My Charge: Moving Beyond What We Believe to be Possible

Dear Friends, Partners, and Supporters,

I am honored to write to you as the incoming Executive Director of the Funders’ Collaborative on Youth Organizing (FCYO). While I am new to this particular role, I have been part of FCYO’s broader network for many years. When I was a young, founding director of a youth organizing group, I pored over FCYO’s early publications. More than a decade later, when I transitioned into the philanthropic sector, I reached out to FCYO for support in crafting a resource strategy to develop and fund youth organizing infrastructure in my state. Since that time, I’ve been an active member of FCYO’s Advisory Board, including serving on its Steering Committee for the last four years.   

As I step into this new role, my specific charge may be new, but my commitment runs deep.  

As a child born and raised in Oakland, I was taught early to take pride in being from the birthplace of the Black Panthers.  

As a public high school student in the 1990s, I sat out of school for months in solidarity with a historic teachers’ strike and participated in student walkouts protesting state propositions that would fuel the mass criminalization of Black and Brown youth and the dehumanization of immigrants.  

As an organizer in New Haven, Connecticut, I came to understand the inherent limitations of any singular organization, witnessed the inevitable deficits of approaches that conflate successful issue-based campaigns with building durable community power, and experienced the particular heartbreak of knowing that the changes we sought were not matched by the size of our base or scope of our power. 

As I watched my organizing mentors and elders be denied resources despite historic wins, I was a white woman leading an organization that worked primarily with Black and Brown youth, and benefiting directly from institutional and structural bias and racism in the nonprofit and philanthropic sector.   

As a leader of a family foundation, I learned painful and valuable lessons about power and possibilities, and the liabilities and limitations of foundations in movement ecosystems. My time in the philanthropic sector catalyzed my desire to make the opaque structures of philanthropy more transparent to community and field partners. If we see ourselves as mutually accountable partners in this work, we must develop a strong power analysis of our resourcing structures and develop strategies that buffer and protect organizing work from the often capricious comportment of institutional philanthropy.  

Finally, as a student of history, I know that the broader conditions of the current moment poise us for unprecedented societal transformation - if we do the work.

I step into leadership at FCYO knowing that I am “on assignment.” The charge of FCYO’s new strategic direction resonates deeply with me because I recognize the critical role that movement intermediary entities like FCYO - which are focused on resource distribution, field development, and connective tissue infrastructure - have to play in propelling movement work forward. The societal transformation we seek requires a line of sight that extends beyond the inherent structural limitations of the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors as they currently exist. Embedded in FCYO’s strategic vision is a mandate to build real, enduring, and accountable relationships as part of a broader movement for racial, economic, and social justice while also moving, influencing, and organizing funders to move with a level of critical analysis and strategic precision that aligns with the needs, visions, and demands of the field.

There is no doubt that the path forward is situated on challenging terrain. At FCYO we are committed to holding the inevitable moments of overwhelm, defeat, and heartbreak of movement work with both gracious curiosity and rigorous interrogation. Doing so ensures that the collective wisdom born out of shared struggle can truly become fertile ground for change, seeding new ways of being, unearthing new practices and strategies, and cultivating a vision beyond what we currently believe to be possible. 

I can’t wait to dig into that work with you.  

With gratitude and commitment, 
Laura McCargar