Issue Space is all about holding space to process life in the business of impact – an experience that’s never been put to the test quite like now.

In this letter, we hear the lived experience of an executive at a progressive philanthropic organization as he weighs whether to respond to false public narratives or ignore them, reflects on how this moment compares to others in his impact career, and thinks about what long-term sustainability looks like now.

Do you work at a federal agency or at an organization that’s federally funded?

I work at a social justice philanthropic organization, where we have some projects that receive federal funding.

What kind of work do you do personally?

I’m a senior executive leader at the organization. My job is to manage our relationships with the grassroots organizations we support, and I oversee a team to do that. But I work in an organization that the right [conservative movement] likes to attack, so we’ve been attacked. In light of that, I’ve had to do a lot of crisis communications and crisis management, which is technically only part of my core job, but right now is everything.

The crisis communications work is like, when a right-wing influencer Tweets something related to our work – we have to decide if we’re going to respond to it or not, and if so, what we’re going to say; what our statement’s going to be. The crisis management work is about managing the internal dynamics based on what’s happening externally.

I’ll make decisions about things like risk profile – how much risk we’re willing to take on in order to support the progressive social justice work we want to do – a lot of which is risk tolerance strategy and looking at how to allocate resources to the priorities we want to focus on when there may be a risk we want to take, but it potentially jeopardizes our other work.“I’m not in a position to be like, ‘I have so much wealth that none of this will even impact me.’ I don’t have that.”

Were you at all prepared for this moment?

Back in the summer of last year, I led a big scenario-planning session vis-à-vis the election to ask, what are the ways the election might go and what are the implications of those outcomes for our work? We mapped out a bunch of scenarios, and now we’ve found ourselves in the worst version of the timeline. Nobody was predicting it was going to be quite as chaotic as it is now – even me, who’s spent a lot of time thinking about what this scenario might look like. So now we’re like, okay, we need to look at our compliance protocols. Now that all of the Executive Orders have come out, whether we like them or not, they're the law until we’re told otherwise.

How are you feeling about your work right now?

My honest answer is that I'm feeling the way people targeting progressive organizations want us to feel – beaten down and discouraged and exhausted. That’s exactly why they're doing all this the way that they are.

Sometimes I feel like the attacks on progressive organizations are very cynical, and other times it’s less clear. I’ll wonder, do you know we’re not doing what you say we’re doing [as far as accusations of corruption or supporting causes that hurt the country], but you’re saying it anyway because you want to make us look bad, or do you genuinely believe that these conspiracy theories are true?

It’s completely exhausting. And it’s hard to know how to respond because you’d respond to somebody differently if you think they’re genuinely confused about how you work versus if you know that they know what they’re saying is not true and they just want to take you down.

It’s distracting, but you don't really have the luxury of saying, ‘I’m just going to ignore it and keep doing my work’ because there are real consequences to the discourse and targeting that’s being used against you. It takes over your whole job even though, as you know, you don’t get into this work to do this kind of back-and-forth; you get into this work to do the work. And now you're not, which is what they want to happen. But striking the balance [of responding versus ignoring] is tough, and it doesn't feel good to be the one who's making a lot of those decisions.

As someone who’s built their entire career in social impact, you’ve been in situations where your work has been targeted before. What’s the same or different about those times versus what you’re facing now?

I’ve worked at controversial organizations in the past. In those days, the attacks against us were relatively straightforward. It was, ‘You're doing this thing that we don't like, and we don't like that you're doing it, so we're going to attack you for it.’ And I might not agree with the characterization our opponents were making of us or the names that they called us, but I could say, ‘Yeah. You are right. You get us. We are doing something you don’t like, and I can understand why you don’t like it.’ And that’s just part of doing social justice work. It's like that Frederick Douglass quote that says, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” Which is basically to say – you can't do this kind of work without being in opposition to the powers that be. But that feels like a good and righteous fight. That is the work. The work is pushing back, and the nature of oppressive power structures is that when you push on them, they push back.

That feels very different from being in the center of a misinformation campaign where you're like – none of this is even true. That feels a lot more bewildering and challenging to have to deal with.

Another thing that feels different now is the sense that ‘they’ are pushing against ‘us’: they won an election and got in power and picked a fight with us and now we have no choice but to push back. As opposed to us being the ones to push to agitate change as a core part of why we’re here. This new dynamic is an existential threat; it could threaten our ability to do our work at all. It’s a very different feeling, the stakes are higher, and it’s just a lot more stressful to do.

