make time for this, over what we’re paid.”

He’s right, of course. I’m flushed with embarrassment and acknowledgement that I’d opted to uphold the busyness of my senior colleagues over the incredible commitment of the Steering Group. I’m grateful that he’s trusting me to share how it impacted him and the other Steering Group members, and that his words are gentle but unequivocal. I take it on board.

I have carried that moment for the past nine months. It has burrowed itself inside of my gut and its presence provokes constant consideration of power’s many disguises.

You want to figure out the most senior people in an organisation? Peruse diaries. The more complexity, the more seniority.

[Obviously, you might be inclined to note. More seniority comes with more responsibility. They’re not bad people, or power-hungry people, they’re just busy people. I’m busy, too!]

Look. I get it — I am, after all, also busy. I’m so busy that I’m utterly bored of myself belching out ‘Busy!’ any time anyone asks how I am. If you work in a similar philanthropic institution, you might relate. Apart from working with a range of partners across multiple projects, we also spend hours of our work lives in meetings — so many of which are meetings about other meetings. It wears on our mental capacity and precludes actual productivity, let alone creativity.

I know now that as much as busyness is a function of my role, and something that so often feels like it is being done to me, it is also a tool. A hammer that can be wielded to signal how important, how in demand, how needed I am. A steamroller that can be revved up to push back a call I deem non-urgent into next month. Knowingly and otherwise, I can use my busyness to my benefit.

I would be remiss to omit the fact that the Legal Director I mentioned earlier (and really, so many people I work with) are incredibly generous with their time and have given countless hours to the set-up of the Black Food Fund. But I also have to call out the fact that I’m using a term like ‘generous with their time’ because that immediately fastens our positionality and our relative power. We’re grateful for receiving the time that we get.

But what is it about these institutions that ties up our time so? A major aspect is the degree to which we are bound by its paperwork and processes — the tedious cousins of busyness — which also serve to entrench the institution’s power. The intricacies of the processes that we concoct to get our money out of our hallowed vaults and into action — these send a message to our partners. It beseeches their patience while we ‘socialise the project’ with members of our Executive Team. The length and legalese of our grant agreements also send a message to their recipients (but this is a topic I might save for another conversation).

The biggest power move of all, though, is that at the end of the day, I shut my laptop and disentangle myself from my complex Outlook diary. This is my job. I can leave it. But at Impact on Urban Health, the work that we support our partners to do is about people’s whole lives. I’m a conduit attempting to shift power from an institution that pays me into a community that I am not a part of. This is a ‘project’ that I manage, through which Impact on Urban Health can ‘learn more about how to support local Black food entrepreneurs’. But there is power rearing its camouflaged head once again. Naming the work ‘projects’ creates a false boundary that supposes ephemerality and, crucially, offers me — and the institution — distance.

The great thing about processes and paperwork is that inasmuch as they are tools for guarding power, they are also created by us and for us. It is entirely within our gift to remake them (to the extent that charity law permits). At Impact on Urban Health over the last year, we have been scrutinising our processes and paperwork to unpack the ways in which they gatekeep, by asking ourselves, ‘What would it look like to prioritise joy, simplicity, learning, and power-awareness? What would it look like if we could redefine risk?’ The answers will never be static and the journey to experimenting with new methods will be neither easy nor linear, but it’s a journey we’re taking.

The question of busyness is similarly not an easy one to answer. I have an inkling that the way through would likely be found in doing less and doing it much better. I recognise that the complexity and urgency of the work we fund is what spurs us to do as much as we can. I think we must ask ourselves if this is the best role we can play. Can we instead reconceptualise ‘impact’ beyond the volume of our funding and towards the collective power our partners wield? Can we eradicate the language and mindset of project-based work and instead adopt that of deep engagement and solidarity building? What would it look like if our approach to partnerships, processes, and paperwork followed? Ultimately, we must figure out how to decentralise ourselves from the narrative while simultaneously locating ourselves within the systems we seek to change.

To come back full circle, this is why it is so important that we interrogate the minutiae of how we hold power — both personally and as philanthropic institutions. The organisation can’t change if people’s mindsets won’t. I invite my colleagues, especially those more senior than me, to share how they’re navigating our journey to grapple with our power. I invite others working in similar institutions to do the same so we can start to collectively imagine and implement alternative systems.

The first step, and what I’ve tried to do here, is to be aware of when we are acting as gatekeepers, name these instances, and take accountability. And to thank people like Will who nudge us to be better.

Thanks for reading. We’d planned to blog once a month but haven’t managed that. So hope to be back next year with a final blog of this three-part blog series where we share the journey of recruiting and onboarding the Black Food Fund committee so far. Wish you all a fab end to the year.

This work has been funded by Impact on Urban Health, hosted by Shift and facilitated by Hello Brave.