“...it's really hard to promote the history of Black people and not address the inequities being experienced by Black people…it just felt disingenuous to not find a way to bring these things together.” Nneka Allen joins Michelle, to talk about her essay in the newly released book Collecting Courage for which she is co-author and co-editor. In this episode, Nneka shares the deep and meaningful work of saving one of the Underground Railroad sites - the Nazary AME Church (part of the Amherstburg Freedom Museum) learning her ancestors were leaders in that movement, and the failure of a Board of Directors, to center the current-day struggles of their community. We talk about aligning ourselves with the demands of love, forgiveness, the power of storytelling, and attachment styles! Don't miss this!
Nneka Allen shares great resources that we’ve passed along in our show notes! Here are links for content and references mentioned in the show:
References then Definitions:
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Intro:
“Its really hard to promote the history of Black people and not address the inequities being experienced by Black people. I mean, for me, it just felt disingenuous, to not find a way to bring these things together.
This is Michelle Shireen Muri, your host and fellow traveler on the Ethical Rainmaker, a podcast exploring topics we don't often visit in nonprofits and philanthropy, including the places we can step into our power or step out of the way.
After the murder of George Floyd in the United States, so many of us, as people, as businesses, as households, as nonprofits, and as philanthropists have chosen to examine or been called to examine our relationships to white supremacy and anti-blackness, and contrary to some of the messaging that we get, or that some of us are putting out - its not just white folx. Most of us are complicit on the daily, upholding the systems whether we mean to or not.
And in one community called the Black Canadian Fundraiser’s Collective, 10 Black folx, wrote first person narratives about their experiences of pain and of healing, while working in the nonprofit sector.
Swiss fundraiser Julie Berthoud-Jury, gifted me the book recently. I started with the last chapter as suggested, was moved deeply and immediately wrote to Nneka Allen, the author of that chapter and a co-editor of Collecting Courage: Joy, Pain, Freedom, Love. This beautiful book shares the first-hand stories of Black philanthropists and non-profit workers across North America. And today, Nneka Allen joins us to share a few stories with us.
Nneka Allen is a relationship builder, a stone-catcher and a freedom fighter. She identifies as an Afro-Indigenous woman, a proud Momma of a beautiful 25-year-old daughter, Destiny and a 6th generation Canadian and daughter of the Underground Railroad. She is the Principal of The Empathy Agency, Co-editor & Author of Collecting Courage, Founder of the Black Canadian Fundraisers’ Collective.
Thank you so much for your work Nneka, and welcome to the Ethical Rainmaker.
Nneka Allen:
Thank you, Michelle. So glad to be here.
Michelle Shireen Muri:
So Nneka, let’s start many years ago, at the Nazrey A.M.E. Church, a national historic site built in 1848 by refugee slaves, and it was one of the stops on the underground railroad. And part of the Amherstburg Freedom Museum in Ontario, Canada.
Nneka Allen:
And for those of you who are familiar with the A.M.E. Church, which is the African Methodist Episcopal denomination... if you will look throughout North America, the churches throughout Canada and United States formed much of what we know to be the underground railroad. And so Nazrey was one of these sites and in 1999, Nazrey was in significant disrepair and either had to be restored immediately or demolished.
I was hired to write what they call the heritage report, which I learned later was a stewardship report. Because nobody was called a fundraiser then, nobody was saying that's a profession. I was just doing this thing, right? It was a part of this much bigger thing. Nobody was even calling it a capital campaign. As a matter of fact, I don't think anybody even said, this is a $1 million campaign, right? It was just, WE KNOW, "Here's what we're here to do. We're getting busy doing it."
I spent six months pouring over primary documents from the A.M.E Church to understand its history, how it operated, what its purpose was, you know, who the people were, all of the names were familiar to me. I could connect them to me in so many different ways. And the picture that began to emerge was a picture of a people who were loving, despite the trauma, who didn't give up, who pursued justice, who dared to taste freedom. And when I began to unearth these truths in these tangible and practical ways, it gave me another view to who I was, who I am. I came up in the heart of the seventies with parents who were very politically active, right? So I didn't have poor self-esteem, but I definitely was the product of a racist society. Right?
Michelle Shireen Muri:
Right… So you’ve got this opportunity and you engage in the deeply meaningful work of saving one of the underground railroad sites, in Amherstburg, Ontario which is just across the river from downtown Detroit, Michigan in the US. Through your research, you discover that all of the names of the leaders - those that were leading and running the underground railroad, were familiar to you! Ancestors, relatives, and your greater community...that’s amazing.
