Javier Torres-Campos serves as program director of the Surdna Foundation’s Thriving Cultures program, overseeing a $9 million grantmaking portfolio to advance the foundation’s social justice mission. Torres-Campos previously served as the director of national grantmaking at ArtPlace America. Prior to ArtPlace, he was senior program officer for Arts and Culture at the Boston Foundation.
We recently had the opportunity to speak with Torres-Campos about his career, the state of philanthropy and other topics. Here are some excerpts from our discussion, edited for clarity.
At what point did you decide that you wanted to pursue a career in the nonprofit sector?
I don’t know if I actually ever made that choice intentionally. I studied business in college and my first career between Philadelphia and New York City was managing a series of nightclubs. I moved from New York back home to Massachusetts in 2003 and had an offer to be a general manager at a friend’s restaurant that he was opening on the South Side of Chicago.
But my mother had been on the board of an affordable housing organization in Boston called IBA (Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción), and she said, “The CEO has this new role. Why don’t you go have coffee with her?” And I said, “Mom, I have a job. I’m getting ready to move.” But I’m a good Puerto Rican son—I do what my mother asked me to do!
I sat down with Vanessa Calderón-Rosado, who is still the CEO there, and she is just this brilliant leader, and somebody that I was quickly drawn to, and I was invited to join the team. They had built a cultural center in a 19th-century Lutheran church that had really great production staff but did not have a business model to help the programs thrive. And so I came in as a business guy trying to bring some of those lessons from the for-profit world in order to drive impact in the nonprofit sector.
Who are some of your biggest influences?
I point to two authors. The first is adrienne maree brown and her book “Emergent Strategy,” which has helped me tap into things that I think we’ve learned as young people. But as adults, I think we get socialized to the ways that things are supposed to be.
I also try to bring a little bit of humanity to my work. Love has been a constant theme throughout my career and bell hooks’ “All About Love” has really been a seminal text for me in thinking about the choices that we make every single day, even when things are hard, even when we disagree, and that love can really exist both within very intimate relationships but also in everyday practices and in agreements between people and collectives.
I’ll also call out a few folks that have helped me see the world in a way that I really appreciate. My former boss at ArtPlace America, Jamie Bennett, is somebody who has always been completely generous with his time, and that kind of generosity is key to the work that we do—recognizing that this work really isn’t about amassing power or privilege, unless we’re going to use it in order to continue to broaden the tent and invite more voices and divergent points of view into the conversation.
This brings me to the person that actually introduced me to bell hooks and “Emergent Strategy.” I originally hired her as a program assistant, but now she’s a consultant and finished her tenure at ArtPlace as a senior program officer, and that’s Leila Tamari. She’s a brilliant young professional who has constantly pushed me to think of the world differently, and someone I could always rely on to double-check my due diligence in a way that I appreciate.
What has been the biggest challenge of your professional career?
I often refer to myself as a “translucent man of color.” I have the privilege of walking through the world as cis male, white, able-bodied. And I get any privileges that come along with that until somebody reads my name on a resume or on a business card.
That has been an interesting challenge—how much do I let my physical appearance allow folks to feel comfortable and perhaps invite me into conversations that, normally, people like me wouldn’t be invited into? But then also, how do I hold myself accountable once I get into those rooms? It’s not my responsibility to speak for others; it’s my responsibility to pull up additional chairs and create space for voices in the rooms of power and privilege that those of us in philanthropy have access to.
I think I’ve been really honest about who I am, but I think it’s very easy to forget, because of the way that I look, or because of my education privilege. And sometimes, people will speak their mind in ways that can be quite offensive or hurtful. I welcome that to the extent that it’s an opportunity to both hear from folks that see the world and experience the world differently than I do, but also an opportunity for them to get a glimpse into the world that I and so many others live in.
What advice would you give your younger self?
As a Puerto Rican man, which is very much my identity, I think that there are things that are unique to people of color, and one of the things that I have found is just a constant struggle with a sort of imposter syndrome—believing that we belong in rooms, believing that it’s okay for us to be there.
I grew up in an activist family. My parents were very vocal, whether in Puerto Rico or in Massachusetts, and so I was always taught as a young person that my responsibility was to fight—to fight for my voice to be heard, to fight for a seat at the table, to fight for my worldview and my needs to be included.
And I think what I would have loved to share with myself at that young age is: “You are already at the seats of power, and these battle tactics are not going to serve you in the long term.” I think so many of us can engage in the socialization of battle as opposed to deep listening, the willingness to have long-term conversations. If I had done that more, I think I might have been a little bit more effective in my early years.
What recent developments in philanthropy make you feel optimistic about the future of the field?
I’ll share an example from my current organization. For years, Surdna has defined itself as a social justice organization that has really pushed itself to listen to field leaders and to think critically about the way in which we intervene in systems and structures of injustice in the United States.
I think it would be really easy for an institution like that to pat itself on the back for being able to lead in so many ways, and what I really appreciate about our board and our president Don Chen’s leadership is that no one’s ready to settle. They know that we are on a continuum of practice and that we need to continue to dive deeper and ask different questions so that we are holding ourselves accountable to the kind of transformation that we want to be a part of.
