Resourcing Equity & Justice
Written by Mariela Cedeño & Adriana Abizadeh
Authors note: In this article, you will see the use of collective terms: ‘us’, ‘we’, and ‘our’. By that, we mean Black, Indigenous, and people of color; we mean social, racial, and economic justice advocates; we mean historically marginalized and disinvested communities; we mean us, we, and our.
As women of color, we are constantly navigating how to access resources for our communities, our neighborhoods, our organizations, our projects, and our families. The work we lead requires that we engage in spaces that often make us uncomfortable; we are obliged to ask wealth holders for resources, knowing well that that wealth was built through centuries of extraction — of land, labor, and resources — from people who look like us. This collectively created but individually controlled wealth leaves our communities at the mercy of their assessment of our potential worthiness, impact, and the returns of our efforts.
And while this has been the status quo for more than a century, a recent focus on equity and justice within philanthropy felt like an opportunity for change. Moreover, because these principles are central to our work, we have long wanted to see them operationalized in the stewardship and distribution of resources. Instead, we are witnessing a doubling down on the existing paradigm: grantmakers with growing endowments continue to believe they know what’s best for us, ‘mission-based’ lenders receiving public dollars¹ to invest in our neighborhoods continue to build systems that prevent resources from reaching our communities and impact investment evangelists have convinced the world that they can do good, feel good, and “achieve at market or above-market returns”². The use of equity and justice language, without an acknowledgment of how wealth was created and continues to be accumulated, has not meaningfully changed our experience navigating this system, nor will it lead to more or better capital becoming available to us. Instead, it highlights what we have been shouting for decades — justice and equity require that entrenched systems be fundamentally transformed.
‘American philanthropy is a creature of capitalism’³, we want to change that
In a sector deeply rooted in capitalist principles, it can be difficult to explain that our goals are not formed around opportunities that will yield the highest return or preserve wealth built on the backs of others. Instead, our collective work is to direct meaningful investments into efforts developed by and for impacted and marginalized communities. This will require radical change from those who can afford it; it means that wealth holders — be that philanthropy, investors, lenders, or individuals — need to relinquish power over our wealth, value our contributions and models, and acknowledge that our communities know what they need. We need resources and investments that match our needs, and we need space to test, fail, iterate, and grow. We need to move beyond charity, look beyond access, and work towards self-determination, collective resource stewardship, and reparations.
While it is unlikely that those who created, maintained, and benefited from these systems will willingly change them, we hope that we can begin to steward this transformation by pressing wealthholders to examine the (mis)alignment between their stated values and the way they allocate resources. Concurrently, we are building our own community-rooted models⁴ of resource redistribution and investment that center on the needs and solutions of impacted and marginalized communities. This space is where we see the most potential — even when we are forced to work in a system that resists change, our collective work is full of examples of how capital and power can be shifted in ways that support collective power and interconnectedness, recognize community knowledge and lived experience, and catalyze new models for shared ownership and economic opportunity.
Collective Stewardship of Funds by Black, Indigenous, and People of Color
Women and people of color-led firms manage ~1% of the total assets in the United States⁵, a disparity partially driven by the perception that those more tenured in the sector are more capable of managing resources and mitigating market risks. Not surprisingly these ‘more seasoned’ wealth managers are primarily white⁶. Digging a bit deeper, this relationship between wealth and who manages it is reflective of wealth inequality in the country as a whole: 86% of wealth is held by white households⁷, and the top 1% holds more wealth than the entire working class⁸. In philanthropy, 82% of foundation board leadership⁹, 92% of foundation presidents, and 83% of foundation staff members are white¹⁰. It is this leadership makeup that decides how racial equity and justice show up in grant-making and investing and evaluates¹¹ whether or not our work has an impact. And while there is little to no evidence that philanthropy has made significant or lasting change in our communities (in fact, the racial wealth gap has widened over the last 160 years), we are still obliged to prove ourselves to them.
Imagine if instead of centering the people, tools, and systems that have extracted and kept resources from us, we centered leaders with lived experience in and with the communities we want to thrive? What would happen if we resourced community-led strategies quickly, nimbly, and fully? What innovations would surface if decision-making and resource stewardship were ceded to Black, Indigenous, and POC-led groups directly accountable to the communities they serve?
A growing field of innovative funds has emerged that are building the future we want to see. These emerging funds are advancing collaborative efforts of shared resources, governance, and knowledge. By centering people, they are building an expanding collective ecosystem that is modeling how racial equity and justice can be infused into the stewardship of capital:
- California Tribal Fund: steered by California tribal leaders and cultural practitioners, the fund supports California-Native-led nonprofits and tribal programs working to steward and protect their food systems, water, languages, traditional ecological knowledge, and land.
