Nonprofit Consortium of St. Croix (USVI)

Back in September of 2017, right after Hurricanes Irma and Maria, our Nonprofit Consortium (NPC) was just a year old. At that point, we’d already spent hundreds of hours with 60 nonprofits, sitting at the same table. Together we established priorities and a unified vision grounded in equity, sustainability, and service. We’d built real trust and trained around collective work and collaboration, which are not natural-born skills! And we grouped ourselves into mission-aligned sectors: youth and education, health, environment, and heritage and culture. We’d done a lot in just one year, but our Consortium was and still is a relatively new concept – locally and in the field of philanthropy itself. It was, and is even more so today, a fluid body of grassroots nonprofits capable of addressing inequities by filling gaping service gaps for basic needs, nurturing new systems based on equity, and empowering community voice.

Today, as our Nonprofit Consortium nears its 7^th Anniversary, members consistently and collectively work across sector lines in programming, advocacy… and securing funding! Lines between “sectors” no longer exist, and our NPC has become a cohesive living system, able to respond to crises whether natural or manmade. We have witnessed our NPC rally for the voiceless and advocate for a toxic oil refinery to be subject to more stringent regulations. We have seen NPC members collaborate in innovative ways to leverage new or scarce funding opportunities. In all, the Nonprofit Consortium has truly become a space where organizations can grow individually, and the civic sector becomes stronger as a whole.

We recount this story because it was GlobalGiving, the Omidyar Network, and a few very committed and visionary individuals who saw the power of the Consortium just as it was beginning to emerge. And so, we could not be more pleased to be writing this report to you today. As you’ll soon hear, in the last quarter we’ve leveraged all those early investments, all we’ve learned, and all we have to teach about how under-resourced communities (and the nonprofits that serve them) can confront and institutionalize new systems, grounded in community. Thank you!

Our Annual Philanthropy Retreat: Demonstrating that Relationship is the Resolution…
AND THE REVOLUTION!

Since 2017, St. Croix Foundation’s Philanthropy Retreat has represented an unmatched opportunity for our local partners and our ever-expanding global philanthropic network to connect, to commune, to learn, and to build forward. Each year, with the exception of a brief hiatus due to COVID-19, the Foundation has hosted this 3-day convening to introduce the concept and impact of a collective body of grassroots civic organizations – and the results have been exponential. Each year, the Philanthropy Retreat has grown in attendance, in scope, and in impact.

This year’s Retreat, entitled The Power of Place, was held on February 16-18th on our unique island of St. Croix. Bringing the largest delegation to date directly to our shores, St. Croix Foundation and the Nonprofit Consortium hosted 22 national and regional foundation CEOs and executives, philanthropy thought-leaders and consultants, climate resiliency partners, and educational grantmakers.

The myriad of organizations at this year’s Retreat were diverse in size, service area, scope of work, and priorities, and included the Association of Black Foundation Executives,  Black Belt Community Foundation (Alabama), Bridgespan Group, Foundation for Appalachia Kentucky, Vieques Conservation and Historical Trust, GlobalGiving, Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation (Arkansas), W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Open Society Foundations, Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation, Lilly School of Philanthropy, One Eleuthera Foundation (Bahamas), Quantum Foundation, K.B. Reynolds Foundation, Philanthropy Southeast, Climate Strong Islands Network, Giving Gap, and Grantmakers for Education.

On Day 1 of the Retreat, guests explored topics around decolonizing philanthropy. Panels featured the power of place-based community foundations like St. Croix Foundation and our peer organizations, who are all serving marginalized, under-resourced communities around the country, from Appalachia, Kentucky Selma, Alabama; and Vieques, Puerto Rico). An island-wide tour led by the Executive Director of Crucian Heritage and Nature Tourism (CHANT) – and NPC member - helped our guests connect with St. Croix’s past, present, and future. And a reception hosted by our amazing partners at the Caribbean Museum Center for the Arts gave guests the opportunity to engage with many of the rich artistic and cultural assets in our community.

On Day 2, our Nonprofit Consortium took the stage, with 22 St. Croix organizations in attendance. They led national guests in a powerful conversation that interrogated issues around environmental justice and solutions related to ensuring equity and social justice for those living in the margins. The St. Croix Landmark Society’s Executive Director continued to ground all guests in our Place, when she hosted a “meditation moment” for guests that continues to resonate to this day.

Finally, on Day 3, the Retreat closed with an interactive, in-depth session on St. Croix Foundation’s field perspective of philanthropy and theory of change, which we project to publish this year. This was followed by the opportunity for our visitors to attend the St. Croix Agricultural Festival, where they had the opportunity to experience the cultural (and economic) assets that St. Croix has to offer up-close.

