"You have a responsibility to think beyond your own career": An Interview with Rye Young on Executive Leadership Transitions
Rye Young
Pronouns: He/Him/His, They/Them/Their
Twitter: @ryeyoungster
One of your favorite nonprofits: Third Wave Fund -- is that too obvious?! Groups like Black Love in the Rust, Khmer Girls in Action, Jahajee Sisters, Street Youth Rise Up, and so many more.
ReproJobs: You started as an intern at Third Wave and eventually became the organization’s Executive Director. Tell us about that journey.
Rye Young: My journey at Third Wave Fund could fill a book. I entered the organization when I was 22 years old as an intern running their emergency abortion fund, and I left as the executive director at the age of 32. My time at Third Wave Fund, and in philanthropy in general, has had many ups and downs, but at every moment I was to participate in work that felt meaningful and that gave me countless opportunities to grow.
ReproJobs: In 2018, you intentionally “passed the baton” as the organization’s Executive Director. Your departure struck us as radical for many reasons, one being that white leaders almost never voluntarily transition out to make room for younger leaders of color. Take us through your thought process.
Rye Young: When I took on the role of executive director, Third Wave Fund had essentially closed its doors due to financial hardship. My charge was to see if the work could continue in a sustainable way. I understood “the work” to mean the work of bringing young women, queer, and trans youth of color into the forefront of social justice philanthropy. And I understood sustainable to mean that the work isn’t successful if we’re depleted of all energy, creativity, and spirit as a direct result of doing it.
To see through this vision of a sustainable organization led by young women, queer, and trans people of color, I had to plan for my departure as a core aspect of my job from the very start. I thought about my leadership transition in the way I hired staff, the way I fundraised, the way I set up our finances and operating structure, and the way I helped grow the board so that they could eventually lead a search process and support someone new.
It was important to me that my staff, board, and donors understood all along that my plan was to transition out, in keeping with our racial justice principles and our youth-led model. I talked about transitions as being healthy and as an important skill for movements to have. If transitions are a normal and healthy part of organizations, it should also be normalized for all staff to dream their next move into life so I tried to bring that approach into my management style.
ReproJobs: Executive transitions require a lot of intentional planning from everyone at the organization. How did you work with the board and staff to prepare for this shift? What did you learn along the way?
Rye Young: We started the transition process during a sweet spot in my tenure. We had achieved a level of sustainability in terms of diversifying our sources of revenue, attaining multi year general operating support, building a healthy reserve and retaining an amazing team of staff and board to see the transition through and to support whoever came into the role. I also felt that I was about one year away from burning through my energy to do this work, and I didn’t want to wait until I had nothing left to give.
One year before my exit, we had a board and staff retreat to plan the process. The board formed an executive transition committee which was tasked with hiring a transition consultant. The committee chose to work with Strategies for Social Change because our values aligned and because they have a lot of experience with seeing through successful hires of women and queer people of color. They didn’t see this as a simple task, but rather as deep organizational change work. They led us through a six month process which included forming a committee of board and staff, doing collective visioning, and conducting a thorough search process including lots of coaching for me, the board co-chairs, and the new directors.
An important aspect of preparing for any leadership transition, but particularly one where a white leader is passing on leadership to people of color, is fundraising. I spoke with donors often about the importance of giving multi-year contributions, but made it a priority in the lead up to my transition.
In my final year, we launched a campaign called the Sustainable Leadership Fund which asked major and monthly donors to make a three-year pledge specifically to help set our new leaders up for success before even knowing who they were. We formed a 25-person campaign committee who additionally agreed to make themselves available to meet with our new directors and support them with institutional memory, fundraising, and moral support throughout their first year. This campaign was all about leveraging the relationships I formed with donors over the years into long-term tangible support for the next leader(s). The campaign also sought to teach donors that they have an active role to play in making it easier to pass on leadership and for Third Wave Fund to stay led by the communities we seek to serve.
ReproJobs: What kind of search did you and your team do for new leadership? What were your “must haves” and your “nice-to-haves”?
Rye Young: Third Wave Fund had been through a lot of growth during my time as executive director. We went from having a budget of under $100k with me as the sole staff person to a budget of over $2 million with 5 staff when we started our search process. We knew this would be a difficult search because the organization is unique and had become larger than we had ever been since our founding in 1996. Given this context and our desire to remain led by the communities we serve, we were very excited to re-imagine the executive director role entirely and welcomed the idea of co-directorship.