Is there anything you feel is misunderstood or misrepresented in the public discourse about organizations like yours?

We’re an intermediary, which means that people grant money to our organization to fund different projects that we’re supporting. But just because a donor gives a grant to our organization while we’re supporting something else doesn’t mean that the donor supported that project directly. That’s where a lot of the disinformation is. They’ll say, ‘Donor A gave your organization $10 and you gave Project B $10 so Donor A must be supporting Project B,’ when that might not be true and when it might be an important distinction which projects Donor A does and doesn’t support. So it’s a convenient model to exploit to paint a narrative that you want. If you want to paint a conspiracy that a donor is funding something specific, it’s an easy story to tell with an intermediary because that’s what it can look like on paper.

Some people understand how it works and others don’t, and then there's a lot of straight-up mis- and disinformation that’s just provably, demonstrably false. But you can’t go and fact-check every blogger on Twitter. They're going to say what they're going to say and if we kick and scream every time they'll just say, ‘Oh, well, now they're denying it, so it must be true!’

But at the end of the day, all of it is a political strategy, and all of the messengers across the media ecosystem that’s been built over the past 30 years are pawns in the game. Even if the folks sitting in the big media boardrooms know that these conspiracies are not true, a lot of the folks disseminating their messages buy into these theories and spread them around.

What’s the energy like among your colleagues and teammates in the social impact space right now?

There's a lot of fear. A lot of fear and a lot of anxiety. Which again, is what’s wanted. But it’s real. There is reason to be afraid. It doesn't mean that all the worse things are going to happen – but they might.

But there’s also motivation to be taken from it that I hear from some folks. They'll say, ‘Well, this is why we do the work; let's just double down and get it done.’ I wish I could feel that more, but it’s hard.

What do you want other decision-makers in the social impact space to know about your experience in this moment?

I think it’s important for us to just be really clear about what has actually changed about the law and what hasn’t. They can write these Executive Orders all day, but a lot of them have been blocked by courts or will be because they’re not legally enforceable. Even the affirmative action ruling from last year, as a for-instance, doesn't mean that you can't do racial justice grant-making. There could be certain characteristics about a grant that make it illegal [that you’d have to address], but they're not inherently illegal. I see some institutions giving themselves permission to be like, ‘Oh, well, I guess we can’t do this work anymore!’ but there are others who would be perfectly happy to keep doing what they've been doing except that all of the swirl around this has made them feel that they can't. Some of it is going to come down to individual risk tolerance, but I want people to be clear that, while there are some things that you can't do, there are plenty that you still can, so be mindful of over-correcting or prematurely complying.

Beyond your leadership peers, do you have any other messages for social impact pros right now?

This is kind of pat but it is just – take care of yourself. This is not going away. It’s not going to get better in a week or a month or a year. This is what it’s gonna be like for now – a marathon, not a sprint. All of us need to figure out how to keep going in a way where we can sustain ourselves. If we all burn out and quit, that’s exactly what they want. They just want to make it so unpleasant and anxiety-provoking to keep doing progressive social justice work that people just don't do it. So take a rest. Take a vacation, a long weekend. Don’t check your email on a Saturday. Spend time with your family. You gotta do it. Easier said than done, but that’s the thing you gotta do.

How are you looking out for your wellbeing as a social impact pro during this time?

I take my time off. I work a ton during the week but I really do try to not work on the weekends to give myself space to decompress. Just down time. I’ll watch a ball game or take some solo quiet time…just basic stuff. It’s gonna be different for everyone.

Finally, how are you thinking about the future?

I want to keep doing progressive social justice work. This is my career; this is what I do. But this is where I think pacing oneself comes in. I still have twenty years of work left in me and I have to pace myself. How do I approach this moment now, and the next couple of years, in such a way where I can retire as a social justice professional and not end up being one of these people who’s like, ‘I can’t do it anymore; I’m gonna go work for a bank.’ I know that’s not right for me so I have to make sure that I retain a good pace and not let myself lose it.

Read other social impact pros’ accounts of work-life in this moment:

A program officer at a federally funded organization

A researcher in the crosshairs of “DEI” backlash

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