Nneka Allen:
That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And so that really informed my perspective of my own family, but also the community that I belong to. Like I immediately could see the interconnectedness of black people in Essex County.
Michelle Shireen Muri:
And you did it. You saved this beautiful site.
Nneka Allen:
It's funny because I was in my 20s, I was a new newer mom. I understood the importance and the relevance of the museum and the church, but in a very, very different way. And I don't think I fully appreciated in the moment, all of what I was experiencing, because what I was sitting in the heart of was a movement, a movement of people who coalesced and came together to raise a million dollars to save this historic site. And the majority of these people were Black.
Michelle Shireen Muri:
That's amazing. Now I can't imagine what that have felt like, you do describe it in the chapter that you wrote about how powerful it was and how uplifting it was to see those names and really get the full story of ecosystem that existed and still holds us up. And then in your chapter, you tell this story about how you started getting involved in the organization and you eventually joined the board.
Nneka Allen:
Yes. Yes. So fast forward six, seven, eight years or more. And I was approached to join the board, which I agreed to do once I completed my CFRE. And it's interesting because that way it was such a wonderful opportunity at that point in my career, because there were certain things in my day job, I had now moved into the health sector where I couldn't really exercise some fundraising acumen. There were certain things I could not do in my day job that I was able to do with the museum. And so it satisfied that part of my career interests, but more than that it was a wonderful opportunity to contribute my skill and talent back into the organization that I view as being the start of my fundraising career and where my love for fundraising evolved.
And it's interesting because I was on the board for several years. And one of the things I was really challenged to achieve during my time there was to write a case for support, and I couldn't figure out what was wrong with me. I couldn't figure out what the problem was. Because I don't think I knew, but I was guessing, I was guessing that the reason why I couldn't do this was because there was a bigger issue at play. And for me, as I began to sit back and think about that bigger issue, I started to think about the legacy of the museum and what the museum should mean to society at large. What voice should we have?
Nneka Allen:
It's really hard to promote the history of black people and not address the inequities being experienced by black people. This was a period of time when Trayvon Martin had been killed. There was just the prevalence of... I shouldn't say the prevalence, we were more aware of the prevalence of these crimes against black people were just becoming prolific. It was just over and over again. And so for me, it just felt disingenuous to not find a way to bring these things together. And so [I/we] really embarked on an exploration of what position the museum could have in that conversation. And it was in that period of time that we actually changed the name of the museum to the Amherstburg Freedom Museum. Ultimately, as I explained in the book, there were some fundamental shifts that needed to happen in order to take a rightful place and claim voice around issues of racial inequity. That was very scary for the board, which was predominantly Black.
Michelle Shireen Muri:
On this episode of The Ethical Rainmaker, we’re talking about the often complicated issues of race, representation, and politics on a nonprofit board with Nneka Allen. She served on the board of the Amherstburg Freedom Museum, and is also a contributing author and editor of Collecting Courage.
So, Nneka, it sounds like you wanted that board to take a strong stance on Black Lives Matter and the murder of Trayvon Martin. And that didn’t happen. That must have been hard.
Nneka Allen:
And in the moment, in those times it was very frustrating, but in retrospect, I understand a lot of what was transpiring. And also in retrospect, I feel sad because I think about what we have accomplished and created as a people in the face of oppression, in the face of trauma, in the face of extreme injustice, over generations. And yet we couldn't find our way forward in this scenario. And so it's only in retrospect, in the process of writing this chapter, that all of those sorts of parts around the role that love plays and should play and could play came into greater focus for me.
Michelle Shireen Muri:
That's one of the things that struck me so deeply about the story that you wrote, and if it's okay with you, I'd like to read from your book just for a few seconds.
So you said of this whole situation that you're describing, where at the time it was frustrating that folks weren't able to step up into the moment. This is my summation, my understanding. Here you are, as a board of directors, this organization existing solely to protect the history, and the heritage of this freedom museum that's based in the deep work of your ancestors that were leaders in the underground railroad. And that even a board that's mostly black was still struggling to really connect to the power of what is happening now and the pain of what is happening now, and of that you wrote... I see you nodding your head. That's an okay summary?
Nneka Allen:
Oh, yes.
