A Liberatory Approach to Centering Race in Leadership

This is the second article in NPQ’s series Liberatory Leadership.

Nonprofit leaders, leaders committed to racial and social justice, are ringing the alarms about the state of our sector and the viability of our work. Over the last several months, those alarms have increased in volume and frequency, as leaders encounter a political and funding environment that makes the already hard work of advancing racial equity and racial justice more difficult.

At Leadership Learning Community (LLC), we are concerned both about the work and the people who are doing the work, as it becomes clearer that this is an endurance game. As things currently stand, only those leaders and institutions that are well-resourced will have the ability to endure and outlast this country’s escalating trajectory towards authoritarianism, particularly those with social privilege and independent resources. BIPOC leaders and those from historically marginalized communities and backgrounds will face the brunt of the consequences. By design, this will mean constrained advances, encumbered work, and erosions to previous wins, as well as burnout.

While the current attacks on social justice feel unprecedented, systems of oppression resisting liberatory transformation is not a new occurrence. This means we already have wisdom and experience we can use from past experiences. Our two publications, Leadership & Race: A Call to Each Other, Exploration of the Current Racial Justice Landscape and Recommendations for Action, and Liberatory Leadership Framework, offer ideas based on our collective wisdom to address the current conditions, while centering our joy and humanity.

While the current shape of the attacks on social justice feels unprecedented, there is nothing new about systems of oppression resisting liberatory transformation.

These resources explore three critical questions: 1) how can we make the sector’s leadership approaches more racially just by supporting the development of racial justice leaders?; 2) how can leadership in the sector advance actual racial justice in the United States?; and 3) how do we practice leadership that advances liberation?

In 2025, we might amend those questions to ask: 1) how will we conduct racial justice work in this moment when terms and concepts like diversity, equity, and inclusion have been vilified, and we are witnessing a rollback to well-established civil rights?;  2) how will we resource racial justice leaders, and critically, BIPOC leaders, to survive and thrive in this current moment?; and 3)  how do we practice leadership that fights for liberation without replicating models of oppression?

The Burdens on BIPOC Leaders

Neha Mahajan and Felicia Griffin, cofounders of Transformative Leadership for Change, already warned us in 2023 that “BIPOC leaders are being asked to simultaneously dismantle the past, survive in the present, and create an alternative future.”

LLC’s Liberatory Leadership Framework offers an ecosystem-sourced model for practicing leadership differently and supporting leaders who are navigating this complexity as they attempt to lead with their communities toward liberation. This support is critical now, given the active efforts we are all seeing on the federal, state and local levels to silence people engaged in the work of undoing systems of oppression, racism, and White supremacy.

Even telling the story of inequity and injustice is being delegitimized. This is part of an intentional and comprehensive attempt to erase the history, voices, and claims of BIPOC people, women, and others who have experienced discrimination and disenfranchisement.

Social justice leaders have entered this work because they care, and despite the circumstances, they remain committed to their causes.

In this atmosphere of fear, uncertainty, and disorientation, social-good leaders are also facing decreases, delays, and increased restrictions in their funding. This means they are being forced to support their teams and continue core work, with even fewer resources, while withstanding multidirectional attacks. Many of these BIPOC leaders took on their roles near and around the pandemic, have already been navigating unforeseen challenges, while they face high expectations as well as constrained and declining resources.

Social justice leaders entered this work because they care and, despite the circumstances, remain committed to their communities. But that does not mean they are immune from harms in this political environment.

LLC is observing and experiencing tremendous leader burnout and exhaustion, and we anticipate more. The leaders we meet are much more conscious of what they say, and they are unsure of what is smart and strategic or a capitulation and self-censorship. Funding loss and uncertainty are also causing direct financial harm, as organizations are forced to reduce staff and decrease programming, which is leading to discord and despair for their workers and communities.

We know this is heavy, so we invite you to breathe: Inhale 1. 2. 3. 4. Exhale 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. Repeat.

