Protopia, Volume 2, 2022: Humanizing Social Impact

Volume 2 2022

The UVU Center for Social Impact

HuMaNiZiNG SoCiaL iMPaCT

protopia (n.) a state that is better today than yesterday

We would like to acknowledge that as authors and contributors to this publication, we reside on Indigenous land. We honor Indigenous peoples, and hope to hold ourselves accountable to the necessity of the work of decolonization.

HuMaNiZiNG SoCiaL iMPaCT

CO-AUTHORED BY CSI IMPACT FELLOWS CASSIE BINGHAM AND TINO DIAZ DESIGNED BY STAUNEY HANSEN

CoNTeNTS iNTRoDuCTioN 1 DiReCT SeRViCe

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CoMMuNiTy eNGaGeD LeaRNiNG & ReSeaRCH

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SoCiaL eNTRePReNeuRSHiP & CoRPoRaTe SoCiaL ReSPoNSiBiLiTy

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PoLiCy & GoVeRNaNCe

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CoMMuNiTy oRGaNiZiNG & aCTiViSM PHiLaNTHRoPy

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CoMMuNiCaTioN 33 CoNCLuSioN 37 SouRCeS 39

pg. 2 Introduction

MAREN OSTLUND & KIARA MARYOTT

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raditional conceptions of social impact, even within progressive circles, often place outsized emphasis on checking the boxes of impact outputs, versus engaging in the strategic and ethical value of human relationships and relational processes leading to them. Social impact and humanitarian work have a long history of homogenizing communities while overlooking their capabilities, intelligence, innovation, and culture. This dehumanization leads to “solutions’’ that are often highly colonial, unsustainable, or irrelevant. Effective, ethical and sustainable social impact must be cognizant of biases and privilege, guided by community-identified needs and lived experience, and respectful of the nuanced balance of data-driven objectivity and sociocultural relativity. However, this cannot be achieved without a humanization of the field that places people in reflective relationship with each other and themselves.

We propose the following humanizing principles as a form of praxis to be taken on by practitioners of social impact and advocates of social justice: ■ Compassionate relationality ■ Maintaining humanity for others ■ Maintaining humanity for ourselves We explore and explain each of these ideas further in the following sections. We stand by these practices as methods of interpersonal, community, and societal healing that we believe will not only serve the reader but also empower them to bring healing into spaces of hurt and aid in collective action toward just, community-centered social impact. As Reverend Jennifer Bailey stated, “Relationships move at the speed of trust, but social change moves at the speed of relationships.”

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Compassionate Relationality A quick Google search of the term compassion defines it as “to suffer together,” and these linguistic roots point to the word’s intrinsically relational nature. Cassie Bingham, program director at the UVU Center for Social Impact, presents the idea of compassionate relationality as the intentional interconnecting of relationships in order to mutually witness human complexity, pain, and experiences that can push us towards a collective response to harmful systems. To truly be compassionate, and to receive compassion, we must be in deep - and often messy - relationship with one another. By definition, relationality is the relationship or connectedness between two or more individuals, groups, or entities. As a theoretical concept, however, its roots reside in Black feminist thought and Indigenous political autonomy.

The lived experience and relational practice behind Black feminism situates relationality as something to be experienced between kin who are not restricted by biological or genetic ties. For example, the practice of othermothering - maternal

care for children and youth who are not a woman’s biological offspring - as a Black feminist and relational system goes back to enslavement when families were literally torn apart at auctions. Enslavement created organic systems born out of survival that recognized family and kinship as not necessarily biologically associated, but rather a relational effort to preserve one another. Additionally, Black feminism informed early coalition politics from the civil rights era on, and acknowledged the difficulty of building trust and relationships within difference and the courage needed to form solidarity sufficient to redesign systems. Angela Davis writes of these experiences as a risky solidarity among the intersections of our identities within society and suggests that “behind this concept of intersectionality is a rich history of struggle.”

Among Indigeous theory, relationality lies at the core of the political struggle against colonization, which coercively organizes the world through categories, biological division, and Eurocentric superiority that seek to separate and divide.

Instead, Indigenous knowledge highlights the relational nature of a balanced humanity, while also making room for complexity. Potawatomi

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pg. 5 Introduction

author Robin Wall Kimmerer asserts that contending against colonial narratives of division requires the ability to see oneself in relationship with not just other humans but also with land and animals.

