Effective Change Requires Proximate Leaders

“The current system isn’t working for us,” says GirlTrek co-founder T. Morgan Dixon. “So we’re building one that is.”

(Illustration by iStock/Lyubov Ivanova)

Black women in the United States face a health crisis. They are dying at higher rates than any other group from preventable diseases. About 82 percent of Black women are overweight and 137 Black women die of heart disease every day—more than from gun violence, smoking, and HIV/AIDS combined.

Why is this happening? For years weight-loss companies, government interventions, and public health campaigns have offered solutions designed as if the primary driver of poor health outcomes among Black women is limited knowledge about fitness and nutrition. Yet for most Black women these solutions don’t address the root cause of the health crisis. These well-intentioned efforts have missed the fact that the stark health outcomes Black women face are deeply intertwined with centuries of distinct social and structural stressors and inequities.

Dixon and Vanessa Garrison set out to change this. The two are long-time friends who supported one another in building and sustaining a healthy lifestyle. Importantly, they come from the very community they are trying to help, enabling them to recognize both the challenges and assets Black women face when striving to get and stay healthy.

Dixon and Garrison recognized the ways in which Black women like themselves are afforded fewer resources and protections than women of other racial identity groups, resulting in social inequities such as income inequality, underemployment, poor access to preventative health care, lack of leisure time, and disconnection from communal life, to name a few. Taken together, these inequities limit many Black women’s activity levels while simultaneously increasing the number of systemic stressors, resulting in a disproportionately high number who experience stress and weight-related ailments such as hypertension, diabetes, and coronary disease.

Combining their backgrounds as educators and advocates, Dixon and Garrison created GirlTrek, an organization whose approach brings together physical activity, such as walking, with programs designed to help Black women reclaim their identities and rebuild their communities.

“Solutions in the mainstream might focus on weight loss or looking good in skinny jeans without acknowledging the trauma that Black women hold in our bellies and bones, that has been embedded in our very DNA,” said Garrison in a May 19, 2017 TED Talk. “The best advice from hospitals and doctors, the best medications from pharmaceutical companies . . . didn’t acknowledge systemic racism.”

Much of the work done to date to address health outcomes among Black women treats them as a monolithic group and defines them solely by their collective struggles and injuries.  This approach is at best uninspiring and in some cases harmful. GirlTrek reframed the dominant culture concept of “fitness” and infused it with what they call a “360 degree agenda to make our communities healthier.”

GirlTrek has experienced a surge in membership and demand as they have expanded their offerings based on input and guidance from Black women across the country. In June 2019 GirlTrek had 175,000 members. Since then—in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, economic recession, and racial reconciliation—GirlTrek’s membership has grown to more than 800,000 women, making it the nation’s largest health movement for Black women, activating each member to be changemakers in their lives, families and communities.

The organization’s adaptive campaigns have seen record-breaking reach, for example 1.4 million viewers engaged in their #DaughtersOf webinar series with 14 million impressions across social media. Recognizing that social distancing could risk isolation for its members, GirlTrek created a podcast called Black History Bootcamp that within two months outperformed 90 percent of all podcasts, cracking the top 10 percent of listenership on Apple and Spotify.

For Trekkers, the life-affirming energy of participating in individual, community-wide, and nationwide action is palpable. GirlTrek expects to enroll 1 million active members by the close of 2020 and aspires to increase life expectancy of Black women by 10 years in 10 years.

Duke University Professor Gary Bennett speaks to the power of GirlTrek. He was quoted in a New York Times article as saying: “I have been doing work on obesity as it affects medically vulnerable populations for 15 years, and I don’t know of anything in the scientific community or any public health campaigns that have been able to produce and sustain engagement around physical activity for Black women like GirlTrek does. Not even close.”

Why Proximate Leaders Are Essential

Dixon and Garrison are examples of what we call a “proximate leader,” someone who has a meaningful relationship with groups whose identity, experience, or community are systemically stereotyped, feared, dismissed, or marginalized. Being a proximate leader is about much more than being exposed to or studying a group of people and its struggles to overcome adversity. It’s about actually being a part of that group or being meaningfully guided by that group’s input, ideas, agendas, and assets.

