Erika Burnett has a tremendous track record in community leadership in the private and public sector. Most recently she served as the VP of Community Development at the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee and the Executive Director of The Village (learn more about The Village here).
Burnett describes herself as a leader who thrives on “collaboration, joy, and the unapologetic pursuit of transformative service delivery.”
In recent months, she has shepherded transitions at the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee and at The Village, describing both organizations as being in a phase of transition.
What has your job entailed?
My primary responsibility is to transition and embed the work that has existed under my leadership at the Community Foundation’s Community Development department. We focused on identifying the Community Foundation’s priorities and most meaningful impact around civic leadership. My role now is to transition our learnings and the initiatives that we piloted to be more intimately embedded into the organization’s Community Impact work, which looks at dollars going out, and Philanthropic Services, which focuses on dollars coming in. The department I was hired to lead has been dissolved.
Over the next two months, I will work with colleagues at CFMT to identify the framing and strategies which will allow them to actualize their commitment to civic leadership while staying mission focused. So that’s that transition as of right now. Under my leadership, we incubated The Village, which was actually my entry point to the Community Foundation. The membership of The Village decided to stand up an independent entity to continue to deepen our proof of concept. I will steward this next phase of the organization’s growth towards independence as their Executive Director.
We talk a lot about innovation. Yet funding is tight. How can innovation leverage slow funding streams?
Unfortunately for us, the nonprofit sector has fallen prey to the negative implications of the charity model. The nonprofit industrial complex is real. Once we understand what fuels that machine, we also gain clarity around its limitations.
What we see unfolding before us is the machine doing exactly what it’s designed to do. Nothing more. This recognition, along with following historical patterns, paints a very clear picture: this system is not going to work for very much longer. So what does that leave: innovation.
Let’s look at The Village, for example. Innovation is the only way we’re going to survive, and it’s also necessary for our professional wellbeing, especially given the profile of our members. Innovation for us has looked like directing our resourcing internally, positioning our members as valuable experts in their field, and facilitating, upskilling and developing opportunities for other Village members. We are looking at the full landscape of funding trends against our budget limitations and individual capacity and then finding ways for more communal and subjective exchanges. Our goal is to first meet our pie chart of needs through our relationships and networks in a way that is aligned with our guiding values; only then do we look externally to our network for outsourcing. The North Star is to build the ecosystem of affirming self-sustainability which allows our members and organizations to move beyond the pit of scarcity, both in resources and mindset.
Innovation for us has also meant thinking critically about risk/benefits associated with our physical location. We are moving from being physically housed at CFMT Community to a collaborative space with at least two other organizations in North Nashville, renting a house from a local church that will be used as an office and gathering space. This is another example of what I mean by internally resourced. We turned to a local church for a reasonable space with place-based implications, we found cultural alignment with Village organizations, we upcycled office equipment from a collaborating partner on Jefferson Street, and we downsized and decentralized our orientation to our space.
Another point on how innovation is driving this next leg of our legacy is that we turned internally to our Village consultants and asked, “What have you learned over the last couple of years nationally that we need to learn together?” As a result, we collaborated with a local expert, curated a results-driven learning series, and we are using the series to develop The Village’s Liberatory Wellness Framework and Ecological Impact Model.
How do you define the nonprofit industrial complex?
I think of the nonprofit industrial complex as a machine. And the main components of this machine are: local/state government/agencies, federal government, private business, private foundations and nonprofits. Historically the requirements, pressures and allegiance necessary to satisfy funders, donors, policy/decision makers has existed in tension with the mission aligned outcomes for the nonprofits, the nonprofit professionals, and the populations they serve. At a super high-level, I use it to make meaning of the tension that has been created as service becomes a commodity.
On your LinkedIn profile you call yourself a Co-Conspirator of the Women of Color Collaborative, which you co-founded in 2018. What is the Women of Color Collaborative?
The Women of Color Collaborative (WOCC) is a space for women of color to work, play and build in affirming ways that center our lived experiences and our unique identities. We challenge the ways in which white supremacy culture has taught us to behave and relate to ourselves, others around us, organizations that we work for and serve, and how we relate overall to the world around us. We explore cause and effect from the lens of those four domains through targeted programming.
I tell folks that a lot of the origin story for WOCC was rooted in a bunch of check boxes. I did the Nashville Emerging Leaders, I did New Leaders Council, Leadership Donelson-Hermitage, etc. I checked all of the boxes that I was told I should check professionally. And what I recognized is there was always an overlay of identity missing in those spaces. There was a gap when we did our Enneagram or DISC assessment that did not factor in my identity, lived experiences, point of view or even unique wiring. And so, the Women of Color Collaborative has been an opportunity for us to center our identity as it relates to these other experiences in the world.
Our primary engagement modality is cohort learning. We want women of color to be the most actualized version of yourself so that when you are in spaces — in the workplace, in academia, at school, in community — that you are able to consistently stay grounded and affirmed in who you are, no matter what is happening around you. And you’re recognizing how your identity, even if lacking environmental representation, still has agency and value in space, along with the tools to relate to the things around us.
