Freedom Dreaming: Cecilia Polanco on Executive Leadership
Cecilia Polanco is the Executive Director of SEEDS. Originally from El Salvador, she has lived in Durham for the past 27 years, where she attended Durham Public Schools and graduated from Northern High School in 2011. She then graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2016, where she was a Morehead-Cain Scholar and Global Gap Year Fellow. She majored in Global Studies with a focus on Health and the Environment, and Latin America, minored in Geography and earned a certificate in Business from Kenan Flagler. She has since been working on launching and scaling So Good Pupusas, a social justice food truck, and Pupusas for Education, a last dollar scholarship fund for undocumented students. She is a community activist entrepreneur with a long history of work with youth and on various social justice issues surrounding food and environmental justice. She is also a mental health advocate and believes that education can enable us to free ourselves and others, and that love is the root of our relationship with ourselves, each other, and mother Earth. Cecilia is a 2019 Transforming Leaders Goodmon Fellow.
“I came into the Executive Director role right after I finished the Transforming Leaders program in 2019. That work really prepared me to do the transformational work — not just leading an organization — but stewarding a team and a community towards change on a systems level. I feel like everything I learned was really preparing me. I love that I have the opportunity to be in spaces where I can speak up and advocate for myself and our communities. I don’t think that I was ready to do that before as loud and as confidently as I am now.”
Kristine: Cecilia, how are you doing?
Cecilia: I am learning to answer that question honestly, whenever it’s asked. So honestly right now, I’m doing pretty well. Things are going really well at SEEDS. I’ve been the Executive Director at SEEDS for about a year and it’s been a tough year, but a really, really good year in a lot of ways too.
Kristine: Good. Talk to me about what’s made it a good year.
Cecilia: It’s actually the reason why I’m excited about speaking with you today, because I feel like I need more platforms to talk about what we’ve been going through at SEEDS. I was hired at SEEDS because they had an initiative to hire someone from the community. They wanted the leadership of SEEDS to come from Durham locally. I was recruited to be there, and I wanted to be somewhere that wanted me, so I appreciated that, but I think ultimately, the organization was not ready for me.
And that’s funny, because during the interview process I actually said that I didn’t want to be tokenized. I didn’t want to be a diversity hire. I said, if you’re not ready to give me power and let me lead, then don’t hire me. That was a risk to take during a hiring process, but I felt like it was really important to state my boundaries and my expectations. And I got the job, so I was really excited to join the team at SEEDS. I started my role at the beginning of February and we closed our doors due to the pandemic mid March.
In and of itself, it’s been a huge challenge to run an organization in the last year. And I was trying to, was hired to, create a massive organizational shift at SEEDS so that we could be more aligned with our new mission, vision and values. That work had been going on for awhile now — it did not start with me. We have worked really hard to get to where we are now — and honestly, we’ve had a lot of staff and Board turnover in the last year. But the team we have now, I’m confident will be the team to lead us into the future. So it’s been the work of being the Executive Director of an organization but it’s also the work on top of the work — the fact that for a lot of us, we don’t have the luxury to just do our jobs.
We also have the honor and the privilege, in many ways, to do transformational work within our organizations, within the nonprofit industrial complex, and within systems of white supremacy. That’s challenging. There were many points where I thought I was gonna throw in the towel, but I’m glad I stuck with it. I realized that this is the work I want to be doing — these are the values I care about.
I came into the Executive Director role right after I finished the Transforming Leaders program in 2019. That work really prepared me to do the transformational work — not just leading an organization — but stewarding a team and a community towards change on a systems level. I feel like everything I learned was really preparing me. I love that I have the opportunity to be in spaces where I can speak up and advocate for myself and our communities. I don’t think that I was ready to do that before as loud and as confidently as I am now. I am articulating myself in a way that really makes me feel like I’m getting across to people.
