Proximity has been central to shaping New Profit’s investment strategy for nearly a decade. Amina Fahmy Casewit, New Profit’s Managing Partner of Portfolio Investing, elaborates on how we think about proximity and infuse it in our practices below.
Proximate leaders and organizations are those who are consistently and meaningfully guided by the assets, insights, and experiences of the communities they serve and who are able to leverage that expertise to co-design sustainable solutions to the challenges their communities face.
Proximity is identity-agnostic; instead, it recognizes lived experience as deep expertise. Building on a call-to-action issued by Bryan Stevenson, Founder of Equal Justice Initiative, at New Profit’s Gathering of Leaders in 2013, our proximity strategy prioritizes investing in the leaders best poised to create transformational change and impact.
We invest in and support proximate leaders who have a track record of being guided by their communities and constituents. We practice proximity in our selection process in two ways: 1) in how we select and 2) in who we select. For the last three years, we have engaged stakeholders from the communities we support in all of our selection processes, including parents advocating for educational reform, frontline workers from various industries, and young people. These stakeholders have enriched our collective perspective, helped us improve our processes, and informed our decisions and inquiry at each stage: from reading and rating applications to screening organizations for mission-alignment, to participating in diligence interviews, to ultimate investment decisions.
In addition to centering constituents in our selection process, we reviewed our assessment criteria and rubrics and have improved these to more effectively identify high-impact proximate leaders and organizations. We also built in mechanisms for constituents to tell us what they wanted and what they valued.
Proximate leaders are quickly able to identify the assets in a community because they’re operating with expertise, knowledge, and credibility in the communities they serve. Often, these leaders are from the communities they serve, so they’re able to diagnose not only the needs of their community but the assets and resources available to meet those needs.
In practice, this can look like:
- Centering lived experience at the CEO and leadership team level
- Including constituents on the Board of Directors or advisory boards and committees
- Sharing power and creating feedback loops in program model design
- Recruiting and staff members and volunteers who possess lived experience and common identities with communities served
An example of this from our portfolio is Kingmakers of Oakland, an organization that takes a targeted universalism approach to empowering all children in K-12 by unapologetically focusing on the experiences of Black boys. One way that Chris Chatmon, Kingmakers’ CEO, infuses proximity in all of his practices is by including young Kings on his Board of Directors to consistently anchor his organization’s decision-making in his constituents’ voices.
Proximity as a practice begins with deep listening but must ultimately inform and shape action. By working collaboratively with our community of proximate Social Entrepreneurs, we are best positioned to build an America where everyone can thrive.