In partnership with The George and Fay Young Foundation and Universe Creative, The Dallas Foundation recently hosted a special showing of Giving Voice: Black CEOs in Their Own Words to share the stories behind some of Dallas’s most notable nonprofit leaders. The short films highlight the unique pressures borne by Black leaders operating in predominantly White spaces. Each episode of the series focuses on the life of a current CEO from childhood through their current work.
Conversations about inequity tend toward bleak appraisals of what is broken in American society. Leaders like Kimberly Williams, Byron Sanders, and Taylor Toynes bear witness to these shortcomings, but they also invite us to share a more optimistic vision of what is possible for future generations. This brand of hopeful leadership is urgently needed in a landscape dominated by so much bitterness and recrimination.
Giving Voice is meant to spur deeper conversation about the necessity of diverse leadership in effective philanthropy, not as a box to be checked, but as a key to engaging with communities authentically and meaningfully. These stories insist that those impacted by nonprofit groups be represented at the highest levels of those groups to ensure, as the adage goes, there is “nothing about us without us.”
Click here to watch the documentary films.
