Liberation Ventures Organizational Beliefs

February 2023

In five words: Black, Coalition, Liminal, Complexity, & Courage.

1. We are accountable to our work: repairing systems and culture to ensure Black healing and thriving; repair as a practice as well as a project.

For this country to become whole, we have to start at the deepest root: the pain and devastation of chattel slavery, and the legacy of exploitation and devaluation that Black people continue to face today. There is no America without Black resilience; there is no repair without Black healing. And when Black people thrive, America thrives.

For us, accountability to repairing systems and culture — to ensure Black healing and thriving — means a few specific things:

• The Black community is not a monolith, and there is a wide variety of perspectives among Black people in this work. We center our work rather than specific perspectives — and take great care to understand all perspectives on that work.
• Individual transformation is necessary but not sufficient. We are aiming for systems and cultural transformation.
• Healing is baseline, and thriving is the goal. Repair as a practice acknowledges centuries of pain, and demands that Black people deserve to be able to lay that past to rest.
• We use our repair framework if and when repair is needed within our organization.
• We bring our full joy, humanity and Blackness to work — we laugh, jab, curse, eat, drink, and joke our way through, together.

How we live this belief:

We use the repair framework to put repair into practice. This includes:

• Reckoning: we excavate the genius of our field and our ancestors; stay current, informed, & politicized; and understand intersections and power dynamics within the Black community to lift up the voices of those most marginalized.
• Acknowledgement: we apologize when we make mistakes; honor the work of our ancestors in our strategies and grantmaking; and acknowledge one another’s lived experiences.
• Accountability: we are Black-led, with a majority Black staff and board; partner with organizations who hold themselves accountable to a culture of repair in our field; share learnings back to the field on a consistent basis; and have an open door policy for feedback from all partners.
• Redress: we allocate time and organizational resources for healing and wellness; and fund organizations who are accountable to Black communities — demonstrated by their leadership, accountability practices, and/or track record.

2. We need a broad coalition on this journey — and we do the hard work of bridging to support innovation, learning, and belonging for all people on this path.

We believe that non-Black people — both white and non-Black people of color — must be able to see themselves in the work of repairing the harms of slavery and its legacy. We do the work of engaging and motivating non-Black people to be active agents of repair, and to understand why repair benefits them too. It is this partnership that brings forth the innovation necessary to build new structures for the future.

For us, bridging to build a broad coalition means:

• Supporting all people to be engaged in this work, across identity groups
• Highlighting the importance of recognizing one’s own role based on positionality — and the fact that often, people are most effective working within their own community.
• Recognizing the difference between truth telling and shaming — and refusing to dehumanize or use shaming tactics.
• Building a strong holding environment for adaptive work in partnership across lines of difference, and holding boundaries around who we choose to partner with if a project or partner does not align with our values or beliefs.
• Acknowledging that the struggle for reparations for Black Americans is inextricably linked with Indigenous communities and Black communities around the world, and that our work must be in solidarity with those communities.

How we live this belief:

• We have a multiracial staff and board, because we know the perspectives of non-Black people are important to help us bring more non-Black people into this movement.
• We co-create strategies with partners in the field.
• We partner with organizations across sectors — and recognize that not all of them are already fully on board with our north star. Our job is to get them there.
• We connect people who can support each other in this work.
• We help movement partners build the capacity they need to receive larger funds in the future.
• We fund organizations across identity groups, while prioritizing Black-led organizations.
• We make information about our movement accessible to many different audiences, through communicating in ways that meet people where they are.
• We take the time to learn about what different audiences believe about our work, and what will move them to support it — while staying accountable to Black healing and thriving.
• In order to do our work, we ask for counsel from many different people and organizations — how we approach these stakeholders varies, and we are vigilant about citation and giving credit.

3. We operate in a liminal space between current realities and the future we envision. We respond to and transform the present to accelerate movement toward liberation.

We are committed to building organizational structures and processes that reliably distribute power and promote equity. In addition, we are unapologetic about using the tools of power that are required to propel our movement forward. It takes constant vigilance to gather the feedback and build the culture we need to do both well, and we prioritize this across the organization.

