This workshop centers the urgent need to unlearn and dismantle the white normative values embedded in nonprofit organizational culture — values that suppress innovation, uphold racial hierarchies, and exploit Black labor under the guise of “mission.” It’s about naming and replacing those harmful norms with Black-affirming, liberatory practices rooted in community, collective care, and transformative leadership.

We’re talking about moving from:

• Urgency → to Intentionality

• Perfectionism → to Process and Learning

• Paternalism → to Shared Power

• Individualism → to Collective Wisdom

This is a culture shift workshop — and it’s unapologetically Black-centered.

This session directly challenges the nonprofit sector’s toxic glorification of overwork, martyrdom, and mission-driven burnout — particularly as it impacts Black staff, leaders, and organizers. It reclaims rest, boundaries, and joy as integral to liberation and sustainability. The workshop invites participants to confront the ways white supremacist culture manifests in nonprofit workplace habits and decision-making norms: urgency, perfectionism, over-productivity, and scarcity.

By the end of this session, participants will:

• Identify characteristics of white dominant culture in nonprofit work habits (e.g. urgency, individualism, defensiveness — see Tema Okun’s work).

• Understand how sacrificial labor is disproportionately demanded from Black staff, often framed as "passion" or "resilience."

• Explore rest and ease as core strategies for resistance, healing, and creative power.

• Begin designing new workplace rituals and systems that honor sustainability, community, and wellness.

This workshop is a call to reclaim imagination as a political and spiritual act of resistance for Black people — one that defies the conditions of oppression by daring to envision freedom, joy, and futures rooted in abundance.

Historically, systems of white supremacy, colonization, and capitalism have tried to confine Black people’s ability to dream. Enslaved Africans were criminalized for visioning freedom. Black youth are often punished for creativity outside “respectability.” Black leaders are told to be “realistic” when demanding equity. This workshop says: We reject those limits.

To dream out loud is to believe that a liberated future is possible — and that we deserve it.

By the end of this session, participants will:

1. Explore the ways oppression has stifled Black imagination, from enslavement to the nonprofit industrial complex.

2. Understand imagination as a radical, embodied act of refusal.

3. Practice collective visioning grounded in Black cultural memory, ancestral wisdom, and radical hope.

4. Create a tangible artifact — a Liberation Vision Board, Freedom Manifesto, or Dreaming Blueprint — to carry into movement spaces.

This workshop is a direct challenge to philanthropic norms that position Black communities as problems to be solved or causes to be “supported,” rather than as powerful agents of change, innovation, and leadership. It is about shifting from transactional funding to a model rooted in solidarity, wealth redistribution, and trust, while holding funders accountable for their role in maintaining systemic inequality.

At its core, it demands a clear reorientation: White people and institutions are not neutral helpers — they are often power holders who must be disrupted and decentered.

Workshop Objectives:

• Examine the racialized roots of philanthropy, from Gilded Age industrialists to present-day social impact branding.

• Explore how “helping” frames strip Black people of agency, and how whiteness is often centered in grantmaking, evaluation, and storytelling.

• Equip Black-led organizations with tools to set boundaries, assert value, and reclaim narrative control.

• Teach funders how to listen, redistribute power, and practice repair — not just write checks.

This workshop reimagines what it means to fundraise from a Black liberatory perspective — one that refuses to beg for crumbs, hides none of our truth, and builds relationships grounded in reciprocity, dignity, and vision.

It’s about moving from scarcity to sovereignty — and empowering Black-led organizations to fundraise without compromising their values or community accountability.

Workshop Objectives:

• Explore how traditional donor engagement models often require emotional labor, assimilation, and code-switching from Black leaders.

• Build a model of donor engagement that centers truth-telling, transparency, and boundaries.

• Cultivate the confidence to set fundraising terms that align with your liberation values.

• Learn how to educate donors without coddling them, and how to build multi-racial donor bases rooted in shared commitment.