March 30, 2004

Alliance MEMBER SPOTLIGHT: Gus Newport

 

The revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will be live.
                                - Gil Scott-Heron

Gus LargeGus Newport is a seasoned activist in nonprofit capacity building with a niche: speaking truth to power.  He is the Gil Scott-Heron of the field.  After years of advising, directing, instigating, and playing other key roles in nonprofits, he is more determined than ever to press the field in the direction of leading change rather than simply adapting to it.  A power analysis is at the heart of what he brings and recommends to the foundations, community-based organizations, government agencies, and intermediaries with whom he works.

Newport envisions nonprofit capacity building as a potential force for justice through its work to strengthen nonprofits.  What it will not be—if his wisdom prevails—is just another profession, career, trade, or industry.  Rather, people in the field will search out and use levers for change in every endeavor.

Newport, whose service on the Alliance Board (2001 – 2003) has had him at turns being a firebrand and a wise elder, but he has always been a mover and shaker.  The former mayor of Berkeley, California, he has spearheaded community-building initiatives as far apart as Boston, West Palm Beach, and Oakland.  He has taught at several higher education institutions, including University of California at Santa Cruz, Portland State University, and graduated from Harvard’s Kennedy School program for public sector leaders.  More recently, he was tapped to be general manager of radio station KPFA in Berkeley—a 54-year old listener supported station in the progressive Pacifica Foundation network and is now consulting to Pacifica nationally.

So when Gus Newport raises his voice, most people are moved to listen—whether or not they expect to agree.

Strategy is better than strength.
                                - Hausa proverb

Newport is no latecomer to the courage and hard work of being a change agent.  Like many counterparts, Newport recalls, "I cut my teeth in the civil rights movement."  When he was just 24 years old, he directed the largest civil rights organization in Rochester, NY, the Monroe County Nonpartisan Political League.  Not only did the organization grapple with race rebellions in the 1960s, but it took on a police brutality case and won the first civil rights victory in federal courts.

Economic development, too, is a forte.  Newport ran one of the early comprehensive employment programs, with GED assistance, job training, and—equally if not more important—training for the "frontline people" who would be hiring participants.  He worked for the U.S. Labor Department in the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, and as a consultant in Oakland and Berkeley, on such projects as wage surveys for nonprofits.  In the nation’s capital, he was brought in as a key player in the rewrite of the Concentrated Employment Training Act regulations and later was rehired by the Department of Labor to implement an executive order passed by then Governor Jerry Brown to hire women in 25% of all non-traditional jobs (electrician, carpenters, plumbers, construction, etc.).

In Berkeley, Newport was urged by many community members to run first for City Council, then for mayor; even Ron Dellums was in the camp of people calling on him to run.  Overcoming the initial hurdle of having little name recognition, he won.  The experience brought many lessons, but one of the most important he carries to this day.  "My progressive colleagues," he says, "had their own agendas."  They were greatly concerned about environmental policy, but largely unsupportive of Newport’s efforts to stop gentrification and build up communities that had been impoverished.

Even so, he seized opportunities to make a difference nationally and internationally from the local power base.  In the U.S. Conference of mayors, he used his position as chief executive of the first city to set a policy and divest from South Africa to protest its legal apartheid, challenging other cities to do the same. He also played a lead role in education, chairing a subcommittee, and put workforce development on the map.

The jewel of his nonprofit leadership record still is Boston’s Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative.  "That’s where I got grounded.  It was about the work of empowering local people from a bottom-line analysis, recognizing that we the professionals don’t know it all.  But if we translate their dreams and visions and undergird it with bottom-line analysis to get the kind of public policies that are needed, we can do something."

Dudley Street forged into uncharted territory—literally.  To generate affordable housing, they did not stop at securing subsidies and helping residents clear up credit records.  "We got eminent domain authority over all vacant properties, and that’s the only time it happened in this country," Newport explains.  Land purchases were funded by Ford Foundation program-related investments at 1 percent interest.  The insight: "Land and knowledge is power.  The ruling class begins to respect you when you utilize parts of the capitalist and social system" to make change.

Listening to Gus Newport, one is tempted to ask: If nonprofits can authorize themselves and do this work, on the model of a Dudley Street, then what’s capacity building got to do with it?  Or, put another way: What relevance does this unique experience have now?  A fundamental principle that drives Newport’s work is systems change.  "The problem with community building is that everyone focuses on these small poor communities, but nobody looks at the prevailing environment.  All the other institutions were supposed to serve those neighborhoods just like the rest of the city," he points out.  "Capacity building was needed across all those institutions so they begin to have a better focus and have the potential for development."


I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.
                            - Audre Lorde

Newport’s approach is to begin with head and heart, not deals and physical structures.  "A lot of people in the nonprofit community, especially consultants, look at it from a colonialist perspective: 'Well, we’re going to help the little natives.'   But there is a far more compelling alternative: focusing on public policy change with a keen sense of historical, socioeconomic context."

As he affirmed in providing technical assistance to a group of 600 block clubs in a northern community, "When you give white communities a big picture analysis, it’s amazing how they embrace it."

