The Metric of Love w Oregon Food Bank

We are so pleased to connect with Vivien Trinh and Nathan Harris of the Oregon Food Bank, where they are changing the way our sector works, by developing practices that center love!Vivien Trinh is the Community Philanthropy Associate Director of Operations at the Oregon Food Bank. With 11 years of philanthropy experience, her career has taken her through the many aspects of philanthropy including direct mail, digital fundraising, donor relations, database management and prospect development at non-profits of all sizes. As the daughter of refugees, she is deeply committed to building inclusive communities that honor the dignity of each individual. You can reach out to Vivien at vtrinh@oregonfoodbank.org. Nathan Harris is the Director of Community Philanthropy at Oregon Food Bank. He has nearly two decades in philanthropic development, working at the intersection of love and generosity to realize transformational change. Before coming to Oregon Food Bank in 2019, Nathan served as chief development officer at Freedom for All Americans, an organization dedicated to securing nationwide LGBTQ nondiscrimination protections by 2025. He previously served as director of leadership gifts and Centennial Campaign at ACLU of Northern California and was the Director of Advancement at Transgender Law Center. You can reach Nathan at nharris@oregonfoodbank.org. References and Notes:Learn more about the Oregon Food Bank and follow them on socials: Facebook, Insta, Twitter, LinkedIn and donate here! OFB has a budget of $34M, with 200 staff, 63k annual donors, and 40k annual volunteers. OFB Community Philanthropy: Theory of Change, Strategic Priorities, Key Hallmarks of Love, Staff Bill of Rights bell hooks defines love as “the extension of one’s spiritual growth  'the will to extend one's self for the the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth.”Focusing on Fundraising Goals is Harmful, Let’s Measure Love Instead by Vivien TrinhHow to Measure a Year. What about Love? On the OFB website“Seasons of Love” from Rent!Risk: We talked about risk and Nathan names that “risk”in changing the practices and tools of doing the work, is to be questioned. That one perspective is the fear of change or fear of something different. Vivien invites us to think about risk, as defined by who might be harmed by our practices and tools...and to center the healing of those folx. Process: Here are some of the processes and practices OFB discussed within this episode...Vivien and a few folks started an Equity in Fundraising work group within their department to casually explore community-centric ideas. They later created a “Love” working group as well.When Nathan came on 2 years ago, they began to focus their work towards building new practicesVivien mentions that unpacking “love” as a word through introspection and team conversation, was the kernel that helped them move forward in designing the “how” of measuring love. They focused on how love might inform their values and how it could change what philanthropy could mean.OFB celebrates Shiree Teng, who they partnered with in the design of the staff self-assessment. The creation of the tool was influenced by her brown paper, “ Measuring Love on the Journey for Justice. (we didn't talk about this on the pod)Performance Metrics: One tool they developed is a staff self-assessment, with the purpose of the assessment focused on reflecting on a staff person’s individual  work over the past 6 month period. Their assessment asks questions like: Do I feel like my work as a relationship manager or a gift entry specialist is values-aligned with myself in this moment? Do I feel like I am making meaningful change in the world? Am I having hard conversations with donors? Am I bringing them along a political journey?In their database, OFB has the ability to code contact reports that our relationship managers have with their donors around these indicators of love.Vivien shares: “...the hope is that we're collecting this information so that we can pull it out and analyze, not like in a punitive way of like, you're not having enough hard conversations with donors, but, if you're not able to code your contact reports with these indicators, what is that telling you about where you are in your professional career at this moment? Do you feel like you're engaging in the work in a way that's meaningful to you and if not, how do we make it happen? What do you need personally, in order to grow, in your career in a way that is pulling away from that centralizing of money?” They propose is to rethink what data we capture and to encourage behavior toward financial goals and encourage behavior toward growth and self-reflection.In creating a collective definition of “love” they identified aspects of love like growth, shared values, care. They later shared that  they have a full “Love Indicators” list complete with a Bill of Rights and definitions! These include: Actions for the Common Good, Care, Client Centered, Community, Engagement, Equity, Growth, Partnership, Respect, and Shared Values.Nathan points out that they have also created other instruments to assess other aspects of love.Another tool is the donor survey, where they ask in 10-15 contexts, whether and how a donor considers their gift to be a contribution of love. “...do you consider your donation...an expression of your love for the organization, the mission? For the vision? For your neighbors?...the systemic inequity that drives hunger? ...Do you experience your supportive Oregon, Oregon food bank as an expression of love? And I think on average 60% or more of our donors agreed strongly, like, yes I do.” Vivien mentions that the donor survey allows the team to be bolder and confident in their work. Nathan mentions that they can be bolder and more strategic in their messaging to facilitate the political journey and facilitate “love” for other (in one example, the love of their surveyed community towards immigrant communities could be increased by political education.)Another practice involves prospect development/portfolio management. In this field of practice, OFB is starting to ask themselves questions around the transformational outcome of a relationship. “It doesn't have to be money. It can be a sharing of a story that helps us move, our donors through a political journey, because they have either lived experience, with hunger or with, discrimination or lived experience of systemic oppression. It could be, they have a rich network of, or they have a community that we haven't engaged with in the past that they can introduce Oregon food bank to. It provides an opportunity to recognize all the different ways that people can contribute to their community that can take action.”Nathan also talks about how they operate with equity not equality, so they are not able to “treat everyone the same.” Instead they focus on increasing the likelihood that an individual will have a love-centered and transformative experience. Transactional to transformational. They later shared that they’d like to celebrate Justice Funders and ongoing collaboration with Mario Lugay, Senior Innovation Director, and they acknowledge the Just Transition for Philanthropy (and Just Transition) framework.They mention decreasing the size of portfolios to allow staff to spend more time connecting with their donors, and paying attention to wether these relationships are being tended to with mutual care, respectful interactions and community-centrism.Nathan notes that OFB is in the silent phase of a large campaign and as such, they are prioritizing donors that can have high capacity, but within that, they are looking at and prioritizing values alignment, love, and vision.Vivien mentions cross-referencing amongst multiple (databases and platforms) places, to better understand how the community member(s) engage with Oregon Food Bank. Are they interacting in multiple ways? Have they donated, volunteered or taken a political action? Vivien mentions that when an individual is engaging on multiple platforms/ways, they are a better candidate for connection/portfolio work. Vivien and Nathan alluded to other tools they are using internally, but we did not have time to discuss in the show!Big pieces of wisdom:Vivien ”you can move quickly and you can leverage the sense of urgency that I think sometimes I shy away from that urgency is important when it is focused on justice. And in that urgency, the point is not to bring everyone along is to center people at the margins.”Nathan “the power of our people and the wisdom of the collective and the possibilities that live at the intersection of the power of our people and the wisdom of our collective. Like we have so much opportunity in this profession to do something extraordinary, transformational and very, very different than what's been done before.We're the ones in these roles keep your best practices. I'll take my better practices. They haven't been designed yet, but I believe in the wisdom of our collective to do that kind of designing. If those best practices don't seem to be working. And I don't think the limitation of that is just how we work. I think that our field can transform philanthropy by working differently than we ever have before. Like take back that power. We absolutely have it. And in doing so, I think our communities can be and will be better served.”