What Can We Do? Surviving Together

Where is the light amid all this doom and gloom? The answer is we are the light, we are the ones we have been waiting for. Despite these hard circumstances, LLC is seeing and practicing vulnerability and openness at much higher levels. We are joining our peers and saying out loud the hard and scary things we face, so that we might work together to preserve and advance our missions.

This reflects an observably deep desire for collaboration, liberatory practice, and collective organizing across our sector. Leaders know that the attacks against us are intended to disorganize and disorient us, and that the only way to survive is to do so together through mutual aid, collaboration, and solidarity. We titled our report Leadership & Race: A Call to Each Other because we recognize that we can answer our own questions. Together, we have the knowledge, skill, and commitment to co-create effective solutions.

Drawing on that wisdom, here are some recommendations sourced from our reports to support racial justice and liberatory practice:

1. Fund, don’t cut, don’t wait. In fact, give more. The time is now. The hard times, the emergency, the rainy day you have been saving for is here now. We know that funders are also feeling vulnerable and are navigating risks. But the risks to philanthropy are far lower than they are to grantee partners, especially smaller, less-resourced grassroots and BIPOC-led groups. Provide long-term, abundant, and flexible funding, ideally in the form of general operating resources. This will allow groups to be as smart, strategic, and responsive as possible.

If you offer programmatic grants, apply the fewest restrictions and account for the infrastructure and administrative costs that this work requires, including the need to change and pivot.

2. Restore overburdened leaders by supporting their healing. Recognize their need to recover from the same oppressive systems they are attempting to transform. Examples of this support include sabbaticals, learning communities, retreats, and coaching. Care for the caretakers, those individuals and organizations that support the sector.

3. Join together. As Morning Star Gali, founder of Indigenous Justice, reminds us, “Leadership is not just one person; it requires collective responsibility.”

4. Liberatory leaders, take collective responsibility for our freedom dreams. The only way through this is together, so we urge you to band together, help one another, and avoid resource-hoarding and gatekeeping. LLC encourages funders to resource collaboration and partnership and minimize competition, so that grantee partners can do the work of “holding space to lead collectively.” That is what Brooke Treadwell, Culture, Race, and Equity officer at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, recommended and adds, “Holding space for your own humanity and the humanity of everyone else that’s with you—co-leading.”

5. Make space for joy and love. What we are experiencing is purposely heartless, intended to frighten and demoralize us. Liberatory leadership provides us with a remedy by centering love and joy. Liberatory leadership’s focus on connection, empathy, and care is in direct opposition to the intentional cruelty of the current regime. As LLC’s Director of Liberatory Programs, Iman Mills Gordon, wrote in 2024 about leading with love, “I’ve also been thinking more about how love, at the core, is an antidote to so much of what we see in our current systems.”

6. Boldly envision, dream, and act. We can’t get stuck in the worst part of the now. We must believe that another world, a liberatory reality, is possible. Quoting an old proverb, Michelle Molitor, founder and executive director of The Equity Lab, reminds us, “I might be planting the seeds of an oak tree whose shade I may never sit under…I want my nieces and nephews to feel less struggle.”

An integral part of this work is slowing down to allow space to imagine a world where justice is realized. This dreaming sets the foundation for bold collective action.

Racial justice leadership also requires leaders to build the collective power necessary to dismantle systems of racial injustice and establish liberatory systems. “The deep meaning is not transformation for anything. It is actually transformation for something very specific, so that we can disrupt the settler, colonial, capitalist, racist structures, white supremacist structures, structures that are making our world, frankly, dangerous for people like us to live in. So that’s the transformation that we’re talking about, and it means relationship and community and connection,” Darlene Nipper, CEO at Rockwood Leadership Institute, shared with us for the report.

Leadership for liberation and justice is hard and feels like it is growing harder to practice, but it’s not impossible, and our collective work ensures the achievement of our aims. We also know that liberatory leadership doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It is because off oppression that we need liberatory leadership, and it is through this practice that we move on to a more liberated future.

NPQ Leading Edge members will be invited to join the coauthors on June 3, 2025, for a live discussion of the liberatory leadership practices covered in this series. Become a Leading Edge member.

For More on This Topic:

Liberatory Leadership: A Transformative Model for a Changing World