Getting to Know You Series: Meet Tiloma Jayasinghe of Community Resource Exchange

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Editor’s Note: We’re back with a new installment in our occasional Getting to Know You series, where we introduce you to our grantee partners, network members, and philanthropy colleagues who have interesting stories to tell. Today we’re chatting with Tiloma Jayasinghe, President and CEO at our grantee partner Community Resource Exchange. Read on to learn more about Tiloma’s work partnering organizations to drive real change in communities, including a concerted effort to “upbuild” New York City. We will also be following this piece up with a guest post from Tiloma, where she dives into the important work of reimagining and restructuring the way foundations work with nonprofits.

Elisabeth Rapport (ER): Tell me a bit about your professional background, and what led you to Community Resource Exchange.

Tiloma Jayasinghe (TJ): I’m an attorney by training, but it’s been a long time since I practiced law. My career in the nonprofit sector has centered around the health and human rights of women and girls. I’ve done work addressing violence against women, and reproductive justice both domestically and internationally.  It was when I was running Sakhi for South Asian Women, an anti-domestic violence organization working with the South Asian community in NYC, that I first encountered CRE.  They were doing the search for the ED of Sakhi, and then once I started, I did their Leadership Caucus and then worked with their consultants on a number of things including theory of change work and supporting my transition out of the organization.  I got to know their work, their team, and more importantly, how to run and lead an organization.  Law school didn’t teach me how to manage, or to lead. I learned that by doing the work and by working with CRE.

That’s why I entered the capacity-building field, because I saw that I could contribute to and support an entire ecosystem, rather than an individual organization or a singular issue.  I realized how important a vibrant nonprofit sector is to achieving justice and how important it is to shore up all of what nonprofits require in order to meet their missions - the management practices, strategy, equity, and organizational development work that is so necessary, but so often overlooked.

I didn’t want to run another organization - I’ve always just wanted to be of service, rather than pin my career on positional authority.  But because it was CRE, and because I love it so much, I threw my hat into the ring and wonderfully, got the job.  It’s such an honor to be at the helm of this much-beloved NY institution, working with such dedicated, wonderful people.  And now I get to support the amazing work that our team does to serve the sector and to be part of its next phase of growth and impact.

ER: CRE is the 'go to' place in New York City for nonprofits seeking technical assistance, consulting services, leadership development, and more. In your view, what unique challenges did the pandemic bring to city nonprofits, and how has CRE helped them find success in facing and overcoming those challenges?

TJ: CRE has had a risk management practice since about 2015, so we’ve known, even before the pandemic, that the nonprofit sector was particularly vulnerable to external environmental threats.  And that was borne out during the pandemic where many nonprofits truly suffered - particularly the ones who felt the disparate impact of the pandemic on BIPOC communities.  Nonprofits serving those communities and/or who were BIPOC-led had to navigate multiple crises on an individual and personal level as well as a professional one. 

However, what is also true is the remarkable resilience and strength of the sector.  Many pivoted rapidly - shifting their programs’ focus to meet the needs of their community - setting up food pantries, moving their programming online, finding creative ways to support and respond to their communities and their teams. 

But how do you plan when you can’t predict anything of what the future will look like?  How do you care for your team during this unprecedented time?  How do you position yourself for sustainability and growth?  How do you ensure that you manage through a crisis? And now, as we start to see a post-pandemic horizon (although I caution that the ongoing effects of the pandemic are still very real), how do you position yourself to take the learnings from the past year and use it for future growth?

CRE helps nonprofits to answer those questions.  We not only stepped in to provide crisis advisory services to BIPOC-led and serving nonprofits during the pandemic, we also stepped into what the city needed from us.  We held our leadership caucuses completely online.  We are providing diversity, equity, and inclusion services at unprecedented levels.  And we are seeing organizations seek to engage in strategic planning so that they can vision and implement that vision into whatever new reality is in store for us.  We will continue to do that important work and continue to innovate so that we can serve the sector well.

ER: RSCF and CRE both care a lot about leadership development! What best practices are you currently seeing in leadership development work, and/or what trends do you foresee shaping the work in the years to come?

TJ: Leadership development is a core offering at CRE because we know that resilient leadership is what enables organizations to be innovative, sustainable, and, as the past year demonstrated,  emerge from crisis.  We can do better about caring for our leaders - I recently wrote an article about leadership burnout in the sector and the ways we can do better.  Leadership development work is key social justice movement building - we have to cultivate leadership and support rising leaders.  I think trends will, or rather should, focus on (1) uplifting BIPOC leadership, (2) centering anti-racism and equity as core to leadership development, and (3) healing justice and care as well.

The nonprofit sector and philanthropy has systematically excluded, and not invested in leaders of color.  The pandemic further magnified these disparities, as did the racial reckoning and uprising.  Leadership development work must specifically respond to and support the particular needs of BIPOC leaders and rising leaders because we face more challenges due to systemic racism and oppressive structures that hinder our success. Not just to meet this moment, and not because it’s a trend, but because empowered BIPOC leadership leads to real community and societal progress that benefits everyone.

Leadership development should also center anti-racist practices, dismantling white supremacy, and cultivating the muscle acknowledging the ways we are complicit, and also the ways we challenge oppressive norms.  There’s no way to lead social justice organizations without having that lens - someone has to be the driver and too many times it’s the front line people of color who start an organization on its diversity, inclusion, and equity path without investment by leadership at the team and board level.  That has to change - and that is why leadership development has to cultivate leaders who are comfortable with discomfort, with courageous conversations, who are open to being called in, and who know the journey is the goal.

Finally, it’s all well and good to understand management practices, but if you’re experiencing trauma, burnout, fatigue, or being under-resourced, you’re not going to be able to lead well. I’d love for leadership development work to include self-care, coaching, somatics, other restorative practices. If we don’t acknowledge that healing and restorative practices are parts of being a leader, then we lose out on the potential of leadership for the long haul.  And all our vision and movement goals are all long term.  Therefore we have to support folks for the long term.  Not just for when they are in positions of leadership, but for the spaces before, in between and after. 

ER: What developments and happenings with CRE are you excited about? Where do you hope to see the organization a year from now?

TJ: I just started in January, so every development at CRE is exciting to me! We’re growing our team, and we’re about to embark on strategic planning to guide our next three years. The time is ripe for us to be bold as we envision what our future can hold. We've been through it all - a terrorist attack, a flood, a hurricane, multiple global financial crises, political crisis, an uprising, and a pandemic. Time and time again, CRE’s been a key partner in rebuilding and renewing our city. This time, our strategy is different: in order to meet the moment and to address the deep racial inequities that the pandemic put on center stage, CRE has committed to not just rebuilding, or going to back to what was, but rather, we are going to create a new vision of what can be - what we are calling the upbuild. We will upend structures and systems that don't serve us, and uplift the practices that do. All our capacity-building offerings are imbued with a race equity lens and have been for years now because we know that racism is real and present in our structures and the very way we do business. Our future strategies and goals will reflect our commitment to equity, to serving the sector as a trusted partner, and to help build strong, sustainable nonprofits and nonprofit leaders.