An overhead view of a field of blooming white flowers spelling out the word, “Life”
Credit: Marko Brečić on Unsplash+

Have you imagined what the world would look and feel like if we invested in life?

Pause with that question for a moment.

Notice what arises in your mind—and in your body.

Perhaps you see thriving communities: children walking safely to school, elders receiving the care they deserve as they age, and everyone accessing nourishing food that supports their health. You may envision healthcare services that prioritize wellness and are accessible to all, public spaces where people—across all identities—gather, rest, and live with dignity and joy. For many of us, this vision is clear.

Across the world, communities have long been building pieces toward a vision of a flourishing future for all. Their efforts span mutual aid, grassroots organizing, and cooperative economies; community seed banks and food sovereignty initiatives that protect land, knowledge, and provide access to meals and socio-emotional support; along with feminist community centers and grassroots care networks that provide shelter, safety, and collective support. Rooted in care, interdependence, and collective power, these are grassroots and movement infrastructures of survival that honor life and promote wellbeing. Built from the ground up, these infrastructures do more than meet immediate needs—they lay the groundwork for creating new community systems of support that are centered on improving quality of life.

Envisioning a world where everyone is valued—and actively working toward creating that vision—is essential. It is how communities exercise agency and restore dignity to withstand systems that were never built to sustain life.

Over generations, this work unfolds in the face of some of the most brutally invasive systems of our time. Under the current political and economic order, we are navigating systems that were built to concentrate more and more profit at all costs. These systems are exporting authoritarianism and violence, all while producing some of the highest levels of wealth inequality in modern history.

A Profound Contradiction

As communities work to sustain life and protect one another, oppressive systems that impede this work continue to accumulate vast concentrations of wealth. Meanwhile, institutions that claim to serve public good—such as governments and universities—are directing billions in investments toward enabling these systems of harm.

What responsibility do these institutions benefiting from public tax benefits bear when they are tied to the very systems harming our communities?

To date, these systems are creating occupations, ethnic-cleansing, genocides, inequality, war, and mass displacement as profitable outcomes. Crisis—war, instability, forced migration, and ecological breakdown—fuels expansion of these systems, intensified by AI and technological infrastructures that scale surveillance and control. Populations are being tracked and managed through data-driven systems; borders are continuously militarized; private security markets are expanding by privatizing land, resources, and enforcement; and extractive economies deepen—fueling further displacement and dispossession.

This raises an urgent question: what responsibility do these institutions benefiting from public tax benefits bear when they are tied to the very systems harming our communities?

Philanthropy’s Role in Divestment

Philanthropy sits squarely inside this contradiction with billions of funds implicated in creating harm and even genocide—and yet it is often the last place where accountability is demanded.

Philanthropic institutions collectively control trillions of dollars in assets, much of it accumulated through histories of extraction, colonialism, and racial capitalism. At the same time, this wealth is publicly subsidized through tax exemptions and charitable deductions—meaning the public effectively helps underwrite the growth of philanthropic capital.

The Gates Foundation—one of the largest philanthropic institutions in the world—offers a stark example of how these contradictions operate and are interconnected in practice. Despite public claims of divestment from fossil fuels and the foundation’s stated commitments to community wellbeing, financial disclosures and independent investigations have pointed to continued investments tied to private prison firms and industries driving the climate crisis and genocide. And its broader corporate ecosystems—through major holdings such as Microsoft—are linked to ICE, militarization, and surveillance. Further, longstanding questions about power and accountability persist within the foundation, including documented associations between co-founder Bill Gates and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, prompting increased public scrutiny of governance and ethical oversight.

While not an isolated case, this example makes an important lesson for the sector clear: philanthropy cannot claim moral leadership while its wealth remains entangled in systems of violence and impunity.

Investing in Public Good or its Destruction?

By law, private foundations are only required to distribute five percent of their assets annually. The remaining ninety-five percent stays invested in global financial markets—often in the very industries driving the crises philanthropy claims to address.

In practice, this means that most of the philanthropic wealth is not being redistributed to communities. Recent research makes this contradiction not only visible, but it necessitates urgent action towards divestment from harm and accountability:

 

  • Investment in Genocide and Weapons Manufacturing: Endowments and philanthropic-linked portfolios remain significantly invested in companies that profit from: genocide, arms and defense contractors, and military technology firms, thereby linking a deeply entangled web of wealth accumulation to global systems of militarization and conflict. Some of the world’s largest foundations illustrate this pattern. For example, the Wellcome Trust has held roughly £1 billion in investments directly linked to the occupation and genocide in Palestine. Similarly, the Lilly Endowment and other foundations maintain millions in holdings in major weapons and tobacco manufacturers—including Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.

Philanthropy is not only accountable to the communities it claims to serve; the public has a stake in how that wealth is governed and invested.

  • Investment in Detention, ICE, and Border Militarization: Financial markets continue to channel capital into private prison corporations, surveillance technologies, and border militarization infrastructures. Companies such as GEO Group, CoreCivic, Palantir Technologies, Amazon, and Google are central to this ecosystem—operating detention centers, powering surveillance systems, and providing the digital infrastructure that supports and sustains agencies like ICE. While transparency is limited and public disclosure is often lacking, philanthropic endowments are broadly invested in public markets and asset managers that hold significant stakes in these firms. Large asset managers that steward philanthropic capital, such as Vanguard, are among the largest institutional investors in private prison and surveillance companies, linking philanthropic wealth to these systems.

