Note: This is an excerpt of the speech given by Jake Goodman, Opportunity Fund’s Executive Director, at the foundation’s 10-year anniversary celebration on February 28, 2025.
I want to talk about the time we’re living in right now. It’s just February. Our country has elected a president whose administration is actively expanding its power, authoritarian in nature, dismantling so very much, wreaking devastation left and right. We’ve all been touched by it – some of us more than others. “And then they came for us” has never felt so resonant in my lifetime.
At Opportunity Fund we are asking: What do we do? What can we do? And with whom?
Here’s what I’m thinking:
We need to take this time seriously, try to see it for what it is, even as it evolves.
We need to move money quickly. Our board member, Alisha Wormsley says, “Get it out the door!”
Our theory of change is: try something. We have to try something. And keep on trying. Change the rule book, see what sticks. There’s. Nothing. To. Wait. For.
When we do change our own rule book, we have to be honest and transparent about what it is we are trying to do, and be open to seeing how it affects what others are trying to do, both positively and negatively, and calibrate.
The goal is not to earn trust. It’s to extend trust. I do not believe that anyone is ever capable of knowing all the answers, and certainly not now. Just try something.
I think that grieving is going to play a big role in many of our doings. This is a time for planting seeds. The soil may be tilled for new things to grow, but we cannot forget that the soil is being overturned and not so we can all enjoy a meal together when it’s over. This is not collective liberation, it is wreckage. And the wreckage involves human lives and dreams.
We fund the arts for the same reasons that authoritarian leaders fear and suppress them: because we know their power. The creation and experience of art forms the most fundamental building blocks of culture that humans can access – and it is something that authoritarian leaders cannot ultimately control – even when they do try to make themselves Chairman of the Arts.
So, as we enter this season of planting or, more in tune with our theme, of dreaming, we will be grieving for all that has been and will be lost.
If philanthropy is all made up, as I first heard from Michelle McMurray of The Pittsburgh Foundation, what place does dreaming have in our planning and doing—now, in these times? At Opportunity Fund, we see dreams not as pie in the sky childsplay, but rather as the beautiful and important vision we each hold pieces of, for our collective future.
Dreaming is an essential part of the work that will lift us up out of these times.
Opportunity Fund is one cog in a wheel trying to make community dreams happen. This room, all of us together, is a wheel. Let’s turn.
Thank you all for being here. Let’s party.