A headshot of Nat Chioke Williams with his quote "It's so important to me personally to have a philanthropy that is committed to Black freedom and liberation, that is not also drowning in Black blood. How can we create the commitment and sense that this is a necessary thing--to liberate and free black people--without the ongoing brutality being evidence as the kind of catapult to actually do something? You know, to have a philanthropy that is not based on white guilt but is based on a vision of Black freedom."

Episode 5 – Funding Black-led Movements

In this episode, our deputy director Elz Cuya Jones talks with Nat Chioke Williams about our long shared history of challenging philanthropy to move money—in particular to Black-led movements. Elz and Nat talk frankly about the challenges we face working within the philanthropy system, and as leaders of institutions calling for a different type of commitment.

Transcript

Nat Chioke Williams: The thing that’s so important to me, personally, is to have a philanthropy that is committed to Black freedom and liberation that is not also drowning in Black blood. How can we create just the commitment and sense that this is a necessary thing, to liberate and free Black people without the ongoing brutality as the kind of catapult to actually do something. A philanthropy that is not based on white guilt, that is based on a vision of Black freedom.

Intro Music

Jenn Ching: Hi, I’m Jenn Ching, executive director of North Star Fund, and welcome to our podcast Meeting the Moment. This podcast is all about my colleagues at North Star Fund talking to folks in our broader community who are taking action to build social justice movements and to move resources to these movements urgently, responsibly and with accountability. There’s a saying–or actually really a joke–in our work that the revolution will not be funded, and it is true that movements have historically been built by people, with or without support from institutional actors like foundations, like places like North Star Fund. But for those of us working within philanthropy, well, we want to change that. What is the role of foundations in changing our society and how do we mobilize the billions and billions of dollars held by these essentially private corporations? How do we convince foundations to support real systems change? In this episode our deputy director, Elz Cuya Jones, talks with Nat Chioke Williams about our long shared history of challenging philanthropy to move money, and in particular to move money to Black-led organizing movements. Elz and Nat talk frankly about the challenges we face working within the philanthropy system and as leaders of institutions calling for a different type of commitment. Nat is a national leader and organizer and a builder. Let’s listen to how he and the movements he’s supporting are meeting the moment.

Elz Cuya Jones: I’m Elz Cuya Jones, deputy director at North Star Fund. For this episode of Meeting the Moment, I am thrilled to speak with Nat Chioke Williams. He’s the executive director at the Hill-Snowdon Foundation, whose mission is to work with low income families and communities to create a fair and just society by supporting their own leadership so they themselves can influence the decisions that shape their own lives. We invited Nat to the podcast because he’s dope. We’ll be talking about Freedom Funders, a new philanthropic intervention that strives to build a philanthropy that is committed to achieving Black freedom and liberation, not in some far off dream, but in our lifetimes. I can’t wait to talk about that. Nat, welcome to Meeting the Moment.

Nat Chioke Williams: Thank you, Elz. I’m so happy to be here. And just real quick, I mean, my relationship and history with North Star goes way back to the beginning of my time in philanthropy almost 21 years ago, when I was a program officer at the New York Foundation and first met Betty Kapetanakis there. And Betty was just, you know, brilliant and bubbly and just a guiding star for me in trying to figure out how I was going to move through this new enterprise of philanthropy. She and North Star staff throughout have been those shining lights for me throughout my whole journey. So it’s really an honor to be here today with you.

Elz Cuya Jones: I know that we’ve been connected, but I didn’t realize that it went as back as Betty Kapetanakis. That’s amazing. So I want to begin by saying that it appears that great, great thinkers think alike. We called this podcast Meeting the Moment way back–well, not way back, but it feels like way back–in 2020. Your organization created a Meeting the Moment initiative to fund Black-led organizations for five and a half years with five and a half million dollars. I want to hear more about that and what happened in 2020, when both organizing in response to the pandemic and the public demands to address anti-Black racism created new possibilities for big, big generational change. We heard a lot of promises that people were going to tackle things differently. Can you share how you were meeting the moment at that time?

