(Illustration by Stuart McReath)
We are living in messy times. The impact of a frail democracy and fissured economy is that day-to-day living for far too many people in the United States is desperate and dire, while a handful of plutocrats, willing to game these political and economic systems, are lining their pockets to consolidate wealth, power, and political influence. Philanthropy is implicated in the creation of these realities. I say this as the leader of a national foundation, but one that came in eager to reform the work and ways of philanthropists, in and outside of my own institution. Many of us are seeking to make sense of our role in disentangling the relationship between wealth and power, redistributing resources for the fights for justice ahead, and repairing generations of harm caused by the institutions we now lead. As I continue to make sense of this for myself, I’m reminded that the fight for justice is always unbalanced. And so, as I think about what should be next for philanthropy, at Marguerite Casey Foundation and across the sector, I would suggest we hyper-focus on doing what we do at our best: moving money to create a more even terrain for organizers, activists, and scholars to fight for a representative multiracial democracy, just economy, and a planet that is treated as sacred.
I think the messiness of our times has distracted us from and confused many of us about what we do best as philanthropists. The last two years created an opening for us to reflect on past practices, engage new leaders, and publically name the winners of our current political and economic systems. It was an opening that many ran through, others peeped through, and some turned their backs on. The incongruent ways philanthropic leaders approached the pandemic, racial uprisings, and ensuing economic precarity led to many of us using the same words with wildly different definitions, approaches, and actions. This creates tension and has the power to undermine our collective impact in a number of ways.
First, let’s look at the many ways the word “equity” has been defined in our sector. Foundations and donors used this word to describe everything from the redistribution of money to those most directly impacted by racial capitalism and defunding the police, to the hiring of one leader of color in an otherwise all-white institution, to launching a coding program focused on getting more people of color into tech. This lack of clarity has resulted in many more of us talking about equity while far less of us are living it. As I once heard a leader in our sector note: “All actions in the name of equity are not equal in their outcomes.” Again, this is a messy time, but that does not mean we get to abdicate our responsibility to create collective clarity by grappling with these different definitions in service of supporting leaders and communities seeking to transform the systems that are causing them harm.
Second is confusion about what our role and function are in the movement for justice. Philanthropy work is not frontline work. We are one small input into what sustains movement organizations: money. Our job is ultimately to fund, not to fight. But I think that there’s growing confusion in our business about the role foundations, donor advisors, donors, and funders should play in movements for justice. Philanthropy and movements are different things. Related, but very different. Most people who work at or for philanthropic organizations earn multiples more than most people who live in the United States. They have access to benefits and workplace conditions that the vast majority of working people cannot begin to imagine. I am concerned that by situating foundations within racial and economic justice movements, we are fundamentally abdicating the responsibility to name the privilege of our role, to state the conflicting commitment many of us hold in challenging racial capitalism yet working within institutions or relationships that are their most pernicious byproduct. And, perhaps most importantly, that in centering ourselves we lose sight of our actual job and role in movements for justice, which is to listen to their leaders and to give them the money they need to do what movements are supposed to do, which is to move—we hope in the direction of a country that looks vastly more like the one we want than the one we have. Our job is not to fight. It’s to listen and to fund. We cannot lose sight of this or we run the risk of creating philanthropic teams that are orders of magnitude larger than the very organizations and movements we fund.
The third incongruency I would offer for consideration can be found in our discussions and approaches to race within our institutions and across the field. Simply put, our inability to understand how race, class, and gender are lived has resulted in many of us talking about racial justice and equity while privileging those people with the greatest proximity to power, platforms, and resources in our field. Professor Olúfémi O. Táíwò aptly describes this as the “politics of deference” when it comes to our discussions and approaches to race within our institutions and across the field. The politics of deference “means just following the lead of whoever in the room seems most oppressed… this approach entails abandoning one’s own responsibility to articulate a point of view and help figure out political problems… It places an absurd burden on people to expect that their pain will be magically transformed into an unassailable political strategy.” By funding, hiring, and elevating the same one or two Black, Latinx, Native, or Asian authors, influencers, or activists and calling this redistribution or reparations, we undermine the legitimacy of the fight against white supremacy and racialized capitalism.
