I think we can all agree Gen Z has lofty ideals and a spring in their step for social change that makes some of us old fogeys a little uncomfortable. But could they be the generation that deconstructs the nonprofit industrial complex while the rest of us stand by and watch the show?
Today, I’m joined by Sarah Medina Camiscoli, Assistant Professor of Law at Rutgers and the founding co-director of the Peer Defense Project. Sarah shows us how these visionary zoomers are experimenting with entirely new ways to build mission-driven organizations, from mutual aid networks to worker-self-directed nonprofits and beyond.
My fave takeaway – the power of Gen Z isn’t necessarily in the benjamins they can raise, but rather in their ability to multiply their following.
They’ve done what we Gen Xers and millennials have merely hoped to accomplish–leveraging digital community and grassroots solidarity to advance justice. (Sarah even gave me a template to start integrating some of these “prefigurative politics” into my own organization without fully disrupting the board and funders.)
So whether you lead an established nonprofit empire or are just a wannabe ally looking to support the next generation of world-changers, listen in on the discussion as Sarah breaks down everything you need to know. Stick around to the end for her best tips on bringing Zoomers onto your board, doing right by youth staffers, and opening up decision-making to a consent-based approach in your organization.
Important Links:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-medina-camiscoli-74b31912b/
Peer Defense Project Resource Guide:
1. Sociocracy and Worker-Self Directed Nonprofits
2. Mutual Aid3. Action Networks (Hub and Spoke Collectives)
3. Action Networks (Hub and Spoke Collectives)
Episode Transcript
RHEA 00:00
Welcome to Nonprofit Lowdown. I’m your host, Rhea Wong.
Hey, podcast listeners, Rhea Wong with you once again with Nonprofit Lowdown.
Today I am with my guest and friend, Sarah Medina Kamishole. She is the Assistant Professor of Law at Rutgers and the founding co director of the Peer Defense Project. And today we’re going to talk about Gen Z. Who are they as donors and what kind of models, in fact, they’re being very disruptive to the nonprofit industrial complex and the funding model.
So we’re going to talk all about that. Sarah, welcome to the show. Hi. All right, before we jump into the content here, why are you qualified to speak about Gen Z?
SARAH 00:46
First, I’m not a Gen Z er let’s be first about that. I am a millennial, but I work, like you shared, as a professor of law, teaching and writing about youth led social movements and the ways in which their visions for justice are really critical forms of knowledge for us to integrate into democracy and law and society.
Beyond that, I also am a youth movement lawyer and have worked with youth social movements for the last 10 years and was a youth organizer myself who founded an organization my commitment is really working to support and elevate these youth leaders who are sharing their genius and showing us the gaps in our society.
And I’m really excited to talk about that from my perspective as a public school teacher, community organizer, lawyer, law professor, movement lawyer.
RHEA 01:33
Ugh, okay. All the things. Okay, so before we get into, really get into it, can you help us define some terms? When I say Gen Z who am I talking about?
What? age range is that?
SARAH 01:44
Okay, so Gen Zers, arguably today, are between the ages of 12 and 27. And so you want to think about like your late 90s babies born all the way until about 2012. And so when we think about Gen Z, We’re thinking about that constituency that lived through some of the most traumatic crises of our time.
In fact, Movement Law Lab talks about the quadruple crises of our time. And of current living generations, this group has arguably lived through some of the most serious traumatic crises of our time. Our time. They lived through public health crises, racial insurrection, terrorism and war, and the rise of and threat of authoritarianism and several economic recessions while being the only constituency to receive information at the rate that they receive it.
And so you have a group of people who is largely some of the most knowledgeable people in crisis and trauma and dysfunction. And, yeah they have some really big ideas for what society should look like and also get a really bad rap by our Gen Xers, by Millennials, by Boomers who are constantly criticizing this idea of hyper conscious, demanding, lazy generation that doesn’t know how to put in a 9 to 5.
When in reality, a lot of the times what they’re doing is Just working nine to five and calling to attention long standing workplace violations that we’ve just accepted as okay.
