How Thousand Currents’ Solomé Lemma Shifts Power Through Solidarity Philanthropy
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Solomé Lemma, executive director of Thousand currents. Photo credit: Julie Elis
As she was growing up in Ethiopia, Solomé Lemma came to believe that she lived in the greatest nation in the world. Surrounded by joy, love and possibility, she was nourished by her community in ways that encouraged a strong sense of pride in who she is, where she comes from, and what she stands for as a Black woman, as an African, as an Oromo, and as an Ethiopian. But when she migrated to the United States, Lemma quickly learned that her understanding of her country’s beauty was a far cry from the one people had in her new home, where perceptions were distorted by political unrest and extreme poverty.
This double consciousness influenced Lemma’s decision to work in ways that would dispel the myths that prevent communities like hers from being recognized for their nurturance, resourcefulness and self-sufficiency. As the executive director of Thousand Currents, she creatively expands the possibilities for philanthropy to resource grassroots groups and social movements in ways that defer to their wisdom about what their communities need. I spoke with Lemma about why the source of the money matters, the limits funders place on themselves, and what it looks like to practice solidarity philanthropy.
How do you think your background shaped your decision to work in philanthropy?
As someone who has existed in in-between spaces and holds multiple identities, I have been formed by my lived experiences. I am originally from Ethiopia and came to the United States when I was a child. It didn’t take long to realize how much of the perception that folks here have of places like Ethiopia—and the majority world, in general—is severely flawed. People asked me if I was hungry, if I lived in a house, and how did I travel here. I developed the sense of responsibility around doing something to change that perception because it wasn’t my reality. We were not a country of need, as far as I was concerned. Of course, there are systemic challenges of all kinds, but the gaze through which the West saw us was not the gaze through which I experienced myself or my community.
As someone who grew up on the African continent who was surrounded by and a witness to the power of community, the power of self-reliance, and the power of organizing, and then migrated to a place that attempted to remove all of that from who we are, that really shaped me significantly and informed the path that I took in life that led me to philanthropy.
Having worked in global philanthropy for most of your career, how has your understanding of the sector changed over time?
I actually didn’t know what philanthropy was for quite some time, so that wasn’t an aspiration of mine. I came to it because I had spent three months doing a summer internship project with an international organization in Liberia. When I was there, I saw so much passion and ingenuity within communities, and because I was part of this international development ecosystem, we couldn’t support that work because our donors had their own priorities and ideas. We had funding for specific, restricted purposes. I left that organization knowing that I wanted to work with those who determined where resources go, because I saw that the resources weren’t reaching the people who are actually doing the work that brings about change in communities. That’s the place from which I entered.
So from the time I started, I knew I wanted to be within a philanthropic ecosystem that moved unrestricted resources directly to front-line communities, and I’ve been privileged to be in philanthropic organizations that cultivated that practice as one way of shifting power. But when I was overseeing the Africa program at Global Fund for Children, I saw a significant gap between where the money was coming from and who was receiving it. We were funding transformative African-led organizations, yet we were securing the money from primarily white donors, and as I mentioned earlier, the majority of my own lived experience is seeing Africans supporting ourselves. I knew that our communities resource themselves much more than philanthropy does, and I realized I needed to expand my own engagement within the sector.
I left the fund to start Africans in the Diaspora to change the idea of who a donor is and what philanthropy is, and connect African diasporans with groups on the continent that are imagining new futures for us. There’s a lot more work to do in that area in the sector. Even though we talk about shifting power within philanthropy and decolonizing, we’re not sufficiently identifying ways we could source philanthropy outside of white spaces and white donors.
How does the source of the money influence the practice?