Kahnawà:ke Mohawk author Audra Simpson states a similar ethic in seeing a recovery of relationality as one of the strongest decolonial acts undertaken

by Indigenous peoples. Tongan author Tevita Ka’ili states that colonization operates through a categorical view of humanity, seeking imbalance in a world where harmony and tension should exist as complements to one another within close-knit communities. In Latin America or Abya Yala, the late Lenca activist Berta Caceres recognized relationality as a political means to exist beyond gender, nationalist, and racial categories to unite various Indigenous communities into a single organization that could confront corporate exploitation and land-grabbing projects.

Additionally, interfaith philosophy inspires our conception of compassionate relationality.

Valerie Kaur, a Sikh Muslim, activist, and author shares her ethic of shared connection and need for compassionate relationality when she states,“I see no stranger, I see no enemy. All of us belong

to each other.” Her work echos a diverse array of cultural voices and identities, including Ubuntu, the African philosophy meaning “I am because you are” and the Mayan In La’Kech, “You are my other me.” Kaura conveys the profundity of the relational human experience in this quote: “What has been an ancient spiritual truth is now increasingly verified by science: We are all indivisibly part of one another. We share a common ancestry with everyone and everything alive on earth. The air we breathe contains atoms that have passed through the lungs of ancestors long dead.

Our bodies are composed of the same elements created deep inside furnaces of long-dead stars.

We can look upon the face of anyone or anything around us and say – as a moral declaration and a spiritual, cosmological, and biological fact: You are a part of me I do not yet know.”

We intend compassionate relationality to be a specific value of social impact work and education that is inspired by Black feminist and Indigenous political ethics, as well as culturally diverse theology and philosophy, and that seeks to make fractured

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humanity whole. In our context, to engage in compassionate relationality is to listen, feel, and seek to understand; to favor generosity and nuance over purity and dogma; and to build trust as a strategy for collective action and advocacy. It is to truly see another person, group, or entity, and to respect and embrace our inherent interconnectedness with them, while seeking to further the depth of shared understanding and shared goals of safety, progress, and joy for all parties.

Maintaining Humanity for Others

practitioners risk alienation of valuable changemakers and gridlocking of progress. Abolitionist and community organizer Charlene A. Carruthers writes the following in reference to social movement building and collective relationships: “Did we set ourselves up for failure by opening a space that espouses values no one can completely live up to?

I can’t accept that.” The messiness of relationality requires us to reject toxic perfectionism culture identified by Tema Okun and Kenneth Jones as a tenet of white supremacy - and lean into the reality that mistakes will be an inevitable part of journeys towards social impact.

Maintaining humanity for others means seeing and embracing human nature in those around us. It means seeing others as simultaneously capable and flawed. It means choosing to sit with the discomfort of engaging with people as their holistically complicated selves. We assert the need to assume that every person has great potential and positive contributions to offer, and to provide both accountability and grace for their ignorances, weaknesses, shortcomings, and biases. Without committing to such nuanced terms of engagement, social impact

Therefore, maintaining humanity for others means that when those around us misstep they should be called in with love and trusted to do better. Activist and professor, Loretta J. Ross expressed “When we ask people to give up hate, we have to be there for them when they do.” Ross is the proponent of “calling in” theory as an antithesis to “calling out,” and speaks often of “speaking up without tearing down.” We must make it clear that Ross’s theories are relational, and meant to be applied in the context of interpersonal relationships. Ross

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clarifies that there are systems, structures, and other manifestations of oppression and corruption that absolutely need to be “torn down.” However, within interpersonal relational contexts, Ross states, “calling out happens when we point out a mistake, not to address or rectify the damage, but instead to publicly shame the offender.” Alternatively, a call-in can happen publicly or privately, but instead of shaming someone who has made a mistake, we patiently express curiosity and ask questions to explore why someone has behaved the way they did. Call-ins can be agreed to between people who work together to consciously help each other expand their perspectives. They encourage us to recognize that growth never ends, to admit our mistakes, and to commit to doing better.

Calling in cannot minimize harm and trauma already inflicted by hurtful words or actions, but it can get to the root of why the injury occurred, and can help stop it from happening again. Ross adds her own disclaimers that calling in is not always the right action for the moment. “It’s not fair to insist that people hurt by cruel or careless language or actions be responsible for the personal growth of those who have injured them; calling in should not demand involuntary emotional labor.” Additionally,

“Calling out may be the best response to those who refuse to accept responsibility for the harm they encourage or who pretend they are only innocently using their right to free speech.”

However, calling in rather than out when appropriate demonstrates a kind of connection, relationality, and humanizing lens that enables us to say to others, “it is my compassion and respect for you that inspires me to let you know about the ways your actions were hurtful, as I trust that you are a person who does not want to cause harm to others.” Admittedly, striking the balance of calling in while attempting to combat deeply harmful social problems is a complex endeavor. However, maintaining humanity for complicated and nuanced humans in order to build trust and work towards collective action requires complicated and nuanced practice.

