It has been a year and a half since 26 million people in the U.S. took to the streets in the wake of George Floyd’s murder—possibly the largest social movement mobilization in U.S. history. Along with so many others, we listened to the appeals of local Black-led grassroots organizations, pulled our face masks on, and answered the call to show up in solidarity with our bodies, our voices, our might.
There was something else racial justice organizers were calling for, of course: funding. Unrestricted multi-year funding for work that had been woefully under-supported for years. (A recent study suggests that from 2015 to 2018, a mere 1% of all grant dollars went to racial justice work.) “Sure, release a statement,” we heard organizers tell those of us in philanthropy, “but more importantly, resource our work.”
Over the past year and a half, we’ve watched as philanthropy has had to reckon with this request. We’ve witnessed foundations make substantial pledges to support racial justice (or more often, watered down commitments to “diversity and equity”), and cheered as some of those commitments came through, while many others did not. As we enter 2022, the question remains as to whether we, as a field, will truly answer the call to boldly support racial justice by standing with the BIPOC-led movements that are moving us toward a world where all of us are safe and free.
We offer our story as one example (amongst many) of what it can look like to answer the call to fund racial justice. Five years ago, we at the Pink House Foundation (PHF)—a small family foundation based in Washington, D.C.—set out to explore what it could look like to redefine philanthropy with justice at the center.
Asking tough questions
For Pink House, this process started back in 2016, when we began asking ourselves a series of tough questions: What if racial justice, gender justice and economic justice were central organizing principles for philanthropy? What if we were honest about the uncomfortable reality that the field of philanthropy is, in many ways, a direct byproduct of persistent inequality and some of the deepest economic and political problems in our society? What does it look like to transform the ways we operate in order to better support the communities and movements at the forefront of social change?
We then explored these questions in collaboration with a wide range of community leaders and colleagues in philanthropy, and the perspectives that we gathered have helped us to truly transform the Pink House Foundation’s purpose and grantmaking practices. In 2016, we launched PHF 2.0 with a long-term commitment to supporting transformative grassroots movements in driving systemic solutions to some of the greatest challenges facing our society.
Since that time, we have had the great honor of funding and learning from dozens of front-line organizations across the country that are building leadership and power in Black, Indigenous and immigrant communities, and driving change on numerous fronts. These include organizations like BYP 100, Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, ONE DC, Southerners on New Ground, the TGI Justice Project, and so many more.
These organizations taught us that real equity and justice require systemic solutions at all levels. We learned that building collective community leadership, power and action are central to advancing systemic change and that movement-building across geographies and focus areas is essential in building the scale that is required for real impact. We learned that it is important to operate with an intersectional analysis that recognizes the interrelationship between racial, economic and gender inequality, along with other forms of marginalization.
We also learned that power and control dynamics in philanthropy are a big barrier to resourcing change in bigger and more effective ways. After five years of building out our social justice giving model, we decided that, in addition to redistributing our family wealth to support justice, we can have the greatest impact if we also redistribute the decision-making power over where that funding goes.
Handing over decision-making power
With the recent launch of PHF 3.0, we have shifted from funding 30 individual grant partners and are now instead making 10 large, multi-year grants to grassroots alliances and movement-accountable public foundations, trusting them to redistribute those funds to BIPOC-led grassroots organizations according to their own priorities and visions. Our new model represents not only a deeper alignment of values and practices, but also a deeper alignment of strategy and impact, recognizing that front-line leaders who are immersed in the day-to-day realities of organizing in marginalized communities are in the best position to strategically deploy resources to advance change.
Our small pool of redistribution grant partners includes the Movement for Black Lives Fund and Groundswell Fund, as well as Right to the City Alliance, National Domestic Workers Alliance, Climate Justice Alliance, United We Dream, NDN Collective, Thousand Currents, the Southern Power Fund and the Diverse City Fund. Each of these redistribution partners has existing practices for redistributing funding to grassroots organizations in strategic and community-informed ways. These organizations represent an intentional cross-section of key issue sectors, constituencies/communities and geographies, including (but not limited to) racial justice, economic and housing justice, gender and reproductive justice, migrant justice, climate and environmental justice, democracy and electoral justice, Black-, Indigenous- and Latinx-led organizing, and organizing in D.C., in the U.S. South and internationally in the Global South.
By funding in partnership with grassroots alliances and movement-accountable foundations that understand the importance of expanding community leadership and power, we are supporting work that is going to build the type of power that can actually challenge the status quo and (hopefully) ensure that in the future, philanthropy will no longer be needed in the way that it exists today.
This shift was also important because, on a personal level, those of us on the board do not want to be professional philanthropists. So much of family philanthropy (and private philanthropy more broadly) is about building large institutions existing in perpetuity, training the next generation to handle the family’s wealth, and thereby normalizing dynastic wealth. We do not want this for ourselves. We want to focus instead on streamlining our role while supporting and trusting movement organizations. For the Pink House Foundation family, this also means putting less time into being board members and more time into being family members, while also connecting with and supporting other funders to stand with us in supporting change.
In addition to shifting power and transforming the way that we move funding, we are also working to maximize our giving. We know that we are working in extremely consequential times and community leaders have called time and time again for philanthropy to be bolder in supporting justice. Instead of prioritizing the accumulation of more wealth or growing the size of our foundation corpus through adherence to minimum payout requirements, we are committed to scaling and accelerating our giving and have tripled our grantmaking budget through this transition.
Answering the call
The path to get here involved a lot of listening to gather critical wisdom from the field without demanding too much time from movement leaders. This involved intentional conversations with dozens of front-line organizers with compensation where appropriate to value their time and expertise. We surveyed grant partners (also compensated), and also had valuable conversations with our colleagues in social justice philanthropy.
We are not alone in our efforts to release both money and control. Last summer, Groundswell Fund published a fierce open letter to philanthropy, calling on private foundations, family foundations and individual donors to embrace “the gold standard of racial justice giving,” which they define as “mov[ing] flexible resources on a large scale to people-of-color-led organizations that are primarily accountable to movements in their communities and capable of redistributing these funds.” The authors identify two specific types of BIPOC-led regranting organizations that fulfill these criteria, which closely mirror PHF’s grantmaking categories: (1) grassroots organizations, alliances or coalitions like the Movement for Black Lives; and (2) public foundations led by people who come out of grassroots movements, such as Groundswell Fund.
This letter was signed by 30 other Black, Indigenous and people-of-color-led public foundations, 400 aligned funders and individuals, and more than 100 movement organizations (and counting). Which is to say, our story is just one amongst many. We are sharing it here because we sense that there are many other funders seeking new and more effective ways to support change in this extended movement moment. Trust us—when BIPOC-led movement organizations and movement-accountable public foundations have developed extremely thorough and thoughtful regranting processes, it can be powerful to stand with them, let go of control, and just write the check.
Additional resources: There is a growing community of funders and affinity groups working together to act on the imperative to put justice at the center of philanthropy; here are just a few:
• Change Philanthropy and affiliate partners
• Neighborhood Funders Group
• Justice Funders
• Resource Generation
• Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity
• Funders for Justice
• National Committee on Responsive Philanthropy
• EDGE Funders
• Solidaire Network
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Hanna Mahon is the former President of the Pink House Foundation, a leader of Families Organizing to Resource Movements (or the FORM Collective), and a writer of strange fiction.
Luke Newton is a philanthropic advisor who specializes in helping build bridges between philanthropy and grassroots movements and serves as Chief Solidarity Officer for the Pink House Foundation.