BFCF AnnualReport DONE - Flipbook - Page 3
In June 2020, four Black women set out to do something that had never been sustainably
done in Washington state. The four of us — Andrea Caupain Sanderson, Angela Jones, Michelle
Merriweather, and T’wina Nobles — launched the Black Future Co-op Fund, a cooperative
philanthropy rooted in the beauty, soulfulness, and strength of Blackness. We envisioned the
Fund as a way to ignite Black generational wealth, health, and well-being across our state while
shifting the philanthropic paradigm. Five years later, we re昀氀ect on the journey from that initial
vision to where we are today.
BLACK GENEROSITY, BLACK PHILANTHROPY
Justice and the need for change have long been discussed in philanthropic circles. In 2020, spurred on by the
urgency of the moment, our group of four had to take action. We couldn’t wait for a perfect path. We needed to
summon our courage, risk failure, and try something new. But even as we set our sights on launching the 昀椀rst
enduring Black philanthropic organization of its kind in Washington, we knew that we already carried a legacy
of immense generosity passed down from our ancestors.
The history of Black giving over昀氀ows with profound kindness and responsiveness that stretches the bounds
of what’s possible, time after time, to help our people. Yet Black ways of generosity and loving care often go
unappreciated by a Eurocentric framework that dismisses them as “informal” or views them as less worthy
of acclaim than white philanthropic largesse. Author Tyrone Freeman notes that Black philanthropy “goes
back to traditions of giving, caring, and sharing that actually were a part of West African cultures before
colonialism.”2 In his book Madam C. J. Walker’s Gospel of Giving: Black Women’s Philanthropy during Jim Crow,
he re昀氀ects: “This idea that generosity and compassion traversed the Atlantic along with other forms of African
cultural genius within black bodies via the slave trade is astounding in light of the conditions under which the
enslaved suffered.”3
The germ of our idea for the Fund was to embody, to the best of our abilities, this deep spirit of Black
generosity. We didn’t aim to be Black women doing Eurocentric philanthropy. We wanted to approach the work
differently. We wanted to do it Blackly. Valaida Fullwood, who celebrates African American philanthropists in
her book Giving Back, writes, “I long to see a radical shift in philanthropy that will come to characterize the 21st
century. That is, a reclaiming of the root meaning of philanthropy: love of what it means to be human.”4 For us,
this would look like philanthropy with a passion for removing obstacles rather than a penchant for bestowing
gifts wrapped in burdensome requirements.
Viewing a wide range of Black women’s giving as philanthropy, Tyrone Freeman writes that this expanded
perspective “gives voice to the heart of generosity at the core of black women’s embodied actions,
commitments and identities.”3 And that was our aspiration here: to give voice to our hearts.
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