How Nwamaka Agbo Is Leading Kataly's Work to "Redistribute and Redefine Wealth"
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Nwamaka Agbo, CEO of the Kataly Foundation. Photo by Bethanie Hines
As a Black woman and the daughter of African immigrants, Nwamaka Agbo brings an identity and lived experience to the role of CEO that is all too rare in philanthropy. As public scrutiny has pushed the sector to reckon with the uncomfortable truth of how its $1.5 trillion of accumulated wealth was created, and whose labor created it, some foundations have sought new leadership with the kind of credentials and indelible understanding that can effectively steward their evolution into a new way of being. For the Kataly Foundation, Agbo is that leader.
A longtime activist and innovator in restorative economics, Agbo is applying her expertise at Kataly, a young, cutting-edge philanthropy that aims to “redistribute and redefine wealth in a way that leads to transformation, abundance and regeneration.” Agbo first became interested in how capital shapes our society while working to advance green jobs legislation in California. She watched as amendments that took her coalition months to successfully negotiate were instantly gutted by corporate oil lobbyists in backroom meetings. Then, in response to the 2012 recession, she saw how many endowed foundations abruptly cut their grantmaking, which had devastating effects on many organizations that were the backbone of progressive movements.
As Agbo looked more deeply into how fluctuations in the economy influence foundations’ spending decisions, and in turn, how philanthropy’s decisions affect movements’ ability to build power within BIPOC communities, she understood that the reliance on a mere 5% payout would never finance the type of durable, systemic change that is at the rhetorical center of social justice philanthropy. In her role at Kataly Foundation, she is seeking to build a methodology that is grounded in distributed leadership, complexity, systems thinking and sustainable solutions that reflect the wisdom of BIPOC communities. I spoke with her about how this approach is going so far.
After many years of organizing, electoral campaigns and policy advocacy on racial, social and environmental justice, how did your path bring you into philanthropy?
Nwamaka Agbo: So many experiences that my family and I had to navigate over the years led me naturally to a place where social justice work is just part of how we move through the world. In trying to understand what levers or strategies can be engaged to create more justice and equity around the world, one of the pieces throughout that journey has been the role of capital and how to effectively engage it. In the emerging impact investing movement, people were trying to figure out questions like: can we still invest, and can we still generate a market-rate return while doing good? Those inquiries are what led me to want to do community-led development and have community-controlled investment vehicles. Part of the story of how I got to be here is a lot of curiosity, a deep drive and commitment to justice and equity, and a recognition that those who are most directly impacted by injustice have to be given the resources and the decision-making authority to shape and govern their own lives.
Tell me about how you and Regan Pritzker began working together to formulate the idea for what became Kataly Foundation.
Nwamaka Agbo: I think relationships are the bedrock for transformation, particularly when they’re rooted in respect, reciprocity and mutuality. Regan is a wonderful individual who’s been really committed to her own learning journey around justice and equity. Our paths crossed in the just transition ecosystem in which I was engaging as a consultant and she was showing up as a donor. At the end of 2018, in partnership with Crystal Hayling, the executive director of the Libra Foundation, Regan decided she wanted to set aside resources to invest in a just transition. They reached out to invite me to figure out if we could use the restorative economics framework I had created to create an integrated capital fund that moves not just grant dollars but also investments to stimulate an organization’s financial sustainability.
We had initially planned on working on a pilot project together, and then that pilot project grew into what is now the restorative economies fund when Regan and her husband received a set of returns through a family investment. Soon after, we created two other program areas: the environmental justice resourcing collective and our mindfulness and healing justice work.
When I spoke with Taj James, he told me I should ask you about the framework that Kataly Foundation uses, because each of the program areas operate in distinct ways instead of adhering to the same practices. How did you come to this approach?
Nwamaka Agbo: One of the habits we’re trying to undo with our work is this impetus for philanthropy, and I would say capitalism and white supremacy, to think that there’s only one way to do any particular thing. What we’re trying to lift up is a foundation that’s able to hold an expansive multitude of strategies through our program areas.
