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Humility is characterized by an accurate sense of self—assessing not just our weaknesses but also our privileges and strengths, being honest with ourselves about both.
Humility literally means being close to the ground.
It is (we are) colonialism in the empire’s newest clothes.
It is (we are) racism in institutional form.
where that wealth came from, why it’s held back from public coffers, how it’s invested as an endowment, and who gets to manage, allocate, and spend it.
what ails philanthropy at its core is colonialism.
those who were stolen from or exploited to make that wealth—Indigenous people, people of African descent, and many other people of color—must apply for access to that wealth in the form of loans or grants; we must prove ourselves worthy. We
We can return balance to the world by moving money to where the hurt is worst.
You don’t choose the medicine, the elders say, it chooses you.
Money is a tool to reflect the obligations people develop to each other as they interact.
We must build whole new decision-making tables, rather than setting token places at the colonial tables as an afterthought.
We need to put ALL our money where our values are.
We must use money to heal where people are hurting, and stop more...
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Everyone has a responsibility in making things right. Everyone has a role in the process of healing, regardless of whether they caused or received more harm. All our suffering is mutual. All our healing is mutual. All our thriving is mutual.
The master’s tools, as I view them, are not money—the tools are anything corrupted to serve the aims of exploitation and domination. If money is an inherently neutral force, as I described in the introduction, then it can also be used for good, as medicine,
settlers cannot be considered immigrants because immigrants are expected to obey the laws of the land when they arrive, while settlers make their own new laws of the land.
many crimes going uninvestigated by either U.S. or tribal officials, because the jurisdiction is unclear.
Decolonization, obviously, is the process of undoing colonization.
decolonization means that the land that was stolen is returned, and sovereignty over not only the land and its resources but also over social structures and traditions is granted back to those from whom it was all stolen.
What we can focus on with decolonization is stopping the cycles of abuse and healing ourselves from trauma.
we embrace a new paradigm of connect, relate, belong.
Teen Vogue ran a story in February 2018, “Indigenous Land Acknowledgement, Explained.”
There is something powerful about the choice to physically remove yourself from the reality of the issues that you are working on.
Stanford scholars Jess Rimington and Joanna Levitt Cea, who are cataloging the hallmarks of “colonized organizational design” in both the nonprofit and for-profit sectors.4
Pyramid processes are top-down, closed-door, and expert-driven.
Dismantling Racism workbook, Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun identified other characteristics of white supremacy culture, including perfectionism, sense of urgency, defensiveness, quantity over quality, worship of the written word, paternalism, either/or thinking, fear of open conflict, individualism, worship of unlimited growth, objectivity, and avoidance of discomfort.
As a result, many of our organizations, while saying we want to be multicultural, really only allow other people and cultures to come in if they adapt or conform to already existing cultural norms.”5
For many of us, it’s about purpose: we earnestly hope, and sometimes believe, that we can connect the foundation’s assets with our drive to improve outcomes for the planet and its people, especially people in our own communities.
Foundations and financial institutions let a few token people of color in, because they see that we have a different quality of access to our communities and because we have some type of wisdom that they want, but we’re expected to completely assimilate.
we need to go beyond mere representation, to access to power and ownership.
Those most excluded and exploited by today’s broken economy possess exactly the perspective and wisdom needed to fix it.
To survive the trauma of exploitation, we always had to believe that the dominant worldview was only one option, even when it seemed ubiquitous and inevitable. This has made us masters of alternative possibilities.
we who are Others translate effectively between the world of the funder and the world of those seeking funding, because we ourselves have to switch between worlds all the time.
make us particularly skilled at coalition building, specifically the ability to come together around common ground despite differing identities.
We often possess the ability to hold multiple realities simultaneously: our thinking unifies, contains, and transcends oppositions,
The basis of traditional philanthropy is to preserve wealth and, all too often, that wealth is fundamentally money that’s been twice stolen, once through the colonial-style exploitation of natural resources and cheap labor, and the second time through tax evasion.
“There’s an overlord mentality: they don’t trust Black or brown entrepreneurs to handle money. Instead they move the money through one of the intermediary organizations in this space, which are mostly white-led.
heartbreaking. With yourself, internalized oppression may manifest as inferiority, inadequacy, self-hatred, self-invalidation, self-doubt, isolation, fear, feelings of powerlessness, and despair.
You might drive yourself into the ground in a quest for perfection and acceptance,
Imagine our movements cultivating this type of trust and depth with each other, having strategic flocking in our playbooks. Adaptation reduces exhaustion. No one bears the burden alone of figuring out the next move and muscling towards it. There is an efficiency at play—is something not working? Stop. Change. If something is working, keep doing it—learning and innovating as you go.1
What being in right relationship can look like
leadership is about listening and being attuned to everyone else.
It’s about flexibility. It’s about humility. It’s about trust. It’s about having fun along the way. It is more about holding space for others’ brilliance than being the sole source of answers, more about flexible shape-shifting to meet the oncoming challenges than holding fast to a five-year strategic plan.
trauma is that very separation from the body and emotions.
Evolution occurs both by holding on to the adaptations that keep us thriving, and also abandoning the elements that keep us from thriving.
“The willingness to own up to the fictional nature of our story is where the healing begins,”
Orphans are not people who have no parents: they are people who don’t know their parents, who cannot go to them. Ours is a culture built upon the ruthless foundation of mass migration, but it is more so now a culture of people unable to say who their people are. In that way we are, relentlessly, orphans.1
Orphans broke the ties to their lands of origin, to the bones of their ancestors, to their old ways.
The grief that this has caused is enormous, yet it is almost ...
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to transform the traumatic we must re-enter it fully, and allow the full weight of grief to pass through our hearts.
Apologies are due for how that wealth was maneuvered out of appropriate taxation—off shore, into havens, into foundations—and shirked its responsibility in paying for roads, bridges, public schools, firefighters, eldercare, etc. Apologies are due for the majority of investments, which support harmful industries, practices, and regimes.
