“We are talking about change that is going to last way beyond you or I are around”: Jabeen Yusuf on the Base Camp campaign
Interview Summary:
Jabeen Yusuf, Co-founder of Health+ Studio and a board member at YES for four years, reflects on her journey since joining YES just before the pandemic and how navigating those challenges deepened her understanding of the community. She expresses immense pride in YES's response to the pandemic and highlights the long-term impact of our current Base Camp campaign, emphasizing its alignment to YES’s mission for developing leaders who create sustainable change in the community. Drawing from an insightful conversation with Dr. Bob Ross, President and CEO of The California Endowment, Jabeen distinguishes between charity and change frameworks of philanthropy, emphasizing the latter's focus on creating lasting conditions for widespread community wellbeing and impact. She sees the Base Camp campaign as a catalyst for enduring community pride, joy, and momentum, shaping a future that extends far beyond our current moment. Jabeen supports our campaign, believing in its potential to bring about meaningful, enduring change within the community.
Transcript:
Devika Saxena: Hi Jabeen, how are you?
Jabeen Yusuf: Hi Devika, good to see you.
Devika: Good to see you, too. Thanks so much for agreeing to share your thoughts and perspectives about our campaign, the YES Capital Campaign.
To start off, Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your board service?
Jabeen: Absolutely, I’ve been a board member with YES for four years. I joined the board in 2019, so right before the pandemic. Perfect timing, but we learned a lot together during the pandemic and it gave me even a deeper perspective of the community because we all had to navigate those challenges together. The way the organization stepped up and took care of the community and took care of the staff reinforced why I am so proud to be part of the YES community and be on the YES board.
Devika: That’s great. And what is most inspiring or exciting about the campaign to you?
Jabeen: We were building up to this point so it was really wonderful to hear about this as it was building up. What’s really exciting about this project and what it means not just for the organization but also to the entire community is the long-term change that it will create in the community. I think that’s really core to the mission of the organization. YES has always been about big, sustainable change that changes young peoples’ trajectories and their leadership pathways and changes a community. So for me, it feels like it fits within our mission of what we stand for as an organization.
I think I shared this story with you earlier. I had the honor and opportunity to interview Dr. Bob Ross from The California Endowment recently and he shared something that crystalizes for me what this campaign means. He talked about the difference in the philanthropic [giving] community- the difference between charity and change. The way he explained it really resonated for me. Let’s talk about charity being something that recognizes that in our capitalist society there are winners and losers and our part as a philanthropic community is basically to help the people who are unfortunate to do a little better- put food on the table, shelter over their heads. That’s the concept of charity and charity is valuable, but it is [concerned with the needs] of the moment and doesn’t address the long-term aspect of all of it.
Whereas the change frame is all about imagining what’s possible and then creating the conditions to make change possible, so it’s not just a one-time [support], but that it changes all the communities and every individual that the action touches. When I think about what we are doing with the capital campaign, bringing this wonderful environment into the community so Richmond families and kids….a place for them to have wonderful programming in new ways, a place for the community to gather together, a place for kids to come after school. We are talking about change that is going to last way beyond you or I are around. That is very exciting because we’re laying a foundation for something that’s going to bring a lot of pride and joy and wonderful positive momentum into the community.
That’s why I’ve been very vocally and quietly supporting the campaign in the small ways that I can by telling people about it and sharing my perspective. That’s what’s exciting to me and I hope that we continue to build on the wonderful start that we already have and bring this project to life.
This transcript has been edited slightly for clarity.