RHEA 03:16
You’ve said a mouthful and you know, it’s so funny. It’s every generation Criticizes the one after it, right? So the boomers criticize the gen xers are complaining about the millennials millennials complain about the gen Like this is the way of the world So what do you think really characterizes?
the gen z Generation like when we think about it as compared to say the millennials
SARAH 03:36
Sure. So I’m going to speak from my experience, specifically working with youth social movements and working at the Peer Defense Project, which I co lead with an incredible Gen Z activist and now law student, Maryam Sanlanova.
And what I would say is that Gen Z, in my particular Gen Z social movements, have really rejected three different I’d say norms around how nonprofits function and how we receive and distribute money. The first is hierarchy, the second is relying on corporate funds, and the third is siloed activities.
And so when we think about the traditional nonprofit model that emerges really from the 1970s this is not a long, ancient model that is tested and true we think of, or we should know, the data, over 80 percent of the executive directors are white adults we have over 25 billion per year coming from corporations like Walmart and Google and Pfizer, and we have extremely siloed spaces, over two million non profits. The three cities with the most non profits in the country, New York, Texas, and California, have the most segregated schools, the most serious housing crises, and of course are dealing with human rights violations like we have never seen before in terms of an immigrant crisis.
So thinking about that, clearly what we’re doing isn’t working. It’s not working. And if we’re going to think about it from an investment standpoint, the investment isn’t working. If we just look at 50 years, did we get more people housed? Did we get, did we improve education and racial justice?
And did we create a more inclusive society? I think a lot of Gen Zers are right when they’re like looks like we need to change course a little bit. Think of it more as evolution and ideation. And we know from other industries that when we see something is not functioning, we need to shift how we do it.
there are three different models that I’ll talk about today, but I’ll pause for a second there. Thinking about structures of nonprofits that disrupt hierarchical decision making, like sociocratic organizations and worker directed nonprofits. Looking at organizations that decentralize funding streams from corporate donors like mutual aid efforts.
And then also looking at action networks and coalitions as other models. For how Gen Z wants to fund and manage the movements that are going to be the legacy they leave behind.
RHEA 06:11
Okay, Sarah, you just said a mouthful, I’m just going to back up a little bit here because, I’m a Gen Xer, so I’m sort of hanging on to the last rung of Gen X.
And I think it’d be very easy for me to write off Gen Z as, youthful idealism, Yeah. That’s all, that sounds great in practice, right? Y’all sound like a bunch of hippies, but you don’t really know the way the world is. So I’m curious, one thing that I do know about Gen Z is they do have lots of big ideas and yet without tried and true models of how it works, it is just an idea.
So how might you respond to that?
SARAH 06:47
Sure. Let’s pick an example. Can you give me an example of a big idea that you think, I don’t know, Gen X or Millennials had, and that we were successful in delivering on?
RHEA 06:58
Successful? I don’t know. Social media.
SARAH 07:01
Social media. Okay, great. Social media. I think that’s a little bit easier because we can think of it within a corporate space, but we also can see the ways in which, right now, These big social media heads are being held to account for causing enormous amounts of harm in our society.
And so I like to think about that Gen Z has a macro analysis of intersecting vectors of harm. And I hate to say it, Rhea, but there’s 82 million of them. They are the largest generation and I don’t think it’s too bad that the largest generation of people right now in the world we’re living in is very concerned with being socially conscious and with equity and with well being.
And that being said, I hear what you’re saying, which is the sort of long standing challenge of what we call prefigurative politics, which I’ll get into, is how do we just put one foot in step of the other, in front of the other, and move forward? Because this is driving me bananas, right?
And so I want to move into that a little bit about Gen Z, and I think this is actually a fundamental misunderstanding, because what a lot of Gen Z activists are talking about, and again, I’m specifically talking about youth that I’m working with in New York City and through the Peer Defense Project’s Youth Defense Network.
And so this is not a hyper generalization of all Gen Zers. I’m particularly talking about the ways in which we see leftist social movements led by young people engaging what we call prefigurative politics. Prefigurative politics comes from Marxist and anarchist theories, which everyone’s oh god, the anarchists, the Marxists, here they come, right?
But really what it is, is just this belief in an egalitarian society. How do we actually Live in a radically egalitarian society, and radically not necessarily meaning violence has to get us there, but really taking something from the root and transforming it, right? Prefigurative politics really asks, how do we build our leftist institutions, or our non profits, or our fundraising methods, to model the world we want to see?
