This video segment, which is two-and-a-half minutes long, is excerpted from a longer webinar originally broadcast on April 22, 2021. For the full webinar, see “Remaking the Economy: Organizing & Wealth Building in Communities of Color.”

Steve Dubb: Nonprofits and philanthropy—what role can they play in supporting the type of work that you guys do? Not just your own organizations, but groups across the country that are doing similar work.

Lorena Andrade: I think, in supporting our work, it’s also being able to see that, in our case, it’s the long-term work of building community. There is a lot of communication. There is a lot of learning from each other. It’s not always just numbers, because it takes a long time to build and to learn together, because we want it to be something that will continually provide information and practice to building community. I think that’s important as well, because we are doing two things at the same time: We’re defending from them taking from our community in the first place, or imposing things on our community, at the same time we’re trying to develop a community that is going to serve our families. But families need to be a part of that process, and that takes time.

It takes time to figure out what kind of education we would like for our kids, and what that looks like, and how we interact with that. What does a better environment look like? How do we build that, and how do we share that knowledge and turn that into a collective practice? Collective work takes a lot more patience, and a lot more time. And we’re able to produce work, and that is important to see funded, but also this is long-term community work, which is not always so flashy. It’s not always like, “Look at this new business.” Once you have the business, there is all the internal work and hidden work that it takes to make sure that it is a project that sustains and nurtures community, and that is nurtured and sustained by the community as well. To be able to have the eyes to see that work and to fund it, because that is harder work, that is the more difficult resource to get hold of, I guess.

Steve Dubb: Yes, patience—that is really important. Thanks for lifting that up.