Syed, I’m so excited to have this conversation with you! To get started, can you share with folks a bit about who you are, what you do, and what brought you to your work?

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In conversation with...

Thanks so much for including me in The Magic Word, Lucy! I absolutely love what you’re doing with Studio Magic Hour. I’ve always found your work and perspective inspiring, so The Magic Word has been a wonderful chance to tap back into your mind.

My name is Syed and I’m allergic to wearing only one hat at a time. I’m trained as an urban planner, work for a philanthropic foundation, and spend nights and weekends on political organizing. Through all of these levers, I’m fundamentally interested in one goal: working towards a future in which where one lives does not determine one’s health and wealth.

I was born and raised in New York City, the child of immigrants from Bangladesh in the Bronx. That shapes everything I do today. The food apartheid whose roots crack through the sidewalks of the city brought me to FoodCorps, where you and I worked together to connect kids to healthy food in school. The segregation of the city and its resources brought me to urban planning, a discipline through which I could unravel how the Bronx became the poster place of planned shrinkage and municipal disinvestment. The rich landscape of community organizations and long tradition of activism across the city helped inspire me to go into philanthropy, through which I could support that work.

Syed Ali

You’re dedicated to using urban planning, organizing, and philanthropy to advance health equity. What role do partnerships play in your work?

Partnerships are central to my work.

As an urban planning consultant, partnerships meant many things. There are formal partnerships in this context: contracts with clients and subconsultants. That might look like working with architects, community engagement specialists, or issue experts to articulate a new vision for a place or program. Bigger picture, the most critical partner is the least formal and defined: the community. The most difficult challenge is to understand how to identify—with an equity lens—who you need to serve and how to elevate them. That could mean giving a values-anchored, community-based organization a formal role on the project team. It could mean contracting with a local firm. It could mean developing a group of key stakeholders who can hold you and your client accountable.

In my political organizing, co-governance is the animating vision. The New York Working Families Party, for which I’m a Brooklyn chapter leader and State Committee member, is fundamentally a coalition. We have an incredibly skilled and strategic staff, but we also have affiliate organizations with shared values, and members we directly mobilize through local chapters. When we endorse a candidate, our process forces us to reconcile differences in approach and policy priority. After we endorse, that means working hand in hand with campaigns to help them speak to the people they need to. After they win, that means us offering specific guidance and assistance to elected officials but also them coming to us for grassroots perspective and helping to build the progressive movement with us.

In my philanthropic work, we actually have begun shifting away from word partnerships to describe how we relate to our grantees. Instead, we prefer to say we are walking alongside our grantees. The term comes from our unique perspective within a church. We do this in three ways: (1) offering technical assistance programs that build the capacities of the grantee organizations; (2) convening people and offering them space to convene others; and (3) using our institutional voice to champion the causes of our grantees. That’s not all, though. It’s clear we have the greatest impact by working in coalition. We developed a coalition of faith leaders to call for a more just reentry for New Yorkers leaving the city’s jails, we pool funds and share strategies with other philanthropic foundations to make our money go further, and we work closely with government officials and agencies to help shape public policy.

Sometimes partnerships don’t play out as you expect them to, or they can change over time in ways that no longer serve a shared mission. How can you navigate those changes when both organizations will continue to work alongside one another?

I don’t think most partnerships are meant to last forever. In the same way that we negotiate the terms when forming partnerships, it’s probably healthiest when we negotiate the terms of ending partnerships. That’s easier said than done, but might be best in the long run for each of the partners.

As with role clarity within a partnership, discussing the distinct lanes that the organizations will occupy moving forward can be helpful. If all of the organizations try to occupy the full lane, someone’s going to get hurt. In social justice work, it always feels like there’s more than enough work to do. 

Where can folks go if they want to learn more about you and your work?

Folks can learn more about me on my website, at syedali.nyc. I’d also welcome the Studio Magic Hour community to stay in touch via social media. I’m @SyedAAli on Twitter, @SyedAgmalAli on Instagram, and am also around on LinkedIn. I’d love to hear about your most complicated partnerships and what advice you have for growing them.”

From your perspective, what do authentic and impactful partnerships look like? 

Authentic and impactful partnerships require some of the same things our life partners, friends, and teams at work require. 

Fundamentally, partnerships require honesty. That’s the foundation for the trust we leverage as we collaborate. It’s always better to have clear communication about the facts and your (organization’s) shortcomings, because it often prevents trouble down the road. We also have to be honest in acknowledging power dynamics. There are power dynamics in the relationships between organizations—how much money you’re contributing, how early you came into a collaboration, who you’re connected to—and there are of course power dynamics between the individual people who serve as points of contact. 

Effective partnerships also require compromise. It’s likely not a deep or compelling partnership if you don’t have to change the way you work at all. All of us have preferences and all of our organizations have policies, but there’s usually some bending required to fit the pieces together. It can be in something as simple as when and where one organization is allowed to use the other’s logo, or developed shared language on how you describe the partnership.

Partnerships also require balancing shared and distinct identities. The legal definition of partnership implies liability for each others’ actions. It means shared ownership and responsibility, particularly when things go wrong. In a good partnership, hopefully all of the parties involved feel confident defending each other. On the other hand, you should be able to defend your organizations’ distinct north stars to each other. At FoodCorps, our north star was healthy food. For our community partners, it could be agriculture, sustainability, or education. At the end of the day, the crossing of those distinct north stars was a strength. 

[Image description: Syed is smiling while wearing a gray jacket and white t-shirt. He is in front of a canal, two boats, and colorful row houses.]