Early on in my career, I thought that as long as I moved the money to the places and people on the front lines of change, where the money comes from is irrelevant. When I say that, I’m not talking about the idea that nonprofit revenue often comes from extraction and exploitation, which makes philanthropy in and of itself a contradiction. I was willing to tolerate toxic management and work culture early in my career. As I grew, I came to the realization that you cannot advance liberation or support social transformation if you have not transformed your own practices and the ways your organization does things. Change begins with the organization, and the people within it, embodying what change looks like. That is a requirement to be meaningful contributors to the type of change that justice movements are envisioning and building every day.
What you’re naming is the inherent tension of working to contribute to a more just world in a sector that is only able to exist because of legacies of systemic injustice, which is a tension that we have to be keenly aware of and proactively navigate in philanthropy. How does Thousand Currents navigate this?
The first thing is we recognize it and hold the tension of that contradiction. Secondly, we hold the vision of a world in which philanthropy doesn’t exist, which allows us to harness resources in a way that builds a bridge toward that future in which philanthropy is not needed. We can recognize that resources may have been secured through unjust and unfair means and redistribute them to those who are working toward the kinds of solutions and systems that will inherently dismantle the sources of this undue wealth. We hold that tension by applying a redistribution lens and ensuring that our work supports systemic change, not Band-Aids. We ensure that resources are returned to the communities from whom much of this wealth has been extracted and who are often excluded by traditional philanthropy. That means Black, Indigenous, and Afro-descendant peoples; it means women and young people.
Can you talk about what that looks like in practice?
We are very clear about what our values are and how we articulate them because everything we do is organized around these values: interdependence, humility, courage, experimentation and creative collaboration. These are integrated across all our work and guide how we operate as an organization. Philanthropy is challenged in that it often focuses on what we do without enough consideration for why and how. So our values are embedded in who is on our board and leadership team. If we say we’re working for systemic change, then our governance structures need to reflect that.
In our grantmaking, we have changed our attachment to time and expanded our understanding of areas like impact, scale and capacity, which are ideas that are so commonly used in philanthropy to determine who gets funded, who doesn’t get funded, and for how long groups are funded. In global philanthropy, the majority of grants are restricted and given on short timeframes, which means that grantmakers are still controlling how groups use the resources. Thousand Currents provides long-term, flexible support and understands that systemic shifts can take decades for movements to achieve.
Our sector often uses biased concepts, like absorptive capacity, to determine the size of a grant that’s provided to a group. And it is often groups led by people of color that are considered to lack absorptive capacity because they have fewer resources to begin with. This is how inherent bias influences decision-making, and we have to undo this if we are to live in alignment with our values. So for us, we have eliminated this idea of absorptive capacity. We don’t take that into consideration in our grantmaking.
Another area that needs to be interrogated is this idea of scale. Scale is thought of as a singular entity: growing in size and reach. This is really limiting when you’re talking about social change, particularly change that’s led by front-line organizing, which is often scaled horizontally rather than vertically. At Thousand Currents, we have reimagined scale as depth, as influence, and as collective action above simple measures of size—because we need different sizes and types of interventions to bring about the kinds of systemic shifts we need.
Where do you find you’ve struggled the most in terms of aligning what you say with what you do?
Collective care remains a challenge, particularly because we’re operating within this unjust structure that doesn’t make space for it. We try to create spaciousness for each other, but we are a fund that raises money, so we have deliverables and requirements from our own funders. The obligations of the work and the systems themselves don’t make it easy to exercise collective care in meaningful, intentional and ongoing ways. As an organization, we’ve taken two breaks during this pandemic period because our staff needed that to care for ourselves and to show up in right relationship with our movements. It’s about finding the balance between urgency and abundance, and that is an ongoing challenge.
Something that’s reflected in your example is how funders’ preoccupation with grantee compliance to what are often arbitrary standards they’ve created can compel organizations to work in ways that are self-defeating.