Leaders who are proximate to the communities and issues they serve have the experience, relationships, data, and knowledge that are essential for developing solutions with measurable and sustainable impact. Importantly, proximate leaders also have the ability to recognize and leverage assets within communities that are often overlooked or misunderstood when viewed through a dominant culture lens.

Mauricio Lim Miller, who founded The Family Independence Initiative, is another example of a proximate leader. Miller was born in Mexico. When he was nine years old, Miller’s mother emigrated to the United States, bringing along Mauricio and his older sister. Unfortunately, the Miller family’s integration experience was not an easy one.

Despite great determination and intelligence, Miller’s mother experienced discrimination and repeated sexual harassment, making it challenging for her to find a supportive work environment where she could earn a steady income. Miller’s sister became involved in an abusive relationship and found herself moving in and out of poverty each time the relationship with her husband soured.

Miller was troubled by the negative views that professionals who were trying to help his family often had of his mother and sister, people he knew to be talented, resourceful, and smart. He came to realize that the ways that most government agencies and nonprofit organizations tried to help people like his mother and sister were misaligned with what it really takes to assist people out of poverty.

When people are in crisis, they need the kind of safety net that the government and nonprofits provide. But when they pass out of crisis they need a totally different system and approach to put themselves on a permanent path to full and independent lives, one that no organization was providing. What was needed, Miller concluded, was an alternative system.

In 2001 with the urging and support of then-Oakland Mayor (and subsequently Governor of California) Jerry Brown, Miller founded The Family Independence Initiative (FII). The core premise of FII is that to truly assist families in escaping poverty, FII must take direction from the very families it seeks to help since the families are the experts of their own lives.

When families enroll with FII, they are asked to submit baseline data about their income, savings, education, health, and housing and to keep a regular journal of activity. Families from the same community who already know one another are organized into cohorts. These cohorts meet regularly to set their own goals and help each other find solutions to problems such as identifying resources for childcare, tuition, or starting a business.

To track all of this information FII created a technology platform called UpTogether, which enables FII to learn and capture trends, and for families to see and understand their own journey. They also use the data to enable other stakeholders, including government and philanthropists, to better understand how families move out of poverty.

What sort of results is FII achieving? After two years with FII, families report on average a 22 percent increase in monthly income, a 55 percent decrease in government subsidies, and a doubling of their financial assets. They also report improved educational outcomes for their children and increases in sharing across their social network—such as giving and receiving childcare, providing financial support, and making job referrals.

FII has expanded well beyond Oakland, and today has established core operations in twelve other cities. As the pandemic has unfolded, FII has created funding partners across the country, touching families in all 50 US states and reaching more than 100,000 households. Proximity, at least in some quarters, is gaining respect.

Practicing Bricolage  

Bricolage is often defined as ‘something constructed or created from a diverse range of available things.’ In connection with entrepreneurship, bricolage implies a combination of practicality (making do with what you have) and craftsmanship (making something unique and valued).

Proximate leaders, it turns out, are particularly adept at using bricolage to create solutions to social problems. For Marcus Bullock bricolage came in the form of mail, the old-fashioned postal service kind. While Bullock was serving an eight-year prison sentence for a crime he committed when he was 15 years old, he maintained contact with his family and the outside world through his mother, who sent him a letter and a picture every day.

“In prison, mail call is the best part of the day, every day,” said Bullock in an October 15, 2019 TED Talk. “Actually getting mail is like winning the lottery.” Even his friends in the cell block began to live vicariously through his mother’s letters. “My mom would send me the funniest pictures. She would send me a photo of a cheeseburger, or a mattress at a department store, with a promise that read, ‘Hey Marcus, one day you’re going to enjoy this fat juicy burger,’ or ‘You’ll sleep in a comfortable bed one day.’ It allowed me to see what the future of my life would be like.”

After Bullock left prison and began to build a successful life, he still heard from his incarcerated friends who yearned for outside connection. “My friends would constantly ask for pictures of this new life I was living,” said Bullock. From personal experience, Bullock knew that receiving those outside messages of hope while in prison was not only a daily lifeline, it was part of what had prepared him to re-enter society. But he didn’t have time to write letters to his friends in prison. And email, texting, and social media are not allowed in prison.

