How Trish Adobea Tchume Cultivates the Conditions for Liberatory Leadership in Philanthropy
/
Trish Adobea Tchume
One of the first lessons I learned as a young organizer is that leadership is a practice, not a position. It is how we are, not who we are — despite what the hero narrative may lead us to believe. So when I started writing articles for Inside Philanthropy to highlight the work of transformative leaders in the sector, my intention was to surface the ways of thinking and being that enable the sector to meet the moment while also planting seeds for liberation.
Trish Adobea Tchume, the senior director of leadership research and practice at the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, came into her role with similar intentions. At the foundation, she creates frameworks for grantmaking, capacity-building and research to enhance the leadership development practice in philanthropy and the field. During our conversation, we spoke about what leadership means for Black women, how to navigate having positional power, and the responsibility philanthropy has to cultivate the conditions for a just and joyful future.
My observation is that you’ve made your career path while walking. What guided your decisions along the way?
Looking backward, the path always seems more connected than it felt in the moment. Being a child of immigrants from a formerly colonized country in Africa, I was always clear that whatever was worrying me as an individual was connected to a bigger set of worries. And I knew that when we work together, and people are clear about their role, we have the ability to make incredible things happen.
I knew this because I grew up with stories about how Ghana became a decolonized country, and because I saw it as a first-generation kid in an immigrant family in the United States. I saw people work together to create a life for their families in this new context. I’ve always had the sense that we are all connected, and we can do powerful things when we are each clear about what our responsibility is in building a world where all of us can thrive.
How did the roles you’ve moved through lay the groundwork for where you’re at today?
We have all been blessed by Deepa Iyer’s Social Change Ecosystem Map, and when I look at my trajectory, I see the ways I’ve been moving around this map. At the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network, my job was to be a visionary and a builder of infrastructure that reflected the collective desires of its 50,000 members. At Building Movement Project, I saw myself as a storyteller and a guide that translated the leadership of Linda Campbell, a Detroit-based organizer who has a clear sense of how to tap into community power. I was in a network-weaving role at Within Our Lifetime and the Center for Community Change, where there were elements of being a healer, a disruptor and a builder of leadership development programs for women of color organizers.
I came to the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation to be their network weaver, but as anyone who’s ever worked with me knows, I never do just the job that I’m given. When I was hired, I structured my role so that I could use 5% of my time to continue working on an issue that had emerged while I was at Center for Community Change. The issue was that the nonprofit sector was hiring women of color into leadership positions, and these women were coming in with liberatory vision, but the organizations they were stepping into were not equipped to embrace their leadership or be liberatory.
Since the foundation works on leadership development, they said “yes” to my request, and now the work to explore leadership practices that more effectively support expansive vision has become my full-time job. For example, we worked with partners to build the Liberatory Leadership Partnership, and that evolved into a set of projects that explore how to tap into opportunities that make sure leadership is something people can do in ways that are joyful and allow them to thrive.
What have you discovered about doing this work from within a foundation?
There are people who set their sights on philanthropy at the very beginning of their career, but that wasn’t my path. Philanthropy just never sparked my imagination as a site of change, so it was interesting to find myself being invited to work for a foundation in early 2020. I didn't think about it as working for a funder because my role was focused on the Sterling Network. From my perspective, I was supporting a leadership cultivation program that was rooted in a racial equity frame and that required skillful and emotionally intelligent facilitation, which is something I know how to do and is also a passion for me. I wasn’t really thinking about the fact that the program was housed in a foundation.
People told me, “When you start working in philanthropy, people will be excited to talk to you.” I dismissed that because I wasn’t a funder. Then I had an interaction with somebody I’d worked with before who had no interest in me as a thought partner then, but when I got to the foundation, he approached me. When I said, “I can’t help you because I’m on the program side,” he said, “I don't know what that means.” And I was really glad he said that because it helped me realize that this was a distinction that was only important to me, and any entry point into a foundation is an opportunity because of philanthropy’s culture of gatekeeping. The fact is that I am rooted in a structure where there is a power dynamic that threads through anything I do no matter what corner I’m sitting in.