There is another pernicious side effect to the politics of deference: the conflating of whiteness with white supremacy. The result being that we are uncomfortable with and unable to engage the ways in which white supremacy has had devastating impacts on the lives of poor white people. We have been unable to engage with class and gender as meaningful influencers for how we live our lives. Nowhere is this dysfunction more apparent than in the rigid dogma and social media policing that is being used in the name of racial and economic justice work. Our inability to grapple and engage with difference has created a vacuum where a person with hundreds of Twitter followers can paralyze a person with 30 years of organizing experience and where doxing is the natural outcome of disagreement, which in turn makes the universe of solutions so much smaller at our collective expense. It has also made it difficult for us to meaningfully contend with the reality that a country for all of us truly means ALL OF US. I come from a tradition of engaging different ideas, approaches, and beliefs as a way to deepen understanding, sharpen my perspective, and hold the contradictions of my own convictions. I worry that many of us are turning our backs on this way of approaching difference and disagreement at the peril of our own dreams. I want to state clearly that we cannot have a multiracial democracy without supporting multiracial leaders and this includes supporting our white brothers and sisters. Philanthropy needs to be better equipped to engage in the complex ways that race, class, and gender come together to create access for some and exclusion for others.
I believe that we can do this and that we can take other steps toward creating bigger, better, and more even terrain for the incredible leaders we invest in. A few shifts already in motion give me hope.
The first shift is “how” our work has radically changed in the last two years. A sector that was once dominated by burdensome applications, the unrealistic expectations of the $25,000 grant that would transform society, and a desire for attribution has let these practices go in service of greater ease, transparency, and relationship. Strategic philanthropy is being abandoned for trust-based philanthropy. Many philanthropic leaders are openly interrogating the norms within their institutions that have hindered movements for racial and economic justice. Multi-year general operating support, shorter applications, and reports collected through interaction and relationship are now more commonplace practices. These shifts in how we do our work are making it possible for many leaders to lead as opposed to solely spending their time and gifts fundraising.
The next shift is the honest ways that many institutions are openly supporting the world of ideas. For a long time, philanthropy has narrated itself as a benevolent force without ideological commitments. Lots of billionaires and billion-dollar institutions were just “trying things to make the world better” without clearly articulating the ways they were putting their fingers—or better yet, entire hands—on the scale for specific ideological projects with political, economic, and social consequences. Two places where this has been felt is in the privatization of public schools and the bolstering of police forces with philanthropic resources. It has been a relief to see a handful of funders explicitly name the ways their institutions are supporting non-partisan ideological projects. For example, in both Marguerite Casey Foundation's Freedom Scholar awards and Hewlett Foundation's Economy and Society Initiative, our institutions are funding and advancing ideas toward a vision of the world we believe is possible.
The last shift is the situational awareness of philanthropy within our current political and economic moment. Our democracy has been on the brink for nearly a decade and our economy has not met the needs of working people for generations. The threat of authoritarianism, greater visibility of white supremacy, and plutocratic political norms are real and so many philanthropic institutions are naming and engaging them in their work. Institutions that were once frozen due to fear of being perceived as too political or partisan are clear that turning a blind eye to these realities will not make them go away.
While many of our institutions are approaching these conditions in different ways and with different beliefs, many of us know that, for our work to be effective, certain conditions need to be in place. There must be rules in place that give people a chance to compete against the current limited forms of influencing government which currently prioritize the wealthy. There must be safety for leaders and their organizations and we cannot accept their being constantly under attack and debilitated legally, technologically, physically, or reputationally. There must be wide-scale public consent, endorsement, and support for liberal protest. And there must be a widespread belief in the sanctity of protest—specifically, the support of protest leaders who are fighting for social change.
I don’t believe the endeavor of working for a better, more liberated future has ever been neat. Social change work, freedom work, invites us to bring the wholeness of who we are to everything we do, and that, my friends, is often messy, meandering, and always evolving. I hope the last three years of harm and pain act as reminders of the urgency, opportunities for greater grace and care, and invitations to engage in the hard but necessary work which lies ahead.
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