Following session one of our new webinar “From Insight to Impact: a Community Learning and Action Series,” Boston Women’s Fund facilitated session two of the series, examining the philanthropic systems that shape equity in our region and what it would take to change them for the better.
In this session, “Missing & Opaque Systems: Who is Locked Out?,” we looked at visibility within Boston's nonprofit sector to better understand why some organizations are highly visible in philanthropy and why others are greatly overlooked.
Asha Abdullahi (she/her) joined the conversation to share her experience as a grassroots leader and founder of Somali Parents Advocacy Center for Education (SPACE), a Boston-based organization whose mission is to support, educate, empower, and inspire parents of special needs children to be better advocates for their families.
Asha was driven by personal experience within the Somali community in Boston and years of educating herself while advocating for her son with special needs. She created SPACE as a response to the barriers many Somali families with children with disabilities face while navigating educational and health care systems that often lack cultural understanding and language access. SPACE “creates a space” where Somali children with special needs can be treated as the seen, heard, and valued members of the community that they are.
While Asha navigates visibility issues within her own community, lack of visibility in the data complicates her path to creating change.
Visibility in the Data
When compared to the rest of the nonprofit sector, grassroots nonprofits tend to be so small that they are under-represented or missed entirely in the research guiding philanthropic leaders. So in our latest research report, Carrying the Weight, Leading the Change, we zoomed in to focus exclusively on grassroots organizations.
Our researchers spent a year analyzing a broad spectrum of data, including leader demographics in Candid’s database, along with info from the IRS’s Exempt Organizations Business Master File, four types of IRS 990 forms, the U.S. Census Bureau, the Boston Public Health Commission (BPHC), and other major datasets. With this, we created the first-ever count of grassroots organizations led by women and gender-expansive people of color in Greater Boston. But even through our intentional approach, we know some organizations still fell through the cracks.
Data gaps don’t just impact grassroots organizations. Vulnerable populations, like BIPOC, immigrant, and LGBTQIA+ communities, are often inaccurately measured, as well. Here’s the critical part: what gets measured gets valued, and what gets valued gets funded.
The complicated part is that we also recognize that remaining uncounted has also been protective. Historically and presently, data collection is used as a means of surveillance, criminalization, and isolation of these communities, which can lead to rational distrust in the systems that continue to fail and harm them.
Despite this duality, visibility does shape where resources flow. In 2020, during a period of racial equity and public commitments to equity, grassroots organizations gained new attention, new funding relationships, and new visibility. From 2019 to 2020, average grant revenue for grassroots organizations led by women and gender-expansive leaders of color rose from $433K to $491K. Yet, in 2021, it immediately dropped back to $440K after enthusiasm for racial equity began to decline among the public. By 2023, this number fell to $368K.
Asha’s Experience on the Ground
Asha’s leadership reflects many of the themes surfaced in Carrying the Weight, Leading the Change, including visibility, language access, community trust, navigating systems, and what it means to sustain community work when your impact isn't always visible to philanthropy.
Our research and conversation with Asha emphasized that visibility is not neutral. It is shaped by systems, relationships, and proximity to power.
SPACE has been recognized with awards and front-page headlines in the Boston Globe, but media visibility is not always enough to attract funders. Public recognition may show the importance of work, but that kind of exposure has not always translated into sustainable funding partnerships. Research from the report found that access to relationships and networks shapes funding, despite the expertise and impacts of the leaders.
“Who gets the relationship with the funders gets the funds…with the network comes everything.” — Study Participant, Carrying The Weight, Leading the Change
Lack of support from philanthropic funders results in reliance on individual fundraising (raising funds from the public), which is difficult when the same staff responsible for fundraising are also leading work in the community. Focusing on individual fundraising takes time, people, and resources away from meeting community needs.
When funders shift toward unrestricted funding and minimal reporting requirements, it alleviates fundraising and administrative burdens, so grassroots leaders can dedicate their time to their mission. With adequate resources, women and gender-expansive grassroots leaders of color do not have to choose between fundraising to sustain their organizations and working to serve and better their communities.
The Takeaway
Philanthropic funders have the power to change the standards that determine who is visible and where resources go. It is crucial that funders zoom in to find the small grassroots organizations that sustain our communities daily. When gaps in data are overlooked, vulnerable communities and grassroots organizations are often missed and critical solutions for change are underfunded.
Funders can also intentionally include members from historically overlooked communities in their decision-making, and/or use community surveys to identify organizations doing critical community work and use that to build their grantee candidate pool. All of these efforts can address potential blind spots, support those closest to the challenges (like grassroots leaders), and increase investments in proximate expertise that can sustain, uplift, and strengthen communities.
Join us for our next session of “From Insight to Impact,” “The Burden Beyond the Balance Sheet: The Human Cost of Scarcity,” on Friday, September 25! Learn more and RSVP here today!
