Celeste C. Smith joined the Pittsburgh Foundation as a program officer for arts and culture in 2018 and was named senior program officer three years later. In her current role, Smith is responsible for shaping grantmaking, developing special initiatives, and evaluating the foundation’s arts and culture portfolio.
A native of Chicago, she received her bachelor’s degree in arts management and film and design technology from Chatham University. Smith is a national 2018 SXSW Community Service Award honoree and co-founder of 1Hood Media, whose mission is to build liberated communities through art, education and social justice.
In May, Independent Sector, the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit coalition, named Smith a Bridging Fellow. Over the next two years, she and 39 other fellows based in Pittsburgh, Dallas and Chicago will participate in community-based leadership training. Smith is also a literary artist, and her writing was published in the 2019 literary anthology “TENDER a Literary Anthology and Book of Spells: evidence.” She lives with her husband and three children in Pittsburgh’s East Liberty neighborhood.
I recently caught up with Smith to discuss her career trajectory, the best piece of advice she ever received, and what “The Wizard of Oz” can teach us about philanthropy. Here are some excerpts from that discussion, which have been edited for clarity.
What made you decide you wanted to work in the nonprofit sector?
This question makes me laugh because I don’t think anyone makes the decision to work 1,000 hours a week for minimal pay trying to solve the world’s hardest problems. But for me, the answer is love. I got into nonprofits to help my husband flesh out an idea — 1Hood Media, which was about representation of Black men and boys in media, and I have a great love for him, of course, and for our people. So I think that’s why anybody really gets into the nonprofit world. You don’t put in that much work if you don’t have love; it’s not sustainable.
Who are your biggest influences?
In the simplest terms, it’s Black people writ large in every single realm, and especially Black mothers, including my own, and their collective dedication to our families, that have influenced my life.
Philanthropically, my experiences with program officers shaped how I approach my work. I’m thinking of Pittsburgh-based folks like Justin Laing, who, if you’ve been in arts philanthropy for any time period, you’ve probably heard his name, and Germaine Williams, who was a founding member of the Pittsburgh Arts Research Consortium. There are people I met at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation — Risë Wilson; Marianna Schaffer, who’s now at Dodge; and Felix Endara, who’s now at Foundation for a Just Society. I also want to mention Taina S. McField, who I met at the Nathan Cummings Foundation and is now at Tisch College.
These individuals were always accessible. I haven’t changed my cell phone number since I’ve been working in philanthropy, because they didn’t [laughs]. So I really try to move in the same manner that they did.
When I think of activism, it’s watching the people on the ground working every day, like Malik Rhasaan, who pointed out racism in the Occupy movement and is uplifting the interests of the Black community. And with 1Hood, as a grassroots organization, I was thinking about my husband and a board member, Cornell Jones, and how everybody came from different walks of life, but they had a common goal.
When I go about doing my work, I don’t leave out my influences or the identity I have. I’m a Black woman striving to eradicate racism and white supremacy. I bring all of that to the work, and these touchpoints shaped who I am.
Your bio on the Pittsburgh Foundation site mentions your “more than money” mindset. Can you elaborate on that?
That phrase comes from a colleague, Michelle McMurray, and it’s about this myth that philanthropy is a faucet you turn on and money comes out. That’s not really how it works.
We try to give grants that are impactful, but honestly, there’s never enough money, and so we have to do things in terms of economies of scale — bringing like-minded people together, introducing somebody to a program officer, or providing a grantee with access to a larger, white-led institution. Oftentimes in life, we need more than a check. As a human, sure, I need money to survive, but I also need my eight hugs a day, right? So how do we provide the things that people need to thrive that come outside of a paycheck?
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
One of the first things that Michelle McMurry told me was that philanthropy is all made up. You know when you hear something and it really blows your mind? Like when you watch “The Matrix” for the first time? That’s what it felt like. It’s like when Toto pulls the curtain back, and we see that Oz is just one of us. It really changes things.
Of course, philanthropy has guidelines and regulations, but a lot of the practices were made up to serve a particular time and a different mindset. I’ll go to a foundation’s website, see what they support, and then fit my proposal to fit something that’s really made up. We try to fit grantees into a box, but what if the box doesn’t exist? Why can’t we make up new stuff? This idea inspires me to dream alongside my grantee partners and cultural practitioners to make something else up that’s more equitable, just and transformative.
That’s a really incisive piece of advice, although I must say, I understood the “Wizard of Oz” a lot more than “The Matrix.”
There you go. Then let’s stick with “The Wizard of Oz” analogy [laughs].
What makes you pessimistic about the state of philanthropy? Optimistic?
I think white supremacist capitalist patriarchy is what foundations epitomize. The systems that have been here for eons. I’m not so much pessimistic about the fact that folks don’t want to change, because honestly, Octavia Butler already told us that change is inevitable — “All that you touch. You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth is Change. God is Change.”
Change is going to happen, but what makes me pessimistic is the amount of work that will be required from an already underpaid and overworked populace. The price that is paid isn’t monetary. It’s the lack of rest, it’s high blood pressure or stress — all of these pieces impact society, and that’s the part I’m a bit pessimistic about.
And so it is my hope — and here I’m shifting to the optimistic side — that some of the old ideologies are beginning to be interrogated. You’re seeing foundations hire more people with lived experience. Some of the people that are holding those status quo ideas are retiring. You’re seeing the influx of people in the field that have liberatory ideas and they’re not scared of the status quo. I’m also excited to see how MacKenzie Scott is approaching philanthropy because I think that if the world’s wealth could be actually ceded and seeded — like she phrased it — with a racial justice lens, we can really see some impact.
What was the last great book you read?
I have two. One is “What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing.” When you think about the nonprofit sphere where people are addressing the ills of the world, a lot of times, resilience and healing are needed to actually do the work.
I didn’t read the book in terms of my own work. I did it for my self-worth and to understand my circumstances and relationships. And then I thought, “We need to have a family meeting every week and study a chapter.” It really was that impactful, because a lot of times, we don’t look at how trauma has impacted ourselves and others before we make decisions and how we move forward with other people.
And the other one was “Finding Me” by Viola Davis. I love, like, how honest and raw she is about her experience, not only as a Black woman growing up with racism and coming from the South, but also as her journey as an artist. I’m a practicing artist, and I think sometimes we romanticize the broke artist — this goes along with activism, too — which is this idea that you’re not allowed to feed your family because you should be doing this work, period.
I love the honesty of how she portrays what it took to get to where she is, and not making it a fairy tale. Her way of being is authentic in a way that you often don’t see in philanthropy, which is why I try to be very accessible because that power dynamic sometimes will choke out the authenticity. So those two books, even though completely different, resonated with me deeply.
Any parting thoughts?
I see this desire to rush back to the way things were before, and I just want to give ourselves grace. We lost people. COVID is still here and we are still in the amplification of the uprising for racial justice. We also don’t want to get back to a time where we’re working all these hours and we’re seeing less of our families.
And so I’m encouraging us to take the time that we had that was the best for ourselves, our family, our quality of life, and lean into that, because what we were doing before wasn’t working. What is going to work for us now and give us the quality of life we deserve, the transformative, thriving lives that we all seek to have? We need to give ourselves grace, time, and be patient with ourselves.