🎧The Rad Ops Podcast is one component of a dialogue-based tool that supports organizations assessing and discussing the possibilities and limitations of putting liberatory values into practice. Each guest will share their Rad Ops lineages, their expertise on today’s pressing operations questions and leave listeners with resources and discussion questions to take back to your teams.
In this episode we talk about Resource Mobilization with our guest, Allison Budschalow, Consulting Partner at Dragonfly Partners, Co-facilitator at Securing the Roots, and co-host of the podcast Movement Money.
Resources from this episode:
- The team at Dragonfly Partners takes a 360-degree approach to support the work of resource mobilizers, including assessing our most valuable resources—our relationships with one another through:
- In It Together—a toolkit and workshop that helps movement-building groups navigate conflict, strengthen accountability, and work together in healthier, principled ways.
- When We Fall Apart—a workbook and workshop to provide social justice groups with a vital framework for navigating necessary organizational and group breakups with integrity and intention.
- Movement Money episodes on Organize the Rich Radio
- Peer connection: Radical Fundraisers Network
- Books:
- Ella Baker & the Black Freedom Movement by Barbara Ransby
- Free the People to Free the Money to Free the People, Edited by: Michael Gast, Marian Moore & Alex T. Tom
- Organizations:
Discussion questions to take to your team:
- What is your 30 year vision—for yourself? For your group, organization, community, people? What will become possible by being honest — with yourself, philanthropy, donors — about what you or your organization or your movement needs to get closer to your vision?
- What is your relationship to the middle class? What do you think the relationship is for the middle class to the millionaires in our communities?
- It’s 2051, and a 21 year-old in your life is asking you about the most valuable resource/s in your life. What will you say?
- When you connect with your most honest parts, what do you want to tell
- a) people who have access to land, wealth, and money?
- b) people without access to land, wealth, and money?
- How will what you tell them get you and our collective movements (organizations, coalitions, neighborhoods, communities, families) closer to freedom?
- How does it feel to think about these questions?
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Produced by Josh Elstro with Convergence magazine. Design support from Kimmie David. Music by Tigercat, Sha’s amazing 10-year-old, with polish by Josh.
Episode Guests
Allison Budschalow bolsters resource generation and mobilization work, building the skills and power needed for communities to fund their own movements. At Dragonfly Partners, she helps groups and individuals connect with their fire, rediscover what drives them, and unlock new or renewed paths toward their goals.
Born and raised in Philly and part of the Kalmyk Mongol diaspora, she speaks Spanish whenever possible, dabbles in Russian, runs often, goes birding when she can, and sometimes paddles with a Dragon Boat team in Philly’s Chinatown.