One is a Washington, D.C.-based organization working to end life without parole sentences for children. The other is an arts organization in New York City that seeks to “partner with artists to reimagine and reshape their world” with a program that offers an alternative to incarceration for young people caught up in the criminal justice system.
While their missions overlap, the most remarkable quality shared by the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth (CFSY) and Recess in New York is that both organizations are busily creating new approaches to how nonprofit advocacy work gets done.
Within the past year, both organizations have changed their top leadership to a co-executive model; in one case, the new co-director is an Afro-Latino* man; in the other, the co-leader is Black. In both cases -- one as an artist and minority activist and one as a formerly incarcerated child -- they come from communities the organizations work to serve. They haven’t stopped there. In the words of Xavier McElrath-Bey, co-executive director of the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth, they are working to undo the “white culture approach” to everything about working in the nonprofit setting—from pay equity to hierarchical management styles.
Or as Allison Freedman Weisberg, the co-director of Recess, told Blue Tent, “There is a clear set of reasons why my identity as a white woman of privilege should be doing a very particular kind of labor in service of my coworkers and my team and the social construct that we enter in general.” In November, Recess announced the promotion of Afro-Latino* artist and activist Shaun Leonardo to the co-director position. That month, Recess also announced a decision to increase all of its starting salaries to $65,000 per year.
Imagining possibilities that don’t yet exist, and making them real right now
Leonardo said that his work and identity as an artist gives him a unique ability to bring “the visioning piece” to Recess’ work.
Rather than acting as a traditional boss, he said, “if I may for a second speak on behalf of artists, in our practice, we’re not thinking about the reality of tomorrow. We’re thinking about our imaginative space, we’re thinking about possibilities that don’t yet exist tomorrow,” Leonardo said. That practice of imagining and “visualizing the steps to get there” make artists “uniquely suited to occupy leadership positions.”
The Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth has also been busy imagining—and implementing—new ways of working, from hiring and work processes to finding ways to create pay equity in potentially challenging situations.
At CFSY, one of the largest shifts has been an emphasis on hiring directly-impacted people; in their case, people who were given extreme sentences as children.
Jody Kent Lavy told Blue Tent that when she was hired as the organization’s first staff person in 2009, “there really wasn’t an organized effort” on behalf of incarcerated children other than some “really well-organized” family members of children being victimized by long prison terms.
Lavy was impressed by the family members and other on-the-ground advocates from the get-go. “It just was clear early on that they brought an expertise that other advocates, including myself, didn’t have,” she said.
In 2014, CFSY hired McElrath-Bey, who was sentenced to 25 years in prison when he was just 13 years old. McElrath-Bey brought both lived experience, a high degree of education—he holds an MA degree in counseling and human services—and professional experience, including as a public speaker, youth counselor and clinical researcher. McElrath-Bey was elevated to the co-ED position in October.
When CFSY first hired McElrath-Bey, “we were a nonprofit really fully staffed with people who sort of came from traditional educational backgrounds,” but without any life experience with the prison system, Kent Lavy said.
Today, she added, “Xavier’s my Co-ED and almost half of our staff are directly impacted by the practice of imposing extreme sentences on children, which is the focus of our work.”
Doing work (very) differently
Hiring directly impacted people and sharing the top leadership position between two people aren’t the only things that Recess and CFSY do differently.
In addition to co-directors, Recess’ board of directors also has co-chairs, Freedman Weisberg said, and “we have devised project-based working groups at the staff and board levels that form around individual skills, interests and experiences so that each person comes to the work from a place of leadership, empowerment and accountability to each other and the mission.” Overall, she said, the co-leadership model is “just one of the ways” Recess is looking to “proactively build structures to revise traditional notions of leadership.”
At CFSY, the process of revising those notions of leadership is well underway. McElrath-Bey said that when he was first offered a position at the organization, he was asked to write the job description for his position.
Today, he added, CFSY has an Equity Leadership group that’s specifically focused on ensuring that “racial justice and equity is at the core of all that we do as an organization.” CFSY has “literally dismantled our managers’ meetings” by bringing team members to the table and actively involving them in decision-making.
In the past four to five years, McElrath-Bey explained, CFSY has evolved beyond the “white culture,” hierarchical model of organizing employees and work. At the same time both Kent Lavy and McElrath-Bey admit that that they are learning as they go; that they don't have "the" answers to creating a more equitable model of nonprofit leadership.