In the context of your organizing, how do you navigate the status that’s afforded by simply working in philanthropy?
With the Sterling Network, the foundation sought to understand how the power of network leadership can support the complex process of systems change in order to address the entrenched inequality along racial lines in New York. The idea of working on that was correct; this is something worth investing in if you care about leadership and the vibrancy of the city. Still, it is very difficult for a funder to not show up as a funder in any room it’s in.
It took me being at the foundation and seeing the way these power dynamics are so deeply ingrained, even when you have incredibly skilled facilitators working on it. The issue is structural, and this isn’t just my opinion. The research we did told us that, and the lessons from that exploration led us to ask: Then what is our role as a funder?
For as long as it exists, philanthropy has a responsibility to serve as risk capital and give people space to think beyond what is currently happening — but its role has to be specific: You’re mostly the money. The work I do is to negotiate that and to create structures that help us to mostly stay in that lane. It’s not that we have no opinion about what we think is possible, but the frameworks we are developing around our exploring leadership work are really clear about our funding role. As transparently as possible, I negotiate the tension between what we care about as funders and what the partners we resource care about, and try to design something that redistributes power so that the people who have the most to gain from this experimentation have the most power in figuring out how the experiment goes.
For me personally, that means fully stepping into that role of resource mobilizer and organizer, as opposed to being like: “I’m not a grantmaker.” It's awkward, and I'm still learning about the models of doing it well and paying attention to the people who do it well. But I know that the way to not do it well is to pretend that’s not who you are in that room.
Philanthropy is expanding its focus on funding infrastructure, although questions of who gets to determine, design and own that infrastructure are often overlooked. How do you think about those questions?
I see that as part of the role. It's ideal to recognize where infrastructure needs to be built and to put the resources and responsibility in the hands of the folks who are best positioned to build that. It’s ideal for philanthropy to give money to things that become a reliable resource for the field going forward. For us, there's always this hope that what comes out of an experimentation becomes something that is a widely useful solution for a number of people and something they know how to tap into. The equitable intermediaries exploration that we’re supporting is a good example of this.
At the same time, I'm also learning that having the expectation that something we resource and build needs to work for the whole sector is a dream killer. I keep learning that lesson over and over again. It's so tempting to think you can create something that will work for any organization, but that’s not a string we attach to funding — and it feels important to resist that temptation.
Your work on liberatory leadership practice resists the franchise model of capacity building. What will it take to resource infrastructure in a deeper way and enable it to scale?
The Liberatory Leadership Partnership is four Black-women-led organizations that came together to sit with this question of: What are we talking about when we say “liberatory leadership?” The definition we use is: liberatory leadership is a style of leadership that invites one to lead from a place of love, wholeness, and interdependence with the goal of operationalizing a vision of personal and collective wholeness, freedom, justice and thriving. It aims to create a more equitable and just society by centering those at the margins of our organizations and our work.
This question about how to expand liberatory leadership practice without packaging it in a way that folks think they can get “certified” has been tricky because we stand on the shoulders of groups like Rockwood Leadership Institute and Equity In The Center that say there is a specific set of work that you can do to create an equity-centered organization and create empowered leaders. We feel a responsibility to define what liberatory leadership can and has looked like for organizations that are practicing it and to create training spaces like the Living Liberation conference where folks learn how to operationalize a liberatory vision. But the thing we’ve mostly been trying to do is build relationships among the different actors who are practicing it right now. There’s a lot of experimentation happening and what’s needed is infrastructure among those who are engaging in that practice.
What does that infrastructure look like?