Finally, maintaining humanity for others also means the obvious - avoiding the dehumanization of those around us. In the context of social impact work, this means that people in vulnerable populations do not have to prove their value or “rationale” in the face of oppression in order to

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be heard or believed. It means that we intentionally avoid joining the narrative as “saviors,” that we center lived experience, and that we produce social impact communications in ways that do not infantilize, fetishize, or erase cultures, communities, or individuals. Chris Atim, a health economist from Ghana stated that step one is to “let local experts tell their own stories.” He added that global powers and media “sometimes perpetuate colonial models and... [turn] local experts into objects rather than subjects of their own development stories and narratives.” We cannot simultaneously maintain humanity for others and objectify them.

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Maintaining Humanity for Ourselves Maintaining humanity for ourselves looks much like maintaining it for others. As individuals, we can accept two things at once: we are worthy of grace, love, and compassion, and we are worth being held accountable to uncomfortable truths that challenge our perspectives. No two journeys toward effective and ethical social impact work look the same. We can offer ourselves flexibility and generosity in growth and evolution, and avoid dehumanizing ourselves or inflicting the toxicity of unattainable standards of perfectionism that lead to unproductive shame spirals.

Humanity embodies complexity, and we must allow ourselves to show up however we can in the face of systems of oppression that demand uniformity and a singular narrative. Instead, we maintain our own humanity by expecting variance and fluidity. We allow our levels of engagement with social change action to flux and flow with our levels of energetic capacity. Learning to embrace this requires an (un)learning of the colonial processes

pg. 10 Introduction

that have shaped Western society and conceptions of productivity. Argentine scholar Walter Mignolo calls this epistemic disobedience, or the rejection of Western knowledge and ways of being to pursue alternatives. This does not happen passively. Rather we must intentionally allow ourselves rest and renewal between moments of energetic engagement in social impact work, and trust that when we are at rest others are engaged, and vice versa. The Black feminist writer Audre Lorde asserted, “caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

Additionally, seeking an internal ethic and practicing the sound of your own thoughts is key to valorizing self-humanization. As Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert puts it, “There is so much about my fate that I cannot control, but other things do fall under my jurisdiction. I can decide how I spend my time, whom I interact with, whom I share my body and life and money and energy with…I can choose how I’m going to regard unfortunate circumstances in my life - whether I will see them as curses or opportunities. I can choose my words and the tone of voice in which I speak to others.

And most of all, I can choose my thoughts.” Gilbert stresses agency and autonomy in a world of limiting social structures. We can translate this into our ability to change society despite the intense and embedded reality of colonial, exploitative, supremacist systems of oppression. We ultimately have the power to honor our minds and bodies as autonomous from the systems within which we exist, while also re-examining and ultimately redesigning said systems for the better.

The following essays make additional commentary on humanizing social impact through each of the Six Pathways of Social Impact, a framework developed through a cohort of universities led by Stanford University’s Haas Center for Public Service.

The Pathways describe a holistic range of possible approaches for addressing social challenges. Each essay will offer a definition of one pathway, explore its relationship to humanizing social impact as defined by this publication, and provide an example of one intervention within the pathway that exemplifies aspects of humanizing practice.

ERIN COUSINS

HuMaNiZiNG DiReCT SeRViCe Direct Service: Working to address the immediate needs of individuals or a community, often involving contact with the people or places being served.

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here is a tendency to think of direct service and volunteer work as inherently good, and as work that automatically reflects the goodness of those who participate. It is work done during one’s free time, out of the goodness of their hearts, and for no money. While that may be true, there must be a more nuanced understanding of direct service and the actual impact it makes upon a community for this pathway to reach its potential within a fully humanized field of social impact. Often, those who engage in volunteer work are underqualified, untrained, and unaware of the historical and social contexts of the social problem being addressed, the community being served, and the organization facilitating. The current status quo leaves little space for critique of organizations, or investigative research to determine whether their social impact and community-facing philosophies

pg. 14 Direct Service

and methodologies are effective, sustainable, and ethical. However, such critique is absolutely necessary in order to build relationships of trust and to engage with vulnerable communities in a dignified manner. No amount of community harm should be tolerable simply because those perpetuating it were intending to help.

