This commentary is by Dru Roessle of Danville, director of performance improvement for the Vermont Agency of Human Services.
As the pandemic reached Vermont, I finished reading Octavia Butler’s premonitory and beloved science-fiction novel “Parable of the Sower.” Butler writes: “All that you touch, you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change.”
A year later and the global pandemic is still exposing deep fissures of inequity in our institutions and ideologies, teaching us that we are capable of changing norms and behaviors, and inviting millions to grieve.
A profound national reckoning with systemic racial injustice and white supremacy culture is teaching us movement-building.
I feel reminded that, though we may not have control, we do have power. We impact one another and our world every day through our actions. I also feel reminded that our sense of reality is overlaid with a filter of our own experiences, assumptions, stories and biases, so acknowledging how much we don’t know is the first step to learning and adapting. The systems we’re in are deeply unjust, inequitable, and imperfect — but they are made, and we can make something different.
National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Goman says, “We will not march back to what was, / but move to what shall be… / the new dawn blooms as we free it.”
So, how do we free the dawn? How do we shape change? How do we let it shape us? How do we make the world we want to live in?
In November 2020, just after I moved to the Northeast Kingdom after many years in Burlington, my friend Leslie invited me to join a workshop series she was hosting on how to start a giving circle. Leslie described giving circles as grassroots philanthropy: a way for groups of people to learn about what’s happening in their communities to improve conditions and to play a role in making it happen.
At first I felt skeptical: I don’t have enough wealth, or know enough people with wealth, to make an impact.
Then I felt insecure: I am so new to the region, who am I to start a giving circle here? And with whom?
And I felt nervous: I don’t know how to do this; what if I start and then don’t know what to do next?
But I also felt compelled, so I decided to join.
LaunchpadVT is a free workshop series co-hosted by the Giving Project and Philanthropy Together. Their shared intention is to create a space for a cohort of people to learn together, plan, and launch their own circle.
I learned that anyone can start or participate in a giving circle, they can choose to focus on anything, and the work can unfold in a hundred different ways. The heart of a giving circle is to empower ourselves and one another to play a role in building the world we think is possible.
Circles are strangers, friends, longtime community members or new, big groups of 100 or little groups of five, from the same neighborhood or across the country. Circles can pool and give money, time, or talents to organizations, or to activists, initiatives, individuals, issue campaigns. Circles choose their own frameworks for learning, giving, decision-making, and changing over time. Circles are built so that they can be sustained, never more than the members’ capacity to participate in it, and in alignment with the principles and values of circle members.
During LaunchpadVT, I designed a framework for a giving circle in the Kingdom that I would want to join if asked, the purpose of which would be to: build capacity for collective thriving in the Northeast Kingdom by pooling funds to support local initiatives, projects, organizations and partnerships working at the grassroots for social, environmental and economic justice.
I imagine an intergenerational group of about 10 or 15 people with different life experiences and different capacities for donating money. We would seek relationships with organizations and people doing collaborative work that inspires us, and learn how to best support their efforts. We would seek to match our pooled donation by asking neighbors and other community members to contribute. We would come to the circle with different interests and ideas, and we would support one another’s deeper inquiries into how to make collective impact in our region.
The lessons I learned with my cohort in LaunchpadVT help me understand and step into what it can look like to change and be changed, and shape the world I believe is possible:
Lesson 1: Show up
- What do you care about? What concerns you? What inspires you?
- Find out who else is caring, concerned, and inspired too
- Get together (probably for now on Zoom)
Lesson 2: Listen
- Who is doing what you are interested in?
- Find or create opportunities to listen to organizations, activists, artists — whoever is doing the work
Lesson 3: Participate
- Understand what opportunities there are for the giving circle to meaningfully participate
- As a circle, make decisions together about how to give
Lesson 4: Shape
- Celebrate the work of the organization or initiative the circle supported
- Stay connected with how the work is evolving over time and increase awareness
- Reflect about how learning and participating has affected members of the circle
With LaunchpadVT, I worked through the skepticism, insecurity and nervousness I held about whether I in my own life could make a meaningful impact, and built a foundation with the others in my cohort. We learned the insides and outs of giving circles and when I left it all felt simple and clear. Impact is about how we channel our interests and questions into action in partnership with others.
I haven’t launched the giving circle yet. But conversations with my new neighbors, with new and old friends in the area, and people doing work I’m interested in learning more about, has led again and again to the inevitable question: “What do you think about the idea of a grassroots giving circle around here?” I’m starting to think that with all that foundation building in LaunchpadVT, the giving circle might launch itself!
Are you in the Northeast Kingdom? Are you interested? Let me know!