For us, operating in a liminal space means:

• Recognizing that by engaging in the world, we are forced to participate in white supremacist systems — and, we have agency regarding how we participate and must hold ourselves accountable to critiquing, subverting, and disrupting them. This tension is challenging but absolutely critical to hold.
• Understanding, using, and sharing the power we have as an organization in disciplined, consistent, principled ways.
• Maintaining a mindset of abundance about how this work can be done and who can do it.
• Creatively, humbly, and nimbly traversing between old and new ways of operating.
• Being transparent about where we are in our organizational development — what is going well, what we’re struggling with, and what our practice with each other is teaching us about the culture of repair we are building in the world.

How we live this belief:

• We depart from the status quo in the social sector by using practices we want to see more of in the field, such as a streamlined grantmaking process with minimal reporting, and multiyear, relationship-centered, trust-based, fiscally flexible funding.
• We call out philanthropy, including ourselves — and apologize publicly when we make mistakes.
• We articulate our goals as long-term systems change, and resist the urge to prioritize short-term wins that don’t necessarily support our long term goal.
• When we are asked to do speaking engagements, we create space for others whenever possible by asking to bring one or more of our movement partners.
• We explicitly discuss how power is distributed and shared across the organization, and have systems that promote clarity about roles and decision-making rights.

4. There are always multiple truths, and holding complexity is our strength. We find a third way.

At LV, our operative word is AND. Our movement is diverse in a myriad of ways, and we hold the complexity of the many perspectives in our field. We create space for all our multitudes to be seen, held, and accepted — and this keeps us from falling into binaries that divide and distract us.

For us, holding multiple truths means:

• Holding the importance of both lived experience AND research/statistics, and putting them in conversation with each other as we develop our strategies.
• Holding the reality that at a group level, descendants of enslaved people see worse outcomes across systems than Black people who immigrated to the US more recently — AND, a cop doesn’t ask about a Black person’s family history when they are stopped on the street. We acknowledge there are a variety of philosophies for this work, and hold the possibility that any one of those philosophies — and most likely, a combination of them — will get us to justice.
• Making plans, AND being unafraid to change the plans. We hold our work loosely and continually go to the balcony to observe and interpret our context, and adapt our approaches accordingly.

How we live this belief:

• We develop grantmaking strategies informed by both the lived experience of people in communities as well as historical case studies, quantitative data, and other forms of experimentation, testing, and research.
• We partner with people and organizations who have different philosophies — from us, and from each other — about what will get us to justice.
• In our messaging, we do not trade off our long-term vision for short term gains. We find a third way to inspire people toward our vision of the future while moving them in the present.
• When asked for our counsel, we advise partners to use language, messages, and strategies that support the third way.
• We are transparent about who we fund and why.

5. We have the courage to make the impossible possible.

We are unapologetic about the audacity of our mission. We are doing what we know is right, and we hope you’ll have the courage to join us. In addition, we are learners. We have the courage to do something that we don’t yet fully know how to do. We take things one step at a time, and we are committed to our own learning as well as catalyzing learning across the field in order to do something no one has done before.

For us, courage looks like:

• Not focusing on what is currently politically feasible. Instead, focusing on our goals — and how to make them politically feasible through our work.
• Anticipating, mitigating, and seeking to understand backlash and criticism from all sides. We see it as a signal of progress, and we use it to strengthen our work.
• Being a first-mover; and in doing so, building the momentum to unlock larger dollars from organizations who are farther up the adoption curve.
• Maintaining a humble yet confident organizational posture; recognizing where and when we need to grow, and knowing that we have the capacity for that growth. We have the courage to be vulnerable and admit when we don’t have the answers, and seek counsel and feedback to shore up our work.

How we live this belief:

• We invest in early organizations. We are not afraid to be an organization’s first funder.
• We take the time to organize more donors into this field.
• We do research to understand what moves people to support our work.
• We are constantly scouring the field for great ideas and people who want to implement them; we are innovating, dreaming, and collaborating.
• When we hear backlash and/or criticism, we lean in rather than away; we get curious about these perspectives and intentionally try to learn from them rather than dismiss them.
• We continually develop new ways to make the case for reparations.
• We seek extensive feedback from each other, our movement partners, and our advisors as we develop our strategies — because we know it makes our work better. We have the courage to gracefully receive feedback and critique.