Michelle Shireen Muri:
All right. So here you wrote, "Robin Allott, author and linguistic scholar says that love is a total state of organization, and I agree. With our immense legacy of love, I think back on my time at the museum, I regret that collectively, we were unable to draw from our ancestors, the strength to go beyond the fear of the unknown and reach for our rightful place in the struggle for freedom. I regret that my fellow black museum colleagues didn't dive into the ocean of love, that is our legacy, to be reminded that we have something meaningful and powerful to share, and that our voice matters and justice and equity can only be achieved when black people are centered in the struggle. Indeed, in the center of the struggle is our rightful place. Those regrets, however, will not allow me to forget that I come from a love that never stopped searching for our love. And I will always allow the richness of empathy to drive my compassion, to level rise and face fear.
Nneka Allen:
It's powerful. It's powerful. It was powerful when I wrote it.
Michelle Shireen Muri:
It is so powerful…
Nneka Allen:
It's powerful, we hear you. It is Powerful hearing your words. Yeah, at the end of it love answers all things is where I landed. And I think that it is such an important message for all of us to carry. But then it becomes for me all the more important when I look at the work of charity, the work were meant to be doing through philanthropy.
Michelle Shireen Muri:
Yeah.
Nneka Allen:
Okay. So what are the demands of love, and why are we not aligned or seeking to align ourselves with that? Because when I think about all of the plans that we were talking about doing at the museum, they were big and they were a audacious and they scared me. I was the instigator and I was like, "Okay, this is going to take some faith." But even at the same time, you it's right. You also know it's right. But you're also petrified.
But the thing I knew for sure about the answers that we were co-creating is that they were all rooted in love. They were all being driven by this love for the future, our youth. Our founder created that museum because he wanted young black people to know they have value and that they have something to contribute and that they are our future. And he wanted them to know, we care, we are here, we are wrapping our arms around you, we invest in you, we believe in you.
And so if that's true, which it was then, I know that all those board members espoused all of those views, but it's the taking of the ideas and pulling it down into reality. And it's the pulling it down into reality that petrifies us because A, we will never get it done alone. So this individualistic approach to life and to philanthropy will never get the job done. It has to be rooted and done in a spirit of collectivism. It must. Right?
Michelle Shireen Muri:
Yes. Right.
Nneka Allen:
And so that whole experience, my summary of that whole experience, I let that inform the way I move forward in all the things I do. And just because something causes fear, doesn't mean that it's wrong. And that I have an answer for fear, it's love.
Michelle Shireen Muri:
Yeah. Ooh. So powerful. So powerful. And so what we need to be hearing right now, all of us, to really step into love, what does that look like?
Nneka Allen:
What does it look like? Yeah. And it's a conscious thing, right? And it requires all of us, when I say, all of us, I don't mean the collective all, it requires all of who we are. You can't phone that in.
Michelle Shireen Muri:
That's right. Try us, we might.
Nneka Allen:
Yeah. Exactly. Oh, we know a good fake, right? We know it immediately. We know when someone truly cares and when someone's really interested, and when someone is willing to step into time and space with us, to better appreciate what we're experiencing, right? You know when someone's going to fight for you.
Michelle Shireen Muri:
Yeah. And you know when you're phoning it in...
Nneka Allen:
You totally know when you're phoning in. This is a little story from 20 years ago when my daughter was five and my brother was taking her... It's just an example of what I'm saying, when you know, you just know what someone's prepared to do for you. My brother was going to take her tobogganing and his girlfriend was with him. And I wasn't going, I was not in the whole negotiation, I was nearby though.
And the negotiation sort of went like this. "Okay, well, yeah, you can come, but I have to leave at such and such a time. And I won't be able to drop you off at home. So your mother's going to have to pick you up at the hill. And so that has to get coordinated, blah, blah, blah." And so they're back and forth and they're figuring it out. I say, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can pick her up." But then my brother, who's now concerned about the idea of, I got to leave at such and such a time. So if I'm not there, right at that time, the kid is going to be by herself. And so before I could even say anything, my brother was expressing his concern. He couldn't even get his sentence all the way out. And my daughter was like, "My mother is not going to leave me." And that was the end of it.
Michelle Shireen Muri:
That's amazing.
Nneka Allen:
My kind of knew. Right? "No, you never worry about my mom. My mom will be there."
We need more relationships like that.
Michelle Shireen Muri:
That's beautiful. That's beautiful. That confidence, that secure attachment, right?
Nneka Allen:
Secure attachment. That's exactly right. And I mean, yes. Some mother-daughter relationship, but I believe that that has application in all our relationships.
Michelle Shireen Muri:
It does. It certainly does. That's how we learn. That's our blueprint.
Nneka Allen:
It is.
Michelle Shireen Muri:
That's our blueprint.
Nneka Allen:
Not my mama.
And some of us don't learn that secure attachment. Yeah, exactly.
Michelle Shireen Muri:
Some of us don't learn that secure attachment.
Nneka Allen:
That's true.
Michelle Shireen Muri:
There was a lot of trauma in my family. My family got ripped out of Iran, shattered completely by the revolution. And I think that has a lot to do with the tender, fragile nature of relationships in my own family. And I just think about so what can we do when we're given, when I personally am given the privilege of having the life that I have and having the capacity that I can create to try to adjust that blueprint, you know, to make it become, or at least to address what it could look like to have those secure attachments. Right?
Nneka Allen:
And it's totally possible. I mean, when I hear you share your story, it makes me think of my ancestors, who were stolen from Africa and enslaved for generations. Right? And their ability, even in those circumstances, to love and to love without boundary, like, boundless love.
Michelle Shireen Muri:
That's right.
Nneka Allen:
And the love that never stops looking for its love.
Michelle Shireen Muri:
I’m Michelle Shireen Muri and this is The Ethical Rainmaker where we are speaking with Nneka Allen, author and editor of Collecting Courage: Joy, Pain, Freedom, Love which was created in collaboration with Nicole Salmon and Camila Pereira. Included in the book was Nneka’s beautiful essay, Our Love Is Our Only Freedom.
Nneka, let’s talk just a little bit about how this book of personal essays with Black Fundraisers from North America, came together.
Nneka Allen:
So what we did in the end is 10 women from our group of fundraisers, which is now called the Black Canadian Fundraisers' Collective, wrote first person narratives about their experiences of pain and healing, working in the nonprofit sector.
And so all of those things made up this project called Our Right to Heal that was supposed to launch in January of last year, got delayed and then delayed again and then delayed some more. And then it launched the week before George Floyd was murdered. The timing could not have been prescribed better because the world was just ready to hear our voices.
Michelle Shireen Muri:
Wow and again, you’re story, moved me so deeply, and I’m wondering if you’ll tell us a little about your chapter in the book
Nneka Allen:
Oh, happy to. So it's interesting, I wore two hats in this process, one of author and one of editor, and I thankfully had the opportunity to wear the authors hat first. And I set out to sort of write mine in the first batch of stories, so then I could switch hats, right? And so when we determined the four themes, we brought the authors together to talk about who gravitated to what theme. And so much of my written work prior to this was focused on really getting into the nitty gritty and the nuts and bolts of the painful racist experiences that I've had. That's something I gravitate to, right? I'm not afraid of the pain. I'm not afraid to share those stories.
And so I wanted to really challenge myself for two reasons. One, I wanted to not write what I'm used to writing. I wanted to write something different and challenging, but right beside that, I also wanted to write with exclusively a Black audience in mind. Toni Morrison did that - her work. And so I wanted to challenge myself to do that. And so I chose love because it felt like almost...the opposite of a lot of what I had previously written. And when I think about love, I think about the beginning of my career, I think about how special that period of time was, being in Amherstburg, Ontario, which is about 20 minutes from Windsor, such a historic town. Historic both for me personally, as it relates to my ancestry, but also because of the museum that exists there and the work that I was privileged to do with them.
And so, so much about those two and a half years at the Amherstburg Freedom Museum encompassed an expression of love, a learning of love, an appreciation for what the different facets of love wrapped up in this really beautiful history.
Michelle Shireen Muri:
Thank you for creating this beautiful body of work. A note to the audience, our show notes have links to several resources and stories that Nneka has been involved in creating so check it out...
Nneka, as we wrap up...I’d love to ask two more questions - one of which is, what are you working on now?
Nneka Allen:
We really view the process of marketing the book more from the perspective of not just, ‘buy the book,’ buy yes, buy the book. But more than that I think our dedication, really speaks more to what we hope to achieve, at least to people of color...to our Black community in all its diversity. Our truth, our stories - are ours to tell. Our voice is our power. We summon you to testify, to document and to share your life.
And so, we really view this more as a movement. We want to encourage people of color, to share their stories of joy and pain and freedom and love. We want to let them know they're not alone in their experiences, and we want them to feel liberated to raise their voice so that our experiences become even more undeniable.
Here in Canada, just last year we had leaders of this country still saying that systemic racism doesn't exist here. And yet, there are nine Canadian authors who begged to differ in very specific ways, right? And so from that perspective, we want to keep pushing the narrative, pushing the invitation to share first person narratives. From my perspective, in my experience and history at the museum, that is the stuff of primary documentation. It's the stuff of history, right? So it's not a small matter. And so we really want to encourage people to tell their stories.
