In an article written by Dawn Wolfe, staff writer at Inside Philanthropy, Sidney expands upon the LeadersTrust’s flagship model, the Flexible Leadership Award, and how it affords nonprofit leaders critical resources in addition to general operating support, to focus solely on building their leadership and deepening their organization’s capacity. We know from experience that this targeted support offers a separate lifeline for leaders to do the internally-focused work necessary to take their organizations from merely surviving, to thriving.

Meanwhile, Sidney also calls upon the sector as a whole to also engage in hard, reflective work and ensure that philanthropy moves beyond mere values and toward true relationship with Black, Indigenous, and People-of-Color-led organizations at the community level.

Here’s an excerpt from the piece:

“At the end of the day,” Hargro said, philanthropy’s “muscle memory” of the way it has always operated toward minority communities “will likely come right back a couple years removed from this time. And the only way to make sure that you don’t go back is that you do the work internally, which is hard. It’s messy. It requires us to really talk about how those values you wrote down show up in practice and relationship with communities that you might have been funding but had zero relationship with.”

You can read the full article (with a subscription) from Inside Philanthropy here.