Kristine: I just want to acknowledge and affirm the work that you’ve done — and also the work on top of the work that you’ve done. That is very hard, hard work. And I don’t know if you’ve experienced this, but for me, it’s also incredibly personal to try to change an organizational system, especially when you have to draw upon your own story and experience to change their minds. It requires a consistent tapping into the emotion that the structure creates. And when you speak your experience to someone and they don’t change their mind, it’s tiring. When it does, it’s great, but it still can be a rollercoaster.
Cecilia: Yeah, that’s definitely what happens and it happens over and over until something gives or until you’ve found like, the inflection point, the right pressure point. And you’ve still got to have the persistence to stick with it to get through that point. It really is worth it though. It really is. It’s very hard. I’ve found myself having to almost… plant myself firmly. Ground myself firmly in a lot of things. Almost to the point where I really hope I’m not wrong, because I’m so rooted (laughs).
Kristine: You needed a lot of clarity and strength of conviction to see the last year through. Where did that come from for you?
Cecilia: I was like, well, they could always let me go. You know? That’s happened to me before, when my vision did not align or my values didn’t align with where I was working. I have been let go. And so, I think that there’s, there’s a point where I realized that and I was like, what am I willing to sacrifice? I mean, I had a level of privilege to be able to be like, all right, let’s go. I’m ready for it. One of the silver linings of the pandemic is that it has created an opportunity to massive change to almost… slip in.
Now I’m thinking about the future. I’m not thinking about things going back to normal — I’m thinking about the new future. How this important work that we’ve done in the last year sets us up for the change we needed even before the pandemic. We’re not trying to go back. We’re looking forward at the horizon. So I’m excited for that because I want to do things differently. I’m coming into my advocacy around building an actively anti-racist organization and implementing indigenous practices and systems at SEEDS.
“We’re freedom dreaming as a practice, as a constant practice…We freedom dream about not just living wages for all of our team members but thriving wages, having jobs that help us create impact with the gifts we have and take care of ourselves. We freedom dream about SEEDS being a community center and a healing center, because food is medicine. We freedom dream about youth development, especially for our high school students, who we believe can have much more control over their education and what their work outside of school looks like… We dream about being truly community rooted as an organization.”
Kristine: Paint a picture of the new future you are envisioning. What does that look like at SEEDS?
Cecilia: We’re freedom dreaming as a practice, as a constant practice. We DREAM about our goals and we tie our own personal health and organizational health into our community health. The future looks like the organization doing well, and each of my colleagues doing well. We freedom dream about not just living wages for all of our team members but thriving wages, having jobs that help us create impact with the gifts we have and take care of ourselves. We freedom dream about SEEDS being a community center and a healing center, because food is medicine. We freedom dream about youth development, especially for our high school students, who we believe can have much more control over their education and what their work outside of school looks like. We dream about work as an education tool for youth — youth farming and harvesting food and putting it into our food distribution program and having the youth make decisions all of the way down that production line. We dream about being truly community rooted as an organization.
SEEDS is down the street from my house in the neighborhood and community that I grew up in. SEEDS is very much a stronghold in my neighborhood and in the Durham community. That is a big responsibility and a privilege. We own the building where we work and we own our land. We have to be stewards of the land and acknowledge that this land has been inhabited and cared for by the Saponi nation for far longer than by us. We have to be in a practice of remembering. We do a lot of brainstorming and innovating, but our future is also about returning to and remembering the systems that helped us thrive together in the first place. I think a piece that is missing is our connection to elders, for me, to the diaspora. We’ve been disconnected from these larger communities that gave us a sense of shared interest in our shared success.
Kristine: How can people support you right now?
Cecilia: Stay in touch with us. Sign up for our newsletter. Follow us on social media, where you’ll find information on how to donate. We appreciate when people sign up to be monthly donors for an amount that is significant to them. We’re also going to be calling people into the space more. We want community involvement, we want community input. Now is the perfect time to get involved with SEEDS — we’re trying to create the future together.
Parents, families, grandparents, children, whatever your unit looks like, we want everyone to be a part of what SEEDS can be. We want to share information about the transformation we’ve been a part of too — we don’t want to hold onto information. Reach out and talk to us. Reach out and ask about herbal remedies or nutrition. We love that.
