"In grassroots and nonprofit community spaces across Greater Boston, leadership often looks less like institutional power and more like improvisation. It looks like pulling double shifts and answering crisis calls after midnight because there is no backup staff. Stretching one grant across three programs. Delaying salaries to keep community services running. It looks like carrying not only organizational responsibility, but also the emotional, relational and material weight of entire communities navigating inequality and philanthropy’s underinvestment.
"A new report, Carrying the Weight, Leading the Change: How Women of Color Grassroots Leaders Navigate Inequities While Driving Solutions, developed in partnership by UMass Boston’s Center for Women in Politics & Public Policy and Boston Women’s Fund, offers a rare, close look at these dynamics. The report focuses specifically on Greater Boston, but the conditions it documents feel strikingly familiar to grassroots leaders across the country. The study reveals what happens when women of color leaders become the infrastructure communities rely on while being denied the resources to sustain that work."
