The following is a transcript of the video above, from our webinar “Remaking the Economy: Liberating Finance to Build a More Just World.” View the full webinar here.
abdiel lópez: When thinking about what needs to change to advance the just transition, we must look also at the culture and the structures that philanthropy upholds, specifically in their day-to-day programming and the way they connect—or not—with grantees, investees.
And in one of the frameworks, we really discuss how philanthropy still upholds an extractive cultural practice by still having that charity, oftentimes paternalistic, mindset.
It passively or even actively accepts the wealth and accumulation and power inequality. It protects donor intent, and it maintains the enclosure of wealth and power.
To divest from those cultural practices, we recognize at Justice Funders that we have to engage everyone from the board to the staff level in these institutions to really invest in new cultures and structures. Again, hospice us out of the old system and into the new.
How do we do that? I think some of the ways that we’re seeing already with some of our funding community members is that they act in solidarity by bearing the risk, being first in capital with nonextractive terms like [Fernando Abarca] just mentioned. Moving assets to meet the needs of frontline communities, rather than dictating what those needs look like for the frontline communities. So, it’s inviting grantees, inviting investees, into the co-creation process of resource allocation, grantmaking, et cetera. It’s investigating and responding to the legacy of wealth as well.
We have seen in the JTIC—the Just Transition Investment Community—that many of the foundations, the funding members, actually trace back the origin of their wealth, and from there, move toward a sort of dreamlike state of asking: “This was our past. What can we do to repair the harm and to move forward to actually seed the future, invest in the seeding of the futures that our frontline communities are doing?”
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So, it’s again, investing. And they write all of that in their investment policy statement, for example. So that’s a critical, tangible step that we’ve seen already funders in our community do.
Find that gap and widen it even just a little bit more—in a carve-out, in the way you talk to your investment committee, with your board of trustees.
And…they intentionally engage in work that centers three main values: redistribution, rematriation, and reparations.
And all of that is not easy. I mean, we work across different constellations of programming, from consulting and coaching to public programming, to continue to build the political education of our funding community. And we must, I think the underlying piece here is just doing so in community and in cooperation.
Because we don’t have a blueprint. There are very few examples of how this work can be done, but we have to be ready to “fail.” I think that is the only way we can actually move into that regenerative space that our frontline communities have asked the funding community to do for decades now.
And so, to find your people, find your community. Experiment. Doesn’t matter how small or big those experiments are. And we oftentimes say, “find that edge and push the edge farther.” Or find that gap and widen it even just a little bit more—in a carve-out, in the way you talk to your investment committee, with your board of trustees.
So, I think it’s really socializing the idea of just being in community, being in cooperation, struggling together, I think. Because once you’re in right relationship with each other and really center the needs of the frontline communities, I think that’s a way to move forward and really bring about the change that we seek.