This policy was initiated from an idea farmer Jennifer Taylor (of Lola’s Organic Farm) brought to AJP in 2023. Leah Cohen worked out the details of implementation in collaboration with Jennifer. It was piloted from 2023 through AJP’s sunsetting in 2026, sharing over $17k in benefits divided among 19 beneficiaries.
Policy #
AJP will pay a designated share of our funding directly to frontline community members who are subjected to race-based systemic injustice and whose stories help AJP obtain grants and donations.
Background & Rationale #
Resources inequities undermine frontline communities’ efforts to provide mutual aid, uplift, and empowerment for their people. These community members deploy their own knowledge, experience, and creativity to resist, survive, and thrive in the face of injustice. Nonprofit organizations such as AJP must work to support these projects, because transformation of our food system and our wider society will require marginalized communities to take charge of their own destinies.
Given the contradictions of the nonprofit sector, however, even well-meaning efforts to support projects led by marginalized communities can raise ethical dilemmas. When a nonprofit uses inspiring stories from community members to enlist donations and grants for the nonprofit organization’s own operations, there is a serious risk that sharing those stories becomes extractive: the organization may receive financial benefit without returning significant value back to frontline community members themselves. At a fundamental level, nonprofits should routinely evaluate and interrogate their work to ensure it is benefitting and empowering people from oppressed communities. Addressing the ethical dilemma of sharing stories is only one facet of that necessary self-evaluation, but it is an important one: the nonprofit sector too often devalues frontline workers even as organizations benefit from publicizing those workers’ labor, life experience, and knowledge in order to better compete for limited funding streams.
AJP has tried some strategies to mitigate this tendency—including by facilitating direct connections between frontline community members and funders—but until now we have not been systematic in our approach. Following the suggestion and vision of farmer Jennifer Taylor, AJP has undertaken to pilot a new policy of sharing a portion of our annual funding with frontline community members whose stories, words, images, and likenesses we feature in our communications.
Funds-Sharing Payments Eligibility #
The frontline food system community members who qualify for payments under this policy include:
Workers in our food system who are historically underserved farmers of small-scale community and family farms (defined in AJP’s standards) and who are Black, Indigenous, or People of Color (BIPOC)—excluding higher-level supervisors and management; and
BIPOC community members who have limited access to high-quality, fresh, organic food; and
Member-based, BIPOC-led organizations representing farmworkers organizations and/or farmers of the type listed in (1) above.
Calculating Benefits #
After the end of the fiscal year, AJP uses a formula to establish a minimum share amount by evenly dividing 80% of the reserve fund among all beneficiaries. The remaining 20% of the fund is divided according to how many times each beneficiary’s story was used.
The formula for calculating individual shares is as follows:
\(S_{n} = (0.8 \times\frac{F}{N})+(0.2 \times F \times \frac{T_{n}}{T_{all}} )\)Where:
Sn = share value paid to a given qualifying individual or entity at the end of the year
F = total funds reserved for share payments (at least 5% of all donations and unrestricted grants received over the year)
N = number of all qualifying individuals or entities, whose stories/voice/photo/likeness were featured in AJP’s communications in the previous fiscal year
Tn = number of times the qualifying individual or entity was featured in AJP’s communications in the previous fiscal year
Tall = total number of times all qualifying individuals or entities were featured in AJP’s communications in the previous fiscal year
AJP pays all shares once they are calculated for the preceding year. If it is unclear whether a share should be paid to an individual or to an organization they are associated with, AJP will consult the individuals and organizations involved and collectively determine the best course of action. Payments may be subject to tax reporting (via 1099 forms) if shares (plus any other non-employee compensation) exceed $600 in any given year.
Guiding Questions for Evaluation of Pilot #
Did this program have the intended impact, and what lessons have we learned?
Did it change how we asked for stories and how often?
Does the program shape overly transactional relationships?
What portion of payments went to each stakeholder group (see eligibility criteria above)? If there is an imbalance, why?
Should we change how we calculate shares or the scope of who receives payments?
Should we change the percentage of our funds allocated to this?
How have funders reacted? Other organizations? Frontline community members?
Did any funders restrict us from setting money aside for this purpose?
What do we want to change after the pilot?