Speaker: Amanda Morrall, Former Executive Director of Cortez Family Foundation & '23-'24 Obama Scholar
Introduce yourself by sharing your name, organization, and title.
Amanda Morrall: Hi, my name is Amanda Morrall and I am a 2023, 2024 Obama Scholar with Columbia University and the Obama Foundation.
Why did you engage Tracey and Indigo Innovation Group, and what were the critical areas that I helped you focus on?
Amanda Morrall: I started working with Tracey back in 2021. I had just started a new role at a family foundation and I was looking to receive some support and really understand one, what my role was as the executive director of the Family Foundation, but then two, where I could take the foundation. And so I was excited to work with Tracey because she was able to help me deep dive and really think about strategy and also help me think about what role does racial equity play within our work, and how we can move racial equity forward, not only in the strategy piece, but also in our grant making.
What expertise did I bring, and what was unique about working with me?
Amanda Morrall: Working with Tracey pushed me to be an authentic leader. And, as a black woman who was in a role, a leadership role, that was one bigger than myself, I had to really think about like, how did I want to show up every day? And so working with Tracey helped me understand, not only did I need to be an authentic leader and really lean into the work and understand and really share with people why it was important to me, but she also encouraged me to not play small. And I think often times women, black women, people of color, we get into spaces and places sometimes where you know, we know what we're doing. We understand the work. We are experts in our field and sometimes we play small because we're scared we're going to step on someone toes, or even offend someone. And Tracey really encouraged me to take up space, to be an authentic leader, and to say I am here because I'm an expert in my field, I know what I'm talking about, and I deeply care about my community and that should come across in everything that I do. So grateful for her that she really pushed me to understand this concept and to really lean into it.
Highlight specific achievements and challenges overcome, and our collaboration's value to you and your organization.
Amanda Morrall: Working with Tracey afforded me several big wins within my work. First being strategy. She helped me think through long term, if we wanted our foundation to think through how we were best working with community members, what did that look like? How could we infuse racial equity into every single thing we did? Speaking of working with community members, Tracey encouraged me to think about, what did I want community engagement to look like? That culminated in a win of engaging over 300 people within Tulsa to really think about if you are on the ground every single day during the work, how can you inform the work that we're doing at the foundation? How can you inform our grant making? And speaking of grant making, that third big win for us was really thinking through our relationship with our grantees when it came to grant making, and thinking about the application processes, thinking about how do we communicate with them in order to make the grant making process seamless and also successful?
Provide inspirational words you would like to share to invite others to work with me and Indigo Innovation Group.
Amanda Morrall: Tracey and Indigo Innovation Group are all about empowering others, and in order to be successful in the work that you do and specifically in the work that I do, you have to be willing to empower others to do the work, to trust them, that they're the right person for the job, they're in the right place at the right time. And so just grateful for Tracey for seeing and empowering me to do the work that I was called to do within that space and place. And also to allow me to own those successes, own those achievements, own those wins that I worked really, really hard for.
