VISION
NLA imagines a world where the mobilization and enfranchisement of millions of people has realigned power in our country; where grassroots organizations led by impacted communities have the power to advance and protect social, racial, and economic justice policies that strengthen our democracy and liberate us all from systemic oppression.
MISSION
New Left Accelerator empowers progressive leaders to transform their ideas into impact. We accomplish this by running an accelerator program and serving as a resource clearinghouse for emerging, progressive organizations.
HISTORY
Deborah Barron founded New Left Accelerator in the wake of the 2016 election. As a founding member of Women Lawyers On Guard, she spent all her post-election free time working to meet the legal needs of a host of innovative, new, progressive advocacy groups. Soon, however, she was relying on her former political consulting and strategic-planning skills to help new founders identify, prioritize, and meet their capacity-building needs. With a little encouragement and seed funding from Open Society Foundation, she decided to leave her job at a law firm in order to create an organization dedicated to providing capacity-building resources to emerging progressive leaders. She has been humbled and awed by the amazing founders, activists, and team that she has had the opportunity to work with since founding the New Left Accelerator.
VALUES
Over the last four years, NLA has worked, learned, and grown with partners and leaders across the progressive ecosystem. In 2019, we paused to reground our work in our values. NLA staff, board, and stakeholders engaged in a six month process to explore how NLA might develop and live by a set of core values that guide our internal practices and partnerships.
These values serve as a commitment to ourselves, to our work, and to the collaborators, leaders, consultants, funders, and partners with whom we work. They are also an invitation to our community to hold us accountable. We seek to use our values to create systemic change; collaborate with stakeholders and leaders to build power, equity, and sustainability within our ecosystem; and address systematic oppression.
Equity, Justice, & Liberation
We believe that disruption of oppression in all its forms––systemic, organizational, interpersonal, and personal––is required to achieve liberation for us all. We commit to centering racial, gender, and economic justice strategies core to that disruption in everything that we do, including our organizational practices. We do this by ensuring that our values and anti-oppression principles drive our programs and partnerships; naming power dynamics and working to shift them; and committing our time and resources to this work.
Personal Responsibility & Accountability
We believe that systemic change must begin with us. We commit to living our values, holding ourselves accountable for the agreements we make, and examining and addressing individual and collective habits that reinforce dominant culture. We do this by engaging in continuous learning as to how race, background, and experiences have affected us within systems of oppression; providing loving feedback; and building intentional accountability practices in all of our work.
Communication & Transparency
We believe that open and honest communication is central to all trusted relationships, and that change happens at the speed of trust. We commit to transparency in all aspects of our work, and to investing in equitable long-term relationships beyond transaction. We do this by ensuring that our work and processes foster transparency, especially as to financial matters, time commitments, and power dynamics; by utilizing non-violent communication practices; and by centering people and relationships above all else.
Innovation & Learning
We believe that to build progressive power to transform our society, we must explore innovative ways to build capacity within our movement. We commit to doing the work of capacity-building differently by dismantling aspects of the dominant culture of nonprofit consultancy that often fail to value the diverse lived experiences, expertise, and knowledge of community leaders. We do this by honoring leaders' wisdom; building intentional learning into our external work, internal practices, and partnerships; and co-creating innovative solutions to emergent challenges.
Transformative Collaboration
We believe that transformative and radical collaboration within our movement is required to create and sustain systematic change. We commit to forming long-term relationships with diverse stakeholders across our movement, to building lasting organizational and ecosystem capacity, and to disrupting funding practices that divide us. We do this by forming deep, sustained, values-based partnerships; engaging partners to co-create solutions to shared challenges; and participating in joint fundraising efforts to support the important work of collaboration.
Resilience & Sustainability
We believe that the work of our movement must be sustainable. We commit to centering wellness, sustainability, and resilience in our programmatic work, policies, and ongoing organizational practices. We do this by creating intentional practices that support self care, building coaching into our programs and internal practices, and dedicating resources to support wellness and cultural and organizational sustainability.
PRINCIPLES OF COLLABORATION
One of our core organizational values is Transformative Collaboration. We know the only way to accomplish the systematic change at the heart of NLA and The Capacity Shop’s (TCS) work is to form long-term relationships and build sustainable collaborations. We also know that strong and sustainable collaborations are hard work and take trust, commitment, resources, and time. We work with our partners to co-create a process to align our work together with shared values and goals. Below we share the foundational principles that guide our approach to collaboration.
Alignment Around Shared Values
Aligned values sustain and support successful long-term partnerships. By grounding our collaborative work in shared values, we seek to set a strong foundation for the direction of our work while building trust to strengthen the fabric of collaboration. We often start our partnerships by sharing our respective organizational values and then co-creating and aligning on additional values needed to guide the collaboration.
Co-Creation of Project Goals & Agreements
Clear goals and objectives help to clarify shared work, support alignment on desired outcomes, prevent mission creep, and enable us to track and measure our collective progress. Most of our collaborations begin by taking time to align on the goals and objectives for partnership, and to surface key agreements that will guide use of our collective resources. We do this by surfacing individual organizational goals, needs, and desires and then aligning on how we will design our overall goals and agreements to meet and balance both individual and collective needs.
Intentional Learning
We believe one of the best ways to strengthen collaborative work is to learn together by experimenting, reflecting, and documenting what we learn. Maintaining a learning stance in our work together enables us to capture critical knowledge and change course when needed. We support the creation of a shared learning agenda, and engage in regular evaluation of our work together. Where appropriate, we seek to share our learning––the successes and the failures––with the progressive field.
Centering Equity
We recognize that white supremacist culture is dominant even in progressive movement work. We seek to center race and gender equity in our work and partnerships in order to undo systemic oppression and avoid perpetuating the harms of white supremacy. We work to include and embody anti-oppression principles in our collaborations. This means that we examine how we are showing up in our collaborations as it relates to race and positional power and check in about needed adjustments on a regular basis.
Changing Funding Relationships Through Collaboration
Funding practices often pit organizations against each other as we compete for credit and scarce financial resources. This can result in individual organizations being forced to highlight their own successes rather than slowing down and executing work in collaboration. We seek to form partnerships that change the way funding practices impact our work, and to counter the mindset of scarcity that prevents collaboration. We do this by communicating directly with funders around difficult dynamics; seeking opportunities for joint and aligned fundraising to support shared work; investing in long-term financial support for the work of collaboration itself; and establishing clear and express agreements with our partners around whether, how, and when partners will joint fundraise for the collaboration.
Transparency Around Investment of Resources & Credit
Time and money are most organizations' most valuable resources. Successful collaborations must therefore provide clarity and transparency around expectations as to staff time and financial commitments, the extent and duration of each organization’s involvement, and how credit for work is shared for collaborative investments. We support direct conversations about these resources and create processes and procedures to ensure transparency around money, time commitments, and credit as a part of our work together.
Generative Conflict & Nonviolent Communication
The process of creating highly functional collaborations can require generative conflict in the form of naming and discussing difficult issues. Collaborations often require frank conversations about hard topics ranging from money, power, and authority to racism, sexism, and microaggressions. We seek to foster a climate where tough topics can be raised and worked through, resulting in deeper connection and relationship. We do this by establishing community norms around conflict resolution, including use of non-violent communication practices and facilitated support for difficult conversations.
Investing in Relationships
We believe strong collaborations take investment. We seek to hold space for investment in the work of collaboration itself. We commit to slowing down to prioritize relationships and people over productivity and results. We spend time ensuring the right stakeholders are in the room and involved in the process. And, because we know that taking the time to build relationships can be challenging in power building and electoral spaces, we provide processes and professional facilitation to support the design of intentional collaboration. For more information about how NLA supports successful collaboration, see our Collaboration Agreements Checklist.
Who we work with
NLA centers impact communities in all of our work, which means that we prioritize partnering and collaborating with organizations that center the experiences and voices of marginalized groups at the intersection of race, gender, and class.
We are committed to identifying and investing in people who are pioneering innovative ways of lifting up and mobilizing their communities, which in turn lifts us all. Specifically, we look for innovative organizations and leaders that demonstrate:
A commitment to working toward a more just, inclusive, egalitarian, and cohesive American society;
Strategies for using levers of power to rectify racial, social, economic and/or environmental injustices and inequalities;
A commitment to raising up the voices and protecting the rights of those underserved and underrepresented in our democracy; and
A deep respect for the dignity of all people regardless of race, gender, ability, age, or sexual orientation.