Currently, our non profits model a world where 80 percent of the owning power is in a white, wealthy, upper class owning group. Google, Walmart, and Pfizer have enormous pull in terms of how social services function. And the places with the most social services have some of the most serious social issues.
In terms of prefigurative politics, there’s really three pieces of it that I think are key, and then I can talk about three models, but I’ll start with the three pieces. Prefigurative politics first demands a shared social analysis. So when you’re saying, I don’t really get what’s going on with them, it’s probably because you guys haven’t sat down and talked about how do you understand the economy?
How do you understand justice? A lot of these prefigurative politics have a very strong understanding of racial capitalism, meaning that Profit is generated along the lines of race and that you have to oppress certain races to generate a profit. So that’s going to look really messy in a non profit, where you have a management team with the highest salaries, who’s white or white presenting, and then you have a younger intern team that probably isn’t even getting paid.
And they’re mostly people of color under the age of 25. The second piece of prefigurative politics is the relationship. Are you talking? Are you engaging in transparent and consent based decision making processes to disrupt that really strong analysis you have of society?
And then the last piece is radical imagination. Of course, you can imagine, in a non profit that needs to report annually to the IRS and to its board, you might have some trouble if you’re trying to integrate a strong analysis of racial capitalism and deep consent based decision making processes and also a reimagination of what the economy could look like.
RHEA 11:04
one thing that I’m just thinking about and being a very pragmatic person, I’m like, all right, Sarah, I hear you. I’m down. I want to do all these things. And do we do it when we’re also constrained by the system, right?
So we have a board that we report to. The board understands that we function in a particular way. We have funders we must report to. We have, grant commitments that we need to make, all of these things may not intersect with these new models of how we lead organizations. What do we do?
SARAH 11:33
I’ll start with Peer to Friends Project, which is the organization where I’m a co founding executive director.
Now, we don’t have everything figured out, Rhea! I don’t know everything!
RHEA 11:43
Really? Because you speak with such authority? Just whatever you say, I’m like, sure, yes.
SARAH 11:46
Don’t! Whatever Sarah says. Do not do that! Do not do that! Do not. we don’t have everything figured out. What I will say, I know to be true, is that There are some strong models that exist right now, which are disruptive to the non profit industrial complex, but are not multi million dollar organizations that are reporting to grants that we are impacting 50, 000 people, right?
I just want to name that Adrienne Marie Brown has this concept of work that is a mile deep and an inch wide, or a mile wide and an inch deep. And I think it’s a little bit divisive, but if we think about the spectrum, right? I’m gonna talk about the organizations that are doing work that’s very focused, but very deep in terms of political analysis, okay?
And that’s not to say that’s fundamentally good or bad, but the question of today is, How do we harness the genius and the vision of this awesome generation we call Gen Z? In terms of the worker self directed nonprofits and sociocratic models I’ll talk from my experience founding PDP. We are small, right?
We’re thinking like less than 10 people. And I say that because one of the founding principles of worker directed nonprofits as a model in this space is consent based decision making. Consent based decision making means that let’s say you and I run this organization called the Rhea Podcast Incorporated, and we want to decide how we’re going to share responsibilities.
So we have a conversation, we go back and forth. Now in a traditional nonprofit, if you’re the ED and I’m a director, I’m like, I really think what we should do is switch off every quarter who’s running operations. You’d be like, oh, that’s interesting, but actually I’d prefer this, and we’d go with what you say, right?
Now, that can lead to conflicts down the line. And people often say, consent based decision making, that’s going to cause so many problems. But how many times down the line have you realized that someone on your team actually didn’t want to do what you actually said you were going to do, and then it caused a conflict?
Anyway, so up front, the two of us, or at the time, the three or four of us that built PDP, sat down and studied models from the Sustainable Economies Law Center, which I’ll share in the resource guide, on how to build shared flat leadership structures. We didn’t agree on everything, but the idea of consent based decision making is not do I love it, it’s can I live with it.
And so it’s creating a new model of workplace culture where it’s can I live with this in terms of its alignment to the mission. And so all of the people, all of the workers are consenting to Participatory budgeting, how we use our money, where we take our money from, right? And not every single thing has to be consent based.