The board and staff worked together to create a job description and leadership profile for our next director(s). We spelled out the core executive functions and left it up to the applicants to propose how they would carry out these functions, either on their own or in partnership as co-directors. We knew that the next director(s) did not need to have advanced degrees, previous executive director experience, or experience in philanthropy. Some things they did need to possess are self awareness and emotional intelligence, communications and organizing skills, knowledge of gender and reproductive justice, skills to bring our justice values into our operations and management, comfort with giving and receiving feedback, and lastly, an ability to hold the contradictions of social justice philanthropy with humility and purpose.
Third Wave Fund is now co-directed by the wonderful Ana Conner and Kiyomi Fujikawa who refer to themselves as “the coco’s”. If you haven’t had a chance to meet them, they are incredible people who are ushering in brilliant evolutions at Third Wave Fund. These evolutions simply would not have happened if I had stayed in the role. My mind is so programmed to see the things I did at Third Wave Fund as radical just because the bar philanthropy sets is so low. I didn’t have the ability to see what stood beyond. I’m very proud of the work that I did, but I couldn’t see the work that was left to do. They are a testament to the beauty and power of leadership transitions and why they are essential to building bold and powerful movements.
ReproJobs: We often hear from older white leaders in the repro movement in particular that they don’t want to leave their executive-level positions because there’s “nowhere” for them to go, or that they shouldn’t “have to” transition out of their jobs to make room for others. What do you make of statements like these?
Rye Young: Social change requires constant evolution in ourselves, in our organizations, and in our movements. Executive directors cannot be doing a good job if they have no vision for transitioning the organization beyond what they can achieve. Why? Because everyone has limitations, everyone gets tired in the role, everyone runs out of creativity in the same position year after year.
For white executive directors, this is even more essential because it is dangerous for organizations and movements to grow around your unchanging leadership and vision, which fundamentally brings oppression with it. If you are a white executive director, I should hope you are a striving to be an actively anti-racist executive director. But if you have no plan to transition from your job, you’ve almost proven that you are not that. If the mere mention of executive transition brings up defensiveness, I wonder what kinds of unchecked racism goes on at your institution and I worry for the people of color on your staff because I know what those leaders are like.
If you’re looking for the next safe thing in your career and aren’t willing to fight to make it happen, you may not have the spirit and leadership we need in our movement and that’s OK. But don’t take up a seat from someone who does while you figure it out. We can not afford to have people who don’t get these simple concepts at the helm of our organizations. I say ‘our organizations’ because they don’t belong to an executive director, or even a founder. The moment a non-profit is formed and money is raised on behalf of a community, you have a responsibility to think beyond your own career to do what’s best for that community, which means building something that doesn’t depend on one person, particularly one very privileged person.
The reproductive justice movement puts forward a vision and a framework that isn’t limited and controlled by the desires and expectations of middle and upper class straight cisgender white women. As reproductive justice has grown in prominence and stature, I’ve witnessed some white leaders become highly effective at co-opting and performing this framework when it serves them but they entirely ignore the work of unlearning white supremacy and taking seriously how their racism affects those around them. Any white director can adopt reproductive justice language. But any white person who takes that framework to heart wouldn’t hold tight to their leadership role in the movement.
ReproJobs: What advice would you give to other organizational leaders, particularly white leaders, who are considering a leadership transition? Is there anything you wish you’d done differently? Anything you’d absolutely do again?
Rye Young: In terms of setting up new leaders for success, it’s very important that you don’t wait until you’re burnt out to start planning for your transition. Pulling off a successful transition, particularly one that takes into account everything that goes into transitioning from a white leader to a leader of color, is very hard work that requires mental and physical energy on top of the regular challenges of your job.
I’d also encourage you to expect that you need a long time to recover. It took me an entire year before I even understood the extent of my exhaustion, and I was relatively good at setting boundaries and sticking with our 4-day work week (maybe my former coworkers would disagree).
If I could do the whole thing over again, I would tell myself to slow down, listen more, and express appreciation for the people around me more often than I did.
ReproJobs: How many browser tabs do you have open at once, on average?
Rye Young: I have attention deficit disorder, so needless to say a lot.
ReproJobs: What do you think is missing in our movement when it comes to workplaces?
Rye Young: A serious review of workplace accessibility and equity through a class and disability lens.
ReproJobs: What’s a delicious meal you made and/or ate recently?
Rye Young: I was trained to be a cook and used to run my own small catering operation, so I love to cook! This morning I made arepas and filled them with scrambled eggs, oaxaca cheese, and salsa verde.
ReproJobs: When you want to feel like a champ, what song gets you in the zone?
Rye Young: My new favorite saying is “if being gay were a choice, I’d be gayer!” That said, when I need a boost, I put a broadway musical on the record machine and do karaoke at home with the liner notes.