We think that’s important, because when we lean into this call to be in right relationship with social movements and organizations, how we’re resourcing work around mindfulness and contemplative practices may look different from what we’re being called to do in the restorative economics space. Being able to have a team that is responsive and deeply understands what is needed on the ground is how we’re structuring our programs.
Everyone on our team is what we refer to as a “practitioner funder,” so people who come from a direct experience working on the ground. The restorative economics framework was the bedrock of my consulting practice, and I have been in relationship with a number of social movements and organizations over the years. The same is true of the nine leaders who are the decision-making body for the environmental justice resource collective, which some would call participatory grantmaking. But it goes beyond the grant decisions, because they make all the strategy decisions over that body of work. Then with the mindfulness team, we have practitioner teachers who are deeply embedded in that body of work and understand what it looks like to resource Black and community of color teacher training programs.
Those are some of the ways we’re looking to democratize the decision-making. We are also leaning into the practice of asking our grantees: who else do we need to resource in order for you to win? We invite grantees to put us in relationship with other organizations they think we should be resourcing. At the same time, we’re also trying to be mindful about being in a moment where we’re building out our own infrastructure. So we want to be receptive to the call to action that we hear from those on the ground and also recognize that we need the capacity to respond to those calls in a timely manner. We’re still in the startup phase.
What does Kataly Foundation gain by having a staff of practitioner funders?
Nwamaka Agbo: To resource the work well, people need to understand what it really looks like to do it. My experience with philanthropy is that funders want to see outcomes every one or two years, and what we know to be true is that policy efforts or organizing campaigns can be much longer. Also, in order for organizations to even be able to materialize outcomes over a period of time, we have to invest in their capacity and support their human development—their skills, knowledge, expertise and access to networks. That’s not a two-year turnaround; that’s a 10-year trajectory. You can’t have centuries of slavery and genocide, and then expect a giant return in two years’ time.
Practitioner funders push back on philanthropy’s flawed thinking and figure out how to resource projects accordingly over the time it actually takes to create real change. We are also able to engage as thought partners as our projects are navigating some really hard challenges. For example, we’ve had projects that had to renegotiate terms for program-related investments from other foundations, because when we looked at their performance, we could see that the terms this other foundation gave them are not terms that they can fully meet and would shift the mission of their project. We have the ability to share our skills, expertise and networks to support these projects because we have done the work ourselves.
You’ve talked about experimentation as being central to how your team is working, and there’s a tendency for philanthropy to frame experimentation as risky. How do you think about this pairing and the different interpretations of what these words mean?
Nwamaka Agbo: Risk and experimentation can be coded words based on the populations we’re talking about. There are ways in which the language of “risk” and “experimentation” is seen as justified when we’re looking at startups in Silicon Valley and the venture capitalists who put millions of dollars into a portfolio of projects knowing that only one or two may succeed. Then, on the other hand, if we go an hour north to Oakland, we can see the different ways the language of “risk” is put on Black and brown communities.
When foundations are trying to assess what is worthy of risk and experimentation, we have to unpack it a little bit more. The risk conversation is also a way that wealthy individuals and financial institutions try to preserve their own interests. Risk assessment is about asking whether our portfolio or balance sheet can take a hit. For Kataly, we recognize that, in addition to looking at the financials of our grantees, we want to look at the social benefits. We want to understand the long-term impact of what we’re trying to do, not just the short-term financial losses or gains. We also want to have a clear understanding of what is at stake for a community if we don’t support this work.
What would it mean if organizations like the NDN Collective don’t have the resources they need to protect and defend Lakota Territory? If initiatives like the Runway Project aren’t able to resource Black entrepreneurs? Kataly believes that the long-term impacts to society outweigh our financial returns, and that’s one of the reasons we are a spend-down foundation. If we were to privilege our own financial benefit in perpetuity over what we know is needed in the community, we would see that as a long-term deficit to society and misaligned with our mission.
