Propel Nonprofits
Report date
August 2018
What has been most instrumental to your progress?
As a new organization, evaluation, both informal and formal, has been a critical tool and insight in evolving our programming to serve our constituency. From feedback forms to surveys to focus groups, consistently assessing ourselves by asking the community, partners, and allies what we are doing right, where we can improve, has enabled us to better understand resource allocation, capacity constraints, and to focus on mission related work. By including those affected by the problem to provide feedback is how we making progress to innovation and creating a solution.
Before precinct caucuses this year, we held two trainings that would help our community understand the virtues of caucusing and the impact of showing up. We held one in person, which garnered around 25 attendees, and we held one through Facebook live, which garnered over 1200 views. We had great feedback from both trainings, and this helped us understand that we need to couple many of our in person trainings with digital calls-to-action. For us, this was really important because it meets people where they are at, allows for flexibility, which then increases our impact. Since then, the use of digital trainings has been crucial to our success, so much so that time and resources are devoted to including this in our pathway model for leadership development.
Collaboration has been a key component of our going faster and further because of pooled resources. We set out to find partners who act as our ambassadors. We used the bushConnect partner model for our own conference--we identified key leaders that participated in our programs, asked them to invite a select number of their networks to the conference, and offered scholarships based on need. We also ask these ambassadors to help us find leaders in their communities as we put out trainings, find Sheroes for our storytelling project, and expand to rural Minnesota.
Key lessons learned
In August of 2017, we facilitated a workshop around the importance of serving on city boards and commissions, hoping that demystifying the roles and application process and hearing from current commissioners would lead others to apply to serve. It didn’t work. While this workshop was helpful for some, we realized very quickly the community members who came to this workshop were already deeply involved in their communities in various ways. This learning helped us course correct to individualize our trainings and spend more time developing a new model that would target each person based on their skills and interests. We call this the “pathway” model for leadership development.
Earlier this year, we worked hard to provide trainings and opportunities for Muslim women to meet with their legislators, and experienced some pushback from women who were unwilling to physically meet legislators at the Capitol. After digging a little deeper, we learned that many women do not have relationships with their legislators, don’t feel prepared when going to the meeting and have never experienced a meeting before. We decided to alleviate these fears by going Facebook Live and by modeling the behavior, we provided an insider’s view on what happens. We provided script on what to say, ask, using personal narrative storytelling techniques. We’re pursuing an opportunity for legislators to connect with their constituents in the fall.
We have learned over the past year that not all of our partnerships are in our best interest. As an organization that is seen as a gatekeeper for Muslim women in Minnesota, we are constantly asked to partner with organizations who have troubling histories with people of color, women, and Muslims. When we first started out in doing this work, we felt that each partnership could help us reach different parts of the community. In the past year, however, we have become much more intentional about letting potential partner organizations know that we have a role in guarding our community from being poached as tokens and trophies.
Reflections on the community innovation process
Inclusive. Change happened because Muslim women of all demographics were invited into our space, trainings, and calls to action. They were provided skills in powerful affinity spaces that allowed them to apply for positions of power on boards, commissions, and public offices. We are creating change because we include Muslim women, organizations led by us, nonprofit leaders, mosque leadership, and our male allies. Muslim women often carry the greatest burdens of negative stereotypes and prejudices directed at our community. When we are excluded from positions of leadership in our places of worship and civic life, we suffer from a lack of representation, and that makes it easier to overlook our views and concerns. Building a grassroots network to lift the voices of MN's Muslim women was necessary to address these issues. Establishing strong relationships with current mosque leadership, nonprofit boards and various government institutions is also crucial in garnering support from leaders who already hold positions of power in which they can generate change. We are always a space by Muslim women, for Muslim women-we will continue to include women from our community who want to lead.
Progress toward an innovation
1. Through the Muslim Sheroes of Minnesota project we have shifted the public perception of Muslim women. As women become more empowered and engaged, as we tell our stories and take back our narrative, we have anecdotal evidence showing a positive shift in the perception the public has of Muslim women.
2. A pathway versus cohort civic engagement training model is being developed to educate and help place Muslim women in positions of influence and power within their city and local governance. This model provides individualized learning and leading in roles she wants to create change in. 100% of women who attended our trainings took an action.
3. A giving circle model incorporating faith traditions and honoring our intersecting identities has been developed and piloted to move Muslim women from donors to philanthropists.
2. A pathway versus cohort civic engagement training model is being developed to educate and help place Muslim women in positions of influence and power within their city and local governance. This model provides individualized learning and leading in roles she wants to create change in. 100% of women who attended our trainings took an action.
3. A giving circle model incorporating faith traditions and honoring our intersecting identities has been developed and piloted to move Muslim women from donors to philanthropists.
What it will take to reach an innovation?
Muslim Sheroes of Minnesota is a storytelling project that continues to evolve. We started out with narrative stories, created digital shorts and recorded podcasts. Now, we want to create curriculum, incorporate the arts, and apply universal design thinking to take it to the next level.
While we have a pathway model, we still need to create our own framework for this model and design it. What resources will be needed different than a cohort model and how will it be sustainable are just some of the questions we are exploring.
While we have a pathway model, we still need to create our own framework for this model and design it. What resources will be needed different than a cohort model and how will it be sustainable are just some of the questions we are exploring.
What's next?
Four identifiable next steps for the next phase include: Continuing to grow the network, creating a connected, brave space; Forming a collective call to action by modeling behavior and bringing others along; Highlight stories of Muslim sheroes who are taking action. We will be sharing more Shero stories via video, blogs, and podcasts; Sharing the story of what the giving circle model is, its impact, and evaluating the process. Currently, we have been supplementing each of our in-person trainings with virtual conversations or trainings through our social media channels. This has helped to connect with and identify women who are just learning about different pieces of the political process. We then help these women take action based on the skills learned from the training they participated in, and recommend them for leadership opportunities in their local community. While we were originally hoping to build a cohort around Muslim women’s leadership, the best culturally-sensitive option for us is to build and highlight leaders who tap into our basic training modules. We hope to identify and train 10 more women this year who will go on to hold leadership positions in their communities.
If you could do it all over again...
Meet people where they are. We started out our grant period testing theories around how involved Muslim women wanted to be in the political process, and made assumptions about where they should start. We realized that we needed to take a step back and look at who was getting involved and even more closely at who wasn’t. By thinking of who was not included, we made steps towards solving this problem and began implementing new solutions. This helped us in determining how to administer our trainings in the future.
One last thought
While we did achieve an innovation in telling the stories of Muslim women ourselves, we experienced some setbacks that resulted in new learnings around civic engagement. Our goal was to increase the representation of Muslim women on city councils, boards, and other public offices. What we learned was that many of the women in our network don’t want to hold public office, and that they still want to be involved in some significant ways. For example, we hosted a caucus training at Clockwork, and over 20 women attended. Every single one of those women, from college-age to seniors went on to caucus. Then, we hosted a virtual caucus training through Facebook Live. 1200 people watched our video. Finally, over 200 Muslim women in MN went on to caucus this year. This major breakthrough helped us understand that we need more base-level opportunities for our community to engage so we can build pathways rather than one-off successes. We need to continue finding these opportunities, training women to take them head-on, and then using them as gateways to even greater leadership opportunities.