The F Word: Shouting About Failure
By: Zaineb Mohammed, Director of Communications
Every time a newsletter floats into my inbox titled “CORRECTION” I think to myself smugly: couldn’t be me! Not this comms director.
I proofread. I triple check my links. I was a fact checker in my past life as a journalist.
Pride comes before the fall.
It’s Monday morning and I’m scrolling through my inbox when I see it: “Copy right matters re September newsletter.” “I am contacting you regarding the use of cbabi bayoc’s artwork in The Kataly Foundation’s recent newletter.” “…the artist was neither credited nor acknowledged for the artwork.”
To say it plainly: this was a major failure, for me, and for Kataly. I used a photo of a mural created by cbabi bayoc, a Black visual artist, illustrator, and muralist 1) without reaching out to him and his partner amber l. howlett-bayoc for permission, and 2) without crediting him for his work.
The mural is one cbabi created as part of several mural installations through his and amber’s partnership with Foot Soldier’s Park in Selma, Alabama.
I used the photo of the mural to accompany a grant announcement about our Solidarity and Resilience fund. I was looking through photos from a trip our team took to Montgomery and Selma, Alabama earlier in 2025 as part of a political education journey, and I saw an image of a mural that said “good trouble” and quoted part of MLK Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham jail. I thought the message had resonance with the fund so I used it in the grant announcement and the email to our list, credited our photographer, and went about my day.
Until I got amber’s email, It hadn’t even occurred to me to try to identify or contact the artist of the mural, a fact which increases my shame about this incident exponentially.
In the email amber sent about this breach, she and cbabi were incredibly gracious. While she was clear that the copyright belonged to cbabi and that we needed a licensing agreement to use the photo, she offered the opportunity to chat about corrective measures, and to explore new opportunities for collaboration. She also named that the path to being a Black artist has not been easy and that they needed to diligently safeguard cbabi’s work.
cbabi and amber’s generosity in their email about our transgression ultimately made it much easier to process and talk about this mistake, and to write about it for this series. They gave us space to apologize, and left open the possibility that we could find a way to collaborate. That openness resulted in an ongoing partnership: cbabi and amber worked with us to design some apparel for Kataly that’s truly beautiful.
But I have to be honest. When I first saw amber’s email, I wasn’t thinking about the relationship we could build or even the impact my failure had; I was concerned about myself. The thoughts running through my head: I have to tell Nwamaka (my boss and Kataly’s CEO) I made this mistake and she won’t trust my judgement anymore; I’ll have to issue a correction and then my whole team (and everyone else on our email list) will know I messed up.
This is what happens when we attach social stigma to failure. My concern was less about the impact of the failure itself, and more about how failing would impact my reputation and credibility.
These types of failures also make us question how we perceive ourselves. I prided myself on being rigorous, diligent, and thoughtful. But in this instance, I had been none of those things. What did that mean about me? I wondered: would my team no longer find me trustworthy? Would it affect how our grantees viewed us?
When I make a mistake, I often vacillate between two extremes: self-flagellation and total detachment. It’s very hard for me to sit with the discomfort of failure without beating myself up, or retreating into a position where I tell myself it doesn’t matter that I messed up.
How do we find the middle ground? I think the only way that failure doesn’t feel catastrophic is if we do it — and talk about it — a lot more.
My co-worker Iris Garcia, Program Officer for our Mindfulness and Healing Justice program, shared an insight about failure in her conversation with our Grants Officer, Danielle Royston-Lopez, that has been staying with me: “to avoid failure, the safest thing to do is just to stay completely still.”
I think about all the times I’ve avoided a task, a project, an ambition because I didn’t want to fail. How embarrassing, to try something and not succeed. What if other people found out?
But there is actually something to be said for people finding out. When I talk about my failure publicly, failing feels much less scary. Maybe it’s a type of exposure therapy. If what I fear most is that people will find out about my mistakes, shouting about them from the rooftops is one way to disarm that fear.
And so, here is the Kataly Foundation’s second experiment with sharing stories about failure.
In 2022, Kataly launched our first failure blog series: a series of blog posts written by staff members about our failures as a foundation. Topics ranged from ways we failed in our communication to grantees, failures to manage expectations, how failure and power intersect, and more.
This time around, we’re inviting others in the philanthropic sector to join us in this exercise in vulnerability and honesty.
As we experience an alarming resurgence of fascism and targeting of social movements, as well as progressive philanthropy, sharing stories about our failures may seem counterintuitive. Isn’t this the time to appear above reproach?
But despite our instinct to fake it til we make it, sharing how we’ve failed is actually a more powerful path forward. For one, if we share our mistakes out in the open, there’s a higher chance someone else won’t repeat them. It’s also the best way of convincing others to take a risk. If we are all caught up in the pressure of being a “model funder” and an exemplar to the field, we are going to try to avoid failure. And when we try to avoid failure, we don’t try things that could actually be our wildest successes.
So our invitation to philanthropy is to join us in sharing your failure stories publicly. Together, we can show that the scariest thing is not failure — it’s inaction.
Watch the teaser for the series here, and stay tuned for more failure stories from philanthropy.
If you would like to contribute to this series, please reach out to zaineb@kataly.org.
