In addition to charitable foundations, individual donor partners provide critical support for RISE Together Fund. Connie Cagampang Heller, a longtime supporter, shares why she continues to invest in RTF’s work and impact.
Soon after we started the Linked Fate Fund for Justice in early 2000s, we developed a focus on grassroots and community organizing for racial and economic equity. To this end, we believe that supporting community leaders who foster participation in the civic life of their communities is central.
Around 2014-2015, we made a significant two-part shift in our grant making. First, because we increasingly wanted to support place-based organizations, we decided to move funds through intermediaries that reflected our values and sensibilities. Also, I read an article by Claire Jean Kim entitled The Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans which helped to deepen our analysis of the problem. In the article, Kim describes the structural role that non-White and non-Black racial groups play in supporting the white supremacist political and economic order. Or, in other words, though inequity predominantly relies upon the two-way black vs. white dynamic in which other people of color (such as immigrants, Asians, non-Black Muslims, or Latinos) seek conditional whiteness to maintain access to economic systems that rely upon anti-blackness, the dynamic periodically triangulates to mobilize hostility under the banner of “American” to target the non-white/non-black racial other. Based on this analysis, we came to realize how important it is to support political education, organizing and power building among racialized communities. This is how we came to support RTF.
In my view, Muslim communities, among many, are being targeted and used to advance a particular political and socio-cultural agenda that seeks to limit who belongs and who matters. And the reality is that it is less about actually being Muslim and more about whether or not a community is perceived to be “other” by those forces hostile to what they perceive as difference. Given this situation, it is essential that communities who find themselves as targets are organized and have opportunities to work together and with other people beyond their immediate community to build power to shift the narratives about their own communities and the individuals in them. Together they have a stronger voice with greater reach and with that, greater potential to identify sympathetic allies, hold people accountable, and support their communities.
As with most communities that are used in a political discourse, the constituent communities do not understand themselves to be a single community — since we all come from different countries, have different immigration experience, different experiences of war and migration, and in this case, likely even practice different religions, or different variations at the least. Organizing and the experiences of working and learning together in this shared context is what builds the political life of the community and its collective power to make change.
Top of the list, is the collaborative model. As individuals, there is no way that we could do the research necessary to understand the field and its needs, not to mention which organizations are doing great work already and are excited to do more. Closely tied to this, is that we could not provide the range of capacity building supports that the fund provides. I think this is ultimately the value add. Additionally, I have learned so much from working with the fund and hearing from our grantee partners. Especially as someone who is not Muslim, I have had the opportunity to learn about the wide range of Muslim communities, the types of particular struggles that they each face, and the creative strategies they develop — not to mention the innovative strategies the fund has developed to support grantee partners.
We strongly believe that our fates are linked and to that end, as a funder, it is important for us to support robust, creative organizing and power building in the wide range of communities that make up all that is wonderful about this country as we work towards its unrealized possibility. Through this fund, we are able to participate and learn from fund leadership, grantee partners and fund supporters alike, and, in turn, become better funders and better leaders.
