GV in May

Written By Genevieve Smith

NEW BRANDING & WEBSITE

I’ve finally graduated from stumbling through website builders and using poor quality screenshots as a ‘logo’! I worked with Caleb Blansett of pretty skin stickers and Penance Tattoo in Brooklyn, NY. This was a wild and surprisingly emotional experience. Caleb asked me the questions I usually ask my clients - turns out that this is vulnerable work!

Check out the new website at gv-advisory.com. (you’re here right now!)

LEARNING

I’m learning so much from so many people all of the time.

Gabi Fitz of Think Twice and I have been learning and teaching each other (or trying to, anyways) how to hold urgency, responsiveness, and spaciousness in our knowledge management projects with social justice movement workers. This looks different every day, but I think it has a lot to do with presence, boundaries, and getting very clear on what we mean by failure//success. (Eugene Kim’s Success Spectrum is helpful for this!) I also think it has something to do with collaborating with folks who know more than you - Gabi is a wonderful collaborator in this way.

Donita Volkwijn of Philanthropy New York has been teaching me more and more about how centering racial equity in our work is crucial for continuing to build systems and cultures that readily share (or even cede!) power instead of hoard it. Check out one of her recent articles: Unveiling the Illusion: How DEI Roles Echo the ‘Magical Negro’ trope in Philanthropy.

Andrew Means (of a million things, but most recently the organizer of Good Tech Fest) has been teaching me (or really, allowing me the space to realize) that I don’t have to separate who I am in my life from who I am in professional spaces — I’m saying this from a place of privilege and power: I’m a white femme, running my own business, so that’s a big part of what makes this safe for me — and I’m so interested in figuring out how to hold the door open, keep the ladder(s) available, and whatever other metaphors we can think of to get more folks in more rooms without demanding respectability or performance from them. That said, I’m not assuming that the ‘rooms’ we have now are even the right rooms.

QUESTION

As a professional “I don’t know”-er, I have more questions than answers. I’d love to hear what you think about this incredibly simple, not-nuanced-at-all question:

What practices might help practitioners and organizations balance the slow, emotional work (like trust building, conflict repair and accountability, and definining what our values statements mean in practice) and the faster, tactical work (information architecture, building out dashboards, working on design sprints)?

Send me your thoughts here!

Genevieve Smith

Genevieve Smith (they/she) is the Founder of GV Advisory, where they work as a Consultant and Strategic Advisor to social impact organizations looking to get in right relationship with data and organizational learning. Genevieve is known for bringing empathy, joy, and humanity to work that can not only feel lifeless and robotic, but has real potential to cause harm to communities and social justice movements.

In early 2019, after five years of working inside of organizations in the social sector, Genevieve founded GV Advisory to work across issue areas to support practitioners to not only design for their data and learning more effectively, but to do so in ways that align with organizational values, missions, and principles of equity & justice. Since then, Genevieve has supported organizations across focus areas (immigration justice, education reform, reproductive justice, health equity, international development, and trust-based philanthropy) to develop community-centric and values-aligned data and learning practices.

The ever-growing lineage of Genevieve's work includes Black feminist thought (bell hooks, the Combahee River Collective, adrienne maree brown (especially Emergent Strategy & Holding Change)), Crass (the band), time spent playing music on sidewalks and makeshift stages across the United States, histories of the archive(s) (Michel-Rolph Trulliot, Lorgia Garcia Peña), and colleagues who have become dear friends and co-conspirators.

Genevieve's favorite description of what can happen when we commit to this work together comes from a past client: "we wrote a love letter to the work and to the communities that sustain it." Genevieve loves how enlightening this work can be - we can gain clarity together while we build new ways to think, dream, and work.

When they're not working, you can find Genevieve playing music and laughing with their friends, loving on their people, bicycling around NYC, and cuddling with their cat, dog, and husband.

Genevieve wants to live in a world where we're all free - where no-one needs to rely on nonprofits and philanthropy to get what they need. But they do - so let's get to work.

https://gv-advisory.com
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GV in June