Humanizing direct service looks like listening to community members with lived experience and close proximity to a social problem, and respecting how they are already engaged with the issue and implementing interventions to help reduce harm and support their own communities. Alignment and collaboration with those who have lived experience should involve relationship building as well Direct service is a good entry point into social as being accountable to those relationships. When we center the humanity of the people we work with impact work because it is actionable and accessible. In order to humanize direct service, participants and for, we can restructure our understanding of and interaction with the world. For example, Indigmust seek a candid and thorough understanding enous relationality theory often refuses hierarchies. of the ethical implications of involving themselves in communities that they may or may not belong to There can be no relational saviors, only co-equal with the express purpose of altering them in some designers of better systems. When we commit to relationality, we commit to prioritizing trust, way. There also needs to be frank acknowledgeempathy, and humility. ment of the structural and systemic inequities as well as the historical and socioeconomic contexts that leave some communities needing more or different interventions than others. Additionally, direct service dehumanizes when it is approached with a savior mentality, due to the inherent power imbalance that comes with intending to save someone who is in a comparative position of disadvantage due to systems that advantage the “savior.”

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pg. 16 Direct Service

An example of this type of intentional relationality can be found in the Food Justice Coalition based in Salt Lake City. The Food Justice Coalition (FJC) is committed to the dignified and equitable distribution of healthy plant-based meals to the unhoused population in Salt Lake County. Rather than hosting food donation drives and collecting the generally unwanted and unhealthy food items from people who miscalculated at the grocery store, FJC is not only feeding unhoused people healthy foods, but also educating the public on how to improve their own nutritional health in a cost-effective way. FJC demonstrates compassionate relationality by immersing themselves in the community they are helping. They work in proximity to and with unhoused folks, treating them with dignity and respect, which is especially important for the unhoused population as their humanity is often stripped away when people refuse to make eye contact or interact with them in any meaningful way. They maintain humanity for the unhoused by recognizing that distributing the rest of society’s rejected food is not adequate; rather, unhoused individuals deserve high-quality, healthy food in the same way any other human does.

By building trust, forming committed and empathetic relationships, and seeing others as whole and deserving human beings, we can engage in direct service that is effective and humanizing.

Direct service will function as a powerful entryway to other forms of social impact and as the needed immediate relief that precedes deeper systemic change as it is practiced in a way that promotes relationality and humanization.

BRE LAMBERT

HuMaNiZiNG CoMMuNiTY eNGaGeD LeaRNiNG aND ReSeaRCH

pg. 18 Community Engaged Learning & Research

Community Engaged Learning & Research: Connecting coursework and academic research to community identified concerns to enrich knowledge and inform action on social issues The production of the documentary Crip Camp is an example of a humanized process of ommunity engaged learning and community engaged learning and research. Crip research provides the knowledge Camp follows the stories of teens with disabilities and awareness needed to engage in that attended the Camp Jened summer camp. The effective and accurate social impact work. Howparticipants described Camp Jened as a utopia, ever, Western research methodology has often because of its intentional design to be a place of included mining vulnerable communities for helpful freedom and safety for those with disabilities, who research insights, but maintaining barriers to their often faced discrimination and bias in mainstream meaningful engagement in research outcomes. society. From summer romances to philosophical Additionally, service learning and community discussions, participants described memories in a engagement practice has a history of engaging place where they experienced their first feelings of with communities in surface level ways that do not full inclusion. This profound experience inspired analyze systemic oppression, without the guidance many of the participants to become fundamenand leadership of community leaders with lived tal change makers and leaders within the disabiliexperience, and in ways that promote savior menty rights movement, such as Judith Heumann, an tality. Humanizing community engaged learning activist who used her physical presence to help and research requires being in deep relationship pressure policy change. with communities, portraying them as they wish to be portrayed, and leveraging privilege and access Crip Camp not only humanized individuals to amplify issues they seek to be amplified. The humanization of this pathway also includes making with disabilities by allowing them to narrate their own experiences through interviews, it also was knowledge production widely accessible to communities, rather than gate-kept and obscured within co-directed by James Lebrecht, a Camp Jened alumnus. Accordingly, there was a level of cultural traditional Western academic platforms.

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competence in the data collection and video production methodology that could not have been achieved without the documentary being directed by someone with lived experience. Interviewees were able to have candid and deeply human conversations around topics such as activism, sexuality, and revolution. For example, one of the interviewees shared that they would describe themselves as a sexual person, and felt frustration that people without disabilities commonly assume she is childlike and not able to have consensual sexual

encounters. Surely, having Lebrecht behind the camera - a fellow member of the disabled community - helped bring such vulnerable conversations to the forefront.

