The New Voices Story

The New Voices Story
We usually measure success with numbers, especially in dollars and cents. But how do we measure the success of those who work for social justice, righting the wrongs done to our world’s less fortunate? How do we prove that our investments in emerging leadership are worthwhile? Numbers are inadequate to this task. But we can hope to see tangible changes in public policy; victories in court rooms; innovative, new products and services; improvements in public awareness and social consciousness; and historic or transformative events that deepen perception, reform imagination, and mobilize constituents.

There are stories within the overall tale of New Voices’ success since 1999, stories such as the support of a former unit director at the Ford Foundation, philosophical quirks of the fellowship program’s director, and diligence of the New Voices staff. Perhaps the most significant story of all has been the selection of New Voices Fellows whose lives are committed to eradicating injustice in the U.S. and abroad. A key to New Voices’ success – and that of its Fellows – has been a commitment to social justice within the program, ensuring cultural and leadership diversity among its extremely talented grantees.

The Creation of New Voices:
Nonprofit leadership icon Pablo Eisenberg wrote in his “Crisis of the Nonprofit Sector” (1997) that many “nonprofits, as they have had to fight for survival and increasingly depend on fees for service, have tended to lose some of their vision and cutting-edge quality.” This has resulted in the “loss of people with passion and some anger, people committed to making a difference in the world.” Eisenberg’s point is especially relevant in the case of social justice nonprofits functioning in America’s post-9/11 economy. With so many struggling to survive the ongoing recession in the sector, programs that help defray the costs of hiring new staff members in mid- to senior-level positions are rare. The constant reality of organizational crisis – especially among smaller social justice nonprofits – was a key reason behind New Voices’ creation.

The other interrelated rationale was to infuse such organizations with young and passionate talent. This pool of individuals would bring fresh perspectives to their work and their organizations. When the Human Rights unit at Ford (formerly the Human Rights and International Cooperation unit, or HRIC) first discussed the creation of the two-year social justice fellowship, most of what it had in mind was providing an additional mechanism to help small nonprofit organizations build their human and financial capacities. The unit wanted to expand “the ability of non-profit organizations to support and develop younger talent,” as well as to “focus attention on young people with fresh ideas.”

Critical to the establishment of New Voices at the Academy for Educational Development (AED) was Anthony Romero. Romero (who is currently Executive Director at the American Civil Liberties Union) was Director of the Ford Foundation’s Human Rights unit in 1999. He believed in the program’s ability to place young people in leadership positions within the social justice community, and supported the work of his own younger staff members as they articulated their vision to launch a program that would make this possible. Between December 1998 and July 1999, the Human Rights unit and senior staff members from AED hammered out the details for the program’s design. After a successful grant proposal submission, the Human Rights unit officially established the New Voices National Fellowship Program on July 30, 1999. Romero envisioned the salary-support awards as a “shot of adrenaline” for each grantee.

“A Stressful Time”:
AED had just nine months to organize a competition and award the program’s first 30 fellowships, and it still needed to find a Director for New Voices. After a lengthy search, the organization hired Kenneth T. Williams to run New Voices. Williams had previously worked for the Emergency Medical Services for Children National Resource Center and Handgun Control, Inc. (the latter organization was part of the coalition that successfully lobbied Congress for passage of the Brady Bill in 1993). Much of the work to organize staff and implement the program fell to Williams, who began his work on October 1, 1999.

Within seven months, Williams – with the help of two other staff members -- had created marketing, application, selection, and fellowship materials for New Voices (including a yin-yang-like logo with the letters “NV”), convened three focus groups, an Advisory Group, two Selection Panels, and organized the first conference for the Class of 2000 New Voices Fellows. “It was a stressful time to say the least,” Williams, “but we made it through.”

AED and New Voices’ staff, with the help of the Human Rights unit, developed a variety of financial incentives to entice talented individuals and innovative small nonprofits to apply. They set the average salary for potential fellows at $35,000 per year, plus benefits. They offered a $1,200 professional development account (now $1,500) for each of the two years of the fellowship. They also developed a financial and loan repayment assistance (FAP/LRAP) program offering up to $6,000 per year to cover student loan debt, childcare costs, and public transportation expenditures, among other expenses.

Above all else, Williams dedicated himself and his staff to seeking young people with interests in “grassroots organizing and policy advocacy,” who were truly “new voices” for social justice and peace. But AED and Ford’s Human Rights unit also expected these new voices to be assertive ones, as individual applicants needed to find an organization that would agree to work with them on a joint application for the grant. This was the first major success of the program, as New Voices received 445 applications for the inaugural competition in February 2000. After a lengthy selection process that included site visits to more than fifty social justice organizations across the U.S., New Voices awarded its first 30 fellowships on April 14, 2000.

Newness and Diversity:
Yet the definition of what the program believed was a “new voice” had expanded beyond “young people.” Of the original 30 Fellows, three of them were decidedly not “young” in a Generation X or Y sense of the word. Their shift in careers – and their desire to do social justice work– also made them good candidates.