A specific example I can give is a partnership that has been built between the LeadersTrust, the Leadership Learning Community and the Center for Third World Organizing. Basically, the Center for Third World Organizing has a Liberatory Leadership Praxis program that can only take eight organizations at a time — so what happens to all the organizations that don’t get accepted? Well, they get connected to liberatory leadership practitioners who are being funded by the Fund for Liberatory Practice at the LeadersTrust. The fund provides resources for practitioners who are operating in the ecosystem as consultants, coaches and capacity builders and thinking intentionally about how they can support individuals and organizations to operationalize their liberatory vision. But those folks are grinding, right? And there’s also a limited number of people who are able to be resourced by the fund, so all the practitioners who are left over are provided with a community of practice, and that’s what the Leadership Learning Community is doing. And the work of building connections between these groups is being supported by a totally separate funder that we’ve been building relationships with who was also deeply invested in supporting liberatory leadership.
Doing this isn’t just building infrastructure; it’s also modeling the practice in the way that it is done. It involves weaving and sharing resources to create a dynamic ecosystem where groups can know and recognize this practice of running organizations and getting to our visionary dreams for the world we want. That’s what the Liberatory Leadership Partnership is facilitating by helping to map out the people who are doing this work and making those connections.
Working in deep collaboration places an emphasis on process and methodology in ways that run counter to traditional grantmaking practices. What do funders need to do to ensure their ways of operating support rather than interfere with this type of coordination?
The next step in our work is to bring more visibility to what’s already happening. Many funders don’t know there’s this entire ecosystem of folks that are holding the complexity of this work. Putting money into something like the Fund for Liberatory Practice is a way to support the thriving of Black-led organizations.
The longer-term project is to build on the work that folks like Fund the People, Rooted in Vibrant Communities and Compass Point have been doing for years to say: When you’re talking about organizational development, these are not episodic projects that you do every three years. You don’t develop an organization and then stop. The fact is that every day of every month of every year has some element of culture-building and organizational-tending that we need to do to be in alignment with our goals and the way the world is constantly changing.
The same way that any budget will always have a line item for staffing and for fundraising, there should be continuous investments in organizational development. Transformational organizational development is part of the cost of doing liberatory work. Philanthropy needs to understand that and make it part of what it’s funding — and, of course, large, multi-year, general operating grants are ideal.
Even though your work moves against the current, you always seem to show up with a sense of confidence, strategy and ease. How do you cultivate that sensibility?
You are not the first person who has said that to me. If what you sense is ease, that is because I was instilled with a very strong moral compass. I grew up in a family and come from a culture where certain things are non-negotiable. In Ghanaian culture, we don't use the word “Ubuntu,” but the idea of “I am because we are” is how we move. You are moving in step with a community.
I think the ease comes from the fact that I know when I'm out of step without even thinking about it. If I'm in a room and somebody says something that goes against my principles or the principles the group has espoused, it is very clear to me. That has helped me to stay steady. The difficulty is that I show up in a lot of spaces where there's a way I think I'm supposed to be acting because there is a social structure that’s been built around us telling us how to be. We all swim in these waters of capitalism, patriarchy and white supremacy — including me. Sometimes, I think I must be buggin’ if I feel like what's happening in the room doesn't make sense. My whole body is telling me something is weird, but the structures are telling me something different. That is the daily battle.
Something my mom would say is, “Show me your friend, and I’ll show you your character.” The concept of a political home is important for me, and I have a group of people I continue to move with no matter what organization I move to. They are people who are rooted in the work I want to see more of in the world, and these are the people I go to when I’m questioning things. They help to keep me grounded in my purpose, which is written out and something I recommit to every day. It is a commitment to living and leading with radical self-love and holding space for others to do the same. I reorient to that first thing in the morning in a meditation practice and return to it multiple times a day.
Mandy Van Deven is the founder of Both/And Solutions, a global consulting collective that supports organizational and field learning, provides strategic advice to individual wealth holders and philanthropic institutions, and designs and implements funding initiatives that advance gender, racial, economic and climate justice. She also co-leads Elemental, a community of practice for funders that cultivates the conditions to resource narrative power.
