Black Women Are Redefining Wealth. Is Philanthropy Ready to Invest Differently?

This Black Philanthropy Month, is a time to honor the generosity, brilliance, and community-rooted power of Black giving. But celebrating is not enough.

We also have to ask what Black generosity has been forced to hold in the absence of just systems. We must ask what Black women have been building with too little, for too long. And, what it would look like to fund not only our work, but our wellness. Not only our organizations, but our imagination. Not only our response to crisis, but our right to joy.

This understanding prompts a question for me that feels both ancient and urgent: What does it actually mean for Black women to be wealthy?

This Black Philanthropy Month, is a time to honor the generosity, brilliance, and community-rooted power of Black giving. But celebrating is not enough. We also have to ask what Black generosity has been forced to hold in the absence of just systems.

Not defining wealthy in the narrow way this country so often defines it—as accumulation, status, or proximity to systems that were never designed for our wholeness. But defining wealth as freedom. Wealth as breathing room. Wealth as the ability to rest without fear. Wealth as health, safety, belonging, time, joy, family stability, spiritual grounding, and the power to imagine a future beyond survival.

That does not mean money does not matter. It matters deeply. Financial resources shape whether someone can pay rent, buy food, access care, leave an unsafe situation, start a business, support family, rest, recover, or plan for the future. Money matters because of the conditions it can make possible.

After years of listening to Black women through The Highland Project, we know those conditions matter just as much as the number in a bank account. Across our multi-year polling in collaboration with brilliant corners Research and Strategies, Black women have repeatedly described economic security in ways that extend beyond income: safety, health, care, joy, time, belonging, economic breathing room, and the ability to shape what comes next.

If Black women are telling us that wealth includes time, health, belonging, safety, joy, and the ability to dream, then the philanthropic sector has to ask whether its own definition of investment is too small.

Philanthropy Must Widen its Lens 

What becomes possible if philanthropy stops treating the ingenuity of Black women as an endlessly renewable resource and begins providing resources at the level it deserves?

Black women have always understood that wealth is about more than money. Across generations, we have practiced forms of abundance that rarely appear solely on balance sheets. We have built mutual aid networks, cared for children who were not our own, organized churches and freedom movements, protected elders, held communities together, stretched resources into possibility, and seeded futures with far less than the scale of what we were carrying.

Too often, philanthropy is more practiced in the art of responding to what is broken instead of investing in what would make wholeness possible. We know how to fund emergency response. We know how to fund programs, leadership development, civic engagement, and economic mobility. But we are less practiced at investing, at scale and over time, in the conditions that could make a crisis less inevitable. And Black generosity has too often been asked to fill that gap.

Our community networks, mutual aid, institutions, leadership, and innovation did not emerge because systems worked particularly well for us. In many cases, they emerged because those systems did not. Black women have repeatedly built what was missing, held what was falling apart, and created possibility where institutional investment was absent.

Black Women’s Research Yields Insights on the Infrastructure Needed for Wellbeing

The Highland Project’s multi-year polling helps us understand the contours of what Black women are naming as important infrastructure for society. The research from Mississippi in 2026 offers one recent example; in this poll Black women described wealth not as status, but as peace. Having enough money to live comfortably meant “breathing room”: the ability to rest, plan, care for family, and enjoy the life they are building. When asked what an additional $1,000 a month would make possible, women named deeply practical priorities: paying down debt, covering housing and food expenses, building savings, and creating more stability.

But Mississippi is not an anomaly. It is one data point in a longer story that Black women have been telling us which offers an imperative distinction for philanthropy.

If philanthropy wants to center the voices of the community it serves, it must include listening to Black women and shift its practices—the sector needs to change how investment is defined, how strategies are designed, what impact is measured against, and who holds power over those decisions.

To amplify these messages, we wanted to create a unique listening space that could deepen what our polling was teaching us by inviting Black women leaders to the table where they could speak beyond the traditional questions institutions tend to ask. Not asking: what did you accomplish? Asking instead: what are you carrying? What are you healing from? What are you remembering? What are you trying to seed? What does freedom feel like in your life?

Across those conversations, Black women have named legacy, land, lineage, emotional intelligence, freedom, rest, care, imagination, grief, power, and joy. They have talked about building for the generations they may never meet, and refusing definitions of leadership that require their depletion.

If our polling shows us the contours of what Black women’s definition of wealth, these conversations help reveal the interior life of that vision.

Together, they reinforce the concept that listening cannot begin and end with asking Black women about pain points, gaps, deficits, or needs. Because we have dreams that do not rely on surviving old systems. And if philanthropy wants to center the voices of the community it serves, it must include listening to Black women and shift its practices—the sector needs to change how investment is defined, how strategies are designed, what impact is measured against, and who holds power over those decisions.

Moving from Admiration to Alignment

The future of Black philanthropy cannot simply be measured only by whether more money moves. It must also be measured by whether philanthropy is willing to transform the frameworks that decide what counts as wealth, investment, and success.

If philanthropy is serious about moving with trust and sharing decision-making power with Black women leaders, then Black women cannot be solely consulted after strategies have already been designed. Black women must be trusted at the beginning to shape the design and focus—in defining the questions, naming the conditions, shaping the metrics, designing the investments, and determining what success actually looks like.

Black women have always known that wealth and wellbeing is about more than money. We have known that abundance lives in care, memory, land, rest, safety, choice, belonging, and the ability to leave those who come after us more free. The question now is not whether Black women can keep imagining new futures. We already are.

The question is whether philanthropy is ready to listen closely enough and grasp onto the imagination to change what—and how—it funds.