We recognize, honor and try to mitigate for the fact that Black women especially have been socialized to disassociate in order to survive, and even more consequential, the embodied disassociation allows us to stay in service to those around us. So, we teach Black women, especially, how to tap back into themselves and leverage everything that we have been taught and/or socialized around to be beneficial for us and our communities in the way that matters to our personal ecosystems first.
I have yet to experience a space in our environment where Black leaders can live and breathe the fullness of who they are while flexing the muscle of unlearning and learning to exist and lead free from the dominant gaze.
I could not and would not be able to do this work of The Village effectively if not for the foundation that the Women of Color Collaborative has laid.
What does leadership mean to you, and what motivates you?
Leadership to me means doing the thing that you are uniquely wired and positioned to do in a way that matters. For example, I used to do neighborhood cleanups with one of my cousins because she worked at a community center. And so to me, that’s leadership, recognizing that there is a need and that I am uniquely positioned to be the person to champion that and meeting that need. In this example I was the favorite little cousin. I made friends with the other community center staff. When I asked if they would be willing to hang out for an hour on a Saturday to help pick up the litter if my great aunt made her favorite chicken and dumplings, they said yes.
What motivates me is knowing that in a particular space there is some wisdom, knowledge, experience, action or curiosity I can offer, that otherwise may not be part of the problem-solving. My leadership is fueled by identifying what needs to occur in this moment that if we chose inaction the outcome would be less favorable for [the] community. This doesn’t always equate with urgency, but it does correlate with importance. So for me, if it’s important, then you prioritize and strategize against that. I ask myself and others, “What can be different? How can we be better in this moment?” And then, “How am I uniquely wired, positioned, skilled, resource to be able to facilitate that?” Finally, I bring people along on the journey because that’s how I choose to lead.
You serve as the chair of the Metro Action Commission (MAC). What is an example of a project where you feel local government has made a difference?
This is my first year as chair, and I want to talk about something that was super timely for us. With the cut at the federal level and the freezing of SNAP benefits, we saw such a tremendous outpour of commitment and activation as Metro Action Commission partnered with WeGo to make sure that residents had access to the Journey Pass program. I presented at MAC’s administrative office while community members were signed up. I am incredibly impressed with the institutional collaboration between WeGo and MAC. However, the real MVP award goes to the MAC & WeGO employees who handled such tense and high-stakes situations with such grace, compassion, and patience.
It was so hot outside; there were lots of medical needs on the part of individuals who were there to get their passes. The level of professionalism, the level of dignity that our staff continued to show towards every customer, that’s what I’m proud of. I’m proud that this city is filled with government employees who understand that their job is to make sure that we are better as an entire community. The way that Metro Action has been able to rally around the needs of this community, in many instances stretching workload capacity, is what makes civic leadership meaningful as a member of the Commission. Director [Jamekia] Bies has stepped in and kept MAC moving with efficiency and impact.
What are some opportunities you see?
To anyone who’s heard me speak, this is no surprise. The opportunity here is really for local government to be much more intentional about collaborating with local impact sector partners and the philanthropic community. Ultimately, we need to be leveraging our intellectual and power gymnastics to identify ways for both public and private dollars to support public wellbeing.
There are lots of barriers when it comes to dollars flowing through government entities. But many cities have figured this out. We really have to acknowledge first that there are multiple layers of historical harm and trauma between government and CBOs (community-based organizations). Although many of the folks who may have caused harm, and/or developed ill-fitting, and now antiquated infrastructure, policies, and procedures are no longer at the table, it doesn’t erase the residue of those actions, or inactions, from existing in [the] community. That’s true for local donors, that’s true for local foundations, but it’s also true for government. And it doesn’t serve the community for us to uphold ideologies and practices that don’t ultimately result in a reduction of negative community health indicators.
We’ve essentially bottlenecked our own dollars because we have not taken the time to journey through some healing, some reconciliation, and an opportunity to see what deeper, meaningful, right-sized resourcing can look like. We have to get into rooms [together]. We have moved beyond “bless your heart” and engage in radical, courageous conversations. We have to sit at tables with integrity and play the hand that our stakeholders have dealtus, with the transparency around what we truly value and the SMIRF (social, moral, relational, intellectual, financial) capital we are willing to invest. We have to flex the muscle of meaningful compromise, radical collaboration and a refreshed approach to measuring success and what impact really looks like.
Overall, I think the biggest challenge and opportunity that can facilitate deep systems-level change is to broaden our appetite for long-term, sustained community work. Community transformation takes time, much longer than the three- or five-year funding commitments rotating in and out of our landscape. What all the research and case studies have proven is that impactful cross-sector collaborations require deep pockets and deep memories. This work takes time. We are comfortable with a sprint, but the marathon requires much more of us. I believe that with the right inputs, government, philanthropy and local CBOs, we are uniquely positioned to lead the way here.