The Fund for Liberatory Practice at the LeadersTrust
The Fund for Liberatory Practice (the Fund) was launched in 2022 by the Resilience Initiative and the LeadersTrust to help support and amplify the field-building and exploratory work of liberatory practitioners more broadly. It was designed to provide grants and modest communications support to organizational development practitioners who are in active, productive partnership with social change leaders and organizations, and who are eager to expand and amplify liberatory practice.
The Fund’s core objectives were to:
- Increase the ability among organizational development practitioners who lead with liberatory equity-focused approaches to spend time defining, building-out and ‘trying on’ new ways of working at the leading edge of this practice.
- Engender greater opportunity among practitioners to share their insights and innovation in ways that also extend and deepen learning among peers and philanthropic partners.
- Advance our collective understanding about innovative, equity-infused leadership and organizational practices which responsibly address the needs, interests, challenges and opportunities of today’s social change leaders and teams.
The first round achieved several positive outcomes including: delivered $15K awards and professional development opportunities to 20 practitioners (out of 218 applications); facilitated connections between them and existing professional networks of social justice practitioners; collected stories about liberated practice, thereby adding to sector knowledge; and demonstrated how funding can reach and be delivered to individual practitioners working on the ground, in community. An additional intention of the Fund, also achieved, was to acknowledge, honor, compensate, and amplify the work that is in motion and has been carried out by ‘innovating’ practitioners over time — a significant number of whom are grounded in the BIPOC and queer community.
Recently, to initiate story organization and storytelling, the LeadersTrust engaged researchers Shiree Teng and Ernesto Saldaña. They reviewed the original application submissions for round one of the Fund and then organized a few focus groups with awarded practitioners, our advisors, and several practitioners who submitted for the awards but were not funded.
We invite you to explore the story of the Fund through the products that have emerged from this work. First, we have a slide deck on liberatory practices. It is available as a document, or in a video version narrated by Shiree. We also have the Liberatory Practices Summary, which describes the Fund’s first phase, including more about who liberatory practitioners are, and the shape and experience of the first funding invitation.