This documentary exemplifies how community engaged learning and research can be directed by those from vulnerable communities, which recognizes their humanity and valuable leadership.

It demonstrates the humanity in allowing those with lived experience to speak to their own experiences. Finally, it gives a great example of how such research and narrative production can be disseminated in ways that are accessible and relational, such as through a documentary that can be accessed by a wide range of people, in contrast to something like an academic journal, where jargon and article access may pose great barriers to underprivileged communities.

SMITH GRIGGS

HuMaNiZiNG SoCiaL eNTRePReNeuRSHiP & CoRPoRaTe SoCiaL ReSPoNSiBiLiTY Social Entrepreneurship & Corporate Social Responsibility: Using ethical private sector approaches to create or expand marketoriented responses to social problems

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n their book Getting Beyond Better, Roger L. Martin and Sally R. Osberg distinguish social entrepreneurship from other social impact approaches. Some groups, for example, engage in direct action that may provide relief but that ultimately maintains the status quo, and others work to indirectly benefit communities through legislation advocacy and policy change. Social entrepreneurs should utilize the market to create transformative change that can be scaled. However,

often social entrepreneurship is bogged down by the inherent aspects of capitalism that center profit rather than people and planet, productivity over healthy relationships with others and self, and growth at any cost rather than ethical social justice.

Humanizing social entrepreneurship and corporate social responsibility (CSR) must begin with recentering community relationships in a way that honors compassionate relationality and social

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pg. 23 Social Enterpreneurship & CSR

equity. The trending focus on small and local businesses offers some examples of what this might look like. For example, local pop-ups have proven to be a turning point for small businesses that do not have the resources to open a standard storefront. It is a model that allows creators and people interested in their work to meet and build community. This creates a social intimacy between sellers and buyers that one does not find in bigger corporate settings. Additionally, such models provide increased accessibility to the market for underprivileged communities, and improve local economy which benefits vulnerable communities more than enriching giant, wealthy businesses.

A great local example is that of Strength in Shades, a monthly pop-up market founded by Black and Latina entrepreneurs Alicea Arnold and Kris Ayoso, that seeks to showcase small businesses run by women of color. Strength in Shades promotes compassionate relationality via its local popup model, bringing community members together, but also provides a platform for groups who have been statistically marginalized within systems that discriminate based on race and gender. Therefore,

this entrepreneurial venture also humanizes identities that have often been under and misrepresented, shifting attention from a white male dominated market and consumer landscape to one that centers and celebrates women of color. Arnold and Ayoso expressed experiencing feelings of estrangement and otherment while attempting to start businesses in Utah, a place where racial and gender inclusion and equity is not always celebrated. With Strength in Shades, they have worked toward building a relational community that both welcomes and amplifies diverse voices and contributions.

Social enterprises like this one help us imagine business and economic structures differently. Rather than using the market for individual advancement, entrepreneurs can promote collaboration and relationships over competition. Changing core motives from unlimited growth and profit to community well-being and relationship building will allow social entrepreneurship and CSR to become increasingly humanized.

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DEEQA HAMID

HuMaNiZiNG PoLiCY & GoVeRNaNCe Policy & Governance: Participating in political processes, policymaking, and public governance.

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olicy and governance as a social impact approach has the powerful potential to disrupt systems of oppression and benefit the lives of full communities of people through legal and policy change. Unfortunately, too often governmental and political structures advance power and benefit for some humans at the great expense and suffering of others. Such harmful human tradeoffs are modern forms of colonization and rely on the dehumanization of communities of whom governments take advantage in order to garner support and acceptance.

and putting local farmers out of business or greatly diminishing their ability to make profit. While the US and Canada monetarily benefited from an increase in access to international markets, already poor Mexican farmers became even more impoverished. This chain reaction also led to the mass migration of Mexicans to the United States, due to no longer being able to subsist through agriculture, where they would face further dehumanization in the face of racist immigration policy stances and social ostracization.

The humanization of policy and governance practice demands that all humans be viewed as An example of such policy fallout on a large equally deserving of benefit and access, rather than scale is the devastating effect the implementation white Westerners constantly being favored in politof The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) had on Mexican corn farmers. This policy ical strategies that generate wealth and power. It abolished most trade barriers between the United includes removing rural bias, and seeing the equally valuable humanity in farmers, lower socio-economStates, Canada, and Mexico, resulting in Ameriic communities, and people of color. can corn subsidies flooding the Mexican market

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One policy initiative that offers potential hope for Mexican corn farmers, and gives an example of a slightly more humanizing policy and governance approach is a political decree signed by Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador in December 2020. The document seeks to return autonomy to farmers, empower them to reclaim self-sufficiency, and promote food sovereignty by phasing out two of the United State’s biggest agribusiness staples in Mexico - glyphosate and genetically engineered corn - by 2024. If this decree continues to be advocated for by Mexico’s president, and is executed on through strategic and local-facing policy decisions, it will represent humanizing policy and governance, at least to the extent of better honoring the humanity of Mexican corn farmers and the importance of their quality of life.