- EFOD Fund [Equitable Food Oriented Development Fund]: is modeling an alternative form of finance for community-led, justice-first, food-based community economic development, centering BIPOC leaders as designers and decision-makers.
- Black Farmer Fund: provides capital built around individual needs to black farmers and black food businesses across the Northeast and centers black farmers, business owners, and land stewards in funding decisions through collective decision-making.
- LIFE Collaborative [Liberating Investment in Food and Farm Ecosystem]: established by BIPOC-led organizations after publishing an Open Letter to funders that called for more just ways of giving, the LIFE Collaborative collectively stewards resources focused on food, farming, and land justice.
These and many other BIPOC-led and collaboratively governed funds not only hold equity and justice as central values in the redistribution of resources, but they also have a deeper capacity to build holistic trust-based relationships, while holding systems that have not worked for us accountable. They are also more willing and capable of supporting community-led work perceived as risky in conventional funding spaces because the risk of not supporting greatly outweighs the potential monetary loss. Though we have yet to see institutional philanthropy and mainstream impact investors fully support this growing field, we are seeing more values-aligned individuals, family offices, and progressive program officers become advocates for change within wealth-holding institutions. While we are feeling hopeful, we are clear that showing up for equity and justice means relinquishing power and capital fully to collective and BIPOC-led stewardship. This is the space where we’re waiting for you to meet us, we hope to see you here.
¹ “Investing in Opportunity: Fiscal Year 2016 Year in Review,” CDFI Fund, 2017, https://www.cdfifund.gov/sites/cdfi/files/documents/cdfi_7554_yearinreview_2016_final_web-020617.pdf.
² Bianca Barragan, “Impact Investors Want You to Know They Make Money, Too,” Bisnow, May 23, 2022, Bianca Barragan, “Impact Investors Want You to Know They Make Money, Too,” Bisnow, May 23, 2022, https://www.bisnow.com/national/news/commercial-real-estate/bisnow-national-capital-markets-and-cre-finance-conference-2022-113136?utm_source=outbound_pub_6&utm_campaign=outbound_issue_57958&utm_content=outbound_link_1&utm_medium=email.
³ Aaron Horvath, “History And Challenges Of American Philanthropy Primer,” accessed September 20, 2022, Aaron Horvath, “History And Challenges Of American Philanthropy Primer,” accessed September 20, 2022, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5dd0aafe5830f30487d7fe68/t/5f61155521c880777a117881/1600197979012/HorvathA-2020-History+and+Challenges+of+American+Philanthropy+-+A+Primer.pdf.
⁴ Camryn Smith, “Community Rooted Organizations,” ed. Niasha A. Fray, Communities In Partnership, accessed September 20, 2022, https://communitiesinpartnership.org/who-we-are.
⁵ Knight Foundation. Knight Diversity of Asset Managers Research Series. https://knightfoundation.org/topics/diverse-asset-managers/
⁶ Belinda Luscombe, “How Hedge Funds’ Lack of Diversity Affects All of Us” (Time, January 5, 2022), https://time.com/6132594/hedged-out-book-hedge-fund-inequality/#:~:text=A%20recent%20Knight%20Foundation%20study,of%20the%20more%20diverse%20firms.
⁷ Federal Reserve. Wealth Inequality and the Racial Wealth Gap. Top 1% Of U.S. Households Hold 15 Times More Wealth Than Bottom 50% Combined. https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/wealth-inequality-and-the-racial-wealth-gap-20211022.html
⁸ Alexandre Tanzi and Mike Dorning, “Top 1% of U.S. Earners Now Hold More Wealth Than All of the Middle Class”. October 8th, 2021. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-08/top-1-earners-hold-more-wealth-than-the-u-s-middle-class#xj4y7vzkg
⁹ Jamal Kareem and George Suttles, “Diversifying Foundation Boards,” Turning Intent to Action, December 7, 2021. https://www.commonfund.org/research-center/articles/turning-intent-to-action-diversifying-foundation-boards.
¹⁰ New York Times. In Philanthropy, Race Is Still a Factor in Who Gets What, Study Shows. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/01/your-money/philanthropy-race.html#:~:text=The%20study%20noted%20that%2092,time%20staff%20members%20are%20white.
¹¹Aaron Horvath, “History And Challenges Of American Philanthropy Primer,” accessed September 20, 2022, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5dd0aafe5830f30487d7fe68/t/5f61155521c880777a117881/1600197979012/HorvathA-2020-History+and+Challenges+of+American+Philanthropy+-+A+Primer.pdf.