What I Learned from Co-Leading with Dr. Chera Reid

Almost three years ago, Dr. Chera Reid and I became co-Executive Directors of the Center for Evaluation Innovation (CEI). Chera's leadership brought to CEI a wealth of experience, lived and scholarly, and a longstanding commitment to liberation for Black and brown people and historically dis-invested communities. In the time she's been at CEI, much has changed about who CEI is now and who we have been becoming.?

As we both prepare to transition out of our leadership roles–-Chera at the end of 2023, and me after CEI concludes its search for a new executive director (our job listing should be out next week!)--I wanted to take this opportunity to thank Chera for her partnership and to lift up just a few of the many things I’ve learned while working alongside her.?

Shifting the philanthropic sector requires us to radically imagine what the future can be.?

While CEI's longstanding body of work has been about improving strategy, learning, and evaluation in philanthropy as it exists now, Chera introduced me to the kind of radical imagining that is required to see a different future altogether for philanthropy.

Over the last several years and working with her colleagues Efrain Gutierrez and Dr. Trinel Torian, Chera created Freedom Dreams in Philanthropy, an invitation to collectively re-imagine the philanthropic sector. Grounded in the Black radical tradition, described by Robin D.G. Kelley and Black feminist theory and methods, this work is creating spaces and opportunities to visualize the future we want to live in, and to harness the resources to move that dream closer toward reality.

This kind of future focus has given the reform work that I do to support foundations in taking meaningful next steps a clearer line of sight to a vision of what strategy, learning, and evaluation could be in philanthropy if these functions were fully aligned with our aspirations around equity and justice. My work can at times require a pace and a set of compromises that feel frustrating against a radical imagination of the future. But I have learned to appreciate this tension because it forces me to think about what I need to do now to accelerate the path to a different future.

Our mission requires more attention to our people, our policies, and our practices.?

CEI’s mission is to partner with philanthropy to provide changemakers the space and resources needed to advance racial justice and create an equitable future. We clarified our stance and our values in 2019, and we have been working since to ensure that we are fully aligned with our intent.?

I founded CEI in 2009 as a fiscally-sponsored project and we operated that way for 13 years. I saw fiscal sponsorship as a lighter lift administratively, allowing us to focus more on the work and less on the organization. Chera helped me to see, however, that fully aligning ourselves to CEI’s mission required us to pay more attention to our organizational culture, policies, and practices so that our people and our partners are fully supported in what it takes to nurture our creativity, our minds, and our bodies in this work.?

Significantly, this meant that in 2022 we became our own 501c3, a move I don’t think I would?have made without Chera’s partnership. That shift led to a number of changes, including a rewriting of our employee handbook to better reflect our values, and to being more intentional about trying to create a more joyful organization that supports team development, cohesion, and spaciousness. It was Chera’s idea, for example, to begin every January with two weeks of independent study that each staff member can use as desired for personal development and to prepare for the year ahead.?

Partnerships and relationships are the outcome we are after, and not just a means to an end.

Our mission calls us to partner with changemakers in the philanthropic sector who are also working toward a more inclusive and multi-racial democracy. We partner with others on almost everything we do–evaluations, learning projects, convenings, and numerous field-building activities.?

While I have been accustomed to seeing partnerships more as a means to an end (i.e., partnerships help us to do our work), co-leadership with Chera helped me to see this the other way around. She asked: What would it look like to center relationships in our work? Rather than the work and its outputs being the end, I now see that the work we do is a means for developing and nurturing the relationships and connections we need to sustain us in our long-term work. New and stronger relationships with purpose-aligned partners are the outcome we are after. Asking questions about what is good for a partnership can yield different answers than questions that are only about what will advance the work.

As Chera and I conclude our time as CEI’s co-leaders, I feel tremendous gratitude for our partnership and for the time we have spent together. We leave CEI in a more values-focused and stable place, poised for new ideas and new leadership.

Thank you, Chera. It has been my distinct privilege.