Nat Chioke Williams: Sure, sure. Yes. So I guess great minds–or just people who were on the same phone call–and meeting the moment. A lot of people met a lot of moments. But so the meeting the moment initial frame for us was a framing around our response to COVID 19 actually. And then we extended that once the racial justice uprising started. But to go back a little bit. So we had already thought that 2020 was going to be a pivotal year, particularly as it related to civic engagement, and so in 2019 we developed our 2020 plan which focused on a new initiative called Democracy’s Promise, the first kind of multi-year grant making initiative where we identified 12 organizations to give grants to for civic engagement related work. And so it was like the trifecta in 2020. It was the 2020 Census. It was the 2020 election cycle–local, state and federal. And it was also the redistricting process. And so part of what we decided to do going into 2020 was to get all of our grant dollars out to all of our partners in the first half of the year because we knew how civic engagement dollars, I could say, didn’t work. You know, they always come at the last minute, not giving people enough time to actually prepare.

So we wanted to get all of our dollars, civic engagement and otherwise, out in the first half of the year. We also realized that in order to do that, it meant we had to streamline our process and so we didn’t do site visits in 2020. We did instead group calls, so we brought together all of our partners and asked them who they wanted to talk to. This was all pre-pandemic, so we brought together our partners and asked them who they wanted to learn from, who they want to talk to, and we set up those calls. And we also didn’t do write ups. We didn’t plan to do write ups for our board that time. We just took this very short, bulleted proposal that people put in and we just cut and paste that and that was the docket. So all these things were in play. We also, as a part of our 2020 plan, offered up our board and staff time to volunteer with our partners around civic engagement work because we wanted to have an all hands on deck approach to this pivotal year, again, all pre-pandemic. And so when the pandemic hit, all of those things that we have already put in place, getting the money out fast, streamlining our process, providing a space for folks to talk together and build with one another, and providing a ready opportunity or readying our board and staff to engage with our partners in a more substantive way.

All of those things served our response to meeting the moment so well. And so we were heartened when, I think it was like eight hundred foundations or something like that, signed on to this pledge to do some of those same things and to give general support. And there was even this little line in there–which I think a lot of people forgot about now–was to support them in advocacy. There were all of these things that people were trying to do to meet the moment where it really shouldn’t have been about meeting the moment, that’s what foundations should be doing anyway, right? You know, you should be given general operating support. You should be flexible with your support. You should be supporting and serving the communities that you are there to serve in the first place, rather than the institutions that you’ve created. And so, you know, I really do think that–I mean, the pandemic, which is still raging, which is still going on is–I mean, I don’t even have words for the depth and the profound loss and just trauma that we are all experiencing in different ways. And the only thing that I can try to do at times is to figure out how to make a shift such that what we’re doing, what I’m doing, what people in my sphere of influence are doing, changes to a way that we recognize what’s essential. We recognize who’s essential and what’s essential. And so when the uprisings happened in the summer, we had already doubled our grant making for 2020 in response to COVID 19. And I’m going to answer a couple of questions here.

But prior to that, we had been over the last five previous years had a reputation for being a philanthropic leader around pushing for resources for Black-led organizing. We’d started that in 2015 after the previous uprisings around Mike Brown and so many other people who were murdered. Just the list, it just goes on and on. So we have for five years, along with North Star, right? It was like a crew, right? It was North Star Fund, it was Hill Snowdon, Borealis Philanthropy had started around that time with the Black-led movement fund, Solidaire had started around that time. And so it was really like the furious four at the time, kind of pushing for Black-led organizing in different ways. And so in our own ways, we were leaders in that work. And so when the uprisings happened in 2020, in the summer 2020, and we saw this flood now of statements and importantly, commitments or at least pledges to support explicitly Black-led organizing and Black movement. We were excited and elated like finally! And we were also behind the times, so everybody was like, every week it was a new statement. I was like, what are we going to do so? So we did commit an additional five and a half million dollars, which is huge for us. It also doubled–I won’t say redoubled–it added another double to our grant making for that year, and it continued on over the next five years. But we were really–

Elz Cuya Jones: Can I just stop and say that when folks were putting out statements and you were like, well, what are we going to do? And I think that question came to you because y’all were already doing it, you know? So when folks put out statements, but you’re already doing that work, you don’t have to put out a statement because that’s already what you’re about.

Nat Chioke Williams: But there’s two pieces to that. One is now that everyone is at this floor where we should have been, now what is it that we should do? And so our prior commitment had been a million dollars over three years, and then we eventually integrated Black-led organizing into all of our programs, because it was a three year initiative. But now we integrated Black-led organizers as a core focus for all of our program areas. And so we said, OK, so now what do we do? How do we deepen this? And we looked at that in a couple of different ways. One was the money. So a million dollars over five–five and a half million dollars for five and a half years going forward. And, even with that, that’s still not a lot of money, right? And so what we do is always try to lead with the ideal. And so the ideal in this time was to focus on infrastructure, which is always the need. And what we wanted to do was to intervene as we could on two fronts. One was to organize the folks who were now making these commitments. It was like, this really is great that you are making those commitments. And this has to be a floor, right? And it has to be sustained. And we have to use this to transform the entire enterprise of philanthropy, such that it is focused on what now people are seeing as necessary.

Focusing on healing, focusing on power, and focusing on creating a fundamental change in the way that people can live their lives in this country and beyond. And so that was one, that’s why we created Freedom Funders which I’ll talk about more in a little bit. But the other part of it, in terms of the infrastructure piece, is that I also understood that if the money–the surge in resources, which I’ll talk about later, because, you know, it’s kind of a little bit of hype there–but the surge in resources, if it went to focus on supporting issue based campaigns and not also supporting the infrastructure that was necessary to carry on any issue based campaign, then we were going to be missing the mark. Because that money was going to run out. It was a surge of money, at the farthest outreach maybe it was 10 years, but most of the commitments were like, you know, three years, maybe five years. So that money was going to run out. And if it just focused on issue campaigns that could take five or 10 years, then we’re not really maximizing the money. We’re not really meeting the moment. We’re just staying in the moment because the only way to really meet the moment is that you prepare for the next one.

So, yeah. So that’s what we were hoping to do in helping to organize Freedom Funders to create this community of folks who are already committed to this ideal of Black freedom and liberation, which we still have to define. But the ideal of it is enough to get people in the room and do so in a way that creates a community of support, a community of will, and a community of purpose in action moving forward. So. I’m going to stop there.

Elz Cuya Jones: I really appreciate the idea that this surge in funding has to be seen as a floor. I can’t tell you how stressful it can be. Or maybe I can tell you, or maybe you already experienced this, when funders who give a lot of money to Black-led organizing and then, you know, a few months down the line, they call and want to meet to see how it’s going. And I have this sense that they want to hear that our grantees have ended racism. I want to talk about also things that you were glad that you didn’t do in response to the crises in the last two years. I remember one of the first webinars I attended when the pandemic hit was something about making sure that your foundation survives and is healthy through COVID. And 10 minutes in, I was shocked because it turned out that foundations put forward their financial people who shared their strategies on how they were protecting their endowments. And this was a webinar that I attended, probably in April of 2020. And I was thinking, people are dying, and this is what you’re talking about? So can you share with me things that, from your learnings, that you’re happy that Hill Snowdon didn’t do in terms of the crises?

Nat Chioke Williams: What we didn’t do and what I didn’t do in particular, was not to believe the hype to go all Public Enemy on y’all. So the hype of billions of dollars going towards racial justice, right? You know, I was reading these headlines, and a colleague of mine who unfortunately passed last year, Allison Brown, one of the last things that she wrote, she was the director of the Communities for Just Schools Fund, and she wrote a paper. She wrote an article in the Chronicle responding to a New York Times article that basically was saying, there’s millions and billions of dollars going towards these social justice organizations, Black organizations, what are they doing with it? And so her analysis was like, look, one, that’s not true. The level of resources that are there now should have always been there. And so many of them were pledges, so many of them were like statements, a lot of money didn’t actually get out the door. But regardless of all that, the point was that we not only need this, we need this and more, right?

And so a report recently came out from the Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity, it was called Mismatched. It’s an amazing report that looks at over about a five year period, a comparison of racial equity versus racial justice funding. And they work directly with Candid, the entity that does data collection for the foundation center and kind of tracks grant making. And the reason why that report was so important was because during that time, with all of these reports, with all these headlines coming out from the Chronicle or other places, I looked at Candid’s data and they had a ticker up on their website. And at one point it was like $6.3 billion dollars. And when I was able to look at the actual data underneath, the sense was that all this money was going towards racial justice work because that was the context that we were in. We were in the midst of the largest racial justice uprising in this country’s history. But when you looked at it, there were a lot of corporate donations in there to like DEI programs.

