BFCF AnnualReport DONE - Flipbook - Page 4
INJUSTICE AND THE NEED FOR REPAIR
While there are caring and dedicated people in philanthropy, the system as a whole is badly out of
balance. A Bridgespan/Echoing Green research report describes how “racial inequity is built into
philanthropic norms,”5 and according to a 2024 data summary from Candid/ABFE, “Majority Black-led
nonpro昀椀ts receive 300% less revenue than their white-led counterparts.”6 The National Committee for
Responsive Philanthropy reports that, in 2022, funding for Black communities totaled only 1.3% of overall
philanthropic giving.7
Philanthropic redlining has made it common for those with the most cultural competence in serving their
communities to receive the least funding. Compounding this inequity in distribution, vast wealth intended
for the public good is sequestered in the accounts of foundations and donor-advised funds. The True Cost
of Billionaire Philanthropy, a 2023 Institute for Policy Studies report, notes that “funds can potentially sit
for decades without 昀氀owing to charities.”8 That hoarded wealth grows larger every year, while Black people
go on paying the price.
The four of us set out to be medicine for a sick system, out of deep care for our communities and our
future descendants. Building on our decades of leadership, we sought to show how philanthropy can stand
up for justice. During the Fund’s 昀椀rst 昀椀ve years, we have celebrated Black brilliance and worked to support
Black people around Washington state in all of our collective beauty, tenderness, determination, and joy.
We are people who make a way out of no way.
It is also true that our challenges are urgent and entrenched. Black people remain systemically underresourced and marginalized, and even as current dangers escalate precipitously, these are new chapters
in an old story. Racist systems exclude us from abundance and opportunity, and on a wide range of health,
quality of life, and economic metrics, we fare worse. Stepping out the front door every day onto America’s
unlevel playing 昀椀eld, we meet less access, less understanding, and more risk than the majority population,
from the health clinic to the tra昀케c stop.
We know how normal cruelty is in this society — as routine as the majority culture handwaving it away.
We have never been compensated for the stolen labor that built white wealth in this country. Our bodies
and spirits carry the weathering and trauma of generations. When we are included, that inclusion is often
tokenizing, or at other times it is what Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor calls “predatory inclusion,”9 as when Black
people gained access to homeownership on an extractive basis that did not lead to prosperity.
Again and again, our humanity goes unseen and uncherished.
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