Meet Trish Adobea Tchume, our Sterling Network Organizer: Part One

Editor’s Note: One of the many challenges of working remotely has been the fact that organizations can’t welcome new staff members in person. We’re proud to have added a wonderful member to our team recently, and didn’t want to pass up the opportunity to introduce her to our community of colleagues and friends. Here’s our new Sterling Network Organizer, Trish, in part one of a conversation with our communications consultant Elisabeth. Check back next week for part two. Enjoy!

Elisabeth: Tell me a bit about your professional background, and what led you to the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation.

Trish: My career reflects movement back and forth between a focus on deep individual leadership development and developing/supporting broader networks. I believe unequivocally that each of us has something important to contribute to building a just world in which everyone can thrive. Sometimes my career calls me to go deep with individuals, sometimes it calls me to go broad and build network platforms. Either way the goal is holding space for people to bring their gifts to this lifelong project of building a just world where everyone can thrive.

My whole career I’ve always worked nationally and volunteered locally. When I learned about RSCF and the Sterling Network, I started to get excited about the idea of bringing my skills as an organizer and a network weaver to the city I love the most and the place I’ve called home for the past 15 years. NYC has some of the widest disparities in the country but also some of the brightest minds and the deepest entrepreneurial spirits. I got excited about the idea of being part of building a thriving NYC and using a networked approach to get there. 

Also, I’ve had the chance to admire the foundation’s approach to grantmaking from afar for a long time. Their commitment to trust-based philanthropy and is an important step in the direction I think philanthropy needs to be moving in terms of how we think about wealth and power redistribution. Also, I knew and loved Lisa and Phil and was excited to get to work more closely with them!

Previously I served as the executive director of the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network, the co-organizer for Within Our Lifetime: A Network to End Racism, the director of civic engagement for the Building Movement Project – and most recently I was the director of leadership development at the Center for Community Change. My Master’s Degree is in Education, and I’ve also written for the Huffington Post, the Stanford Social Innovation Review, and the Nonprofit Quarterly.

On a personal note I’m a first generation Ghanaian-American, Brooklynite by way of Philadelphia, a proud auntie, and an active volunteer for initiatives that allow me to experience a pro-Black future in the present: the Central Brooklyn Food Coop, the board of Change Elemental, and Ancient Song Doula Services. 

Elisabeth: You're the new Network Organizer for the Foundation's Sterling Network. Tell me about your role, and how you're helping the network evolve.

Trish: I always tell people that as a first generation Ghanaian-American, I grew up inside of a network and didn’t even realize it at the time. My parents came to this country 50 years ago, and landed in Philadelphia close to the beginning of a wave of immigrants from Ghana making the same move. And they knew instinctively that the only way that they would survive and thrive in this country would be to bring the communal culture indigenous to us to this new place. I grew up knowing that networks could make everything happen –whether you needed to throw a party, make a dress, get an urgent letter to your mother in your hometown, or organize a homegoing for someone who had passed. I learned that it was okay if no one in my immediate family couldn’t sew or DJ, because we knew other families in the Ghanaian Association who could sew or DJ. Our job was to know who everyone was and what everyone brought to the community and to show up for each other when the time came.  

I’ve had experience with a wide variety of networks but my understanding of Network Theory was really shaped by my experience with SwarmLab, which was a community of practice for network weavers hosted by Movement NetLab. In that space we learned that on some level weavers are always tending to 1) relationships within the network, 2) the network’s culture, 3) the network’s structure and supports, and then 4) how the network moves to action. 

The Sterling Network has been around for three years now and has reached an important point in its evolution. It’s clear that the relationships throughout the network are numerous and strong. It feels like the work of this next phase is around strengthening culture and structure for really relevant, impactful action to emerge.  This culture- and structure-building tends to be slow, deep work so the challenge is how to do it at a pace that also feels responsive to the urgency of this moment. 

Finally, the foundation to this point has done a lot of management of the network gatherings and activities but it seems that there is, rightly, a real desire by the Fellows to take more governance and management of the network on themselves.  This feels like the next important phase. Some of this structure-building is the precursor to that. But beyond this next year, the goal is that the Sterling Network has much more self-direction and self-management.