01:41 Mallory Erickson: Welcome everyone. I am so excited to be here today with Andrew Grant Thomas. Andrew, welcome to What the fundraising. 

01:49 Andrew Grant Thomas: Thank you, Mallory. Good to be here. 

01:52 Mallory Erickson: So why don’t we start with you just introducing yourself, telling everyone a little bit about your work and what brings you to our conversation today. 

02:01 Andrew Grant Thomas: Yes. Well, I am the co-founder and co-director of a national nonprofit called Embrace Race. We are trying to bring resources and community to parents, to educators, to other caregivers, to children so that those children can be thoughtful, informed, and brave about race, which we think is hugely important, not only for individuals and families, but ultimately for communities and the country as a whole. And what brings me to the conversation, I think the way you approach this issue of fundraising is super, super interesting. And we of course have a mutual now friend and colleague who was a previous guest on your show and recommended me. 

02:40 Mallory Erickson: Yeah. And I’m really excited to speak with you about your experience in fundraising and fundraising, particularly around the work that you’re doing and how that has shifted over the last few years and what you’re hoping for or looking at for the future.

And I think there’s some interesting similarities between the work that you do in terms of helping people be brave, talking about hard things. And the way I try to think about those same constructs when it comes to talking bravely and vulnerably about fundraising and money. And so, I’m wondering, could we talk just for a moment about when you think about bravery in your work and when you’re helping families and kids be brave. What are some of the pillars of that?

03:27 Andrew Grant Thomas: Mallory, let me say, it’s a great analogy because race and money and race and fundraising specifically are on one hand we all have ideas about them. They’re sort of ubiquitous topics. But they’re both topics that also have a lot of depth to them. There’s a lot going on below the waterline and certainly with respect to race and for you with respect to money and fundraising, we’re trying to scratch at that surface a bit, get underneath the waterline to reveal the bulk of the iceberg that lies beneath. And there’s a lot of interesting stuff to be said there. Can you repeat your question? 

04:02 Mallory Erickson: Yeah. I love what you just said, and I love that visualization of the iceberg. And so, I’m curious to learn from you a little bit when you think about the bravery piece and really helping kids and families be brave talking about race, what does that look like? What are the components of that growth and development that your program really focuses on? 

04:25 Andrew Grant Thomas: As a rule, a lot of people in this country, in the United States who mean very well, and I say that as a non-patronizing way as possible, who really are trying to do good sort of racial equity, racial equality work in the space of race have been taught and believe that ignoring race is the best way to do that, certainly when it comes to socializing the kids in their lives. So, we’re not going to talk, you know, we’re going to be colorblind. We’re going to not see, or which is really pretending not to see race. We’re going to be color mute, meaning we’re not going to talk about it. But in fact, we know that from a very early age, kids are registering race or what we subsequently come to identify as race, right? Skin color and hair texture and how someone sounds and maybe the language they speak and all sorts of things. So actually by ignoring or pretending to ignore race, they’re doing no favors. They’re allowing the messages about race to come unmediated to the child. And by and large, the message is out there that kids are receiving tend to make them anything but thoughtful, informed, and brave about race. So, what we’re saying is, you need to embrace race. You need to not pretend that we aren’t seeing, registering race, thinking about race, engaging race all the time. And if we are all learning about race and registering race from a very early age, and the question isn’t whether we do, it’s how we do what it looks like. And to do that in a more and less healthy way means that we, the adults in the lives of kids, for them and for ourselves, need to be deliberate and thoughtful about how we do it. And so that’s what we’re here for, trying to support them as best we can. And we are them. We are they, you know, we got into this work. We, being Melissa, my life partner and I, because we have two children, you know, we’ve long been concerned with race and identity issues professionally. But then we became parents and the question was, yes, how do we do this work as parents, conscientiously, thoughtfully, deliberately, all of that stuff. Then we find that there are lots of other people who are asking the same questions. And of course, with the Black Lives Matter and President Trump and the race really becoming very prominent and explicit as an issue of concern. Lots more people are saying, oh my gosh, the old way of colorblindness, it’s not the answer. But what is the answer? That’s what we’re trying to help folks work through. 