“We’ve been throwing it all against a wall, to be quite honest with you,” McElrath-Bey said.
"Even doing these interviews, we're like, 'We just started. Can you really lift us up as a model?,'" Kent Lavy said.
Dismantling the white culture model of work also extends to self-care.
“Self-care is in our core,” McElrath-Bey said. This means balancing organizational goals against the need for “healing and open discussion” when situations arise that are stressful for CFSY’s staff. It also means “being overtly encouraging to our staff members who take time off,” to the extent that the organization rewards staff who take all of their vacation time with more vacation time.
Show me the money—pay equity and funding for radical organizational change
Ensuring pay equity is a primary goal at both Recess and the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth.
“[The lack of] pay equity is a huge component of the structural racism that is woven into the fabric of all sectors, but specifically the arts and the nonprofit sector,” Recess’ Freedman Weisberg told Blue Tent, particularly at entry-level positions.
With a staff that includes attorneys—who are taking pay cuts to work at a nonprofit—and formerly incarcerated individuals who may never have been paid according to their worth, enacting pay equity is a more complicated process at CFSY.
Attorneys and others with professional degrees, Kent Lavy said, have a “sense of what kind of [salary] growth they should expect,” because of their advanced degrees and accompanying student loans, while employees without a traditional education have a “value to us that hasn’t been translated into a certain salary level the same way a law degree has, right?”
“We’re trying to navigate the expectations of some, namely people who come from privilege, or more privilege, and the lack of expectations among others.”
That lack of expectations can be particularly fraught. Kent Lavy told Blue Tent that during a recent job interview, she asked an impacted person what seemed to him like an appropriate salary. The candidate asked for a little bit more than the minimum wage where he lived.
“That question was not appropriate,” she said. “That is inequitable—to say to somebody, ‘What do you think is a fair salary?’ Or to say, ‘Well, what have you made previously so I can make my decision based on that?’” Now, CFSY publishes the salary in each of its job postings.
It’s one thing to make a commitment to enacting pay equity and other supports, like the 100% paid health insurance CFSY provides its staff. It’s another, some would say, to find funders ready to support that kind of investment in people.
But if CFSY and Recess are any example, that situation is changing, as well. Recess’ 2021 budget anticipates contributed revenue of $1,411,185, with major support coming from Ford Foundation’s Art for Justice Fund and other foundations. In 2019, CFSY reported $3.1 million in revenue, and a spokesperson told Blue Tent that Public Welfare Foundation and Art for Justice “have explicitly stated” that the shift toward leadership by directly impacted people contributed to their support for CFSY’s work. In addition, the Annie E. Casey Foundation has paid for professional development and coaching for staff because of the transition of directly impacted individuals into leadership positions.
When it comes to finding supportive funders, Freedman Weisberg of Recess said, “every institution needs to do the difficult work of prioritizing the resources they have at their disposal.”
“I resist the urge to say, if Recess, with a budget of a million dollars, can pay people this way and convince funders that this is worthwhile and valid, then cry me a river to these other folks who are saying that that’s impossible,” she said, adding that she doesn’t mean to imply that other organizations should exactly copy Recess’ practices.
On the other hand, “If a CEO is paid half a million dollars, and they’re saying that there’s just no room to allocate resources to the folks who are risking their health and their safety and have no job security at the bottom of the institutions… that argument just doesn’t hold up to me.”
Leonardo called resistance to pay equity—and to funding pay equity—“simply a failure of imagination,” and also a failure that “implicates philanthropy, because we’ve gone through decades of funders citing importance in programming rather than people.” He added that imagining ways that more democratic values [including pay equity] can “infiltrate” an organization, “requires that individuals in leadership see how their own whiteness gets in the way.”
At the same time, Leonardo said, he sees signs of “an opening” among funders.
“I personally have felt an opening to a different conversation with philanthropists, and have been welcomed into those critical conversations to not pull any punches and not hide any of my words,” he said, adding that he doesn’t feel he could have safely had these conversations as recently as last year.
“There is an opening, there is a possibility, it just requires that we own it. And it requires that we be daring about it,” he said.
NOTE: The original version of this article identified Sean Leonardo as Black; he identifies as Afro-Latino. Blue Tent apologizes for the error.