In order to humanize policy and governance, lobbyists, policy makers, legislators, and other government officials must continue to promote initiatives that rectify past colonial and dehumanizing policy. Even further, they must support and implement new policies that redesign systems and create new systems that promote the humanity of all communities regardless of nationality, race, or other social identity.

pg. 27 Community Organizing & Activism

PRISCILLA VILLASEÑOR-NAVARRO

HuMaNiZiNG CoMMuNiTY oRGaNiZiNG & aCTiViSM Community Organizing & Activism: Involving, educating, and mobilizing individual or collective action to influence or persuade others

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ommunity organizing is inherently relational, and effective activism also relies on community relationships whether in the form of collective action or through the communication of advocacy that is accessible to community members. This might look like protesting in the streets, creating socially provocative art, or advocating for vulnerable communities using social media. Often, community organizing and activism spaces provide safety and sanctuary for groups experiencing oppression. Due to the sensitive issues being combatted, intentional relational strategy is needed to continually humanize community organizing and activism.

An example of this type of intentional strategy includes the Chicana student newspaper

Venceremos. Venceremos - which means “we shall overcome” - started at the University of Utah in 1993, and aims to “challenge all forms of oppression and counter dehumanizing narratives about Latinas/Latinos in mainstream media, largely by incorporating Chicana/Chicano history, voices of Chicana/Chicano community members, and accounts of marginalization.” Drawing on the influence of Chicana activist Delores Huerta, Venceremos uses specific rhetorical tactics to assert humanity in Chicana/o/e issues. Rhetoric is the art of persuasion via discourse, and is used to tell stories or convey messaging that produces specific emotion in an audience. Venceremos implements rhetoric known as plática (talk/conversation), which allows for sharing communal experiences of minoritized identity and disenfranchisement,

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in order to build shared narrative, trust, reciprocity, and compassion among community members.

Similarly Venceremos uses testimonio (testimony), or personal stories, as a form of powerful rhetoric.

One of the editors of the newspaper explained the importance of testimonio by stating, “You want to honor people’s voices and put your personal opinions aside…I wanted to empower everyone in who they were and how they grow.”

Dolores Huerta, a labor union leader and civil rights activist who, with Cesar Chavez, co-founded the National Farmworkers Association (now known as United Farm Workers), also utilized strategic rhetoric in order to produce relationality and engender emotion for the humanity of vulnerable communities. One way Chicana activists did this was by haciendo caras (making face/making soul), which was a way of intentional communication via emotional facial expression and body language used to gain the attention of audiences.

Huerta intentionally used expressions of passion and tears to demonstrate her commitment to the work, to encourage empathy, and to challenge power constructs.

In these examples, plática, testimonio, and haciendo caras humanize community organizing and activism by allowing for people with lived experience to share experiences in safe communal circumstances, tell their personal stories, and authentically express their feelings. When social impact work includes such practice, it creates genuine and compassionate relationality, and allows for maintaining humanity for others and self. We will continue the further humanization of community organizing and activism as social change tools that allow for vulnerable rhetoric and communal sharing.

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SHIRLEY CHANG

HuMaNiZiNG PHiLaNTHRoPy Philanthropy: Donating or using private funds or charitable contributions from individuals or institutions to contribute to the public good

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lthough modern forms of philanthropy include crowdfunding, which can help bring community members into collective action via online platforms and humanize the individual struggles of beneficiaries, most Western philanthropy actually does very little to promote communal compassionate relationality.

The approach as practiced within the United States - a country suffering from immense wealth disparity - often becomes convoluted by the incentives of large tax breaks and positive public relations messaging for ultra wealthy individuals and corporations, inspiring skepticism about motivations and sincerity.

is Resource Generation, “a multiracial membership community of young people (18-35) with wealth and/or class privilege committed to the equitable distribution of wealth, land, and power.” Resource Generation provides education, resources, and organization to those with large amounts of inherited wealth in order to help them engage in intentional philanthropy meant to address systemic inequity.

Their guidelines include committing members to redistribute all or most of their inherited wealth to social justice movements that address root causes of social problems, divest from Wall Street, and commit to continual collective action towards societal wealth redistribution.

