Follow Up to “An Open Letter from BIPOC Leaders in Food & Agriculture to Food Systems Funders”
Dear W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and Walmart Foundation,
As the year comes to a close, we write to follow up on our communications this past summer.
In response to our Open Letter, you accepted our invitation to have a conversation to discuss the issues we raised in the letter. On August 4, 2020, representatives from each of your foundations met with the leaders of nearly all of the organizations that signed onto our letter.
On that call, we expressed gratitude to you for responding to our invitation to participate. The invitation was to radically reshape the role of your foundations, and the philanthropic sector as a whole, in order to align with our movements for food, land, racial, social, and climate justice. We shared several concrete examples of how our groups, because we are rooted in BIPOC leadership and communities, are already meeting this moment of immense pressure and change, even if we aren’t resourced enough to do it at the scale our communities need. We also communicated the specific harms associated with the approach of rapid assessments, scans, and other extractive methods of seeking out and granting funding that excluded BIPOC-led groups. We asked for your commitment to meet our demands and were told you needed more time to deliberate.
We write to you in response to the update you shared via email on August 11, 2020 that you have decided not to move forward with the joint COVID-19 Assessment RFP. We acknowledge and appreciate the gesture on your part to cancel the RFP, along with the commitment from Rockefeller Foundation to offer $150,000 in recognition of our labor in this process. These are resources that will, at least for now, not further the extraction of information, energy, and effort from BIPOC communities in service to the institutional desires of philanthropy instead of the needs of those communities. Finally, we offer this response in the spirit of continuing an honest and transparent dialogue about the necessary organizational change to advance justice.
We laid out a number of issues in our open letter, and as far as we can tell, there are a number of gestures that you, collectively and individually, did not make.
You did not redirect the funding allocated for the cancelled RFP to BIPOC-led coalitions, alliances, or organizations to support their current, on-the-ground COVID response work.
You did not restructure or rescind the grant to NCAT, a white-led, well-funded organization, for the national “scan.” You awarded that grant despite us sharing with you how NCAT would not be able to do the work without relying on the signatory organizations to this letter and other BIPOC-led groups. In fact, soon after our letter was published, NCAT reached out to every single signatory with a request to meet and discuss partnership and collaboration on the scan. We continue to receive requests for participation in this project.
You did not commit to supporting a compensated process for developing a funder network to engage in the necessary transformation of philanthropy so it can support, instead of hinder, our efforts to achieve racial, climate, and social justice within and beyond our food system.
Just taking action is not the same as taking just action.
We reiterate these unfulfilled issues from our initial letter to underscore our focus on both divesting from the status quo of white supremacy in philanthropy and reinvesting in BIPOC leadership, organizations, and communities. If you are on an escalator going the wrong direction, it is not enough to simply stop walking, you must turn around and take steps in the other direction.
In fact, many of your peers in philanthropy are taking those steps. In a companion letter also sent to you on August 4, 2020, representatives from several philanthropic institutions, including Globetrotter Foundation, Ceres Trust, and Surdna Foundation, among others, echoed our call for change and have themselves committed to reorient their own philosophy and philanthropic practices to align with the movements for justice. We encourage you to accept their invitation to engage with a network of peers who are also on a journey to dismantle the white supremacy and capitalist logic that underpins the philanthropic sector.
Our dialogue with you is not happening in a vacuum. The COVID-19 pandemic, as of today, has claimed the lives of nearly 300,000 people in the US. Adjusted for age, people of color are dying at disproportionate rates compared to white people. If they had died of COVID-19 at the same actual rate as White Americans, about 21,200 Black, 10,000 Latinx, 1,000 Indigenous, and 70 Pacific Islander Americans would still be alive. Beyond the global pandemic, the war on Black lives continues, climate disasters are causing intense disruption across much of the country, and the recent election tested the limits of the fragile and fraught democracy we are led to believe exists in the US. The signers of this letter are engaged in addressing each of these issues, many of us working on more than one, and we need your institutions to make a strong and unwavering commitment to boost our capacity, autonomy, and leadership to win.
In our opening circle on August 4, we each introduced ourselves by answering the question, “Who are you accountable to?” Representatives of your foundations acknowledged your accountability to grantees, to the communities you serve, and even to the wellbeing of all humanity now and in the future. In the spirit of living into and deepening this accountability, we ask you to consider and respond to the following questions, in a writing addressed to all of the letter signers, to help us understand what the future of our relationship holds and how we might move forward together:
What are your responses to what was laid out above and in our open letter?
Beyond canceling the RFP, what steps are your institutions, collectively or individually, committing to take to meet the movement at this moment? Specifically, how are you cultivating authentic partnership with BIPOC communities, ending inequitable grantmaking strategies, redirecting multi-year, unrestricted funding from white-led groups to BIPOC-led organizations, and examining your own endowment investments and funding trends?
What steps have you taken to respond to the call from your peers in their August 4 letter inviting you to a co-learning journey within philanthropy?
We look forward to, and would appreciate, a response by January 8, 2021 to these questions to learn what tangible steps might soon emerge from this ongoing conversation.
Sincerely,
Navina Khanna HEAL Food Alliance
Anthony Chang Kitchen Table Advisors
Dara Cooper National Black Food & Justice Alliance
Helga Garza Agri-cultura Network
Patricia Carrillo Agriculture Land-Based Association
Shakara Tyler Black Dirt Farm Collective
Stephanie Morningstar Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust
Mark Winston Griffith Brooklyn Movement Center
Krysten Aguilar & Cristina Dominguez La Semilla Food Center
Mai Nguyen & Neil Thapar Minnow
Edna Rodriguez RAFI-USA
Anim Steel Real Food Generation
Philip & Dorathy Barker Operation Spring Plant
Kirtrina Baxter Soil Generation
Leah Penniman & Larisa Jacobson Soul Fire Farm
