(Illustration by Stuart McReath)
Throughout modern American history, philanthropy has often helped enable progress by pushing society beyond its cultural status quo. Today is no different, as we can see from both the efforts to make American society and democracy more inclusive and the backlash against those efforts.
To navigate through this challenging environment, philanthropy must have a strong spine and maintain a long-term view. Even more importantly, our sector needs to return to and embrace the original etymology of philanthropy—a “love of humankind”—as our animating force. That would be a radical counter-cultural act in our polarized, politically militarized country. But it would follow guidance inspired by author, academic, and activist bell hooks’ ethos on love: The work of change suffers when it gets swept up in the cultural status quo in America, which prioritizes heroes winning, conquering, and acquiring.
The real heroism is choosing to lead with love, as hooks exemplified in her life and writing.
Bold Moves for the Love of Humankind
As we prepare to follow that example and step up to the calling to advance a more just world, it is useful to reflect on the bold actions of past generations in philanthropy, particularly those that were counter-cultural and visionary, but largely unappreciated or met with great resistance, in their time.
Madam C.J. Walker, one of the first Black millionaires in America and a contemporary of oft-cited pioneers in modern American philanthropy like industrialist Andrew Carnegie, committed herself to racial uplift, giving to organizations that served Black people and were often run by Black leaders (only a few decades after the ending of chattel slavery in the United States). She was one of the first to embed racial equity and justice into the way she ran her business, sowing the seeds for private-sector involvement in social impact work.
In the 1920s, a little-known philanthropist named Charles Garland used an inheritance he initially intended to renounce to make a transformative gift to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). This helped catalyze the early movement for equal educational opportunities for Black children, the landmark Supreme Court victory in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, and the larger Civil Rights movement.
During the Civil Rights movement, the Ford Foundation and others supported new systemic and community-grounded approaches to social change by backing large-scale integrated research, advocacy, and capacity-building efforts. In the 1980s, the successful campaign against apartheid in South Africa became a global cultural movement powered by diverse networks ranging from indigenous activists and students to business leaders and superstar entertainers through mass media and mass action.
In the 1990s, information technology started to connect people and put social impact power in the hands of average citizens in an unprecedented way, and a disruptive wave of social entrepreneurs and philanthropists infused a new sense of dynamism and innovation into the sector. In the 2000s, a once unthinkable era of collaboration between the philanthropic, private, and public sectors took flight under the auspices of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and the President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI), which saved millions of lives in Sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere around the globe.
And now, a group of innovators personified by MacKenzie Scott, who has personally donated $12 billion to more than 1,250 organizations since 2020, is elevating an approach to philanthropy that is based on trust and shared power. Scott, who once wrote that “people who have experience with inequities are the ones best equipped to design solutions,” is modeling how to shift power dynamics in the sector and put more agency in the hands of leaders, organizations, and communities with first-hand experience, untapped insights, and innovative solutions for transforming America’s most inequitable systems.
These momentous innovations are, or will likely be, seen by history as little appreciated in their time. But they are bound together by the bell hooks manifestation of love that I mentioned in the opening to this piece.
How Philanthropy Can Lead With Love
When it comes to love, philanthropy today still has some clear deficits to overcome, and the current generation of leaders has been called to answer major challenges in the sector:
- At New Profit, we released a research report in 2020 that found that organizations led by Black, Latine/x, and Indigenous leaders received only 4 percent of total grants and contributions in philanthropy, despite the fact that so much social impact work is focused on supporting these communities.
- Restricted funding models, which are still the norm among institutional funders particularly, have hampered social innovation and weakened organizational capacity in a way that makes the sector overall less able to deal with fast-moving events like the COVID-19 pandemic or to make future-focused internal and external investments.
- Silver bullet approaches relying on unproven technology and unrepresentative data continue to proliferate, at the expense of proven, community-based approaches that get less attention. Where is the catalytic intersection of the two?
- Tribalism and intense partisanship is fueling a backlash against the momentum for racial equity and justice that was created in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, and threatens to upend critical dialogue and progress in education, economic mobility, and democracy.
These dynamics are hindering our ability to come together with shared purpose and work towards shared goals, which is so necessary during times of national tumult. Embracing the love mindset can drive critical shifts in philanthropy and society more broadly:
Love illuminates brilliance and expertise. Proximity—in philanthropy’s case, the expertise and insight that comes from experiencing community assets and inequitable systems firsthand—may be the most powerful untapped force for change we have. For too long, our sector has looked at communities through a paternalistic lens, believing that intellect and resources from outside are all that is needed to fix what is perceived to be “broken.” The lack of love in that approach is obvious, as is its strategic perversity: We are systematically underinvesting in people who have the expertise we need to solve to create equity and opportunity for all. We have to grow and sustain giving to these proximate leaders.