Absolutely. There are so many things that funders think we have to do that we actually don’t have to do. When we look into compliance frameworks and ask why something was created, we learn that it was usually created to make someone feel more comfortable about moving the money because they didn’t trust who they were moving it to, as opposed to any legal requirements. For Thousand Currents, there are multiple ways that was showing up, and we had to do our own learning and self-reflection. There was a time when we would ask our partners to submit a report, and we were getting 15 pages of information back. Several years ago, we asked ourselves: Do we even need these written reports? What do we really need to know and what do we want to learn? Is there a better way to learn it that would also support the type of trusting relationships we want to have with our partners? Now, we ask our partners how they want to be in relationship with us, and we work in whatever ways work best for them.
In everything we do, we’re trying to push the boundaries of compliance within philanthropy. We support unregistered groups that are in formations that operate outside of any government oversight, which is particularly important when you’re supporting movements and organizing, since many times, groups can’t register for safety reasons. We support all kinds of movement formations, and we take on the work of figuring out how to get resources to them instead of putting that burden on their shoulders.
In the Buen Vivir Fund, we are looking at how to create a democratized framework and practice for resourcing grassroots economic solutions through integrated capital: grants and investments. It’s a partnership between Thousand Currents, investors and our grassroots partners. The grantmaking we do enables the grassroots groups to build their capacities in the ways they need to so that the investment resources they reach are catalyzed to do the work. Within this fund, we’ve hit upon so many bottlenecks because of compliance and the way financial systems are set up. For example, the community wanted to give zero-interest loans, but capitalist systems don’t understand that, so we are having to work with lawyers and auditors to expand their understanding and ask them to be a little more creative in order to advance our innovative solutions. It’s something we are still in the process of, and questions come up every day, but we are committed to doing this—because when we talk about decolonizing practices, this is what it means. This is what it takes to eliminate the colonial relics that are deeply entrenched in our systems and practices. These are limits we have placed on ourselves, and we can find ways to push past them.
Part of the reason it’s so difficult to transform systems is that when one thing shifts, everything else has to shift to accommodate the change. I appreciate that you’re naming why doing the hard work is so important, even when the impact seems small, which is that when you shift, you create both the space for others to shift around you and the mandate for them to do so.
Right. The system is set up to discourage innovation and creativity. It wants stagnation, so it makes anything else very difficult and uncomfortable. That’s where being very clear about your values is important. Everything we do and support is geared toward systemic changes, and we move from a framework of solidarity philanthropy. This comes from the idea that our challenges are shared, as are our solutions. As a philanthropic organization based in the Global North, we have benefited from an extractive system, even if those of us on staff don’t identify with the dominant culture or fully benefit from its privileges. But as an institution, we represent both the problems and opportunities of the system, so the way we enact solidarity is by securing resources, taking them out of extraction as soon as we can, and redistributing them to movements that are transforming societies.
Solidarity philanthropy also means that our practices are rooted in trust, mutuality, reciprocity, humility and accountability. We think of accountability as being in right relationship, and to be in right relationship, we have to be clear about who it is that we’re accountable to. For us, it’s to the grassroots groups and social movements we work with and the communities they represent. But it’s not enough to just say we’re accountable to them; we actually have to uphold that accountability through what we do—not only listening to our partners when they give us feedback, but changing ourselves and going back to them to tell them how we’ve changed.
As you point out, working in a way that centers systems change is persistently difficult. In moments when you’re feeling depleted, how do you replenish your energy?
I would be lying to you if I said I’m consistently getting the type of sleep I want, but I am intentional about getting the rest I need. The second way is being in nature. Going for a walk outside is always humbling and grounding. And probably the most important is play. I’m the mother of a five-year-old, and recently, in a stressful period, my son came to me and asked if we could pretend like we were lions and tigers. He had me running around the house being super-silly. It reminded me of who I am, and that I am not my work.
Mandy Van Deven is a philanthropy consultant with 20 years of experience in strategy and planning, grantmaking, organizational development, capacity building and strategic communications in the philanthropic, nonprofit and journalism sectors—with an emphasis on gender, racial and economic justice and fortifying the infrastructure for narrative power.