In 2017, when we first hosted this Retreat, our modest aim was to invite national foundation executives to our shores to introduce them to our nonprofits and allow them the chance to really SEE us with the hope that they would recognize the U.S. Virgin Islands as a worthwhile philanthropic investment and the home of innovative, community-rooted solutions to entrenched social issues.

This year, after a two- year hiatus due to the pandemic, the retreat surpassed any vision we had of what was possible, offering “moments” that can almost not be put into words.  We project now that the Consortium and our Annual Philanthropic Retreat have touched and improved well over 10,000 souls and brought over $4 million in investments into the territory.

As we look to the future, what all of us at the Foundation and in the Nonprofit Consortium know to be true is that everyone doing the really deep and dirty social justice work at this high-stakes moment in history is placing a lot on the line to safeguard the social contracts we steward for the voiceless and vulnerable in our respective Communities.

We’re also learning that Social Change may be much less complicated than we previously thought. Through the evolution of our Nonprofit Consortium, comprising a diverse cadre of civic soldiers - across nearly 30 nonprofit organizations - working in collaboration with a strategic network of national partners, we now realize that Change can be radically powered through durable, trust-based relationships that are rooted in Place. In the words of our systems change consultant, RELATIONSHIP IS THE RESOLUTION! We’ve modified that - just a tad - with the affirmation that RELATIONSHIP is the REVOLUTION; that People in intentional alliance-ship (and Love) can change the world!

We once again pause to thank all of you, who believed in the power of real, community-rooted coalition building!

A Pivotal Time for St. Croix: Local Advocacy Work for Environmental & Social Justice
This is a pivotal moment in St. Croix’s timeline. As an isolated yet culturally rich agricultural community, the island has remained largely untouched by development. St. Croix, often called the Big Island, has been developed primarily for industry, relying on rum and oil production since the 1960s. Large resorts, stadiums, theaters, sports parks, etc. have simply not been built to date. However, with recovery money from the hurricanes now finally mobilized after COVID-19, St. Croix is ripe for corporate development.

The re-start of the aging oil refinery on St. Croix, which poses the risk of a fire, explosion or other ‘catastrophic’ releases of ‘extremely hazardous substances’ is a current and ongoing development project for the territory. In just the past two days, the Environmental Protection Agency met with St. Croix Foundation and members of the NPC’s Environmental Sector, the St. Croix Environmental Association, Crucian Heritage and Nature Tourism, and the VI Good Food Coalition at the Foundation’s headquarters, where the EPA debriefed our NPC in private regarding funding opportunities and general status updates. As the only consistent community conveners on this topic, together, these four small organizations have been on the frontlines of advocating for safe, clean, sustainable development-- and the work continues.

On that same front, the Nonprofit Consortium recently rallied to formally state their position to our local legislature on a new, proposed concrete plant that will release dangerous silica into the air – in close proximity to what will soon be a school. And, NPC workgroups are also investigating a proposed rezoning of historic districts in an effort to ensure that local property owners won’t be stripped of their homes. We are also working with the New York Community Trust on a regional application to the EPA’s Thriving Communities grant.

National Advocacy for the U.S. Virgin Islands
And while local advocacy for our People, Place, and the nonprofits who serve them, never stops, beyond our annual Retreat, our Nonprofit Consortium is busy, trying to shine a light on the realities of America’s only predominantly Black colony on the national stage.

In May, St. Croix Foundation and our NPC hosted the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, John Williams, at our office. Joined by 12 nonprofits, we shared the civic sector’s view of the “false recovery economy” that St. Croix is in after the hurricanes--- and the role that nonprofits have and continue to take on to meet basic needs.

Organizations representing all sectors of the Consortium led a robust conversation about the challenges facing our community and the critical role of the Territory’s CIVIC SECTOR to sustain innovative economic and community development solutions. Nonprofit Leaders also made the case for more targeted and equitable capital investments in our community and explored opportunities for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to advocate for and serve the needs of St. Croix and the USVI. All of us at the Foundation are proud to share space with our nonprofit partners – as we collectively and courageously advocate for the most vulnerable and marginalized! We are grateful to President Williams for his time and for such a rich discussion.

Sustaining the work…
When the 2017 hurricanes hit St. Croix, the Consortium was put to the test. Thanks to your early investments we were able to execute multi-layered, cooperative initiatives that then served through COVID-19. In the end, the Nonprofit Consortium is demonstrating that the social change we seek is rooted in relationships that are fused and in close proximity to Place. Today, to keep momentum, St. Croix Foundation and members of the Nonprofit Consortium are currently writing grants, collecting data, and conducting outreach to help sustain all of our collective efforts.

We encourage all to watch this innovative and high-impact space!