Click here to donate to Class Action’s Winter Appeal.
December 10, 2021
To our supporters,
As my first full year at Class Action comes to a close, I am reaching out to ask for your continued support as we begin our work in 2022! During this COVID-impacted year:
- Class Action has continued to offer online training and support to more than a dozen organizations We supported the first Career Day for first generation college students in the spring and hosted the ninth annual First Gen Summit in the fall.
- We held a first ever convening of racial justice and anti-classism trainers that brought together an amazing group of people from all over the country to discuss ways to collaborate for race/class equity. We connected with equity-minded philanthropists about their accountability for burn-out nonprofit jobs, with a survey and a conference presentation by our Staffing the Mission team; and
- We created a new team of advisors who are working to support Class Action’s leadership at this critical moment.
The board and the staff/consultant team at Class Action have spent a lot of this year reaching out to donors, program participants, trainers, and allies to gather perspectives on Class Action’s work. Informed and energized by these discussions, our programs in 2022 will focus on:
– race/class intersections: Our work to educate and build awareness of class identity, class bias, and classism must be done in conjunction with work to educate about racism and racial justice. Our Trainers’ Summit has opened important conversations about how to best do this work in the training realm. We are committed to bringing this joint lens into all of our program work and into the organization’s operations as well.
– expanding our work to support First Gen student leadership: We will work with first generation college students to offer the kinds of support they identify as priorities. This includes opportunities to deepen their work for mutual support, consciousness raising, and cross-class relationship-building back on campus.
– piloting a new cross-class dialogue effort: In 2022, we will pilot a new initiative to support dialogue and relationship building across class. We hope to work with first gen (FG) students to support a FG student-led effort on campus. In addition, we will offer a space for skills building to facilitators from diverse ethnic, racial, gender and class backgrounds who are interested in this work.
– advocating for nonprofit workers who are underpaid and overworked: Through our Staffing the Mission (StM) program, we will work to build awareness about low wages and poor working conditions in nonprofit organizations. We will continue to build partnerships with philanthropic leaders who wish to support a livable wage and good jobs for their grantee organizations’ staff, adding a class perspective to their racial equity commitments.
– seeking partnerships and collaborations in everything that we do: We cannot make progress on our equity agenda without allies and partners who are open to sharing histories and strengths. Collaboration is crucial, especially to our efforts to bring an intersectional approach to work for race and class justice. Class Action will work to create these opportunities for joint work in all that we do.
These program commitments are a tall order! We cannot accomplish this work without you. Please join us by making a contribution to our Winter Appeal, Class Action’s end of year fundraising drive.
Together, we can create a world without classism,
Ann Philbin
Executive Director
Class Action