06:56 Mallory Erickson: I’m so grateful for the work that you do and if I’m really in touch with my own nervous system, even during this conversation as a parent and I have a three-year-old, and so we have definitely been trying to do the best we can here, and I feel my own fear around getting it wrong. And I feel like that is also this parallel perhaps, that we share in our work of asking people to be brave, inviting them in to be brave, and knowing that, in doing that, in stepping closer and closer to that line, they’re going to feel perhaps in their bodies and in their head, this resistance or hear this narrative that you’re going to get this wrong. And then, you’re going to get called out, and then you are actually much more at risk for doing it that way than just maybe pretending that we’re colorblind or pretending in my case, that everything’s okay. And so, I’m curious, how do you think through helping people move through the resistance that they might feel. I love how at the beginning you talked about the difference between sort of intention and impact, and I hear a lot around the fact that leaders say they want change or that they’re going to change these things, but then when push comes to shove, they don’t do the things that are actually going to create change. And I think particularly in the DEI space, in the equity and justice space, there’s rightly so a lot of frustration here. The difference between like lip service and what’s actually happening. And I think some of that is, performative activism and all of those things. And I think some of it might be that in their head they do want to do those things, but as they get closer and closer to doing them, they feel this level of resistance and this other narrative that they were not prepared for. And it sidetracks them. And it’s not that in the beginning when they were saying they wanted to do those things, they were faking it or lying, or they really did believe, I’m going to be this kind of leader. I’m going to make this kind of change. I’m going to address these issues in my organization. But they were not prepared for was how uncomfortable it was going to get. What do you think about that? 

09:21 Andrew Grant Thomas: Yeah. I mean this issue of resistance, and again, for your space of money, you just think about how difficult it is to talk about money and to wrap our heads around money and all that implies, or what it’s thought to imply. I mean, again, there’s, I think a really good analogy there with the race. I think there are lots of things going on with the resistance to talking about race. You know, we’ve been taught so many things. Unless we excavate the teaching, we can’t appreciate just how deep it goes or even that we know it. So, on the issue of race, I think we’ve been taught that, first of all, to be biased. And that’s usually what we have reduced it to, right? Issues of bias. If you are biased, so first we have this word racist. If you have racial bias, then you are racist. And racist means this characterological thing that it tells you something fundamental about who you are, who I am if I hold biases against someone on the basis of their race. Even though in fact we all do, or at least that is the default position because we have been steeped in biases and stereotypes and et cetera about each other again, from the womb and perhaps before that. So that’s one thing I would love for us to divest ourselves of, this idea that if you have a bias or if you act in a biased way that tells you something fundamental about yourself, something unchanging and eternal and sort of primal about you. It doesn’t. I think what we’re responsible for is less sort of the default kind of social conditioning that we’ve received on race, on gender, on any number of things about money for that matter, about ideas of deservingness, you know, and fairness. I mean, all these sorts of deep things. I think we’re less responsible for the default conditioning and more responsible for A, let’s be honest and face the truth about that. Let’s be honest and face the truth, not only about the effect on our own thinking and behavior of this default conditioning, but on what that means, again, for us as a collective of people, of community as society, because implications go far beyond you, Mallory, as an individual walking through the world or me as an individual walking through the world. It shapes like, how do we think about criminal justice? How do we think about healthcare? How do we think about who deserves what in this country? What do we even identify as a problem? Is the fact that in 48 states in this country, prisoners, most of whom are US citizens cannot vote. Is that a problem? Does it concern us or not? If it does, what kind of possible solutions do we think are possible to that problem? Those two questions, how we think about them are significantly infused with ideas about race. So, from the micro of who we are as individuals to the macro of what our institutions look like, what we see as a problem, what we see as a viable solution, race is infused through all of that. And that’s why we need to pay attention to it. Right. Let me mention one other piece about race, which I think accounts for a lot of the resistance, which is the way we’ve framed it. 

