Providing BIPOC leaders a “Brilliant Transformation” into leadership roles

Here’s what a new study learned and recommended to help integrate leadership transitions successfully into our collective work.

Editor's Note: AiLun and Lisa co-authored this piece for NYN Media. You may view the original here.

The two of us first met in 2021 when we sat on a panel together to talk about leadership transitions. Lisa and The Robert Sterling Clark Foundation had just published its report, Making (or Taking) Space, with the Building Movement Project. The report highlighted some of the unique challenges that BIPOC leaders face when they succeed white founders and executive directors. AiLun joined the panel both as a BIPOC leader who had succeeded a white predecessor and as a co-facilitator and member of the BIPOC Leaders Network, a group of BIPOC CEOs and executive directors that came together at the top of the COVID-19 pandemic to share resources and to support each other. Lisa joined as a white funder who was supporting organizations going through leadership transitions.

We were both committed to creating the conditions for leaders to thrive, and our conversation has continued long past that ‘21 funders panel, and now includes many wonderful leaders across New York City, and beyond. We have come to understand that although all leadership transitions are fraught, incoming BIPOC leaders face additional burdens. These burdens include the outsized expectations of BIPOC leaders to solve for structural racism expediently simply due to their racial identity and the added outsized expectation to provide support and protection to exiting white leaders. 

The report struck a chord with many of the leaders in AiLun’s BIPOC Leaders Network, as many of the group’s conversations revolved around BIPOC leaders being “hand-picked” and tokenized to succeed white leaders but without proper supports, autonomy, resources, and information. Network members and others held an intuitive and documented set of challenges, and a yearning for vision and strategies to help organizational actors to support leadership transitions for incoming BIPOC leaders in a holistic and doable way.

In response, The Robert Sterling Clark Foundation funded the research and production of “Brilliant Transformation: Toward Full Flourishing in BIPOC Leadership Transitions” to gather practical guidance to the field on how boards, funders, exiting leaders, and staff can all take deliberate action to support and care for BIPOC leadership transitions.

This study reflects the insights of BIPOC leaders navigating positions of power in social change organizations as they succeeded white predecessors. The report researchers, spoke with BIPOC leaders from across the country, who shared a wide range of experiences related to their transitions, their strategies for navigating these transitions, and specific recommendations for how to make these transitions better. 

We learned so much - including:

• The experiences of BIPOC moving into nonprofit leadership are multifaceted and complex, as are the organizational dynamics. Racism shows up in many different ways.

• BIPOC leaders call for intentionality and transparency. When organizations have carried out clear processes, transitions have been better. 

• BIPOC leaders are doing the work necessary to build the world we seek to create. We are coming up with and making the solutions right now, and we could use some support. 

Creating the conditions for the full flourishing of BIPOC leadership will require new practices throughout the nonprofit ecosystem. The call for intentionality and transparency runs throughout the report recommendations, as does the call for recognition that everyone involved in supporting these transitions brings a different kind of power to the situation. 

Reflections for leaders

As a core leader on the report, AiLun brought a “full-circle” perspective to reflect on the recommendations presented in the report as she wraps her four-year tenure as her organization’s first BIPOC CEO. As someone who initially heard from a funder, “We want to wait and see how you settle into your role as CEO before we commit to funding you,” four years ago, AiLun is now hearing the same message regarding the transition to a new CEO, “We want to wait and see who the next leader is and then make our decision.” Neither stance from funding partners evinced confidence or partnership during these moments of transition despite evidence of a healthy and impactful organization. While time has passed, these stubborn orthodoxies remain. This report is an important tool in steering the conversation toward change. AiLun is heeding the report recommendations by: 

• Giving her transition ample time to neutralize her leadership influence and transferring key relationships to senior staff and eventually the incoming CEO. 

• Documenting the loose ends she’ll tie up by the transition and the ones she’ll pass to the new leader to contend with, leaving little room for surprises.

• Preparing staff and senior leadership team to design “onboarding tours” to give the incoming CEO a warm and informative welcome.

Reflections for funders 

As a funder, Lisa believes that individual and institutional funders can help by:

• Fully acknowledging our outsized power and operationalizing it by offering extra financial support during leadership transitions and encouraging other funding partners to do the same.

• Trusting organizations to know what they need.

• Funding like we want BIPOC leaders and their organizations to flourish. 

• Remembering that getting it wrong compromises grantees’ work and communities.

There is much for each of us - outgoing leaders, board members, funders, search firms, and staff – to do in our individual roles, and also a hopeful and ambitious message for all of us to move towards transformative leadership. We urge you to read the report, to visit the Leading Forward website for additional resources and communities of practice, and to join our conversation about how to integrate leadership transitions into our collective work for a brighter future. 

AiLun Ku is president and CEO of The Opportunity Network. Lisa Pilar Cowan is vice president at the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation and a regular contributor to New York Nonprofit Media.