I went to Morehouse which is a historically Black college, but there were like gobbles of commitments to historically Black colleges. There were some loan funds. There were things that were all important, but it was not what people were in the streets fighting for, right? It was not what people on the streets were putting their life on the line for. And so it created this false impression that all of these dollars were going specifically to racial justice. And the problem with that is, it gets back to what you were saying earlier, because then sometime someone’s going to come and be like, so what do you do with all that money? You know, why haven’t things changed? And so you have to first chronicle what is the reality, like how much money actually went there. And if you look at the Mismatched report, a sliver of the billions that they’re talking about actually got committed and granted. A lot of those were pledges. A lot of those were developed from press releases of what people said they wanted to do. And so again, not believing the hype, verifying that is critical. And using that as a basis though, so the sentiment around wanting to do something is still powerful, even if it doesn’t necessarily match up with the dollars that are necessary to create the change.

So that’s what we were trying to tap into with developing the Freedom Funders. People were moved in a moment, but a whole bunch of people were just kind of waiting. I could imagine a whole bunch of program offers just waiting, just like waiting, they got their plans together. They’re like, I know who I want to fund. And they waited for this moment and they were like, OK, let’s do it. And so they were able to move money. So that’s critical. But if we don’t organize those folks, if we don’t provide them with the community to say, OK, so how do we institutionalize this episodic support that we’re getting right now? How do we work with our executive management, with our board? How do we build the narrative and the force to keep the pressure on supporting Black movement towards freedom and liberation outside of the most historic racial justice uprsing–I mean, like if you think about it, the billions or however much was conferred, only happened for two reasons. This grotesque, just vile, and public lynching of this man that was played over and over and over and over again. And which spurred, along with this long history of racial oppression and racial subjugation, this movement. It was those two historic things that happened. And then you get some trickling of dollars, right?

And the thing that I want to do, the thing that’s so important to me personally, is to have a philanthropy that is committed to Black freedom and liberation that is not also drowning in Black blood. How can we create just the commitment and sense that this is a necessary thing to liberate and free Black people without the ongoing brutality as the kind of catapult to actually do something? A philanthropy that is not based on white guilt, that is based on a vision of Black freedom.

Elz Cuya Jones: I’m wondering when you think about 2022, what are you focused on? What are you most concerned about? What keeps you up at night?

Nat Chioke Williams: 2020 people credit with a historic year, I mean it was in so many different ways. 2021 is a continuation of that, and it was a window into what I in my more pessimistic times am looking at as the endgame. That between 2022 and, say, 2028 or so, next five to six years, this project that the right has been, diligently in many ways, magnificently carrying out since the late 60s, to both shift the loss of their social and moral power relative to racial justice and recognizing their dwindling numbers in terms of white people in this society approaching “majority minority” society that the only way for them to win is to cheat, is to rig the system.

The system has already been rigged, but to rig it in such a way that they don’t even care that people see it as rigged. And so, yeah, for 2021. So you got the big lie, right? Which is just one of several big lies that’s always been told in this country. You have these voter suppression bills, you have these anti-protest bills, you have the right just kind of whipping up a racist fraud and frenzy among their base around anti-vaxxing and all these things that serve the primary purpose of concretizing and solidifying the political power of the white ruling class. And the thing about it is that it’s working. It has been working, and I don’t necessarily see, even with the brilliance of all of the organizers, all of the advocates, all the people on a day to day basis who are working for justice, even with their brilliance. And their effort. I don’t see like a countervailing energy, a countervailing infrastructure that can stand against this decades or 100 years long project.

And I do really see the next several years as being critical in the direction of Black and brown BIPOC communities in the direction of a progressive agenda. And also just in terms of like a Democratic state. Right? You know, however, we see that. So I don’t want to be all like doom and gloom. I really don’t. But I’m just really saying that in this way to speak about the urgency. Just the extreme urgency that this blip, this surge in support that we’ve gotten for movement, we have to like double, triple, quintuple that in the next several years in order to even stand half a fighting chance. And I don’t think that is the mindset in philanthropy right now. There’s been some great advances, folks coming together like the California Black Freedom Fund and the Democracy Frontlines Fund, kind of organizing resources, millions of dollars. And these are great. And it’s not enough.

Elz Cuya Jones: Yesterday I listened to your Black Freedom Funders webinar, and one of your panelists said, we’re not going to 501c3 our way out of this. And I would add, we’re not going to philanthropy our way out of this. So Nat, in your vision if philanthropy is not acting right, they’re acting like this is a blip, they’re doing this surge in funding and who knows what’s going to happen in 2022. I know I’m feeling it here at North Star Fund. What are the interventions outside of philanthropy? What in your vision needs to happen in order for us to achieve Black freedom and liberation?