12:24 Andrew Grant Thomas: So, for a long time, actually still, I subscribe to the New York Times and to the stories that are coded as race stories by the New York Times. So, it delivers me into my inbox these race stories. The question is, what’s a race story? And it turns out that in the New York Times, as in our media in general, nine out of 10 race stories are bad news stories. There are stories about bigotry and bias and oppression and hatred, and white supremacy, nationalism, all the difficult things which mean it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s not that those aren’t race stories, those kinds of stories, but there are other stories that could be coded as race stories that would have a more positive kind of emotional valence, right? Imagine if we understood race in a way that allowed all the range of emotions to show up and not so disproportionately things like fear, as you mentioned, and anxiety and resentment. Which again, whether you’re looking at news stories or research about race, those are the key terms of race discussion and dialogue, which means that even someone like me who’s done this work my whole professional life, it’s hard. Because race, it’s like medicine at best and for a lot of us who think, well, but it is really important, I do need to know and understand these things. It means, yeah, it’s medicine and in the end it’s good for me to know and to do the work and all of that, but there’s very little joy in it. There’s very little community in it. There’s very little, again, these more positive things. Of course, I get it when people feel fatigue and want to avoid and things like guilt, right? White guilt, these sorts of things. I’ll just say one last thing on that last point cause it’s super interesting to me. Kids, including white children, are much less likely to feel to respond that way. It’s like, yeah, if you tell a five- or six-year-old child of any racial stripe, let me tell you about what the police did to an unarmed person in an age-appropriate ways. We don’t need to go into the gory details, but we say, yeah, this has been happening and police have been treating people who they think of as black people unfairly, whatever. The child is likely to respond with, oh, that’s awful, that’s terrible. Why did they do that? How can we make it better? That should stop. Let’s problem solve that. Right? But not to feel, oh my gosh, wait, this is associated with white people. Am I a white person? Does that mean it’s that I’m a terrible? No. Because you’re not responsible necessarily for the problem, but you can participate in making things better and let’s step up to do that. So, I think very often the excuses really, that adults make for not engaging these issues with children really is a reflection of our own anxieties and difficulties. Really our own hangups, which again, are not primarily our issue. We’ve been conditioned and socialized this way, but we should, I think, distinguish between what’s the child’s and what’s ours. 

15:27 Mallory Erickson: I really appreciate that point. I found myself saying to someone the other day, the hardest part of being a mom in my opinion is distinguishing between what is deregulating me and what my daughter needs in that moment, and making sure that my stuff is not getting in the way of her learning or experience, whether it’s doing something really hard where it’s hard for me to watch her struggle, or have these conversations. And so, I really appreciate that. And you know, it’s interesting what you said before about the fact that the conversations around race are unenjoyable or medicine at best, that they perhaps aren’t something we deeply desire. While I still feel that like butterfly in my stomach around, maybe I might say the wrong thing, especially on public platforms where I’m asked to share some of my personal experience sometimes. I do actually find them, I don’t know if enjoyable is the right way, but I find them deeply meaningful. I do want to and desire to much more than I did at the beginning of my own journey in education around race, to engage in those conversations. But something that has, I think, really shifted that for me was this expectation that it’s not always going to be comfortable and that’s okay. And that once I embrace that, that these types of conversations are not about comfort, but comfort is not just good and discomfort is not just bad. And once I could really differentiate between those things and I went into the conversation saying, yeah, there are going to be these moments that are uncomfortable. That’s the point after all, because then we’re in it. We’re in the actual conversation, and that really shifted my desire and also my connection in the conversations. That does feel really good because at the end of the day, doesn’t it feel better to talk about real things than to be surface level robots?

