Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Education equity means that a student of color receives an equal and quality education as white students do.
What we tried to do is really create that new wave of activists,
but again activists who are grounded in a sound spiritual foundation.
When people can see you stepping up and walking with them, versus just serving.
A long term systemic change has to come within the community. It comes from the heart of the community.
A lot of Headwaters efforts start from people talking to their neighbors and having a conversation about something that just isn’t right in their community.
We were a small organization – just a couple of staff. We had this idea and we had no money for it.
Through a conversation with Headwaters Fund, they became the first institutional funder of that work.
To think back on that and realize the risk that Headwaters was taking on us at that time, it’s pretty special.
Grantees understand that the root cause of injustice is in systems and they work on systems change.
If a roof has a hole in it, and there is water that’s coming through. It’s important to put a bucket under that hole.
What social change work is is someone climbing up on the roof and fixing the hole.
We fund community organizing exclusively as a strategy for change.
Headwaters was there at the beginning, there to take a risk on what we started out doing,
and gave us a chance to build ourselves up so that we could actually organize others and raise other resources to do the work.
You have the sense that we are all fellow travelers together.
Our board table includes both donors and activitists.
And in our grantmaking decision processes, we have a team of about 25 grassroots activists that are making decisions about proposals as they come forward.
I like the fact that they don’t do their job behind a desk.
Headwaters isn’t just funding a community for social change, they’re a part of it.
We connect small groups to larger groups, but we also connect small foundations, like Headwaters to larger foundations locally and nationally.
Together we have a much larger impact than we do separately.
It helps you to be a little bolder in what you want to move in the state, because you know that there is someone else alongside with you.
We believe that there is a better future for all of us, and that when we lay that foundation for that work,
we can all have the opportunity to be a better community together.