If I wanted to come on this podcast, for example, I’m represented as an individual, I don’t have to seek consent from my organization, right? But if I was like, Pure Defense Project is going to host a new podcast, I would have to get consent from all of the people. So one is consent based decision making processes, and it happens in circles.
And so we can think of the traditional corporate model as a weekly stand up. The stand up actually is just now a strategy circle. And instead of everyone coming together and reporting on what they did, and the ED giving a thumbs up or a thumbs down, Everyone comes together and reports on what they did and shares any operational issues that they need to discuss and vote on.
Now, Rhea, that takes more time! That takes more time! And if you want to do this, it’s essentially one of your programs. That is part of your programming, and I think that when we’re considering funders, whether it’s major donors or foundations that are thinking about this, you really want to look for more of your model funders who are looking to fund transformational models.
Less than issues, right? That model of supporting and elevating impacted people, and particularly with young people, and when I say young, I’m talking of working age, not anyone who cannot work, because then they can’t be an employee and they can’t consent. Also including a coaching model. Because not everyone shows up to space as being able to make those decisions, or fully even understand what operations are.
So a huge part of that consent based decision making, and thus your programming, is professional development, coaching, and also really strong talent recruitment. This isn’t just Anybody, right? These are, in the youth space, adults who have experienced education, facilitation, and organizing, and youth organizers who have experience in empathetic leadership development, and other different spaces.
I’ll pause there on that. That is more of your like, smaller, we’re gonna build it from the ground up. And the board, Is a board of people who is committed to that mission and also has capacity to invest in that, right? And so when we go to our board each month, we are reporting our budget, we are reporting about our programming, and the questions they’re asking us are not only about alignment to our serving of other youth orgs, but also alignment to the shared leadership values that are part of our mission as well.
RHEA 17:06
Really good stuff. And then from a board representative perspective, are you also thinking about bringing New York City youth onto your board as shared leadership?
SARAH 17:15
Yeah, we’ve learned a lot in terms of this space as well because the youth organizing space is also a space where we are creating emerging models of shared leadership, because this is not how it’s set up right like in some states.
You can’t have anyone under the age of 18 on your board. In New York, I believe you can have one board member under 16. Now, instead of focusing on just that age band, we really look at this wider expanse, this wider expansive age band of who are youths, which is generally aligned to brain science on the frontal cortex development, 14 to 25.
And we actually just onboarded our first youth board member. And what we talked about was identifying the skills that we needed. so we particularly needed people with more board experience. And so we spent time recruiting young people under 25, who had extensive experience on university boards.
Because they’re our student trustees, right? it’s both that intersection, and I think It’s like this, it’s like a curse word to say affirmative action now. Thinking about affirmative action where it’s the multiple dimensions of an individual, age as one of the many dimensions, race and culture and ethnicity as one of the many dimensions in addition to skills.
And for some reason with young people, we seem to get that somewhat in terms of race and gender. But we really don’t seem to get that in terms of young people. There’s just this concept of everyone under 25 has the same skill set and the same problems and the same issues. Whereas it’s really about, do we have skilled recruitment?
Do we have skilled coaches and people who are able to identify talent?
RHEA 18:59
I’m really glad that you pointed out to that the coaching aspect, because that, one of the things that Occur to me is you can have a 22 year old and they can have some really great lived experiences.
They can be super smart that hardworking, et cetera, et cetera. But there’s just a level of call it wisdom of just like being on the planet longer and knowing how things work based on pattern recognition. So the ability to help them to intentionally develop seems like a very important aspect if you want to think about this model.
So let’s switch a little bit and then I want to talk about funding because, this is Nonprofit Lowdown. We want to talk about funding. But if I’m already running a nonprofit and I’m like cool, Sarah I, I think that I’d like to incorporate some of these models and ideas into an existing non profit.
How might I begin?
SARAH 19:45
There’s two different models that I think are interesting. I think the worker directed non profit and the sociocratic method, I don’t want to dilute that so that it basically becomes like a pretend place, right? And I think especially in youth spaces, we’re like, go play house over there and we’ll actually run the house here, right?
