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By Michael McAfee & Ashleigh Gardere
After a year of political chaos and setbacks of hard-won gains, many in the nonprofit sector are grieving what we’ve lost and bracing for what new battles tomorrow will bring. We must not deflect or deny this despair but reflect on our role in how we got here.
While it’s easy to fall into the learned practice of finger-pointing or blaming, the hard truth is that our lack of urgent, courageous, results-based leadership at a systemic scale contributed to this moment. If we want to lead the nation out of this mess, we can’t just hope for it all to pass. We must take ownership of our sector’s contribution to this moment — not to blame the victim, but to make a clear-eyed and accountable assessment that empowers us to lead more effectively in the future.
Many of us for decades have softened our message that this nation must serve all people. We have been apologetic about what we’re fighting for, self-censored our vision, or tiptoed around race, class, gender, and other ways of exclusion. Our sector has too often prioritized the tenderness of egos over the urgency of our vision and impact, centering comfort over liberating strategy.
We are learning a tough lesson that results-based leadership can build up or tear down, provide or withhold, lift-up or harm. Those set on an exclusionary vision for this nation have delivered on the results-based leadership our sector loves to talk about — these organizations know exactly who they serve and declare it without hesitation.
Meanwhile, we seem to be ashamed to proudly stand for serving all, especially the more than 85 million people struggling to make ends meet in this country — and more than willing to sacrifice Black and brown people and poor whites at the altar of political appeasement. Faced with these pressures, many organizations are tempted to retreat into the work that’s deemed safe: charity, or programs that won’t rock the boat or land them on any hit list — as if we can hide from the politics of our work, and as if charity and programs will significantly impact the 85 million (the data shows it won’t be enough).
But to play small and operate from a place of fear would be the ultimate failure. We cannot shirk our responsibility to courageously lead through this moment. We need to stay focused on our vision and take up the results-driven leadership necessary to see it to fruition.
The good news is that what we must deliver is clear. The demands of the people have remained the same for over a hundred years, from the Great Depression (1920s) to the Civil Rights Movement (1950s and 1960s) to the Occupy Movement (2010s) to the Movement for Black Lives (2020’s): housing, education, safety, jobs, a clean environment. A strong economy. A strong democracy. A strong citizenry of people who have what they need.
Designing a nation that delivers these results requires our sector to assume a founders’ stance — a leadership approach that takes on the work of building a thriving, multiracial democracy. As founders, we do the work for the generations to come, even if our vision seems impossible to imagine now.
To lead as founders, we must cultivate these six leadership capacities:
- Foresight to see beyond the known, and the courage to act on behalf of all people to shape our nation’s future.
- Radical imagination to expand the bounds of our creativity to envision what has never been done and breathe life into the fullest promise of the Constitution: liberty and justice for all.
- Audacity to set our vision as bold as the future it seeks, trusting in both our individual and collective power to achieve it.
- Humility to prioritize the power of the whole over the power of one, building with the belief that collective thriving is our most necessary pursuit.
- Love for all to do no harm to people or planet, see the inherent dignity and humanity in every person, and to work in service of their thriving.
- Self-renewal to reflect, learn, and release what no longer serves—so we can take decisive action to design a just and flourishing society.
Today, we see a small group of people in power using the first three capacities — foresight, radical imagination, and audacity — to unapologetically govern for the few. But the work of building a nation for all is harder, because the country was never designed to do so. That’s why we need new leadership, new institutions, new laws and regulations, and new customs and norms to make this evolutionary leap.
And it’s the final three capacities — humility, love for all, and self-renewal — that we must simultaneously embody as founders.
What does this look like in practice? Foresight, radical imagination, and audacity requires not just opposing the status quo, but projecting a vision of what we want to build. This means designing governing models that center the most excluded. This entails redesigning federal agencies to deliver measurable results for people, and a new legal framework so that our strategies are durable and enforceable by law.
Humility requires looking honestly at our leadership and our organizations. Are we delivering results to the communities to whom we’re accountable? Should we still have the right to exist if we are not? We must ask ourselves, are we willing to hold our institution and our partnerships accountable for delivering material benefits to the 85 million people struggling to make ends meet in this country? The answers to these questions led us to assume this founders’ stance.
Love for all means designing systems that serve all people — especially those often not acknowledged when we use the word all. This requires us to build coalitions, organizations and governing institutions where we affirm that in the richest nation on earth, there is enough for all to thrive. And for those of us in leadership positions, it requires us to choose to do the thing that doesn’t cost money, doesn’t require launching a big bet or new initiative — simply stop causing harm.
Self-renewal means we cannot cling to the strategies of the past. It means we release what no longer supports our ability to design a nation that supports the flourishing of all. That could entail renewing organizational leadership, sharing resources with lesser-funded organizations, and nurturing our internal organizational cultures to withstand the challenges ahead.
We have decades of work ahead of us, and generations beyond. But like our ancestors before us who dared to claim freedoms deemed impossible, we must ground ourselves in a vision beyond today’s chaos. By embodying these six leadership capacities, we will be centered in our power and purpose, which will sustain us through the despair and loss — because we know the arc of transformation is long and fraught.
We must be founders of a renewed nation. Together, we can redesign and build a democracy that serves all — one that has never existed but is ours to create.
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Michael McAfee is CEO and Ashleigh Gardere is president of PolicyLink, a national research and action institute working to redesign this nation so that it governs for all.
