With the recent Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action, as well as last year’s Dobbs ruling, there is no better time for philanthropy to take the lead in setting an agenda for equity and democracy. But first, institutional philanthropy has some soul-searching to do.
At a time of rising threats to democracy, solutions and innovations which centered the lived experience of BIPOC women and the LGBTQ community — as well as rural white Americans who flagged rising extremism in their communities — were sometimes decried as too polarizing. Guess what happened? The threats to bodily autonomy, reproductive justice and democracy that marginalized groups were the first to point out are now everybody’s problem. That’s what happens when you ignore the wisdom of people on the front lines. Many program officers from marginalized communities also experienced the same diminution of their judgment that organizations in the field did.
American life expectancy is declining, there’s an unprecedented mental health crisis and we are in a serious civic decline. Philanthropy has touch points with every sector of society, and that should give the field some superpowers in meeting the moment. But just as America is traumatized, I believe philanthropy is traumatized, too. Healing requires a thorough diagnosis, and loving rigor about seeking a cure.
I’m inspired by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa — and the second wave of truth which came out of it. Bishop Desmond Tutu, who was instrumental to the functioning of the commission, later came out in favor of restorative justice, including reparations for victims of apartheid. Tutu wrote that the “commission was a beginning, not an end.”
South Africa, a nation of nearly 60 million people, has not yet put in place a national system of restorative justice. The ranks of institutional philanthropy are much smaller than that, and at least in theory, one should hope that major organizations could collaborate toward that end. But the field should begin an equity audit only if it is willing to reckon with what it finds.
As Darren Walker wrote at the start of “From Generosity to Justice: The New Gospel of Wealth,” “Afflicting the comfortable demands that we reckon with the ways in which we, ourselves, benefit from vast disparities in access and agency, voice and value. And afflicting the comfortable obligates us to rectify — to repair — the deep inequalities that deceive us into ignoring how and why we put ourselves first and others second, resetting the cycles of privilege built into our laws, norms, customs and behaviors.”
What would that reset look like in philanthropy? First, we’d have to be transparent about the numbers. Data is power, and philanthropy can do a better job of longitudinally tracking investment in more than superficial ways and sharing that data. As one example, I feel honored to have played a small role in philanthropy’s march toward equitable funding of media, including co-launching the Racial Equity in Journalism Fund in 2019. That effort was bolstered by Democracy Fund research showing that from 2009 through 2015, BIPOC-serving media got only 6% of the philanthropic funding in the sector. There is also a presumption that founders from elite backgrounds can be better trusted with high initial investments to go to scale, which certainly leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy of who gets the most resources.
So what would it take to succeed with equity audits and restorative justice in philanthropy? Imagine, for a moment, if we took the stale diversity committee and replaced it with a truly committed and resourced approach. Here are some basic steps philanthropies could take to walk that path.
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Make service on the equity committee clearly defined, competitive, paid and powerful. Too often, employees from marginalized communities are drafted onto time-suck diversity teams with no clear mandate, just more unpaid labor. Decide in advance what part of the problem you are tackling, what you are not, and communicate that clearly in advance.
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Offer people an honorarium for serving on the committee, and make the positions competitive. By having applications, you will find who wants to serve. If few want to serve, or only people from some demographics want to serve, it might be time to go back to the drawing board and refine the mission and the recruitment strategy.
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Give the committee money to spend on meeting your goals. Perhaps a small philanthropy offers a $5,000 budget to implement recommendations. Or perhaps your huge institution provides the team 10 times or 100 times that amount. Provide a budget for the equity committee to spend on successfully completing their work and, again, be clear what that is for. Is the money to design and implement an equity audit? Is it to reward staffers who have been champions of equity? Philanthropy is where mission meets money. Equity work should not be an unfunded mandate.
Our nation can no longer afford platitudes about diversity and equity, or to retreat when our feathers are ruffled. Sometimes, as with the civil rights movement and so many other movements, it is only through conflict and contention that we get clarity about the stakes. Philanthropy’s desire to be seen as genteel has, at times, produced ungentle and unsubtle forms of bias within the ranks. As what were once considered democratic norms continue to crumble, there will be ever more transparent efforts to make people from marginalized groups permanent second-class citizens. It doesn’t have to be this way. Philanthropy could model what it means to do the hard and important work of co-creating a world we want to live in — but only once it does the work within its own ranks.
Farai Chideya is the CEO and host of Our Body Politic, a nonprofit nationally syndicated public radio show, podcast and insights brand centering Black women and all women of color in civil society. Chideya has worked for FivethirtyEight, CNN, ABC and NPR. Our Body Politic is also producing “An American Story,” a documentary about the BIPOC legal eagles of the January 6th Committee.
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