But I’m going to look at mutual aid and action networks. So I actually got a lot of my learning around Action Networks from Brooke Ritchie Babbage who does non profit mastermind, really great. And the idea of Action Networks is that a group of pre existing organizations, so let’s say the Ria Wong has 50 employees, and you are reaching an audience of 3 million people, right?
Not really maybe the time to dramatically change your structures entirely to consent based decision making and circles and all of those things. But maybe you’re like, you know what, we need to operate differently. And so I’m going to find all of the other podcasters who are thinking about progressive nonprofit management, and we’re going to create an action network.
And what the action network is going to do is it’s going to prefigure more collective decision making and more collective fundraising. And so we’ll have a general circle, and that circle will have a representative from three to four of the organizations at a given time, and then we’ll rotate. That general circle will receive funds and then allocate it to different projects that are worked on by different podcast organizations.
And so what it does is it doesn’t require that the organization collapse in and of itself, although some organizations do need to. But it also it allows for an organization to engage in a process of sharing resources, expertise, and talent with other organizations in a less siloed way, right? That then requires that the five non profits are dealing with all of the stuff that comes up for us when we are going in to go on a shared bid for a grant with someone.
It’s not easy, because it’s oh god, should I have done it by myself? Oh, ah, but I have to hoard the grant and the money and how do I do it, right? So that is one way that I think is challenging, but also really feasible and done really well. And some of the organizations that are doing that work are Law Students for Climate Accountability.
Of course, Movement for Black Lives, where we see organizations coming together and creating these networks that share resources and talent in intentional and democratic ways. Because I want to say one last thing, prefiguration, whatever, if there’s one thing you take from this podcast, one thing, ONE THING, Gen Z is showing us what it would mean to live in a culture of democracy.
And what that means is a place where everyone who shares in public space co authors the laws and policies for those spaces. That’s public schools, public libraries, highways. If you are involved in that space, you have more of direct impact on the policies that are impacted there. And that’s not everywhere, but that’s some really important local spaces where I think that we need to start really considering and building skills around that to solve these really entrenched problems.
RHEA 23:02
Okay, let’s talk about funding because you mentioned the notion of action networks, you talked about mutual aid I’m curious too about the Gen Z philanthropists, right? Because if we have folks who have, material resources that are of this generation, how are they thinking differently about funding, about supporting organizations than perhaps Millennials or Boomers or Gen Xers?
SARAH 23:25
Okay, so I’m gonna show you like two sides of it, right? Let’s say like Gen Z er, fundraiser, and the Gen Z er donor, because I think that especially because we’re that band is quite Small in terms of when people, especially generation that’s lived through this economic recession has capacity to actually generate wealth.
We can get to that, too. But I think one really well known organization that everyone should know about is Resource Generation. They’re an organization, obviously, that work with young people who have inherited wealth over a period of time to think about fundraising in a way that is, transformed and new and less controlling.
And so if you check out their work, a lot of their work is around first understanding the roots of anti Black racism, classism, anti Semitism, xenophobia, and then supporting the people who hold privilege and power to give more generously with less control. And I actually think this is something that you’ve really helped me to see a lot as well in terms of the importance of building relationship and really refocusing on major donors.
Not saying that people who can give large sums of money as individuals are not connected to corporations, but they are not Walmart, they are not Google, they are not Pfizer, right? And so there’s something really interesting in this model of building relationships, and one group that I think is doing that really well is resource generation.
Resource generation has also committees, they’re issue based committees, where they’ll invite people to come and present about their work. They also have these listservs, and so it really is about democratizing access to these wealthier people. Who are interested in doing things differently. Whereas, what I find in more of the Gen X and Boomer fundraising spaces, I can’t even find a contact online for this family foundation.
It’s supposed to remain hidden. I’m not supposed to know how to find it. It’s more of a whisper network model. And so I think that that’s one way. The other thing I wanted to share is that There’s a real interest in mutual aid. And so I want to get into what that looks like, both from the like receiving and donating because mutual aid disrupts that binary between who receives money and who gives money.
Mutually has three key components that it’s initiative mobilizes people meet survival needs and brings participation in. There’s one Gen Z actress out of Texas, Julie, her name’s Juliana. Queer Latina. And they do incredible work around abortion funds. And so basically what they’re doing is they are elevating the dysfunction of state bans on abortion.
