Luca’s philosophy as a grant writer operates on three core principles: listening to, amplifying, and equipping lived-experience leaders with tools to secure the funding they need to carry out their work. He aims to de-center himself and to uplift the voices of his clients to build a more equitable nonprofit industry.
What is “lived experience”?
Lived experience is a byproduct of reality for many marginalized people — it is a culmination of knowledge and memory that people build across their lives as they experience bigotry in its many forms. For example, those who have been excluded or targeted because of their sexuality have lived experience, as they have dealt with homophobia firsthand. Because they are intimately familiar with how homophobia functions, they can more readily create solutions that resonate with others like them. As such, supporting leaders with lived experience means letting those directly impacted by a given issue take the helm in solving it. It means listening to those in need directly instead of being a surrogate for their ideas, and ensuring that the leadership of a given organization is reflective of the people it serves.
It also means showing up and maintaining long-term support. Luca strives to prioritize sustainability in his writing and editing work, giving lived-experience leaders not only what they need in the present, but also the tools they need to succeed in the future. He has helped emergent organizations represent themselves in their very first proposals, and also helped build out comprehensive language libraries, allowing organizations to repurpose text for other funding initiatives in the years to come. Luca has also written internal grant writing “style guides” for all members of an organization’s development team to reference, and to utilize as an onboarding tool for new staff. Luca believes that a grant writer is not just someone who can follow instructions and write good copy; a grant writer can empower others to do vital work in their communities by giving them tools that will last forever.
Why is Luca passionate about uplifting marginalized leadership?
For true and lasting change to occur, people must be in control of their own destinies. Right now, the opposite is too often true; when leadership does not reflect its constituency, we see inequity. For example, there are significant funding disparities between white leadership and leadership of color in the nonprofit industry. Why is that? Tené Traylor, grant maker at the Kendeda Fund, reminds us that “philanthropy is really centered on this notion of charity and benevolence… there are assumptions of privilege and power wrapped up in that.” When one group positions themselves as caretakers of another, it creates an imbalance of understanding and respect. To dismantle harmful systems, we must first dismantle harmful power dynamics.
As both a member of the LGBTQ+ community and a grant writer, Luca firmly believes that every human being should have the power of self-determination, and never live beholden to others.