However, the majority of prevention programs and policy have targeted teens, thus missing the adult window when African Americans typically start to smoke. Racial biasboth personal and institutional, conscious and unconsciouscreeps into all parts of the philanthropic and grantmaking process. Read more stories by Liz Dozier & Candice C. Jones. According to the Building Movement Projects Race to Lead report, leaders of color, on average, have smaller budgets to work with and are more likely to report they lack access to (and face challenges securing) financial support from a variety of funding sources than white leaders. make sense of changing conditions and improve infra-structure in their organizations. Mekha sits on a number of boards, including the Center for Economic Inclusion, the Minnesota Council on Foundations, and Shared Capital Cooperatives. For Echoing Green, we consider our own responsibilities as an early-stage funder. The challenge can be daunting, even for those with the best intentions. Prior to taking lead of the organization in 2002 she was a social entrepreneur herself receiving and Echoing Green Fellowship in 1992 to help launch a community-based mobile health unit in Boston. Many foundations have recognized, if belatedly, the inequities Roberts has experienced, and are having frank conversations about race and access. Previously, Baker spent 17 years at Pillsbury United Communities, pursuing bold strategies to address systemic inequities, and culminating her career there as president and CEO. What do we need to be doing differently so that the reality better matches our intentions and hopes? A definition that cares about the intentions of the abusers more than the harms of the abused is inherently racist, he argues. During the conversation, we opened up our intimate space to share our personal connection to the movement for Black lives, Black struggle, and Black joy. Abundance is a collaboration between three Chicago-area grant makers, Chicago Beyond, the Grand Victoria Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. But if you come to the same lake and half the fish are dead, then it makes more sense to analyze the lake. Barnes buildon Stevensons concept to urge grantmakers to move past the zero-contact grant application process and the feel-good stories of giving without seeing often told at homogenous cocktail hours, and strive to get to their boots on the ground, where they can clearly identify how current systemsand in some cases their own practicesare perpetuating injustices.. or continuing to otherwise browse this site, you agree to the use of cookies. And we are not alone. Working hyperlocally on the ground in the South and West sides of Chicago, the initiative was able to pinpoint the type and magnitude of support their communities needed, delivering $250,000 per week of basic necessities to families, and adjusting distribution as needs evolved. The authors argue for two big changes in the world of philanthropy. Still, what specifically is holding the sector back from realizing a more racially equitable reality? By Lauren Brathwaite Nonprofits are grappling with new questions about how to harness the scale of giving in support of the Black community by donors of color and funders dedicated to race-conscious giving to create changes in Black philanthropy's visibility and proliferation. Learn more about us. After all, his organization had been a grantee of the foundation for 25 years and part of the program officers portfolio for almost eight years. We even spoke to one respected up-and-comer who left the nonprofit world rather than accept the promotion to the leadership role of her organization because as a black woman she did not want the weight of being responsible for fundraising to rest on her shoulders. Yet he still found himself having to defend his organizations approach and its demonstrated success. He challenges our most common definition of racism which sees racist behaviors as the products of contaminated hearts and minds.. For many years, ABFE has been advocating for greater funding to Black communities. We connect donors to learning resources and ways to support community-led solutions. To achieve more equitable results, philanthropists also need to apply a race-based lens when considering what programs to support. When it comes to philanthropic funding the racial disparity is clear. The unrestricted net assets of the black-led organizations are 76% smaller than their white-led counterparts. But this change will require that philanthropy wrestle, not just with broad racial-inequities in the world, but with the unique field-based inequities we drive and are uniquely positioned to disrupt. Make sure your metrics are important to your grantees and not just to you. This goes beyond site visits and often requires funders to get out of their comfort zone. Subscribe today and get a full year of NPQ for just $59. It is not enough to be not a racist, he argues, you must also expose and eradicate racism wherever you encounter it. What Would an Economy That Loved Black People Look Like? During these conversations we found again and again that leaders of color are consistently hitting four barriers with their fundraising. This work will necessitate humility as we revisit the composition of our boards, how we articulate funding strategies, our processes around grantmaking and reporting, and consistently tracking who gets access to our resources. For Goff this focus is misplaced. She is on the Minnesota Council on Foundations board of directors and VoteRunLeads national advisory board. According to estimates in the . Black Collective Foundation MN, Joint Statement, accessed February 9, 2023, See