The Power of Listening

This coming weekend, Alfonso and Kate will be traveling to St. Cloud, Minn. and then to Fargo and Grand Forks in North Dakota. This trip was planned before the two of us joined PFund, but it’s also a launching point for a series of listening sessions we will begin holding on a monthly basis. These listening sessions are part of a broader convening that began following the Creating Change conference in February. The focus of these sessions is to listen to how individuals and organizations on the ground are working to advance LGBT equality each and every day and to then build networks and strategy that supports that work across the entire region. 

As a community foundation, our role is to build the power of LGBT communities in the Upper Midwest through funding, developing leaders, inspiring giving, and convening and reporting on issues of importance within our communities. This means working to change attitudes, change systems and break down barriers at the intersection of our identities- sexual orientation, gender, race, and culture- to advance equality. We’ll be asking what that means specifically in multiple communities across the region, starting with this trip on April 29 through 30.

Every other month, PFund will be traveling out of the Cities to a different part of the five-state region to ask these questions and listen to the answer. At the same time, we’ll be holding regular listening sessions in the metro area. These will be organized by zip code and the first, at 55407, is set for Monday, May 16 .  Metro area listening sessions will be asking the same questions: what work is already taking place, what needs still exist, and what is PFund’s role in meeting those needs. But for the sake of conversation, let’s break that down a bit further.


During the metro listening sessions, we are interested in hearing about what it’s like where you live. What are the issues that seem most relevant in your neighborhood? How does that impact you? We’re talking in a general way initially, in a kind of day to day basic living kind of way. This means that you might talk about your LGBT experiences but you might not.  Don’t worry, though, we’ll be layering questions specific to being LGBT: What is it like to be LGBT where you live? What are the issues that most concern you? What do you love about being LGBT and want to celebrate?  What do you wish that others knew?

PFund is a community foundation. What that means is that our role is to provide spaces for community to identify its own needs, visions and strategies while we provide the resources to help make it all possible. So every listening session is going to spend some time talking about resources. And like good listeners, we’re going to be asking questions about all resources including money, of course, but also time, attention, information, infrastructure and so on. What would help to address the issues that have been raised? What kinds of resources already exist in your community and what resources are still needed? And then following on from that, how can PFund help?

In all of these sessions, whether in Fargo, Des Moines or St. Paul, we will make sure there is time for building relationships because, after all, that’s the strongest resource we have. As much as we want to listen to you, we are also excited by what happens when we are all listening to each other. And those conversations are the kinds that build movements for social change.  

- Kate and Susan

Talkin' 'bout my generation...

In a conversation with a community member about PFund’s origin, we reflected that we are both interested in learning more about how people stepped up to help each other when the AIDS crisis was at its most terrible. In particular, we mentioned wanting to learn more about how community members supported each other before organizations were established: with healthcare, money, information and so on. The community member, involved with PFund since the early days, remarked that those stories weren’t interesting, everyone already knew those things. Kate leaned across the table and said, “I don’t know those things. I was six years old then. This is my history and I want to know about it.”

Sitting in a staff conversation where three of us were reflecting on a local organization, on how it has changed over the years and what those changes mean. Susan kept referring to the vision and mission of the organization, telling stories of its early days and how those stories were really the heart of that organization. One of the staff members, sitting quietly during this storytelling, interrupted at one point to say, “For some of us, that history isn’t what’s real. What’s real is what we’ve experienced over the past three or four years. This is all we know so it’s what we respond to. Just because we weren’t around for the early days doesn’t mean our experience is invalid.”

One of PFund’s strengths is that its staff and Board run in age from 24 to 65. There are significant differences in the coming out experiences of our oldest and youngest members. Some things are better and some things are harder, depending on the moment we’re talking about. But what is key is this: each of us carries a critical piece of understanding PFund’s role as a community foundation in supporting community.

There is seventeen years in age between the two of us. When Kate was born, Susan was already finished with high school. Susan’s memory includes the ending of the Vietnam War, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, and the moment when Ronald Reagan was elected. Susan remembers walking down the streets in Bristol, England, having a conversation with a friend about this strange “gay disease” that was cropping up in the States. She remembers lesbian feminism and the March on Washington in 1987. One of Kate’s earliest political memories is the falling of the Berlin Wall when she was 8 years old. She came out as queer in the context of debates about trans exclusion at the Michigan Womyn’s Festival and read “This Bridge Called My Back” as a historical text, twenty years after it was published. The election of George W. Bush and the aftermath of 9/11 are what she remembers as the events that shaped her political coming-of-age.

The historical moment when we first begin to name our sexual orientation or our gender identity is key to how we understand ourselves. It’s the foundation we build from. And for a lot of us, it’s a fierce foundation. Naming yourself when everyone around you tells you that you are wrong or different is an act of personal reclamation. It’s an act of defiance. And it takes a significant amount of will to speak your truth into a large chorus that tells you there is something wrong with you. For this reason, when we do name ourselves, we tend to be very strongly marked by the moment we speak out. This is the moment of our story, our history, and it can often feel sacred.

This is why intergenerational work in the LGBT community can be so challenging, and yet so worthwhile. Words like “queer” hurt the ears of some of us and soothe the ears of others. Who we think about when we say “our community” varies based on when we came out and who was around us. It also affects what kind of work we feel still needs to happen in order for all LGBT people to live safe and celebrated lives. 

