Dismantling Historical Power Structures

by Leah Fox

SVP Portland works to dismantle racist systems by building bridges between communities and elevating the voices of those most impacted by injustice. As venture philanthropists, they mobilize skills, money, and influence, collectively building community capacity to solve problems together. SVP’s goal is to ensure that all children have high-quality, culturally relevant early learning experiences.

As part of an ongoing governance effort to decentralize decision-making and shift organizational power, SVP set up their first-ever Dynamic Team to answer the critical question of what their role should be around advocacy. SVP was looking for support facilitating the Dynamic Team and their decision-making process.

LFC collaborated with a racial equity facilitator to co-create a space that brought together community leaders, organizational staff and volunteers in a thoughtful, adaptive decision-making process. Relying on the wisdom within the group, we hosted a series of five in-depth conversations over four months. Each gathering captured feedback from participants via a 2-minute exit survey which allowed us to understand how well we lived out our stated values (e.g., collaboration, inclusion, respect, progress), and then apply learnings to design future meetings. Meetings utilized diverse strategies to facilitate engagement; from large group discussions to smaller break-out conversations and personal reflection or brainstorming, ensuring that participants could engage in a multitude of ways. 

The Dynamic Team process succeeded in shifting power by giving voice to community members most impacted by the work and empowering them to identify advocacy and influence priorities for SVP. A rigorous qualitative evaluation uncovered that overall, participants felt the experience was worth their time and effort, and most would be willing to participate again.