Bullock realized that he could solve the communications challenge by combining today’s technology to create a message with yesterday’s technology to deliver it. Bullock launched Flikshop. For as little as 79 cents Flikshop allows people to take a photo, add some quick text, and press ‘send.’ Flikshop then prints the photo and text on a postcard and mails it to an inmate at any prison in the country. Today, Flikshop has more than 180,000 users who have sent more than 400,000 postcards to friends and family members in all 50 states. Bullock calls Flikshop, “Instagram for the incarcerated.”

Given the power of this connection and the trauma that incarcerated individuals and their families and friends endure, it is perhaps not surprising that Flikshop has spawned a community of participants. Flikshop now has about 20,000 friends on Facebook who know that they can trust the experience of other members, and this is creating new connections across the United States. For example, a Flikshop user whose husband has just been incarcerated might ask for and receive guidance from other users on what they can wear when visiting a particular prison facility.

Nurturing Human Potential

The proximate leaders that we have studied and worked with have two additional qualities that stand out. The first of these is that they are unabashedly asset-based in their view of those they wish to help. The second is that when working with people in the community they focus on several dimensions of human potential which, when taken together, can form the foundation for achieving transformational results.

When we talk about being asset-based we mean eliminating the practice of defining less-protected communities as a culmination of deficits or traumas. Asset-based means first recognizing that all communities, including those often labeled as “marginalized” or “disenfranchised,” are filled with knowledge, skills, ideas, and solutions that if respected and supported, can scale up in ways that advance sustainability, impact, and self-determination.

The five dimensions of human potential we see proximate leaders attending to most in their interactions with others are the following.

Human Dignity | People who are part of a group that has been marginalized or prevented access to basic services such as health and housing often report feeling invisible to large parts of society, while at the same time feeling hyper-visible to others—the police for example—who project unwarranted pathologies onto them. Proximate leaders see the individuals they serve fully without judgement or qualification, recognizing that all people have unique gifts and assets.

Connection | As we are seeing so visibly with the COVID-19 pandemic, people need to connect with others—it’s an essential part of thriving as a human being. As Bullock, Miller, Garrison, and Dixon all illustrate, proximate leaders’ intimate knowledge of their communities can enable them to find ingenious ways of connecting people—ways that might not be as apparent to others who don’t have their lived experience.

Community | Proximate leaders recognize that they are part of a larger group who are walking together on the same path. Members of healthy communities feel that they “belong to each other,” in the words of Mother Teresa. For proximate leaders the multiplicity of connections a person has with others in their community is an extension of the assets that individual has. The stronger one’s community ties, the stronger one’s assets and ability to thrive.

Agency | When proximate leaders work with people in their community they strive to ensure that everyone feels they have agency—a person’s belief that they can shape their own future, relationships, and environment. People who believe they have agency also believe that they can change the world. For Miller and FII, for example, agency means supporting a family to the point where they believe they can steer their life in one direction or another of their own accord, instead of being handed choices over which they have no discretion.

A Sense of Possibility | Most entrepreneurs and organization leaders are optimistic and believe that no matter how challenging things are right now, they can get better. What makes proximate leaders different is that they try to help the people they work with also have the same sense of possibility. They are acutely sensitive to cultivating the spark within people that flickers in search of a promising future.

Honoring the Expertise of the Community

To increase impact, social sector decision makers must recognize the assets and expertise within the communities they seek to support. In one respect this is not a new idea. Over the last decade more and more social sector leaders have adopted approaches such as community engagement, human-centered design, and user feedback tools such as the net promoter score. The core idea running through all of these approaches is to ensure that the professionals who design and run social sector programs take into account the needs and perspectives of the people they wish to help.

While these processes and methodologies are important, they are not sufficient for transformative, systems-level change. What are needed are proximate leaders such as Bullock, Miller, Dixon, and Garrison, people who have already demonstrated the ability to develop grassroots high-impact strategies and solutions that have had transformative effect on their communities.

Leaders who are proximate are not just good for upfront input, after-the-fact feedback, or even engagement throughout. Proximate leaders should be leading, not following, the field’s cadre of academic, nonprofit, governmental, and business experts in creating solutions to their community’s challenges.