The multicultural nature of the applicant pool from the 1999-2000 selection cycle and of the Class of 2000 Fellows also made it clear to Williams that diversity in all of its forms would play an important role in the selection of potential Fellows in the program’s future. Diversity would also enhance the quality of the program’s leadership development experience. Over half of the 445 applicants were persons of color, while three out of four were women. Gays, lesbians, and persons with disabilities also applied in significant numbers, with a number who became part of the first group of Fellows.

This was no accident. Although the program did not use quotas or numbers to select Fellows, Williams and the Selection Panel made a point of keeping diversity as part of the outreach and selection process. As Williams put it, “if we do social justice work, we should start by practicing it in our organizations. We have to recognize that diversity is as important as -- and not unrelated to – both innovation and impact.”

Williams’ philosophy has grown with the program in both literal and figurative terms. At the first New Voices Conference for the Class of 2000 Fellows and their professional mentors, Williams quoted the Dalai Lama, Lieh Tzu, and Sri Aurobindo as inspiration to the gathering. In succeeding conferences and retreats, Williams has quoted virtually every Eastern religion and philosopher (as well as a few Westerners) to provide a context for doing social justice work. This, according to Williams, reinforces the importance of the diversity of thought within the fellowship program while outlining the role of “balance” in doing social justice work.

What the Program Does:
The program’s August Conferences and January Retreats strike a balance between providing some of the specific skills necessary for leadership development and enabling the Fellows to build relationships based on their diversity of ideas and experiences. Public speaking, grassroots fundraising, leadership philosophies, and exploring the contours of diversity are among the topics for training, debate, and discussion at these gatherings. To keep the Fellows connected, the New Voices staff has developed an electronic chat forum that Fellows use to “meet” monthly and discuss their work and professional development, along with current affairs. Staff also compiled a curriculum, a reading list of hot topics in the social justice arena, and Fellows respond monthly to these readings through the program’s email list-serve. This allows the Fellows to understand better the nature of each other’s work and the obstacles that they all face as social justice activists.

Williams and his staff have constructed a variety of leadership development components to take advantage of the program’s burgeoning diversity. After evaluating a number of leadership assessment tools, Williams created a leadership self-assessment tool for the Fellows to use at the beginning of the fellowship. Williams also studied best practices in work place mentoring, and developed a model mentoring agreement during the program’s second year to help each Fellow and Mentor construct a concrete plan for tracking the Fellow’s path of leadership and professional development (mentors are often the Executive Directors of the organizations in which the Fellows work). Later, Williams introduced an external mentoring program and networking account, in which Fellows could spend up to $1,000 during the second year of their fellowship to retain leaders in their field for additional mentoring and feedback.

New Voices at Present:
Over the past four years, eighty percent of the 75 New Voices Fellows have been women, three out of four have been persons of color, one out of six has been gay or lesbian, and four have been persons with disabilities. But this only tells part of the story. In the past four years, New Voices Fellows have dined with the First Lady to discuss women’s rights in Afghanistan, helped draft legislation for paid family medical leave in California, won cases at the Inter-American Court, and published articles and op-eds in everything from Harper’s Magazine to the New York Times. Four of the Fellows have become Executive Directors of their own nonprofits. Fellows who were once homeless or imprisoned or who have had direct experiences with human rights abuses and ethnic genocide have been influential in keeping the eyes of public officials in the U.S. and at the UN focused on these topics. They have raised over $2 million for their host organizations, even as these nonprofits have invested funds to retain them beyond the two-year term of the fellowship. The sheer volume of their work is extraordinary, and the results of their work are just beginning to ripen.

What makes the above statistics all the more poignant is the reality that many small nonprofit organizations (and the progressive movement in general) remain in need of younger leadership and new ideas, especially in the social justice world. The Civil Rights Movement and the Counterculture Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s influenced many of the leaders who created these social justice nonprofits. Because many of these leaders have moved on to other careers or retired altogether (due in no small part to burnout), it is now imperative for their organizations to find new, potential leaders to take their place. Given the context of doing social justice work in the early twenty-first century – particularly the economic and political realities that all organizations face – the inability to attract younger people to serve in leading roles could serve as a death sentence to many organizations and movements.

Beyond that, the need for a more diverse leadership within the social justice arena has also become acute. It is increasingly difficult – if not impossible – to work on issues like globalization, the death penalty, foreign policy, or immigration without an organization taking the necessary steps to reflect the community of which it is a part. And a program dedicated to bringing new voices into the social justice field through opportunities within small nonprofit organizations would be far from sufficient if the promotion of diversity were not part of the outreach and selection processes. Foundations and people of means need to recognize the role employment-based fellowships can play as a powerful tool in driving social, economic, and political change. We need programs such as New Voices if we hope to grow the diverse and visionary leadership needed to advance social justice and peace in a troubled world.