Nat Chioke Williams: So, wow, that’s a huge question.

Elz Cuya Jones: Think outside of philanthropy.

Nat Chioke Williams: I mean, there’s so..freedom has always been the lifeblood of those who are denied it, right? And so there will always be struggle, there will always be fight, there will always be victory towards this ultimate goal of freedom. And in what we do within philanthropy, this is what I tell my board all the time. You know, again, we’re considered to be a relatively small funder. I was like, you know, what we do with our grants is really support the activist spirit. With the money here somebody can maybe pay a couple of bills with what we’re giving. But it’s really saying that we believe in you and we need you to change this world.

That’s fundamentally what we are doing. And I think, if from a philanthropic space and I’ll talk about outside of philanthropy in a second, but, I think from a philanthropic space, if we adopted the mindset that we are here not only to serve you–serve our partners, the folks that we we support. But because you are essential to our future. That we can’t be what we need to be without you. And I think if we adopt that mindset, hopefully we would act differently. And then outside of philanthropy I think one of the things that’s critical at all times is making sure that people are in community with one another and in deep community with one another. And sometimes that gets messy. But it’s essential to have the ability to be in deep, broad, and powerful community with one another, whether we call that community building.

One of the things that we saw during the height of the pandemic were people coming together supporting one another that they didn’t know, right? Because they saw that there was a common destiny and a common mortality that if we did not support one another, then neither one of us was actually going to advance. And so I mean, I think that is always the aim or ambition is to create that level of community and that level of belonging, that level of interdependence with one another. And that is a fundamental reason why I am such a supporter of community organizing. Because it creates that community, it does that both by creating bonds, but also breaking shackles that hold it down. And so, as far as I’m concerned, all philanthropic dollars need to go towards community organizing.

Elz Cuya Jones: Yes, that’s what we support at North Star Fund, I would agree with you. So we’ve talked about the trauma and the ongoing pain that has been happening for everyday people, essential workers, those who have died from COVID, those who have died at the hands of police. I want to shift it now for our last question, which is what you’re looking forward to in the next year. And what your vision is for your own freedom and liberation making for you.

Nat Chioke Williams: I look forward to in the next year, the same thing I look forward to every day. It is a divine ultimate privilege to be in the position that I’m in, to be able to provide whatever meager support I can to support the vision, support the power, support the brilliance of our partners in this world. So I’m always inspired. I’m always just amazed by them and see this as a privilege to be in partnership with them however I can. And I know that “winning” looks different to different people, but every day that we do not lay down, we win. And so every day that we stand up, we win.

Our partners just are fighting all the time. And so I know they’re going to continue to do that. That’s what always excites me, the particularities of the fight change but the the spirit to fight and to be free never diminishes. More concretely within say some of our specific work, like so with the Freedom Funders. This is an ideal that came together. Now we have like, I think about 90 different folks on our listserv, representing about 80 different foundations and donors and movement leaders of all different stripes. And so the potential to create, again, this community, not another working group, not another affinity group, not another bureaucracy, but a fluid community that is grounded in this common recognition–even if not a common definition–of freedom and liberation that is necessary. And that we need to be in community in support of one another and figure out how to both be brave, subversive, and strategic in that. I said a while ago that if we are doing our grant making and we don’t feel the hairs on the back of our neck standing up because we’re scared, then we’re not doing what we’re supposed to be doing in the space of privilege that we are in, committed to and aligned with movement. The risks that they take every day. Not only do we have to match it, but we have to match our own sense of possibility and subversion within that.

Elz Cuya Jones: Yes, yes. I also am with you on what I look forward to is seeing the incredible and tremendous work of our grantees. It is absolutely humbling to be a witness to it. Also very humbling for me to be speaking with you today. Nat Chioke Williams, thank you so much for all of your work and your leadership and your vision.

Nat Chioke Williams: All right. Well, thank you so much for having me on. Y’all will always be my North Star.

Music

Meeting the Moment is a North Star Fund podcast. Thanks so much to our magician of an audio engineer, Greg Lakhan. If you visit northstarfund.org/moment, you’ll find all the episodes, including transcripts and links related to each episode’s guest. Thanks so much for listening.

English