Mindful of that reality, Newport is impassioned about the possibilities for the capacity-building field.  "I’ve always felt that philanthropy dollars should leverage public policy, and we’ve never made that full bridge," Newport offers. A shortcoming that he has found in the field and in the Alliance is lack of understanding of public policy.  For too many, "it’s something that’s created in the gap," to deal with a specific issue in a relatively short time frame, when in reality it is "the longer-term bottom line analysis, not what looks good at the moment."

The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them.
- Albert Einstein

Newport is convinced that foundations—especially trustees—and the full spectrum of people and institutions working for nonprofit effectiveness could benefit hugely from learning and embracing a different sense of outcomes—that outcomes are in fact about "the state of public policy," about the process and result of challenging past practices and generating new ones.

Along with capacity builders, media institutions have a crucial role to play in this process.  Though few consistently take the opportunity, they need to "give an honest analysis rather than taking stories off the wire" from news services—often perpetuating a mainstream view that benefits wealthy elites. "If we focus on the issues and make people aware that their conditions are not [simply] because somebody’s Black, that it’s a common struggle based on the state of the economy, we’ll all be better off," he declares.

"You can’t come from the technical standpoint of knowing it all," Newport warns.  "That’s the main advantage of people of color as consultants doing some of this work.  They’ve got to be the bridge culturally," encouraging people to access their own knowledge and work in ways that are true to their experience.  This point in no way reduces the importance of white TA providers transforming their own thinking and practice.  "You’ve got to understand, if you didn’t create the conditions in this country, your forebears did," and the benefits have been handed down.

Newport is steady in his bold analysis of the political, the socioeconomic, and the historical and his dedication to changing capacity building itself—including organizations like the Alliance that bring capacity builders together.  In countless conversations with practitioners, he says, "I’ve been amazed at the limitations or controlled practices of just [wanting to have] a clean house—what I refer to as the 'clean underwear game' …a way of manifesting the industrialization of nonprofits."


The world is a severe schoolmaster, for its frowns
are less dangerous than its smiles and flatteries, and it
is a difficult task to keep in the path of wisdom.
                                  - Phyllis Wheatley

"Many people are standard liberals," he says, who shy away from the deeper analysis that is a precondition for genuine equity. “The Alliance has first got to deal with content, with ethics, with morals, with changes that need to take place, and a bottom-line analysis about how to go about those changes—not window dressing, but putting people in place who are willing to fight the good fight.

"In some ways, they [the Alliance] have come a long way.  The frightening thing is what was the starting point?"  In Newport’s view, a consciousness that the end goal is a new system, and a command of the means to bring it into being, will have to be the starting point now.

"You can force the best of technology and methodology and still not have changes on the ground," Newport insists.  "What kind of approaches need to be taken to get [to] a lot of these communities where millions of dollars are spent out of dependency?  That is the big question mark."

In truth, Newport suggests, change starts right within the field and with each person who takes on the mantle of capacity builder.  The barriers are at times subtle and insidious.  "It’s a combination of people wanting to get paid and to maintain the intellectual control" that holds us back, he argues.  "Most have not given a thought about what it would take to have a redistribution of the wealth.  And those are the discussions that we never get to; there’s never the time for that.  Everything’s in a rush, to at best perpetuate the status quo."

Revisiting the limits of professionalism, he laments, "We’ve become intermediaries.  [If] we don't constantly go back to the community, after a while, it becomes our 9 to 5; it doesn’t become that we’re seeking a common prize."

To make a difference, Newport believes, the Alliance must tirelessly spark the conversation and action—sending messengers into policy circles, arts circles, human services circles, to connect ideas to applications that support transformation.  "We need to do a future search if we want to keep this country from destroying itself and the rest of the world," he states.  The need is to set a course of action that would "so disrupt" the usual order that we "would have to do things differently" as a nation.

In so doing, recognizing the experiences of different cultures and peoples in our midst will be critical.  Terrorism, for instance, is witnessed in our own history and drive to build up wealth and force.  "I’ve got a group of men of color in their 80s that I meet with, from Louisiana, from Mississippi, and they’ve said to me, ‘Brother Newport, we grew up under terrorism," he recalls.  "Many people don’t understand that our foreign policy dictates our domestic policy and vice versa.  That’s how thoughtful the Alliance and others need to be.  They can’t just look at technical assistance" out of context.

An ardent and early supporter of the Alliance's People of Color Affinity Group, Newport does not exempt that group from challenging itself.  What must happen, he says, is to "really assess what the potential is, what we could accomplish if we gather the resources."

It is not that Newport is a pessimist.  He is an unrelenting change agent.  He asks that all capacity builders hold themselves to a higher standard than ever before.  That is because the stakes could not be higher.

"We all come into this work wanting to make the world a better world," Newport believes, "but because of limited resources and inability to humbly admit what we don’t know," change is often thwarted.  "The set of moral practices we live in has to be at the forefront, so that you’re measuring against that when you’re working to make change."

 

 

This profile was written by Brigette Rouson, Alliance professional resources developer and an Alliance member who maintains her own consulting practice, Rouson Associates/Paradigm Partners.

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