adrienne maree brown, A Call to Attention Liberation: To Build Abundant Justice, Lets Focus on What Matters,. Abundance is not a pledge, but rather a . Public Welfare Foundation has narrowed and deepened investments in eight targeted locations to fund community-led ecosystems for justice reform. We remember protecting our blocks, homes, and businesses as White supremacists targeted our neighborhoods. May 4, 2020. We followed that initial call with a learning series that brought together people of great power in philanthropy to address anti-Blackness and work toward realizing racial justice in philanthropy. Based on what weve learned through our work and this research, were calling for two big changes in the world of philanthropy: Funders need to financially support more leaders of color, and funders need to pay more attention to race-conscious solutions. This involved asking philanthropic institutions to sign on to a bold and courageous joint statement that amounted to a public declaration of their commitment to racial justicein order to demonstrate solidarity with the movement and to inspire public accountability of institutional philanthropy, past, present, and future.1 This statement was shaped by a group of Black leaders and additional leaders of various cultures in the field of philanthropy. The murder of George Floyd by a police officer one in an unbroken string of unjust Black deaths at the hands of law enforcement has triggered an unprecedented national outpouring of grief, rage, and demands for change throughout the country. Living within our bodies and within our communities, while pushing one of the most powerful sectors in the worldphilanthropyto transform, took a toll on us. The text has been corrected. Repa Mekha has over 30 years of experience in community-based leadership, community capacity building, asset- and wealth-building strategies, organizational leadership and development, and systems change work. We invited guests to join an intimate conversation about what it meant to the three of us to live in a time of radical hope and despair. Interpersonal bias can manifest as mistrust and microaggressions, which inhibit relationship-building and emotionally burden leaders of color. How Philanthropy Can Support Black-led Change for the Long-term Dec. 14, 2020. We engaged with communities most impacted by racial injustice in the process of identifying our strategic direction, as we sought to better understand the opportunities and obstacles in Minnesotas funding ecosystem; identify strategic opportunities to have impact in combating anti-Blackness and realizing racial justice; and refine the goals and structure of the collective. What funders can do: Ultimately creating a portfolio with a more diverse set of grantees will require a rethinking of assumptions on the part of funders of what is worth funding and where solutions are found. In the middle of the uprising, the three of us, Repa Mekha, Chanda Smith Baker, and Lulete Mola, reached out to one another to consider how we could move the philanthropic sector beyond momentary sympathy into accountability, solidarity, and transformation. And many of the approaches just seem too broad and are trying to do too much.. Read more stories by Cheryl Dorsey, Peter Kim, Cora Daniels, Lyell Sakaue & Britt Savage. Leaders like Hassan are in every community, on the ground working every day in the same zip codes that have been most impacted by the pandemic and often reflect generations of systemic inequities. The work began immediately. A PHILANTHROPIC PARTNERSHIP FOR BLACK COMMUNITIES 3 ABFE: A Philanthropic Partnership for Black Communities (ABFE), recently conducted a study to learn how leaders of Black-led social change organizations in the United States and U.S. Still, we admit, creating racially equitable funding flows is hard work. The authors provide several examples of how foundations have done this. Chicago Beyond launched the Going Beyond initiative and the Backing the Fight Fund to reach and support Black and Brown communities during the pandemic and recent social movement. One foundation program officer who is trying to remedy this problem jokingly calls her efforts subversive philanthropy. She spends a great deal of time researching organizations and making cold-calls to their executive directors, especially smaller and newer community-based nonprofits which do not typically have access to the bigger foundations in her region. What funders can do: Diversifying sourcing pools is one way to move toward a more racially diverse portfolio of grantees. This month, that drip became a deluge, as the Covid-19 crisis and racial-justice uprisings led many foundation leaders to acknowledge the central importance of addressing inequity. Lyell Sakaue is a manager in the philanthropy practice at The Bridgespan Group. This collection of responses become almost a barrier unto itselfcall it an invisible fifth barrier. Hyperlocal Giving to Black-Led Nonprofits Cannot Simply Be a Trend. We found that leaders often adopt a set of strategies in response to repeated interactions with bias from the funding community, and that some of these responses can undermine their long-term success. Insights from "What Does It Mean to Be Black-Led? - Going Beyond I am on my own personal crusade, she says. 6, Copyright 2023 Stanford University. We each have to own the work of uncovering and addressing our own bias and proactively meet people where they are rather than expecting them to always come to us. The low levels of institutional philanthropic support for Black-led social change organizations and Black communities are blatantly apparent. Since its founding in 1987, it has supported 832 fellows.