And they are asking everyone in their life for 5, for 1, for 2 on these huge TikTok platforms. And so what’s interesting about that and this is just my personal opinion, this is not Proper advice. I don’t, this is not advice. But what I see in those spaces is that when young people are getting sort of your Bernie Sanders grassroots small donor campaigns off the ground that attracts other people who also have wealth and then can make larger donations.
And so I think the power of the Gen Z donor is not necessarily in the wealth, but in the So the scope of people and the following and the consensus that they are building in spaces and the visibility that’s getting elevated. I will say in terms of mutual aid, there’s some critical pieces that I think anyone listening to this or wanting to support Gen Z to do should share the resources with anyone at all.
Barnard Center on Research on Women, and Dean Spade and Michael Haber at Hofstra, this will all be in the resource guide, have instructions and webinars on how to think about tax liability in those spaces. Because you can do mutual aid under a 501c3 non profit. But you also, most people don’t, as what I’ve seen.
A lot of the time it’s through Venmo or personal accounts, and so accounting and other things like that are really critical pieces that sometimes I see people really challenged with and jump into the work without setting that up first. So those are some different forms of technical assistance I would suggest on that.
RHEA 27:45
Yeah, it’s interesting too, because I mean, you see like GoFundMe pages set up all the time and I’m like, what are the tax implications of this, right? Because as we know, the IRS is going to get its piece.
SARAH 27:56
Yep. And I think that you won’t I think that’s interesting too, like within the mutual aid space oftentimes the amount that you’re donating is not going to hit an amount that is even going to get you like that sizable of a break.
And so it’s interesting to consider also how mutual aid is disrupting that transactional model of I give to you so that I can get this reduction in terms of how much I have to pay on taxes. But yeah, I think the mutual aid model is another really powerful example. And Youth Alliance for Housing is an abolitionist organization demanding a right to housing for all young people, who does some interesting work around that too.
RHEA 28:33
Sarah, this has been so interesting. And I’m just personally, my brain is buzzing right now. The thing that you said that I just really want to underscore here is you said The power of Gen Z is not necessarily in how much they’re able to give, but in how they’re able to access a network.
And it’s true that this is a generation that are digital natives, like they grew up with an iPhone in their hands. And so the ways in which they are able to navigate this digital world and build a community around it far surpasses any generation before. And so I think as we think about how do we really bring in the strengths and the superpowers, if you will, of Gen Z, we have to think about what are they uniquely suited to do?
And what are the ways in which the environment has shaped their perspective that is different than other generations? And I, your point taken about, they came into a world with. Probably more trauma than any other generation. I don’t know, maybe like the silent generation had more trauma, but but still the influx of information that they’ve been given makes them unique.
SARAH 29:38
Yep. And I want to say one point to that, don’t make the Gen Z or your social media intern. That is the rule. The rule of today is find a way to genuinely support, elevate, integrate, and pay a living wage to the younger generation of people. An example that I can give from Peer Defense Project, we have an incredible communications intern Saroma Cray, who came to our organization.
And because of our worker self directed model. She was like, your network. No one’s talking in your network. And she, instead of just posting on social media to our existing and in her mind non functional network, she dramatically transformed the interaction between hundreds of youth organizations and now has really shifted the culture in terms of youth organizations and young activists being able to identify and share and discuss legal needs with one another to Collectively develop legal consciousness instead of relying on us or me or the other lawyers to tell them where there are legal issues.
So, I think this isn’t just Gen Z, right? And I would say to Gen X, to boomers, to millennials up and down this time, there are unique gifts and unique perspectives that different People, based on different identities and intersections, bring. And so I think the question is how do we structure our organizations to really extract and compensate and honor and nurture those gifts.
RHEA 31:18
Beautiful.
Sarah, this has been so fun. I know you gave us a bunch of resources, so make sure to put in the podcast notes for folks who want to do more reading on this. We’ll also make sure to put your LinkedIn profile if folks want to get in touch with you. Is that okay?
SARAH 31:30
Yeah, thanks so much and check us out at puredefense.org.
RHEA 31:34
Puredefense. org, folks. Check it out. Thanks, Sarah. Bye.
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