As a community foundation, one of our greatest strengths is the differences in ages among our staff and Board. We can’t tell you how often it happens, that one of us will make a statement as though it were the truth, and someone else will say, well, that’s not quite the way I see it. This is a tremendous strength because it helps us remember that no single one of us has the whole story for what it means to be lesbian or gay, bisexual or transgender, or queer. PFund’s role is to keep listening, keep asking questions, and find the points in common. And along the way, to connect all of the dollars we can put together into a great big pot with the organizations and initiatives that are doing the work of making the world a better place for LGBT people, our families and friends.

Jobsharing – a little deeper in

We’ve received some interesting questions – or reflections – about our jobshare. A few people have told us that it will never work: “Two people can’t share a position. At one point, you are going to disagree over something and this partnership will break up. Then what’s going to happen to PFund?”  Another question we’ve heard multiple times, “No, really, who’s the main ED?” When we reply that there isn’t one, the follow-up has sometimes been, “Yes, I understand that symbolically, but seriously, which one of you is mostly in charge?”

There have been other flavors of reflection as well including the most common: “How come no one told me I could jobshare?” And the second most common, “You are going to write this up, aren’t you? It’s a great idea. I want to know how to do it.”

Jobsharing is just another form of collaboration. And collaboration is something that we ask our children to do (share that toy!) as well as our grantees (organizational partnerships are very good things). Collaboration is not at all hard, when it’s really truly something we want to do. Our experience is that the challenges arise when we’re not completely invested in collaborating.

Almost weekly, the two of us look at each other and marvel: sure, it was our idea to jobshare but even we weren’t prepared for exactly how awesome it would be. A good example: we were talking about a challenging phone call we had just received and trying to determine what to do. In the way of reactions, we each had responses to the phone call that came from past experiences and patterned ways of thinking. Our responses to this phone call were not the same, and as we sat there going back and forth, listening to each other and then asking questions, we ended up at a conclusion that made us both wiggle with glee. “Oh my goodness,’ said Kate,” that is so much smarter than either of us could have figured out by ourselves.”

And that, more than any other sentence, reflects jobsharing. A few things help make that happen: we have shared values about how the world works, how change happens, and how a foundation is part of that change. We also deeply respect and truly like each other. And our commitment is to the work – to an LGBT community that is celebrated and is free from discrimination and violence – rather than to our individual careers.

This blog posting is not intended to be a back-slapping aren’t we great kind of moment. On the contrary, this is a blog about collaboration and some reflection about what makes collaborations function well.

No single individual or aspect of our community has the answer for how to support all LGBT individuals, families and communities in living full and unchallenged lives. If anything, what’s going to help us get to that point is the same thing that helps the two of us jobshare: an understanding that our different experiences form different perspectives and that those perspectives are both valid. And in every situation, some perspectives have more airtime than others. It’s hard to listen with fresh mind but it’s a skill to always build. Collaborations, like jobsharing, are about practicing the skill of actually liking each other and constantly feeding a deep grounded respect. And then it’s about being willing to engage in the back and forth sometimes struggle of wrestling across our different ideas and commitments.

Really, collaboration is just about showing up with heart, with love and care for the community, rather than an assertion of our individual egos. On some days, we do that really well. On other days, well, it’s a bit harder. But that’s the fun of it, isn’t it? It’s this place of creative tension that we call learning.

- Kate and Susan

Change, change, change….

You know what they say, most major changes come in threes. Well, that’s as true for PFund as for anything else.

The first change was the start date of the two of us as Executive Director in January of this year. The second change was the wonderful Susan Cogger deciding to leave PFund for new horizons. And now we are on change number three: the promotion of Alfonso Wenker and Ryan Kroening to new positions within PFund and the announcement of an open position, Program Officer.

There’s a lovely logic to this shifting and rearranging. While organizations are not technically living things, they are living systems. What that means is that the people who work there, the visions they share, and the ongoing culture they create is part of a system that, over time, establishes habits and routine expectations just like any other system. Any change affects the whole thing, not just a single part.

With this in mind, staff have spent the last two months looking at the whole thing, otherwise known as the organization, and asking the question: what is the best way to operate PFund? In order to answer this, we put big pieces of paper up on lots of walls, wrote words and ideas on post-it notes, and then moved and rearranged those post-it notes from one meeting to the next. We read some articles about how other community foundations are run. And we listened to our Board and past staff talk about what works and what could still be improved. And then we arrived someplace, pretty much exactly where we began.

In other words, we ended up with what we already know: that PFund operates really well. It’s not broken so there’s no need to fix it. And yes, we knew that as we began the conversations, but just like spring cleaning, sometimes it’s good to just shake out all of the sheets and see how they want to be folded back into place.

Any changes we made were minor: all staff positions now include some community and relationship responsibilities, as well as some fundraising goals. How those are met will be based on the person and the flavor of the job they are doing. As a community foundation, our role is to listen as broadly as possible to how you reflect on the conditions affecting your lives and the lives of your families. It only expands our capacity if more of us are listening.

You might be wondering, what is so interesting about a blog posting on job changes at PFund? Well, the specific details depend on how enamored you are of organizational development. But the bigger part of it is this: accountability. We take seriously the role of stewarding community dollars to meet community needs.  At moments of transition or change, we want to take a minute to explain what’s going on and why. It feels like the responsible thing to do. After all, how else can we be worthy of your ongoing trust?  

And by the way, if you are interested in learning more about the Program Officer position, the job description is at www.PFundOnline.org. The deadline is April 22. Pass the news along to your friends. And you can tell them we sent you.

- Kate and Susan