The way that that’s taking shape at the moment is that Don is leading us through a multi-year process with external consultants to work toward becoming an anti-racist institution. And I think there are lots of others. When I look at the leadership of the Marguerite Casey Foundation at this moment and the transformation that their leadership is driving, it is really exciting to me.
Folks are speaking honestly and asking questions like, “How do we look at ourselves? How do we hold ourselves to continue to build and deepen accountability in our work in our practice?” It makes me really optimistic about the work that philanthropy is doing and will continue to do in the future.
What recent developments in philanthropy make you feel pessimistic about the future of the field?
Well, first off, I would probably frame it as opportunities for us to do better and less about pessimism. I think that the good news is that there’s always progress to be made.
I’ve been having some really great conversations with the Leeway Foundation in Philadelphia and their executive director, Denise Brown, who has been a mentor for so long. The founders walked away from the corpus and turned the institution over to a community-led board and governance structure, where they no longer have a say as to how those resources are used. That story, I think, is one that really sticks with me, because it reminds me of what’s possible when we can acknowledge the roots of philanthropy, why it exists in its current form as an outgrowth of capitalism.
I think that what can be fearful for some is that there aren’t many Leeway stories, there aren’t enough folks that are willing to say, “Not only do I want to do good in the world, but I can admit that perhaps the way I’ve amassed these resources, or the way my ancestors amassed these resources, may not actually qualify me to make decisions about how these resources should be stored and invested in the long term.”
Those are painful and challenging conversations, but I think those are opportunities for us to continue to look at ourselves and find deeper impact in the philanthropic sector.
What advice would you give nonprofit leaders as they attempt to navigate the current landscape?
There are two pieces of advice that I would give. The first is that relationships are paramount. All of us in philanthropy are doing the best we can in communicating what we support, how we support it, how we get there, and I think we still have a little ways to go to figuring out how we communicate more clearly and transparently.
The other piece of advice is to hold a hard line on what the work actually costs. At Surdna, we’ve recognized that general operating support is really critical and necessary. We still do some project funding in our Thriving Cultures portfolio, but we don’t have a cap on administrative fees. And we have really deep conversations with our partners about what their benefits packages look like and what their wages are for their staff and salaries. We also encourage the regrantors that we support to include line items like vacation and debt reduction as real expenses.
I was just having a conversation with one of our colleagues out in Chicago who was struggling to raise money, and one of the things I said was, “You made your work invisible on your budget.” I know that the executive director and the CEO are working 70 to 80 hours a week, but the extra work that they’re doing are real jobs. They’re jobs that, if the money existed, somebody else would be doing. Having a real job description, being able to show that in-kind donation of time and expense in your budget, is really important.
You need to be able to communicate and tell that story to a funder and say, “You can’t just fund this box that I need in order to carry things from A to B. You need to fund the food, you need to find the electricity.” Holding funders accountable to funding for cost is going to be an important pivot in our sector that I believe nonprofit fundraisers can help us make if they hold hard and fast to those lines of real cost.
What are some of the other great books that you’ve recently read?
One recent publication over the last year that I’ve been sharing with folks is a book published by some beloved colleagues in Boston at the Design Studio for Social Intervention called “Ideas-Arrangements-Effects.” I think in the nonprofit sector we’ve been obsessed with this idea of systems and structural change, and how do we get there, but so much of the language that we use is really jargony and not really accessible to our everyday lives.
What I appreciate about the way that this text has been laid out is that it talks about the very simple, mundane things that we take for granted. And one of the really great examples is the idea of how classrooms are traditionally set up, where all of the students’ chairs are set up in rows, and they all face one direction to the front of the room, and that there are implied ideas, even the way that we arrange classrooms, about what direction learning happens in or how learning is supposed to happen.
The authors provide some really simple and accessible language and imagery to help folks think about what we can do in our everyday lives and in our work, to simply shift arrangements and begin to question the things that we take for granted, and what their effects are on the world.
Any parting thoughts?
A lot of folks have been talking about somatics for the last several years now, especially in social justice spaces, which is essentially a fancy word for “how do we actually embody the world and the values that we believe in.” Sometimes we just have to start practicing these things. Everything takes practice and the creation or the development of a routine or of a ritual, and eventually we get there.
One of the stories I always end up telling is that—for those of us who learned physics—if your hand is warm and my hand is cold, that your molecules are moving faster than mine, and if we hold hands, they will eventually find equilibrium. Your molecules will slow down, share energy with mine, and we’ll both be a little warmer.
I really encourage folks to realize that simple touch manifests change in the outside world, but so do our behaviors, and if we begin to shift those, or even shift the way that we think and we talk—it takes a little bit of time, just like my hand holding yours, but that’s how change is generated. And I want to encourage folks to fully live into the world they want to be in, as opposed to pretending or imagining that it’s just something that needs to exist in the future. It’s something that can and should exist now.