Deaconess Community,

I had the joy of connecting with colleagues earlier this month at ABFE’s Annual Harambee Conference in Atlanta, GA.

Harambee is the largest gathering of Black professionals in organized philanthropy. The term “Harambee” signifies unity and community empowerment. This event gives us the chance to gather as Black philanthropic leaders, organizers, and advocates for impactful discussion and action.

I was invited to provide remarks during the closing plenary, and below, I am sharing with you my calls to action for not a single one of us, but for all of us.

There’s a special spark in your spirit when you live at the nexus of philanthropic futurism and prophetic imagination. I was seeking direction from the Holy Spirit prior to the election results to ground me for what was to come. And I share with you now what I heard with my spiritual ear: “The preparation will hold.”

This let me know that we would be in the righteous fight for our lives as the called-out ones in our generation—but the ancestral preparation will hold. It means that what has been prepared will be sufficient and endure until the time it is called upon, and that all the effort (the blood, sweat, tears, and the rest) will not be wasted.

And like a good strategist, we begin with the end in mind. The end is that we win when these conditions are met.

Solidarity demands reckoning and reconciliation before strategy.
Before we can unite and move forward together, we must reckon with the harm we’ve caused within our own circles among our own people.

Build endowments that free us to lead.
It’s time to emancipate our leaders who carry the torch for change—leaders who know how to leverage their vision, power, influence, purpose, creativity, and prophetic imagination without restraint when they are no longer tethered to fundraising and downright begging for what should be well-resourced in perpetuity.

Prepare the people for freedom. It’s a condition for our victory.
We are on the verge of something profound and revolutionary in our lifetime. We have a duty to prepare ourselves and our people to hope and fight for possibility and promise. We must recognize and celebrate glimmers of the future in the now. And reparations sure sound like preparation to me.

Discern times and seasons.
Time is moving both fast and slow. Pacing is required for this race. Be meaningful, methodical, intentional, and do root-system, not leaf-level planning.

Become equipped to be a Mental Health First Aid practitioner.
Thoughts and prayers as sentiments are not sufficient for the weight of spiritual, mental, and emotional distress. Mental Health First Aid is CPR for emotional wellbeing. We are on the front lines of response and must prepare ourselves to help ourselves and our people endure hardness.

Love is the Lasso – consider love as the foundation of our strategy.
The antidote for hate is love. LOVE is strategy. All things rooted in love attract bounty and overflow. There is no checkmate for love. Love is unbeatable. Love makes the unwinnable winnable.

Love is the motivation that will create the conditions for the preparation to hold us up and together. Love breaks the strong delusions and the spell that has been cast over our nation and almost 50% of its people. Love is the unconditional condition of our sustained and durable democracy.

Think intergenerationally and globally.
Young ones, middle-aged, and elders have to come together. The traditional non-profit sector model is on hospice and is a system of entrapment and unhealthy co-dependence. Let’s revolutionize our continuum of care, community-created services, and civic infrastructure. Over-reliance on the US and Western model, dependence on the soft money of philanthropy, and decaying institutional infrastructure not by nor built for us calls for us to do what we always do, create something powerfully new and worthy of our people.

Think long game.
If you’re still thinking in three to five year spurts, you’re part of the problem. Pilots and partnerships take seven years to even generate meaning. Anything less than 10 years is churn not collaboration. At Deaconess Foundation we are planning and working for the next seven generations.

Have a written purpose statement and live by it.
Articulate and ground yourself in your vision of liberation, justice, and freedom. You will be rendered ineffective in a fight for what you cannot see and don’t believe. Walking around like a question mark instead of your birthright of being an exclamation point. Write the vision and make it plain and watch freedom move from possible, to probable, to inevitable.

Leave behind a Marauder’s Map.
A Marauder’s Map is a Harry Potter magical document that reveals hidden passages and shows how people move secretly, but only if you have the password. Let’s leave behind that map for the next generation of freedom fighters to decipher and add to their war chest. We have to think now about how we pass the baton to the next generation.

The preparation will hold. But only when we decide to rally and create the conditions for it to turn the tide in our favor. The secret to our success is to boldly sit at the confluence of where the will of the Spirit and the Will of the People meet.

Deaconess Foundation and our community partners give me the safe places and brave spaces to live in my exclamation point manifestation of who I am called to be.

I invite you to do the same.

In service to the will of the Spirit and the mission,
Bethany Johnson-Javois, President & CEO

Read the full April 2025 newsletter here.