The other invitation of the book is to white people, and I love Decolonizing Wealth. And in it Edgar talks about the healing phase of repair, and three things make up repair, acknowledgement, restitution, and closure. And this book, I believe is an invitation to white people to acknowledge, to acknowledge first, to fully acknowledge. And so those two things right there require, I think, a longer focus, like a continued and persistent focus. I think we have to continue to send that message or continue to extend the invitation.
And then in addition to that, sitting beside it in a very natural way, which is interesting...are both my work through the Black Canadian Fundraisers' Collective, which I spoke about earlier, it's a group of black Canadian fundraisers across Canada. And we serve a variety of purposes, but one of the primary purposes that we serve is to be sisters and brothers to one another in this struggle, in this sector. But also to lift our voices together in unity, to create safety for one another, and also to lend our thought leadership to the sector that so desperately needs it. And so we're always looking at a variety of ways of doing that through partnerships in a variety of things, things like Collecting Courage.
Nneka Allen:
And then lastly, my life's work is as an equity coach and I do that full time now. And I spend the majority of my time in the nonprofit sector. And I spent quite a bit of time coaching individually black and brown fundraisers, helping them to survive the environments they find themselves in. And then I spend some time with my partner, Chris Conroy, out of Boston. And we spend the bulk of our time working with white leaders and their teams to really improve those very environments that I'm helping my black and brown clients survive. So it's all a labor of love.
Michelle Shireen Muri:
Yeah. Sounds like it. And that work, your life's work is all done through an organization called The Empathy Agency. Right?
Nneka Allen:
That's right. Yes.
Michelle Shireen Muri:
And your partner in that work is Chris Conroy, whose podcast I listen to, called Whiteness at Work.
Nneka Allen:
It's great.
Michelle Shireen Muri:
Also an excellent podcast. Yeah.
So one of the questions we often close with on this podcast, is about identities. Between the moment you were born and now, many things have happened… which of your identities, shape the work that you do now?
Nneka Allen:
So oftentimes when I introduce myself, I say, "My name is Nneka Allen. I am Afro-indigenous. I'm a sixth generation Canadian. I am a mama of a black daughter. I am Ojibwe and African." All of those pieces, I would say, descendant of the underground railroad, which is synonymous with descending from American slavery, which is me being very specific about my blackness and my black experience, alongside my indigenous heritage, which is something that I have had the pleasure of learning more and more about in my more recent research. Obviously being a woman, but being a mother, and being a mother now of an adult who's married, that all informs who I am and how I see myself.
I think identity is fluid and changes with time. I feel as though my understanding of all of those identities, all of which I've always been aware of. I've always been aware of my African heritage, my indigenous heritage, being a woman, all those things very present from the beginning of my life. But my understanding and appreciation of them, my scope of understanding has increased and changed. It's almost like seeing an object from one side and then seeing it from all sides. And the appreciation you begin to have for that.
I can remember several years ago as I was taking a deeper dive into my indigenous history, realizing that what I just assumed was just blackness, black culture, our black culture was actually this beautiful merging of indigenous and African cultures. And I almost couldn't pick up or decipher where one began and the other ended. And it's beautiful to me and it makes me... I recently had to answer this question, what were some of the things that you were told when you were a kid? And one of the things I was told when I was kid was, "You're special, especially because you have something to contribute. You're smart, you're bright. You come from great people, you have something to contribute. You're special." And so when I began to think about all of those things, it just affirms what my parents told me. And we all have that, right? If we just discover it, if we begin to get curious about understanding all of those parts that make us who we are. Yeah.
Michelle Shireen Muri:
That's beautiful. Thank you for sharing. And thank you for this interview.
Nneka Allen:
I loved our time together, Michelle. Really great questions.
Michelle Shireen Muri:
Me too. Thank you.
And that’s it for The Ethical Rainmaker. I’m Michelle Shireen Muri. We have extensive show notes featuring the work of Nneka Allen, at theethicalrainmaker.com.
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The Ethical Rainmaker is produced in Seattle, Washington by Isaac Kaplan-Woolner with editing assistance by Kasmira Hall, and socials by Rachelle Pierce. This pod is sponsored by Freedom Conspiracy, my fundraising consulting collective, which you can find at freedom-conspiracy.com. Special thanks to Trick Candles for letting us use their awesome song “I’m Gold”. Find them on Band Camp. That's it for The Ethical Rainmaker. See you in two weeks!