Decolonizing Foreign Aid & Global Philanthropy
We have been invited by international organizers and networks to support expanding our work beyond the US. We have given talks and workshops with funders in 12 countries outside the US in the past year that have supported our global expansion and helped us better understand how we can partner and support Black and Indigenous grassroots leaders.
We hired a director of global programs and planned a 2022-2023 Decolonizing Wealth World Tour. We partnered with 8-10 local organizations across Eastern Africa, South Africa, Mexico, and Brazil to hold activations that lift up local Black/Indigenous leadership inviting funders and lateral funders/governments for conversations about decolonization and shifting resources and capital to local communities.
We also met with various Black/Brown leaders to see their work, build relationships, and amplify their stories. We commissioned research to ask hundreds of leaders across the Global South this question – what do you want to see different about global philanthropy? These events have a proven record of success in the US, where we have raised more than $15M for Black and Indigenous-led organizing and dramatically shifted funding practices in this country.
PROBLEM ANALYSIS
Black and brown folks on the front lines having been pushing global philanthropies and NGOs to shift their funding practices or to “decolonize humanitarian aid” to shift more dollars to BIPOC folks on the frontlines of global racial and economic justice movements and to build local leadership, pushing back on colonial ways of funding and controlling.
For too long, people in the Global South have been marketed as beneficiaries of aid who need “white saviors”. An international movement of networked organizations are pushing to reinvent foreign aid by shifting money and power closer to the communities that aid is meant to serve.
Demands have been made at international meetings to push donors and large aid organizations to community to sending 25% of humanitarian funding as direct as possible to the local level.
Impact
We are working to shift power, money/capital to Black and Indigenous leaders and to disrupt harmful aid practices. Our work will support a campaign to increase international funding to local, Black and Indigenous organizations from 2% to 25% in alignment with the demands of our partner organizations in this report.
My project “Decolonizing Foreign Aid & Global Philanthropy” is wrapping up quite well. My organization, Decolonizing Wealth Project (DWP), partnered with Peace Direct, a global organization based in London, UK, to conduct research and to publish a report on decolonizing global philanthropy. The report will come out in 2024.
At DWP, we support foundations, donors and finance professionals working across the loans-to-gifts spectrum to redistribute wealth with values of racial justice. This support includes education and engagement through donor advising, workshops, and presentations. Gearing up for the report release, we held Decolonizing Wealth events in London, Nairobi, and Bogota. We also have held two events in Mexico City.
Through these trainings and workshops, we have helped redistribute $600M to Black and Indigenous communities in the United States, with racial justice, trust based and participatory funding becoming a norm, and the naming of white supremacy, colonialism and the history of foundations wealth, no longer a radical thing to vocalize. Our own fund, Liberated Capital, has redistribute more than $15M to Black and Indigenous-led organizations in the US.
DWP is known for introducing the framework of “decolonizing philanthropy” and “reparative philanthropy” to the sector and will continue build on our success in shifting philanthropic practice and narratives to impact sector practices globally.