In order for philanthropy to be humanized, it must respond to historical and social injustice and help create relationships across social classes that produce compassion, empathy, and equity-focused generosity. One organization seeking to do just that

Resource Generation’s focus on helping those with extreme monetary privilege to orient themselves towards social justice philanthropy and redistribution of power via wealth and land ownership is a humanizing approach to philanthropy. It

pg. 32 Philanthropy

requires compassionate relationality, as those redistributing their wealth choose to be in an actionable relationship with vulnerable communities that have suffered due to systems of oppression.

As we continue to reimagine philanthropy as a tool for ethical social impact and systems change, we can increase its impact through relational practices. Equitable wealth redistribution strategy rather than occasional (and often self-serving) charitable donations should be considered standard practice for truly humanized philanthropy.

GREGORY BROOKS & JOSÉ COREAS

HuMaNiZiNG SoCiaL IMPaCT CoMMuNiCaTioN

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uthor of Nonviolent Communication: a Language of Life, Marshall B. Rosenburg, wrote that “We only feel dehumanized when we get trapped in the derogatory images of other people or thoughts of wrongness about ourselves.” In the text, he connects violent or dehumanizing communication with societal hurt, and in a world where communication happens everyday and increasingly far beyond our geographic localities via virtual platforms, it is important that our communication becomes a means to humanize one another versus a tool for hurt or pain.

To better understand the role of communication and how to humanize people we interact with, assistant professor of Communication Studies at UVU, Dr. Leandra Hernandez, provided valuable

information through an interview. She states that communicating humanely does not require us to have a similar identity to those we interact with, but it does help. Communication between cultures can be hard to bridge and according to Dr. Hernandez, situational awareness helps individuals anticipate highly charged stories. Empathy is also a key component in communication, especially between people of different cultures. The role of empathy in communication is to understand the feelings that are being portrayed and the perspectives that shape another’s views. Cross-cultural communications and those across ideological differences therefore require compassionate relationality, an empathetic engagement in the complexity of identity and perspective, as well as a willingness to maintain humanity for others and self.

pg. 34 Social Impact Communication

Visualizing Humanized Social Impact Communication We utilize the term social impact communication broadly, because context matters as we seek to humanize through ethical communication. For example, a PR campaign from the philanthropic arm of a large corporation could be seen as a kind of social impact communication. Alternatively, nn activist protesting a specific policy near the State Capitol is also engaging in social impact communication–although perhaps on a different scale, or with a different end in mind. It is easy to guess how certain forms of communication within the field of

social impact could be unethical and eschew just and compassionate relationality in favor of reinforcing inequitable power constructs and corruption.

Imagine if the fictional philanthropic PR campaign used social impact or social justice jargon and principles as a shield for hiding unethical corporate practices. Truly ethical and humanizing social impact communication does exist, but it is not easy to achieve without asking the right questions and committing the necessary resources to answer them.

“ The key is to consider every knowledge system as valid.

Stories tie people to their landscape, their heritage and one another. Storytelling sparks dialogue between generations and provides a time and place for ideas to be shared. In this way, stories preserve cultureand could help preserve the envrioment as well.” — Dr. Fernández-Llamazares

“ In decades past, trauma-informed journalism & the ethical component of journalism was not as defined. When you think about how the discipline of communications has been around for over 100 years, partricularly in the social impact/ social activism space, we’re now starting to see researchers, scholars & practitioners having conversations about these topics: thinking about the role of humanity, ethics, & social justice.”

— Dr. Leandra Hernandez

Reflective versus reactionary communication that takes systematic issues & history into account.

Emotional perspective-taking, compassion, & communication that takes the feelings of your subjects into acccount.

People with lived experience, letting people center themselves in their own stories.

Self-awareness of positionality on an issue, skills that promote healthy cross-cultural interactions, & intending to honor other people’s culture.

“ I accept cultural humility to be the ability to maintain an interpersonal stance that is other-oriented... while accepting cultural competence as the ability to interact effectively with people of different culturesmore of a learned/taught condition. I pride myself on being able to claim bothcompetence & humility-recognizing both as a lifelong journey, without an end point.”

— Dr. Ella Greene-Moton

“ Empathy is critical for understanding people, which in turn supports typical communication tasks such as developing effective communication tools, promoting attitudinal change, and boosting audience engagement. Research has demonstrated that empathy can be learned...[and] could include the development of... listening skills, ...the ability to ask probing questions & identify nonverbal cues, as well as behavior modification.” — Fuller et al.

Transparency & accountability on an institutional level helps maintain trust between stakeholders & people with lived experience.

