Vanessa Daniel Isn’t Waiting for Change

Not long after graduating from Smith, Vanessa Priya Daniel ’00, along with one of her colleagues from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and a group of home-care workers, crashed a Rotary Club event in the San Francisco Bay Area. As labor organizers with the SEIU, they wanted to pressure a local county board member to support a proposed wage increase.

With youthful confidence, Daniel walked up to a table, picked up a fork to clink against a glass, and made an announcement: “We’re here because workers who need to take care of people need a living wage, and this gentleman has the power to make sure they are not living in poverty,” Daniel said, according to then-colleague and longtime friend Shaw San Liu.

The crowd was stunned. “Classic Vanessa,” Liu says. “She was so good at going up there, acting like she owned the place, and launching eloquently into this higher ground like, ”‘What are we standing for?’” The workers won wage increases.

Over the next 20 years, Daniel and Liu advanced in their careers, started families, and occasionally bonded over the episode.

Without a doubt, Daniel was a great organizer. So, some people didn’t quite “get it” when she entered philanthropy, Liu says. But it’s possible to organize within philanthropy, Daniel told Liu, and the field needed allies. Daniel had a vision and a passion for galvanizing large amounts of resources and directing them at undersupported communities of color. Early in her career, she discovered she had a gift—what she once described as a “knack for inspiring people with a lot of wealth to see and value the leadership of people of color.”

In 2005, in a move Daniel describes as a “grand experiment,” she founded a visionary funding agency called Groundswell. With her at the helm, Groundswell injected more than $100 million into organizing groups led by women of color (WOC) and transgender people of color, and it became one of the largest funders of the reproductive justice movement. Her transformational approach to grantmaking earned her a spot on the 2021 Inside Philanthropy Power List as one of the most influential players in philanthropy. It also earned her the Smith College Medal. Again, Daniel did what she set out to do. Classic Vanessa.

Daniel left Groundswell in 2021. After running the foundation for almost two decades, she was ready to move on. She has since launched a consulting practice and joined the boards of numerous foundations.

Now, Daniel has united the various strands of her work by writing a book, Unrig the Game: What Women of Color Can Teach Everyone About Winning (Random House), that offers guidance on the leadership needed to tackle the social and economic problems of the future. In the fight for democracy, justice, and the environment, the book argues, women of color are leading on every count. “This book is for any and everyone who’s serious about winning social change in the United States,” Daniel says.

“Women of color leaders are disproportionately represented among the MVPs—the Most Valuable Players of social justice movements. They are responsible for many of the biggest wins we’ve had in recent years,” Daniel says, citing their leadership in the Black Lives Matter movement, their support for increasing the child tax credit in the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, and their work to successfully expand abortion access in seven of the 10 states where it was on the ballot in November.

The book is informed by Daniel’s experience in philanthropy and social-movement work as well as her interviews with dozens of prominent labor leaders and civil rights activists, including Ai-jen Poo, president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance; Alicia Garza, cofounder of the Black Lives Matter movement; Dolores Huerta, cofounder of the United Farm Workers union; and Rep. Pramila Jayapal, the first Indian American woman to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives. Smith College is represented in the book thanks to Daniel’s interviews with Loretta Ross, associate professor of the study of women and gender, and Sharmila (Mona) Ghosh Sinha ’88, global executive director of the human rights organization Equality Now.

Despite ample proof that women of color are effective leaders, Daniel argues that they’re underutilized in social-movement work and often lack full support. Their leadership can be undermined from the outside and the inside. Barriers to movements and those working in them harm all races and genders but exact an especially harsh toll on women of color leaders, Daniel says. For example, she writes in the book, “Right-­wing forces want racial diversity and progressive views out of academia. So, they seize on one gaffe in a speech by Harvard University president Claudine Gay to call her antisemitic and terrorize her into leaving her leadership position.”

Daniel argues that women of color leaders possess three “superpowers” that light the way: 360-degree vision, boldness, and generosity. [See below.] “We have to start talking about the three superpowers to truly value them,” she writes. “And we must start talking about the forces that keep WOC on the bench.”