The harms caused by these financial entanglements—between philanthropy and the corporate infrastructure of these violent and oppressive systems—are impossible to ignore.

A Call for Collective Action: Philanthropy Can Divest from Harm

We all have a role to play in driving change forward. Philanthropy is not only accountable to the communities it claims to serve; the public has a stake in how that wealth is governed and invested. That responsibility requires more than grantmaking. It requires ensuring that a foundation’s endowment capital is not fueling the very systems of violence, extraction, and dispossession philanthropy claims to address.

Moving toward accountability requires concrete action steps across the ecosystem—whether you are a grassroots organizer, a community member, a nonprofit leader, a worker in philanthropy, a foundation board member, or a donor. Here are five key areas where change is recommended:

1. Build collective pressure and accountability: Organize across movements, sectors, and geographies to ensure philanthropic institutions divest from the prison industry, fossil fuels, weapons manufacturing, surveillance technologies, and all systems that profit from displacement, extraction, and genocide. This includes coordinated campaigns, public pressure, direct action, and shareholder interventions targeting endowments, asset managers, and boards. For philanthropy, the invitation is not only to respond to pressure, but to actively partner in this work. This can mean committing to transparent divestment timelines; resourcing frontline and grassroots organizations leading these efforts; and supporting independent, community-led accountability structures that guide and evaluate investment decisions. By shifting from passive grantmaking to participatory governance and accountability, philanthropy can help redistribute power as well as capital.

These systems persist because they are financed—cutting off capital is essential to dismantling them. Accountability will not be given; it must be demanded and won through sustained collective action. Learn more through case studies and toolkits on how philanthropy can divest from genocide and from the prison industry.

2. Transparency is non-negotiable; disclose endowments and enforce binding divestment policies: From grassroots organizing to aligned institutions and policymakers, coordinating collective action urges philanthropic institutions—whose wealth is largely tax-subsidized—to fully disclose their endowment holdings and investment strategies.

In partnership with community leaders, philanthropy should co-create endowment investment policies as legally binding documents. These would explicitly prohibit investments in companies and investment funds that profit from genocide, war and weapons manufacturing, fossil fuels, private prisons and detention, surveillance technologies, tobacco, and the privatization and extraction of land, labor, and natural resources. These exclusions must be mandatory and comprehensive with a shared understanding across the organization on how these investments cause harm and disrupt the institution’s stated mission. Changes should be applied across all asset classes, including commingled funds, index funds, and third-party asset managers.

To prevent further harm and make explicit steps to shift toward investments that sustain life, philanthropic institutions must also adopt and enforce robust negative screening criteria to identify exposure to harmful industries. These include: prison industry screens (private prisons, detention, and carceral services); weapons, war, and militarization screens (defense contractors, military technology, border enforcement); fossil fuel and extractive industry screens; surveillance and data exploitation screens; human rights and genocide risk screens; and public health harm screens (including tobacco).

Where harm has been caused, reparative measures should be developed that directly resource impacted communities…

3. Disrupt narratives that legitimize harm: Philanthropic endowments that are materially connected to private prisons, detention, militarization, fossil fuels, and systems of genocide and extraction should be made visible to the public. Everyone—including donors—can challenge narratives that frame these investments as neutral, necessary, or disconnected from real-world harm. These investments are upholding interconnected systems of racialized control, ecological destruction, and profit-making. Confront institutions that obscure or misrepresent their financial ties and employ strategies to shift public discourse to make these connections undeniable.

In recent years, philanthropy has developed a track record of releasing press statements to share their stance on an injustice that has been spotlighted by the public, and while acknowledgement is useful, more is needed. Where harm has been caused, reparative measures should be developed that directly resource impacted communities, alongside public admissions of responsibility and concrete commitments to change.

4. Call out and collectively withdraw participation and partnerships from foundations that continue harmful investment practices: Foundations that continue investing in systems that profit from displacement, extraction, and genocide.

To help stop the cycle of violence and financial entanglement, grantees can work in collective ways to excerpt pressure—including boycotting foundations that opt to continue to fund harm—which ultimately reduces their legitimacy especially if there is failure to comply. Non-cooperation is a strategic tool—these institutions depend on public legitimacy and relationships to maintain influence. When they refuse to change, they must be isolated.

Philanthropic institutions who are willing to divest from harm can develop strategic divestment plans and produce progress reports for public awareness as part of their annual reporting. As the number of foundations that share these plans increase, this creates a significant level of peer-led demand within the philanthropic sector.

5. Shift from philanthropy to community-controlled systems: Philanthropy—as it’s currently structured—concentrates wealth and decision-making power while remaining deeply entangled in systems of harm. The goal is not to reform it, but to outgrow it.

This means building and sustainably resourcing community-controlled systems—mutual aid networks, cooperative economies, land-based initiatives, and alternative financial infrastructures—that reduce dependence on philanthropic capital altogether. Abolition is not only about ending prisons, fossil fuel extraction, or militarization—it is about transforming the underlying systems that make genocide, occupation, climate crisis, ecocide, immigrant detention, and other forms of systemic violence possible and profitable.

If communities are functioning in systems that sustain life with well-resourced infrastructure supporting their wellbeing, then the dependency on philanthropy will become obsolete.

Making philanthropy irrelevant is: shifting power, redistributing resources, and building a future where communities govern the conditions of their own survival and wellbeing.

Change is not only urgent, it is already in motion. The rising waves across philanthropy working to create meaningful change must become a united force: disciplined, long-term, and unyielding—until all funds are divested from harm and invested in life.