In 2016, the New Orleans-based National Performance Network (NPN) launched Leveraging a Network for Equity (LANE) to support arts organizations of color and rural arts organizations. In the ensuing years, the network provided its cohort members with general operating support, technical assistance, and consulting services “to ensure these organizations can thrive in ways that are consistent with their values.”
Fast-forward to July 2022. With the initiative set to wind down, the NPN announced the formation of the Department of Racial Justice and Movement Building to continue and expand the work. In doing so, the network named Sage Crump, who led and helped shape LANE since its inception, as the department’s director.
Crump is a culture strategist and facilitator with deep roots in advocacy, the arts and social justice. She is a member of the Detroit-based artist collective Complex Movements and principal and co-founder of an incubation space called the Kinfolks Effect (TKE) Studios. According to NPN, Sage’s work “incorporates complex sciences, emergent strategy and creative practice to imagine the world we want to live in and build strategies and practices that will get us there.”
I recently caught up with Crump to discuss her career trajectory, why she’s optimistic about the state of philanthropy, and the best advice she ever received. Here are some excerpts from that discussion, which have been edited for clarity.
How did you get involved with NPN?
My background is as a therapist, and when I left that field, I started doing work at WRFG, a public radio station in Atlanta. Downstairs was the home office for Alternate ROOTS, which has been working at the intersection of art and justice for over 40 years. My station manager Wanique Shabazz and I would talk a lot about art and justice, and one day he said, “Do you know Alternate ROOTS?” I hadn’t, so he introduced me to them.
I previously ran independent hip hop tours and had a growing understanding of the relationship between who we are as people and the artistic content we consumed. At the same time, I came to the radio station after having worked in mental health and HIV, and I often say that I was politicized through my work in HIV, but authentically, the art and culture space was always where I had been pushing up against systems to get capitalism to where it needs to be in order for it to function. So those two distinct parts of my life began to weave together.
Through Alternate ROOTS, I met John O’Neal, who was one of the founders of the Free Southern Theater, and Tufara Waller Muhammad, who was the cultural organizing director at Highlander Research and Education Center. I also met MK Wegman, who was the longtime ED of NPN. The network asked me if I would be interested in running LANE and I absolutely was, and so that’s how I got to the NPN.
Who are your biggest influences?
The first would be Toni Morrison. She was continually talking about how what you do and how you talk about yourself can show you who you are talking to. There’s an intentionality in her novels that’s very important to me.
Another is Amílcar Cabral, who was the founder of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde and was part of the revolution in Guinea-Bissau. He wrote a lot about culture and understood that in relationship to colonization. They weren’t simply fighting to replace the Portuguese, but to build a self-determined culture of their own. That reminds us of the power of the work that we’re doing.
And then, lastly, there’s Grace Lee Boggs, who was engaged in almost every modern revolutionary front that you can imagine, from Black Power to feminism to labor work. Grace was constantly looking at how things fit within the world as it’s currently shown. She would often ask, “What time is it on the clock of the world?” to remind you to be thoughtful about the context of the moment and how things are interconnected.
As a facilitator, one of the first questions I ask folks is, “What’s different now than three years ago?” because the pandemic was a cultural rupture. We learned so much about what’s possible. Things that people said they could never do, they suddenly started doing. There’s no going back, and even if there was, there are those of us who are going to put our foot in the door and say, “We’re not going to go back to that, because there are more interconnected and dignified ways for us to be engaged with each other.”
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
I was 22 or 23, and crying my eyes out over a relationship, and my best friend said, “You know a broken heart doesn’t actually kill you, right?” We can try things and they may not work out. But the fear of trying the thing is ultimately worse than what could happen if we did. adrienne maree brown talks about this — “never a failure, always a lesson.” My best friend taught me that at 23. As long as you’re breathing, it didn’t kill you.
What makes you optimistic about the state of philanthropy? Pessimistic?
What makes me optimistic is the wide range of experiments that I’m watching people try. I am seeing deeper relationships between funders and grantees. I’m seeing a deeper exchange of information and learning.
I get to work with program officers from a wide range of foundations. Some are beginning their learning curves and others are doing all the things that we’re supposed to do and want to be sure they’re aligned with that which is just and right. Going back to what Boggs said about context, more people now are asking important questions about philanthropy — “What role could and shouldn’t it be playing? What does the road toward its obsolescence look like?”
But one of the things that feels haphazard in our field is our political development — where we are doing good things, but not changing the underlying structure. I think doing something good is laudable, but if it doesn’t have a long-term vision, that can still be a stumbling block for us.
What’s the last great book you read?
Right now I’m reading “Uncut Funk,” which is conversations between bell hooks and Stuart Hall. As for the last great book I finished, it would be “Saving Our Own Lives: A Liberatory Practice of Harm Reduction” by Shira Hassan, which is brilliant. We can talk about harm reduction in so many important ways, including our relationship to philanthropy.
LANE is wrapping up and the network will be publishing key learnings next year. Can you give us a sneak peak into what you’ve found?
Well, we’re putting out a 300-page workbook, so there’s a lot to unpack [laughs]. But we ultimately identified seven areas of learning — leadership, relationship, transformation, risk, organizational capacity and infrastructure, organizational culture and power, and influence.
One of the key components for us was being clear about what a cohort of organizations is and what it’s for. Oppression gets inside an organization when we feel alone and isolated, and so the ability to build a sustainable web of learning and support is important for arts organizations of color, as well organizations that are at the margins of racialized capitalism, because those become the safety nets. You can’t rely on a system — even if it wants to pluck you out and use you as the token — as a viable strategy for sustainability. We have to be in community, and community is what gets us to liberation.
Another cornerstone of LANE is the idea of popular education, which talks about how those who are at most at-risk and with the most experience should be the primary author of the solutions to their needs. The historic mindset of trying to fit funders’ needs isn’t a recipe for success for anybody, so having an opportunity to rearrange that power dynamic felt really important. This means being thoughtful about what gets reinforced in conversations with funders and what both parties should be doing in relationship with each other. It’s not a question of, “What do you need me to be?” It’s a conversation of, “This is who we are — is this exciting and interesting to you?”