CommuniTEA in the Garden ep. 1
Last Tuesday I met with my new friend Erika Prasad in my garden over coffee and Asian pastries about books, ideas, wishes and dreams. She helped me launch my new series, CommuniTEA in the Garden. This is the first of a series of chats with people I admire about things that matter.
Erika and I share many things in common besides our wonderfully diverse South Sacramento neighborhood and appreciation of multicultural foods. We are both women of color who have poured our lives into the nonprofit fundraising field, trying to improve things for others while bearing our own intersectional burdens. We have both been battered by recent experiences in organizations, pulled away from our authentic selves by the undertow of systemic racism in the nonprofit industrial complex, and uplifted by the recent understanding that we are not alone.
Erika and I met through Community-Centric Fundraising, a burgeoning global movement of people like us who want the nonprofit sector to do good, better. People who are tired of being marginalized and oppressed by the very organizations purporting to benefit the marginalized and free the oppressed. People who know: there is a better way to do this work.
We talked about how the overlapping crises of the pandemic and the George Floyd-inspired social justice movement have represented an incredible opportunity for personal and societal change. We talked about joy as a practice, and the incredibly difficult but important task of doing nothing, and how nonprofits can get out of their own way. We mused over the potential and limitations of Tiktok, the double-edged sword of media and culture, futuristic Black SciFi, co-op structures applied to nonprofit management, and composting as an allegory for how to build better communities.
Erika is brilliant; luminous, but guarded. She is navigating her way through stacks of trauma, and still manages to find inspiration, empathy, and vulnerability along that journey. She was kind and trusting enough to reveal her true self to me, and that is a precious gift that I shall honor. So I will try to relay the spirit of our chat, except for a couple quotes, rather than record her exact words.
Joy As a Practice
One of the books on my nightstand is “Collecting Courage” which is a collection of essays by BIPOC women fundraisers curated by Nneka Allen. The pieces are brief. Some are lyrical, some poetic, some academic, but through them all a common theme runs: finding strength, courage, and even joy amidst the intersectional trauma that is doing the good work, while personally marginalized. The first chapter focuses on the power of joy. Joy, deep down in my soul, as the words of the old gospel hymn go.
Joy leads us into surprising spaces. And sometimes it comes from unlikely places.
Erika told me that she found a surprising source of joy in a reparative conversation. That means she called someone to apologize to them for something she had done in the past – in this case, a long time ago, and in a familial context – and observed the emotional consequences for both parties of that apology. She felt freer and lighter. So did they. Her whole face lit up when she talked about it.
In fact, it reminded me of the concept someone else from CCF introduced to me recently: radical reparativity, where you apologize to someone, sincerely, for something you didn’t personally do to them. Imagine if you had a horribly traumatic childhood incident, and someone innocent of the crime just looked you right in the eyes and gave you an acknowledgement of harm, an expression of empathy and regret, and a promise to do something to repair it.
Sure, it’d be awkward at first. But what kind of feelings do you think would emerge if someone said to you, “Hey, I am so sorry your puppy got run over when you were little. That must have been incredibly hard for you. I know I wasn’t there to help you then, but I’d like to give you this little stuffed puppy just so you know I care about you. Will you please accept it?” Maybe I’m just a softie, but I’d be crying all over that beanie baby. RIP Fluffy!!
It made me wonder how hand-wringing white liberals, desperate to reconcile with their BIPOC friends, reaching for something beyond performative allyship, would feel if they simply apologized for systemic racism and the ways they have benefited from it, to one Black or Indigenous person.
The Transformative Power of Nothing
The crises forced some nonprofit administrative professionals like me into a state of suspended animation. Organizations closed offices. Many of us sat guiltily at home, wracked by worry about people who were essential and the safety they were compromising to keep us office-based folks and our families safe. We were faced with appallingly empty hours at home, severe lack of to do lists, a complete dearth of time and structure with which to orient ourselves. Time itself lost all meaning there for a while. (See: Letters from the Pandemic: The Demented Clock)
What do you do when there is nothing to do?
With no galas to plan, silent auction baskets to package, or email campaigns to write, we invented new tasks. We grew gardens, baked terrible bread, acquired chickens and houseplants, tried desperately to reorient ourselves to something resembling structure, because, as Zadie Smith writes in her 2020 collection “Intimations“, it was “something to do”. There is certainly pleasure in tasks all lined up by priority, a self-satisfied contentment in accomplishing them, a pleasant anxiety motivating us to continue until blessed completion. Check it off the list!
“I’ve never loved myself as much as when I was doing nothing. I’ve never hated myself as much as when I was doing nothing.”
Erika Prasad
But slowly we discovered that there was also something special in those moments that still creeped in when there wasn’t anything to do, moments without task or time, little reveries, watching a new leaf unfurl, staring at misshapen lumps of dough trying to will them to rise with the heat of our gaze.
In boredom, imagination has room to grow. I told Erika: All of my best program ideas have arisen during the quiet period right after a big event, when the accountants are counting up the results of all my months of hard fundraising work, and I don’t have to start on that appeal for another week. I putter around and clean up my digital workspace and stare blankly at the screen, doing nothing. Bloop bloop! Life-altering ideas bubble up.
In unproductive time there is room for reflection, self-examination. Much of the hard work of unlearning systemic racism must happen when there is sufficient quiet time, enough time to muse, to wonder, to regret, to resolve. This isn’t a new idea, of course, but it bears revisiting right now as we collectively emerge from the doldrums.
As we return to life at a faster pace, commutes and carpools and lengthening to-do lists, I worry that our ability to not-do is being lost.
I remember, I remember, I remember
CeeLo Green
When I lost my mind
There was something so pleasant about that place
Even your emotions had to let go
In so much space
Today, I hope you can find a moment to do nothing, a nice big empty space to lose your mind in, or a circumstance in which to create and savor joy for yourself or for someone else.
See you next week, when my guest is Grocery Croppers‘ Keith Hudson and the topic is one of my favorites: dirt.
Want to join me? Tea’s at ten on Tuesdays. Let’s chat.