Not only should proximate leaders be supported in creating solutions, they should also be provided with resources to scale up solutions that are working. As Ford Foundation President Darren Walker wrote, “They are not objects of charity, but drivers of change.”

If proximate leaders have all of these important attributes, why aren’t foundations and philanthropists funding them to the same extent that they fund other types of nonprofit leaders? Why is it that only 4 percent of US philanthropic dollars go to organizations led by people of color? Why are nonprofits in rural parts of the country funded at a much lower rate than urban nonprofits? Why do so many funders look for nonprofits led by people with degrees from elite colleges and universities?

There are several reasons why proximate leaders are not funded. To start, many funders believe that proximate leaders are riskier bets. In her book, Biased, Stanford University Professor Jennifer Eberhardt provides insight into what may be driving this perception. People are hard-wired to feel safer with leaders, methodologies, and diagnoses with which they are familiar. Familiarity leads to perceived safety, safety leads to trust, and trust is a key driver of decision making for investments, power sharing, and support.

With fewer influential contacts and less access to start-up capital, organizations led by proximate leaders are often small, making it that much more difficult to attract funders. As a result, initiatives started by better connected leaders will grow faster than initiatives started by proximate leaders. This self-perpetuating cycle gets further accentuated when next-in funders add grant dollars to the ideas that have already been approved by first-in funders.

In addition, proximate leaders often see greater nuance and multiple root causes behind the issues they are addressing. As a result, their interventions are often more systemic in nature, addressing the multiple conditions that hold their communities back. GirlTrek for example, focuses on physical health, yet its outcomes cascade into mental health, community-built environment, and the community activism of its members.

Consequently, these systemic interventions are not as easily measured as a single-point intervention or easily attributed to the work of a single organization. Many funders view greater ambiguity around outcomes as a signal of greater risk of success.

Expanding the Promise of Proximity

While philanthropy has made it difficult for proximate leaders to succeed, it can also play an important role in bringing greater attention, money, and resources to proximate leaders. For philanthropists who wish to broaden their grantmaking portfolio to more readily support proximate leaders, we offer several recommendations.

Broaden your networks to surface proximate entrepreneurs with whom you would not typically come into contact. Many funders have moved away from open RFP (request for proposal) processes, instead relying on their existing networks to identify potential grantees. However, selecting grantees based solely on those who are in one’s network carries a great risk of selection bias. To counter this it is important to proactively connect with representatives of the communities you wish to serve for recommendations of who they believe merits attention.

Create an initiative specifically targeting proximate entrepreneurs. New Profit (a venture philanthropy where two of us work), for example, has an initiative called Unlocked Futures that solely funds proximate leaders who have been directly impacted by the criminal justice system.

Provide support for proximate entrepreneurs to help them with the grant submission process. Many government and philanthropic initiatives provide consultants who work with grant applicants to ensure that they receive an equitable shot at funding based on the merit of their approach and not on the style of their presentation. Even if you don’t or can’t fund coaching, make sure that program staff are available to provide proximate leaders with extra attention during the grant application process.

Ensure that program decision makers, as well as your board, receive implicit bias training. Everyone brings some level of unconscious bias to their relationships, understanding, and decision making. Training in and use of implicit bias tools can help minimize the degree to which bias factors into grant decision making.

Be willing to shift your cultural model and expectations for grantees. Much of mainstream philanthropy remains in a dominant cultural mode, prioritizing such qualities as perfectionism, perpetual sense of urgency, and valuing content over process. These cultural characteristics work against developing sustainable and transformative solutions that are based on lived experience but which may have less of a traditional evidence base.

We live in a highly segregated society and function as if our fates are not connected. We learn, live, work, and worship within networks and communities that are often homogeneous racially, culturally, economically, and politically. A recent survey found that 75 percent of white individuals reported that their social network is 100 percent white.

To create and sustain the organizations and movements that will truly change society for the better, the status quo won’t do. Philanthropy and the rest of the social sector must build greater support for proximate leaders who are capable of creating solutions that are both sustainable and transformative. These proximate leaders will enable the sector to fully tap the human potential of the most vulnerable and marginalized, leading to a more just and equitable world for all.

Read more stories by Angela Jackson, Tulaine Montgomery & John Kania.