Teaching power

What are we doing here if we're not helping people recognize, understand, and use power?

To me, this feels like a key question organizations need to be grappling with now.

Too many organizations act like they have power. But if they're not teaching people about power and building their power then, no, they don't have it themselves.

In this moment, if you don't have power you may have nothing.

I came up in a time when institutions were granted power. This seemed ok until it was not.

💰 "Here's my donation, you go do your good work and keep me updated."

💰"Here's my taxes, you go build the roads, build the parks, put out the fires and clean the water I drink."

💰"Here's my tuition money, you go educate my kid so they get a job and stop living at home."

💰"You seem like a nice smart leader. Here's my donation to your campaign. Now go to Congress and do your job."

Most of us didn't have to learn or care about power. Go to school, get a job, fill a house with stuff, raise kids. All good. Maybe we read about power in the news.

But power is like weather. It's always there. Shifting and evolving.

Power gets strong and weak. It can be concentrated in one spot or spread across a huge area.We ignore power at our peril.

One of the pieces I shared in a recent Future Community newsletter was from Jason Lewis who runs Responsive Fundraising.

In The Soft Authoritarianism of Institutional Philanthropy, Lewis writes about this moment when philanthropy seems to be pulling back from power. But the piece is mostly about the millions of moments preceding this one, when the collective we didn't build, manage, teach, understand, or use power:

Because power doesn’t ask for permission. It doesn’t wait for its turn. It rushes in, fills the vacuum, and rewrites the rules while everyone else is still workshopping their value statement.

We've been so busy building "messages" that we ignored power.

Hey, it's not just organizations. Members of Congress are so busy chasing dollars and poll numbers that they forgot about their own power and their institutional power.

Now they have none.

It's easy to critique philanthropy, funders, donors, and the system. But fact is, we're all stuck managing organizations and budgets amidst the wreckage of late-stage capitalism. Systems are broken. We should change them.

We need power to do that. Real power. Lasting power.

Email lists, petitions, followers, posts, clicks and even donations do not add up to power.

Some questions to ask yourself and your colleagues:

✊ Do we know what power is, how to use it, how to teach it and model it?

✊ Who out there are the people who are ready to learn about power and use it?

✊ Is this email, this blog post, this piece of content creating, using, expanding power?

✊ Does our mission, our values, our staffing and way of working recognize and build power to change and sustain change?

✊ Who are the 1,000 people on my list who will assemble and act? Who do they know? Do they have the skills and support to lead on their own?

If we don't know how to recognize and teach power we can't expect to every gain it, hold it or use it. Every organization can be part of this work.