One leader who understands the illuminating power of love is Vichi Jagannathan, the cofounder of Rural Opportunity Institute (ROI), an organization working to shift the underlying conditions that create health inequities across generations. (ROI is a grantee-partner in the inaugural New Profit Health Equity cohort, a collaboration between New Profit and Deloitte’s Health Equity Institute). ROI supports youth, organizations, and communities in rural North Carolina to help them design innovative solutions for healing and resilience. Vichi views her work as focused on building upon the assets of her local community, and combining that with the resources and best practices that exist elsewhere. “There is so much wisdom and experience already present in our communities and our histories,” she says. “It is a gift to get to soak up these lessons. I lead by listening to what our community is telling me.”
Love removes restrictions. For a century, donors have restricted their giving in ways that made it hard for most nonprofit organizations to build strong organizations that can pursue long-term impact at scale. As Scott and others have recognized, unrestricted funding is the key to strengthening trust and creating an abundance of learning, collaboration, and impact.
Hassan Hassan, founder of 4.0 (a New Profit grantee-partner), believes that all people are capable of creating real change in their communities if they are invited to leverage their insights as problem solvers and entrepreneurs and given unrestricted access to resources to develop and test their ideas at the earliest stages. 4.0 invests capital, coaching, curriculum and community in diverse education innovators to meet the equity challenges of families in their own communities. Through their fellowship programs, 4.0 aims to shift resources and innovation in the education system closer to the communities the system serves. In Hassan’s vision, leaders in education reflect the diversity of their communities, and funding is abundant and democratized as a rule.
Love powers coalitions. As students of history, we know that transformational change has always come due to the work of multiracial, intergenerational, cross-sector coalitions. But reaching out across differences and building trusting relationships has always been difficult—and is so much harder when working against the turbulent cultural and political landscape and the isolating force of COVID-19. We have to recapture the transformative power of closeness any way we can, as we navigate our way into the future.
The Beloved Community Center of Greensboro, or BCC (also a grantee-partner of New Profit), was founded in the tradition of the 1960s movements for social and economic equity by friends and colleagues of five social justice activists who were murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi Party at a community justice rally in 1979 in Greensboro, North Carolina. The survivors of that tragic day initially pursued justice for the slain through the courts, eventually achieving a civil settlement after seeing two white-dominated juries exonerate the murderers of all criminal charges. The lessons learned led BCC to become a force for truth, justice, and reconciliation in North Carolina, where the legacy of racism remains painful and destructive. Drawing on lessons from the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa and other similar efforts, BCC led a powerful truth, justice, and reconciliation process in Greensboro from 2000 TO 2006. In fact, the Archbishop Desmond Tutu traveled twice to Greensboro to offer spiritual and strategic guidance. That experience led to a substantive apology from the City of Greensboro for the roles played by police and city officials in those murders and established an annual scholarship for five high school students in the names of the five individuals killed. BCC is now leading a statewide truth, justice, reconciliation process in North Carolina.
As BCC cofounder Joyce Johnson says of her relentless, decades-long work, “Love requires us to reach out and build community across racial and other divides; we have to walk towards each other, so that we might learn how to walk together.” BCC believes that a high-quality truth process in North Carolina might inspire other states, even our nation, to undertake similar initiatives.
Love prioritizes people more than programs. We must start seeing ourselves and our grantees, partners, and other relationships across philanthropy as humans first, rather than instruments for impact or, to borrow a phrase from the author and activist Romal Tune, “admirable sacrifices” to justice movements. We are at our most loving and powerful, and our work achieves its greatest impact, when we are healthy in mind, body, and spirit. We have tools in our hands to make that more possible, especially for the frontline social entrepreneurs and others leading the love movement.
In November 2022, New Profit brought together more than 400 social impact leaders from across identities, generations, and sectors for our first in-person gathering in three years. In codesigning the event with our community, we knew early on that love, healing, joy, and wellness were as important, if not more important, than scholarship and programming. With the health of movement experts, artists, and others, we tried to infuse love and wellness throughout the experience. But that’s just an event. What if we took it a step further and infused a loving embrace of wellness into all of our decision-making? What if it was mainstream for funders to collaborate with grantees on sabbatical planning as a standard part of grantmaking?
Love is fearless. To prepare for the turbulence of the present day and the years to come, we need to shift our mindsets, and do many things that are counter-cultural to the way philanthropy currently operates. There is resistance, and there will be more. But the love ethic that bell hooks defined is fierce and powerful. It doesn’t skip over messy or difficult things. It’s about truth-telling, and holding onto an unshakeable belief in the possibility of a better world.
As the poet Rumi wrote, “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” It’s time for philanthropy to recognize that love starts with us.
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Read more stories by Tulaine Montgomery.