Philanthropy has long been a topic of debate, and its problematic aspects have been revealed to me slowly but effectively. Whether it’s the fact that rich people are simply picking and choosing to put their donations into only the few places they deem worthy of help, or that much of the money that gets donated doesn’t actually make it to anyone in need, there is a vast agreement that our system of philanthropy in America is all jacked up.
I’ve been thinking about adding a spotlight element to the blog since I started it. Every day in my research I learn about inspiring organizations and come across so many websites with clearly passionate people behind them. I take them in for a little while, clicking and reading through the links, letting them feed me, before tucking them into the bookmark folder.
I want to talk about one of these organizations that embodies a solution to this philanthropic mess. The Decolonizing Wealth Project (decolonizingwealth.com) is an anti-colonial model for how we might arrange our society, especially regarding monetary donations. Founded in 2018 by Edgar Villanueva, author of Decolonizing Wealth (2018, 2021), he and an experienced team work in three main areas to create economic justice, “collectively healing the wounds of colonialism and white supremacy by using money as medicine to shape an equitable future.” (https://www.edgarvillanueva.net/)
Philanthropic Practice
Decolonizing Wealth works with grantee partners made up of Indigenous, Black and other people-of-color led initiatives working for transformative social change. One of these partners (of hundreds) is Reparations Summer: a call for white people to organize, move resources, and mobilize networks to move resources “every Juneteenth until this collective mass mobilization is more than enough to seed the autonomous infrastructure we need.”
As Akua Dierdre Smith of Reparations Summer said, “We are not asking people to answer for their ancestors’ crimes, we are asking them to stop upholding the structures their ancestors created and to stop hoarding the wealth our ancestors created."
The way we do this is through a program created by the Decolonizing Wealth Project called Liberated Capital. Liberated Capital moves money through a reparations model that trusts and supports the leadership of those most impacted by historical and systemic racism. It’s “a donor community and funding vehicle aimed at moving untethered resources to Black, Indigenous and other people-of-color communities for liberation and racial healing.”
It’s important to me that I learn and own my relationship to money. In a time when so many donors feel that their donations aren’t doing enough good, Liberated Capital helps me see that my donation is. They work with their partners to get the money quickly into the hands of those who understand the needs of the communities who have been harmed the most by institutional racism, decentralizing power from corporations and millionaires and billionaires. It’s definitely a community worth joining. Donate here.
Racial Healing
This is a tough topic for a lot of white people, and with that, it is an area that deserves a lot of attention. When talking about abolition we can’t avoid talking about race, nor do we want to, lest we distort the true goal of liberation. Police and prisons have long been tools of anti-black violence and oppression. The percentage of Black people behind bars is vastly out of proportion to whites and other races, and even if the living conditions weren’t abhorrent, and the treatment inhumane, locking somebody in a cage to suffer alone for retribution flies in the face of everything we strive to teach our children about power and conflict resolution.
Yet years come and go and we do nothing to stop the brutal treatment of the most ostracized and vulnerable. This is where organizations like Decolonizing Wealth come in. Their mission statement for racial healing is to “Create and facilitate decolonized resources, tools and spaces that promote personal and organizational transformation and advance diversity, equity and inclusion.”
Through one of these tools, called the 7 Steps to Healing, the listener is taken on an emotional tour of grief and accountability. It brings us face to face with how so many bodies and lands were stolen in order to create our civilization. “You cannot and must not opt out of whiteness. You have to grapple with the messiness of the privilege,” it reminds us. It urges to “build whole new decision-making tables, rather than setting token places at the colonial tables as an afterthought.” Do no harm, invest in decolonization, using money as medicine to heal the racial wealth gap.
Narrative Control
The final area of the work of the Decolonizing Wealth Project has to do with storytelling. They contextualize the cultural stories that have been so mercilessly commandeered and bring visibility and change to issues impacting BIPOC communities. Their writing has been published in the Washington Post, New York Times, Vox, and Advocate. Their staff speaks at national and international conferences. To leverage the power of storytelling is to shift the camera, to call attention to different characters and settings. We need to never stop doing this.
When we talk about Abolition, we might not always be talking directly about the dismantling of physical prisons. But there are many ways that people are kept enchained here in the Land of the Free. The unfair distribution of wealth is something that impacts all of us. But it impacts some of us more severely depending on what color skin our ancestors had. I’ll continue to look for ways to offset the power imbalance between the wealthy elites and the ostracized working class. I’ll let you know what I find.
Comments