17:41 Andrew Grant Thomas: Wonderful point. And I think what it speaks to in part is, one is, it becomes easier with practice, right? So first, I mean you have to, you know, you said at the beginning it was really hard and it sounds like you’ve been engaged with this journey. You’re more than a couple steps into your journey. First, it has to be a journey. Ideally, it’s a routine. I think so many of us, and again, especially white identified people in this country, if they engage race at all, it’s sort of a gearing up with their children, for example. We’re going to have the talk, you know, and it’s prompted because reality is forced their hand. The kid has said something, you know, the classic thing of in a public place, the four-year-old points and says, oh my gosh, why is his skin dirty? And the parent is mortified. And either you squash it, you grab the kid’s hand and you say, nope, we’re not talking about that. Or you think, okay, I have to have this conversation. Right. Charlottesville happens, George Floyd happens, and the child overhears the radio story and says, what’s going on? Why are people so upset? But if we take this view that this is at most a periodic big conversation to be had, then it feels very, very high stakes. And if you feel that so much is at stake with this one conversation that if I mess up, I’ve ruined my child, you know, for all eternity. But of course, none of that is true. I mean, think of how you know my children are 14 and 12, as they say if I had a dime for every time, I said say thank you. Right. You don’t think that you can tell your child to say thank you one time or 10 or 100 times and that that will be all you need to do? No. You keep revisiting and revisiting and you’ll say it any number of ways and times and contexts, and that’s true of any number of things. That’s what it means to parent or the socialized children. You’re revisiting again and again and again because it’s important. Right? And because none of us takes to it right away when you’re talking about a change in behavior, like, oh, I’m reflexively now going to say thank you when someone offers me something or does something nice. So, we keep revisiting similarly. So why would we think that it’s enough around something that’s complicated as a race or as complicated as money, and all the ways that those topics can play out in real dynamic. That you can say whatever the conversation that you think it is, that you can say it once or twice a year. 

20:06 Andrew Grant Thomas: No. If that’s your practice, it’s okay or at least necessary, inevitable that we’re not going to do as well as we would like to do in any given moment. But if you know there’s a next time and a time after that, and especially if you invite your child or whoever you’re engaging with in the money conversation, let’s do it again. You have some questions, you have some thoughts, you have some observations. I have some. Let’s keep revisiting that. And it’s not only a matter of, of course, you’re going to revisit and revisit. It’s that, of course, in the case of a parent and child, the child in particular, but probably both of you, change the conversation what your child is ready for at 3, it’s going to be very different, of course, than what she’s ready for at 7 and then at 11 and then at 18, et cetera. So of course, the conversation needs to move accordingly and you will change too. As much as you know and are thoughtful about fundraising and money, you’ll be even more so or differently so in five years, you’ll have new insights and ideas and reflections on what you’ve said now in five years that you can share with your daughter. So, we just got to keep revisiting, and if we do that, folks, at least the participation will get easier and the rewards will get better. Even if the discomfort remains. And you’re absolutely right. It’s ok. It’s hard stuff. There’s important stuff at stake here. Of course, we’re going to feel.

21:29 Mallory Erickson: You just gave some of the best fundraising advice. So, I want to reflect it back to you in terms of fundraising, because there are a few things you said in there that could not be more true for how we think about fundraising. So that first piece around repetition, I think is so important. That as fundraisers absorb a ton of content about how to do things, tons of free webinars, reading blogs, nothing replaces, and I love this about your framework too, because you have information and bravery and what was the third piece of it?

22:04 Andrew Grant Thomas: Thoughtfulness. Yeah, be thoughtful.

22:05 Mallory Erickson: Thoughtfulness. Okay. So, I love that because for me, you can learn all of the fundraising things, but nothing replaces that practice, that repetition, having the words come out of your mouth, doing it again. That is just such good advice. The second piece there is around, how big things feel when they are few and far between. So, when fundraisers send out one fundraising campaign a year or one particular email around something, or they email one corporate sponsor for this, I think there’s so much power in volume because it builds our muscle in doing it and it reduces our obsession over each action. So, if you know, you’re ultimately going to send out 10 emails about this thing, I think our fear around each email is actually slightly decreased because we do break that, this is my one shot to get it right because that is such a dangerous belief. And so, I love, love, love that advice, especially for nonprofits who are trying to figure out different ways of being visible. I have found this to be really true with video too. I remember a friend asking me, how do you always go put a reel on Instagram or something? You just click the camera and you go, and you make mistakes and you don’t edit it, and you just throw it up there. And I said, yeah, you know, the first one was really scary. But now there’s probably thousands of videos of me online, so it’s just a drop in the bucket. And so, if it’s not perfect, if people don’t really like it, I’m testing some new content, it’s fine. It’s just a little, little, little piece of the pie. And so, I think that advice for fundraisers is also so good. And there was another thing that you said that I loved, which was about the assumptions that we make based on history and not giving ourselves time to grow and change with people and in ourselves. And I think this is such an important point for fundraising too. In our relationships with funders and in our relationship with our own fundraising selves that we’re allowed to change and a funder’s allowed to change. And I see those assumptions hold people, they said no last year so they’re going to say no this year. Why? There’s 12 months of new data between that moment and this moment. That person is different. The organization is different. The company is different. We have no idea that they’re going to do the same thing. And likewise for the future. That just because someone was aligned in one moment doesn’t mean that they’re always going to be aligned in the future. And the more open conversations we can have, the more we can calibrate with our partners. I think it’s just so important, and that we give ourselves permission as nonprofits too, to grow and change to say, hey, we were going in that direction because we thought that was the best route to do blank. And over the last 12 months, we have learned X, Y, and Z, and we’re making a pivot. And here’s where we’re going to start to focus because we’re aligned on X, Y, and Z. We would love for you to make that pivot with us and give you all the information around why we’re making this change. But we also understand if you want to find another organization doing blank, but that’s not the right move for us at this time. And so, just those pieces, I just had to double click on them and reframe them from a fundraising perspective because they are so important and wonderful. 

25:46 Andrew Grant Thomas: Thank you Mallory. And, and I want to actually want to pick up on, especially on this last point that you made, that the idea of a no in the fundraising context is actually almost always so much scarier than the reality of no. And the same is true in the race piece. It’s like, oh, if I say something wrong, let’s say in a group that there’s a conversation about race. And if I think, oh, I’m gearing up for this one thing and I’m going to open my mouth, or I want to open my mouth, and somehow what I say will sort of pull back the veil on who I am, and that’s going to be horrible if I just mess up because gosh, I’m not a racist. I’m a good person. I mean well, but I could make a mistake. I could be misinterpreted. This is where the bravery comes in the first instance. It is scary and people may judge you, but you’re going to keep showing up. Over time through those 10 emails, not just one. Through those many interactions with my colleague at work or participating in this group that’s talking about difficult topics of race or whatever else, they’re going to see 10 versions of me over these next 10 meetings. And it’s going to be okay. Sometimes we mess up. If you speak to your funder and the funder says, no, you’ll be okay. You’ll survive that. And if someone is upset at you for something you said when a race related conversation. You will survive that too. And in all likelihood, the relationship doesn’t end and you can rejoin the conversation, and it’s okay with your colleague or your friend or your neighbor, your family member, or your child to say, you know what, that last conversation we had, I feel I didn’t articulate what I really wanted to say and I’ve given it some thought, it’s a little bit embarrassing that I said that. I think it did reveal something, you know, about the way I’ve been thinking about this issue, and I want to be better. I want to do better. I’ve learned something I want to do better. I’ve been reading a little bit, I wonder if you could help, whatever it is. If we thought about more about, again, not who we are or perceived to be, but what is the journey? What is the direction we’re moving in? How can we do better? You know, Maya Angelou said, when we know better, do better. That’s it, man. That is a guidance for life.

27:59 Andrew Grant Thomas: When we know better do better. I certainly hope that I endeavor to be in all sincerity, a better person now, which is say, a person who lives a life more attuned to the values I profess now than 20 years ago, and I hope to be able to say the same thing in another 20 years if I’m around. That’s the measure for all of us, right? Rather than beating ourselves up for the ways we fall short of who we want to be. And again, to a degree that more and more of us can try to know better and then try to do better when we know better. And we will see it in our family dynamics, in our neighborhood dynamics, our community, our schools, the whole thing, churches, synagogues, mosque, all of it. And the shortfall is also what we see. We collectively are responsible for all that we see. So, let’s do the best we can. 

