Rebirth Update #1: The WHY and WHO of ICAH's Transition
Dear ICAH community,
Throughout its 44-year history, ICAH has experienced a lot of transition and growth. In the past two years, circumstances that many BIPOC-led organizations are facing have made it clearer than ever that we need a new kind of transition. Youth, friends and longtime supporters, artists, board, and staff are ready to birth a new ICAH in order to most fully embody and advance our reproductive justice values.
ICAH is resilient, stable, and ready to make space for a strategic rebirth, both in leadership and in our organizational structure. As with our recent periods of rest, this is a public way that ICAH shows leadership in disrupting white supremacist, anti-Black, ableist, colonial, adultist, and inequitable approaches to work in the form of nonprofit structures and programmatic agendas with little breathing room for rest and reflection. We are committed to addressing these structures of oppression, even when we uphold them ourselves. This deeply held commitment to transformation demands our time, energy, and resources.
How you can support: We need patience, confidence, thought partnership, and celebration. We need your wind in our sails. It’s the perfect time to make a generous end of year donation.
For a true and complete rebirth of ICAH to happen, high levels of collaborative leadership and sustained support are already happening. ICAH has so many brilliant people who will share responsibility for the upcoming organizational redesign that will be our rebirth. Here are just a few, and we look forward to sharing more with you in our next update.
Alyssa Vera Ramos and Aisha Chaudhri will temporarily serve as transition co-directors from December 2021 through July 2022. They have deep levels of experience in leadership at ICAH and will guide and plan the process for rebirthing ICAH’s organizational structure on that timeline.
Sona Smith (our outgoing ED) is graciously continuing to be part of the transition conversation and is supporting ICAH as a consultant and leader. Read Sona’s departure letter here.
Current or prior youth leaders are being invited in and compensated for joining this process. Centering youth as we restructure our organization represents essential and innovative programming to advance youth leadership now and in the future. Expect more about centering youth in Update #2 in January!
Chinyere Achebe and Jenni Kotting are serving as board co-chairs of our 18-person working board of directors, who are majority BIPOC and TGNC. Current board members were selected and/or approved by staff members, and include multiple former ICAH staff members and artists. Chi and Jenni have more than a combined decade of being in relationship with ICAH, with bios below. Five board members are part of a transition committee who will meet biweekly to support staff and youth leadership in the months ahead.
This organizational redesign is capacity building. It is leadership in the field. It is organizing. It is an investment in centering youth leadership. It is the most important thing we can be doing unapologetically, at the exact right moment in time. And we must do it now so that ICAH can survive and support the leadership and reproductive justice of young people for another 44 years.