“...there are some very clear benefits of transparency, particularly when it comes to government-centric goals. For example, greater transparency appears to consistently improve the quality of financial management & reduce levels of public sector corruption. On the other hand, ...mixed results for core transparency goals such as trust, legitimacy, & accountability suggests that other benefits of greater transparency are less clear-cut.” — Cucciniellio et al.

This can include qualitative & quantitative research, as well as following up with people you are communicating with or about.

“ Enviromental impacts are readily regulated through established monitoring practicing and goverance frameworks, such as enviromental management systems & plans... yet equivalent tools for managing social impacts are not widely accepted. This is due in part to methodological difficulties that face Social Impact Assessment followup & the absence of suitable tools for monitoring management strategies.” — Mottee & Howitt

pg. 36 Social Impact Communication

That said, If an institution or individual wanted to improve their social impact communication to be more ethical and humane, what elements should they consider adding to their process? The following visual encompasses our attempt to loosely define social impact communication that can be applied with relationality and humanization in mind.

It includes calls to involve the voices of those with lived experience (living experts), frame social issues in social and historical context, employ empathy, practice cultural competence and humility, and investigate impact. The diagram includes quotes from scholars and professionals in six different fields to help understand each domain.

complementary. What’s clear, though, is that the ethics of communication are perhaps more relevant than ever as a means to humanizing social impact.

There are more professional fields grappling with questions of equity and ethics across the board.

There is a recognition that institutions do not operate in a vacuum, so the social impact aspects of how they operate and communicate are increasingly considered.

Ultimately, ethical communication can be seen as integral to the wider ecosystem of humanizing social impact. Humane and dignified stories deserve to be told, and social impact projects require an honest accounting of where they succeeded or failed. It should also be noted that The diagram reflects the reality that social improving the ethics of social impact communicaimpact communication happens, even if it’s not explicitly identified, in a diverse array of fields from tion is not a linear or guaranteed endeavor. It is possible for an organization to grow less transconservation and communications to education and public policy. In the diagram, there are overlap- parent over time, or an individual might entrench themselves in their favored knowledge systems ping concepts, theories, and even practical/scholarly controversies that we have noted. For example, and lose some cultural humility. Ethics are hard to maintain, in part, because they require sustained cultural humility and cultural competence are related but distinct ideas, with debates especially in commitment over a long period of time, but the results are worth it. the field of healthcare for what skills they represent beyond the theory. As Dr. Ella Greene-Moton indicates, sometimes unhelpful binaries are created between concepts when they are actually quite

CoNCLuSioN

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his publication contextualizes the concept of relational humanization within the field of social impact and acknowledges the Indigenous political and Black Feminist theoretical legacies from which we draw heavily. This is critical because we cannot bring the work of humanizing social impact to fruition without recognizing and centering minoritized, gendered, and racialized voices, as well as other underrepresented and overlooked identities.

For far too long, actors within the field of social impact have invasively injected themselves into social challenges without proper trust and relationship building, assumed solutions to local concerns without seeing the full humanity of local communities, and deemed themselves authorities and decision-makers leading to unhealthy or violent outcomes, ultimately dehumanizing those they seek to serve. Additionally, toxic perfectionism culture

pg. 38 Conclusion

and dogmatic approaches to social impact work continue to alienate individuals who seek to be a part of social advocacy and systems change work, when instead their efforts and intentions should be embraced and refined through compassionate relationship building.

of each other also requires a consideration of plants, animals, land, and water, because impact is interconnected and cyclical.

We call upon the reader to join us in committing to humanizing social impact through three main values: compassionate relationality, maintainHumanizing social impact demands that a ing humanity for others, and maintaining humanity deep, shared relationship be in place prior to any for ourselves. Each of these informs our strategies social impact intervention. It requires a careful nav- towards effective, sustainable, and just praxis within igation of the complex challenges in building trust the field of social impact, and a commitment to with minoritized and vulnerable communities and growth which never truly ends. Indeed, abolitionist seeks collaborative resolutions, even if that means Mariame Kaba states that to see a world where all withdrawing and respecting the self-determination have what they need requires constant experimenof these communities. Additionally, we acknowltation and a revolutionary hope that we can continedge that concepts of relationality also extend into ue to redesign systems to that end. This publication challenging anthropocentrism or solely human-cen- is one attempt in a field that is just beginning to tered ethics, particularly when they are informed by own its problematic history and assert new futures Indigenous political thought. All things exist in rela- informed by the past, and we cannot think of anytion to one another. To consider the humanization thing more human and relational than that.

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