Reflecting on our first 10 years, part 1: Following the lead of movements
2020 has been a turbulent year, to say the least. A global pandemic and its resulting economic fallout for people of color, historic uprisings for Black liberation, and severe climate disruption evidenced by massive wildfires and hurricanes have all exposed the failure of the extractive, capitalist economic system. This week’s devastating news about the police killing of Breonna Taylor, that there will be no charges against the police officers for her murder, is yet another egregious reminder of the entrenched forces of white supremacy and anti-Blackness on which American capitalism relies. These events are requiring us to imagine how to radically restructure our economy into one that prioritizes the health and well being of all people and the planet over the wealth and power of a few.
This year also marks Justice Funders’ 10-year anniversary as an organization that has always had a different vision for philanthropy than what most others thought was possible. And in this moment of both crisis and opportunity, we are beginning to see some hopeful shifts in the field as individuals and institutions with wealth are reckoning with the ways in which philanthropic practices have contributed to and exacerbated the systemic injustices that grant dollars seek to address. At long last, philanthropy is coming to terms with the need to act much more boldly and intentionally if we are to have any chance of addressing the scale of crises our communities are facing.
In celebration of our anniversary, we are excited to share a series of reflections about our impacts and contributions over the past decade, including insights from our members, our movement partners and our philanthropic allies who have journeyed alongside us to push for and actualize the changes in our field that we are seeing today. We are deeply grateful to those in our community who participated in interviews this spring and summer about the work we have done together to usher a Just Transition for philanthropy, whose words we will share throughout our reflections to bring our stories of impact to life.
“What has been helpful about Justice Funders’ work is to sort of give us a more tangible sense of [a] world…in which private philanthropy doesn’t exist as we understand it. The path to the vision seems more real as the result of that work.” ~Philanthropic partner
Justice Funders first emerged as the Bay Area Justice Funders Network following the murder of Oscar Grant by BART police in 2009. A group of local funders sought to bring the philanthropic community together with frontline leaders to push philanthropy to be more responsive and accountable to grassroots, people of color-led movements advancing systemic change.
In partnership with our network of social justice funders, we spent our early years shifting institutional grantmaking practices toward ways that facilitate, rather than hinder, the work of movements. Through resources and programs like The Choir Book and the Harmony Initiative, we have worked with countless institutions to align grantmaking practices with social justice values and mobilize increased resources to social justice movements.
“[Justice Funders] has done a great job of showing models of good practice and inspiring other funders who aren’t quite there yet.” ~Philanthropic partner
From the beginning, Justice Funders had a clear vision of how we would operate differently than other philanthropic support organizations (PSOs). Rather than being in a role of serving philanthropy — and therefore serving those with wealth and institutional power — we understood our role to be one of organizing philanthropy to follow the lead of movements.
Our earliest manifestation of this stance was the formation of two Community and Funder Collaboratives to re-orient philanthropic resources to be aligned with local movement priorities in support of regional power-building. Over the course of 4 years, we partnered with local funders to align more than $1.5 million to two powerful civic engagement alliances, Bay Rising and Lift Up Contra Costa, comprised of frontline groups organizing for racial and economic justice. Through these collaboratives, we facilitated new levels of partnership, trust and coordination between grantmakers and community organizations whereby funders built new muscles for listening to and trusting the grassroots leaders who were best positioned to propose the most effective solutions for their communities.
“ JF is clear about who they are accountable to… I think that is important in their ability to help us as funders to work in alignment [with movements].” ~Philanthropic partner
In 2015, our movement partners began calling on Justice Funders to re-imagine our role in the philanthropic ecosystem toward supporting a field-wide transformation to align with the vision and values of Just Transition. Recognizing that grantmaking represents approximately 5% of philanthropic assets, we understood the need to harness the entirety of a foundation’s assets in order to make the level of intervention necessary to radically restructure our economy from one based in extraction, exploitation and the privatization of wealth and power to one rooted in cooperation, care and collective well-being.
In response to this call, Justice Funders underwent an organizational evolution in which we gained an even greater level of clarity about what our vision and strategy needed to be. We became clear that our North Star, as articulated in our Resonance Framework, was to fundamentally transform the way the field of philanthropy is constructed and how it operates to redistribute wealth, democratize power and shift economic control to communities.
When we consider the fact that philanthropic wealth has been accumulated through practices of extraction and exploitation — particularly of Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) communities — it becomes impossible to ignore that philanthropy has a moral obligation to reverse and repair centuries of harm by not only redistributing wealth to the communities from which that wealth was extracted, but to do so in a way that supports BIPOC communities in governing those resources for themselves. In accordance with this vision, our Maestra program is supporting philanthropic executives and trustees to guide their organizations through a Just Transition, shifting their practices away from extraction towards regeneration, and aligning practices with the values and needs of the communities they fund.
“I could not have imagined that I could be in philanthropy with anyone who was saying white people who control money should not be…JF brings a level of accountability and integrity…[and] brutal honesty about the right way to be in relationship with ridiculous wealth.” ~Philanthropic partner
The events of 2020 have encouraged us to take our programming to a new level of what one of our members calls “the courage, bravery, independence in taking a political position even if that means not all of its membership agree.“ As we mourned the loss of George Floyd and countless other Black lives murdered by racist police and vigilante violence, Justice Funders saw an opportunity for philanthropy to reckon with the ways in which the practices of our field have contributed to anti-Blackness. Over the summer, we held a 3-part series of online workshops exploring how philanthropy can abundantly resource, be in deeper alignment with, and have greater accountability to Black-led movements by applying a reparations framework to grantmaking and investment strategies.
We also published a series of Medium posts discussing topics such as philanthropy’s moral obligation to provide reparations for the centuries of harm our field has caused to BIPOC communities, how our field must support the unequivocal call by Black-led movements to defund the police, and how funders can relinquish enough power and control to support BIPOC communities in governing resources for themselves.
Throughout our first ten years, the Bay Area Justice Funders Network, and now Justice Funders has worked to follow the lead of movements to determine the direction of our work in philanthropy. Recognizing that the ways in which grassroots leaders are literally putting their bodies on the line for the sake of our democracy mirror the ground conditions following Oscar Grant’s murder by BART police, we understand that we in philanthropy must work much harder to respond to these moments of crisis with the same level of boldness and risk taking that our movements are demonstrating. Our collective path forward requires us to humbly listen to and follow the lead of the most courageous movements of our time. By being in right relationship with the communities who are building the path toward liberation, we can work together to usher in the deep, systems-level transformation of philanthropy that is necessary to advance a just and thriving world.
“We know that the field of philanthropy writ large is failing justice… $1.2 trillion in foundation assets in this country and the growth of those assets is a reflection of economic inequality. I think continuing to boldly push partners, peers and mainstream philanthropy to center justice movements and to have bold and honest and uncomfortable conversation is a huge contribution… Justice Funders and partners together have had a real impact; the number of people participating in [those] conversations has grown considerably.” ~Philanthropic partner
We invite you to read the following two posts in our 10th Anniversary series:
