Melissa Johnson is the newly appointed executive director of the Neighborhood Funders Group, as well as a newly elected member of BPA’s board of directors. Melissa explains why philanthropy matters to her.
When she began her career as a social worker, Melissa tried to solve particular problems for individual families. She soon realized that wasn’t enough.
“I began studying as opposed to doing direct service, trying to develop mechanisms around families but quickly learned that the broader community as a whole needed attention,” she said. This shift to big picture thinking led her to work in the policy arena, first helping rural communities through a North Carolina community foundation. “At the time,” she explained, “I had no interest in the philanthropic piece but wanted to learn more about the rural piece. But I had to learn about philanthropy in the institutional sense and how I could be a part of it.”
“The rapid pace of change, both in our community and society as a whole,” said Melissa, has influenced the way philanthropy works, or doesn’t work. “There has been constant change in how communities interact with each other, what they look like, how they are being supported or not, and the level at which we’re able to develop defense mechanisms to respond to all of the change.”
In response to events like Katrina and the BP oil spill, “all of these major systems in the broader ecosystems are being affected. Philanthropy is most directly affected by the economic crisis; however, there is not enough focus on people and how these systems change.” Melissa believes that dealing with this issue involves “how to problem solve and redirect and reorganize in a way that does prioritize speaking to the crisis of money but also valuing the change of people.”
On leadership, Melissa believes that “the most valuable and effective type of leadership is inclusive. Your role or title or position has very little to do with how effective you are at doing your work and effectively managing people to do their best work.” Melissa attempts to model leadership that is honest, transparent, and humble. When she doesn’t know something, she admits it.
Melissa looks at philanthropy from a broad perspective. “Philanthropy really epitomizes the generosity and the abuse that is potential in a capitalist society. The reason why it is even possible is because there has been some type of inequitable distribution of economic wealth and resources. On the one hand that’s what makes it possible for institutional philanthropy to exist. On the flip side, the notion of giving that money back to the broader public good is a tremendous sort of generous charitable instinct that really isn’t required. People don’t have to set up foundations and give away money but they choose to do so over and over again.
Presenting that fundamental dichotomy of why it exists and the beauty of it is why our network identifies with and what we strive toward. We try to make sure that the giving is done in ways that really tries to rewrite those inequities. This dichotomy is why I stay in the work. I want to make sure that as much money as possible goes toward uplifting the most the folks who have the least.
Day to day, what keeps me going is also my personal experience and where I come from– one of those rural communities. We felt that we were philanthropically rich in a different sense. My community has not yet seen those resources distributed in the same way.”
In her office hangs a framed quotation by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: “Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.”