One such force, she explains, is the assumption of incompetence that leads women of color to work four times as hard to be seen as equal to their white male counterparts. “This really bleeds people’s energy and weathers leaders unnecessarily,” Daniel says. Another is the demand to “mother and mammy,” as in to “deliver this outsized amount of emotional nurturing and labor that is expected from no other leaders.” Yet another is having zero margin for error: “being easily discredited or harshly punished for any mistake, real or perceived.” Abandonment when under attack is the final force that surfaced in her reporting. “People move away or treat women of color like they’re radioactive when they’re attacked, whether or not that attack is justified.”

Friends describe Daniel as equal parts passionate and practical. She’s always trying to figure out how to accomplish a goal, realize change, and connect people with the resources they need to succeed. And she rallies others to join her. “She has always been that kind of leader, even at university,” says Jessica Horn ’01, another longtime friend. “It’s not just about her and her voice and her ideas. It’s also about, ‘How do we get here to winning?’ That’s her network mind. She’s always looking and thinking, ‘Who’s there? Who can we bring in? Who can we connect? Who can we encourage?’ She’s not just thinking about herself; she’s thinking about us.”

Daniel grew up as a queer, mixed-race kid in Seattle in the 1980s and ’90s. Her mother was a middle-class, second-wave white feminist and her “biggest champion against any gender-based oppression,” Daniel says, “but who really struggled mightily to acknowledge the racism that I experienced growing up.”

On her father’s side were working-class Sri Lankan people who came to the United States fleeing a war. They were “really outspoken about the realities of racism and colonialism but struggled to acknowledge gender-based violence, including the violence I experienced,” Daniel says.

In the book, Daniel recounts being sexually abused by a relative on her father’s side. He threatened to harm her if she told anyone, but, at age 5, she spoke out anyway. This decision changed the trajectory of her life. When her aunts and cousins, with whom she had previously shared a close bond, refused to protect her from the abuse, her mother packed her up and the two moved out of the house.

As a result of the experience, Daniel says, she has always “really longed for people who had the capacity to acknowledge and break free of all of it, from every form of oppression that we need to free ourselves from in order to thrive.”

Eventually, Daniel enrolled at Smith, where she and several friends started a student club called FIRE, short for Feminist Intercultural Revolutionary Encounter—“Encounter mainly because we needed an E,” Daniel says.

And she made time for fun by taking Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Cuban dance classes. “She always brought that flair,” Horn says, “just a deep connection to culture.”

After Smith, Daniel entered full-time community and union organizing. But it was those early experiences growing up in Seattle that influenced her desire to build and shape Groundswell.

“Growing up as someone who understood viscerally what it is to be othered, what it is to be marginalized, really inspired in me a desire to center groups of people who suffer that in society,” Daniel says.

In focusing on such groups, she developed a gift for speaking truth to power. She recalls being approached by a wealthy white woman after giving a talk at a conference about women of color and reproductive justice. The woman hadn’t thought much about race and wanted to learn more, Daniel says. So Daniel began inviting her to events and setting up meetings for her with reproductive justice groups.

The woman went on to organize a house party to raise money for Groundswell and reproductive justice work. At the event, she got to practice answering questions from peers about why it’s important to broaden reproductive rights funding beyond predominantly white organizations. Ultimately, Daniel says, the woman and her late mother helped Groundswell launch the Groundswell Action Fund, which cracked open resources for electoral organizing led by women of color.

“In critical moments, when a lot was on the line for communities of color, she became a brave spokesperson in predominantly white donor spaces, galvanizing hundreds of thousands of dollars to grassroots [work],” Daniel says.

Daniel talks about race and power in spaces where these conversations don’t typically happen, says Liu, who is now executive director of the Chinese Progressive Association, a nonprofit civil rights group that organizes low-income and working-class Chinese immigrants in San Francisco. Liu credits Daniel with organizing people across races and generations. By carrying these skills into philanthropy, Liu says, Daniel influences the sector and empowers organizations and communities in the process.

“The two things I bring to engaging white folks are a high capacity to love people despite where they are on the learning curve and a strong ability not to coddle them,” Daniel says. “When you love people, you can empathize with why they may not see the full picture. I believe that respecting people’s humanity means trusting in their capacity to understand complexity.”

Daniel’s book shows how women of color can teach others to exercise influence while avoiding traps created by the systems of power that social justice movements are trying to change. At this moment, when the United States is so politically divided, there’s a whole world at stake. “There is a wisdom that comes from people at the margins about how everyone can get free,” Daniel says.

April Simpson ’06 is a writer in Greater Houston, Texas.