28:56 Mallory Erickson: I love all of that. I want to ask one more question before we wrap up, which is, we talked about in our first conversation the influx of funders and companies paying special attention to race over the last few years with the rise of Black Lives Matter following George Floyd’s death, and there’s been a lot in the media around accountability on that front from some companies. I’m just curious, as an educator, as a provider in this space, what are you really hoping to see in terms of the longevity and the sustainability of funding for race related organizations or education organizations who are really trying to move the needle here? 

29:44 Andrew Grant Thomas: Well, of course I’d love to see much more funding, longer term funding, and the kinds of things you would expect. Part of the key to that is, it remains true that there just isn’t enough appreciation for how important this work is, how important it is in the sense of the stakes involved. So, there’s still a lot of people, even in social justice spaces, I think. But if you think of, for example, what we’re doing as this sort of parochial, like, oh, that’s awesome. Yes. You’re, create book lists for kids. Well, actually we don’t do that very much, but that’s important work. Yes. And we do so much more than that. And kids are learning about race from the get-go, and by the time they are four or five years old, most are expressing what we could recognize as a bias. And by the time they enter kindergarten, and by the time they enter adolescence, those biases are entrenched in it. But it’s much more than bias. Right? It’s, do you have an appreciation of the thing we call structural racism and what difference that makes? Do you think it’s important that fairness and justice are those real values for you? There are lots more things to talk about that aren’t simply about how do I feel about people who look like this? But the real point is that all that ladders up to everything we’re concerned about. If you’re concerned about the economy, the functioning of the military, you need to be concerned about this. And if people can appreciate that, so whatever their issue is, you’re concerned about climate change. You need to be concerned about race. I’m not saying race is the only thing, or even the most important thing in any given issue, but it is central to the way we organize ourselves and think about things. So, whatever your issue is, I literally can’t think of one where we have the research that the researcher doesn’t show that racial dispositions, broadly speaking, are implicated in that thing. So, it’s not a parochial thing. It is a deep structural thing, you know, just as gender is, and identity in general, and that was the other things we could name. So yes, if you understand that, it’s not this little thing here, just like some other little thing, like some other little thing. It is a fundamental thing. It’s a structural thing. And therefore, yes, I’m concerned about that because I know it affects the thing I do. I’m really concerned about and therefore I need to support either race work specifically, or ensure that the work I do support is aware that race is one facet of this really important of the approach that I need to take to engage that issue, and that’s something that, that’s something we’re trying to do is make that case better than we have. But the case is there to be made for sure. 

32:29 Mallory Erickson: Thank you so much for this conversation. I’ll make sure in the outro that I give links to your work and the organization so folks can go and learn more. I’m so grateful for you sitting with me and talking about the parallels here. I learned so much from you and I’m walking away with so many different ways of thinking about the intersection of your work and my fundraising work. So, I’m just so grateful for the time.

33:00 Mallory Erickson:  All right. There is so much inside this episode, but here are a few of my top takeaways. 

Number one, if you are feeling resistance or the desire to avoid candid conversations about race, it might be fear of getting it wrong. And if that’s the case, you’re not alone, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be having those conversations

Number two, racial bias is inevitable. Whether we decide to get honest about it is where we have choice. 

Number three, every conversation about race will not go well, and that’s to be expected. It’s a part of a journey that requires practice and repetition. The same thing is true for conversations about money. Things take practice and time. We need to lower the stakes sometimes and get vulnerable together. 

Number four, if the fundraising stakes feel too high, reduce the stress through volume. More activity means more chances to practice, improve, and ultimately get it right. 

And then lastly, number five, who you are as an intentional, ethical human isn’t reflected in a single moment in time. Embrace the continuum that we are all on, working towards more justice and grace, both personally and globally. We need to stay in these hard conversations if we’re going to find our way through them to a more just and equitable world. 

Okay. For additional takeaways and tips inside this episode, head on over to malloryerickson.com/podcast to grab the full show notes and resources now. You’ll also find more information there about Andrew and our amazing sponsors, Keela. Thank you for spending this time with us today. If you enjoyed this episode, we would love it if you would give it a rating and review and share it with a friend. I am so grateful for all of my listeners and the good, hard work you’re doing to make our world a better.

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