One of the beautiful things about experimentation is that you set your hypothesis, run the test, and then iterate and get better. If we lean into a culture of experimentation, we can start to understand that what is necessary for the Appalachian Impact Fund may be distinct from the REAL People’s Fund in Oakland, California, but there may be some through points that are consistent, even if their specific strategies look different. Those are the ways we’re trying to challenge the coded language of “risk” and “experimentation” and lead with practice, not perfection.
In the spirit of rejecting perfectionism, and I know it’s still early days at Kataly Foundation, but are there things you’re already learning?
Nwamaka Agbo: With the inflection points of a pandemic and the Black-led uprisings that we saw this past summer, we are recognizing that it is important to show up and provide rapid-response support and funding. That’s not a shift away from our mission or our approach; that’s a deepening of our commitment to the communities we know are most impacted by systemic inequalities and structural racism.
We are seeing the need to support the projects that are deeply committed to being in alignment with social movements—and to do so early, often and aggressively. With our first set of grants, we will need to mitigate our expectations and recognize that even the ability to sustain through these tumultuous times will be a testament for many of the communities we support. We’re also learning how to unpack this trend in philanthropy around participatory grantmaking and confront this conversation around power. We look at power as not only having the authority to make a decision, but the resources to then implement those decisions.
It sounds like there is real clarity of focus in the work that you all are doing, and I’m wondering how you decide what to bring in and what to leave out to maintain that level of focus?
Nwamaka Agbo: We are really clear about who we want to resource and how we want to resource them, which is Black-led, Indigenous-led, and community-of-color-led projects that serve those communities and do so with a clear power-building analysis. One of the things we are trying to figure out is our flexibility around white-led organizations that want to be in deeper alignment and support racial justice. This is a place where we don’t want to say, “We don’t want to partner with you,” but our priority is to support those who are most impacted by injustice. While we recognize that this is the time for white-led organizations to do deep work, we think it should not just be around diversity, equity and inclusion, but around justice, liberation and accountability.
The values that are guiding Kataly Foundation are clear. Can you talk about how those values show up in the work?
Nwamaka Agbo: Regeneration is particularly important for us as a spend-down foundation. We’re supporting projects in a way that prioritizes their financial sustainability and their ability to regenerate resources in a way that circulates back out into their local community rather than being returned to the foundation. We want to leave more value, more wealth, more resources, more knowledge and expertise in the community rather than to extract from our grantees.
Another value I would point toward is accountability, which connects to our value around healing. Accountability requires us to take actions to repair past harms. Philanthropy’s ability to exist is based off of understanding that we have a broken tax system that allows people to create foundations rather than circulating tax dollars back out into the public sector to democratically support the public good. Our ability to really honor and recognize the humanity of BIPOC leaders and communities supports our ability to recognize the emotional, spiritual and intellectual change that needs to happen to transform society. The ways we are accountable are what facilitates healing.
As Kataly continues to take shape, what are some of the most important conversations your team is having right now?
Nwamaka Agbo: One of the points of inquiry our team is sitting with is how much infrastructure we want to build internally versus how much we want to invest in creating in the community that will live beyond the foundation. We think it’s important to invest in capacity-building vehicles where communities are making decisions over a set of resources and aggregating capital and determining how to reinvest those resources back in the community. How do we start to create financial systems that live beyond the foundation? How do we support the philanthropic vehicles like donor-advised funds or fiscal sponsorship organizations that can be owned and led by BIPOC communities? Because what we invest in supports the calls for the redistribution of wealth and power.
Another piece is that, as people think about the calls to democratize decision-making in philanthropy, the initial impetus is to bring more community leaders onto our boards, which is essentially taking those leaders away from the time they would be spending in social movements to come and tell us what we need to do. In some respects, that can help to move the foundation forward by providing a level of education that the board or staff may not have access to otherwise. However, in the event that the foundation isn’t deeply committed to making the shifts that communities are calling us toward, it is more performative than it is impactful. I think philanthropy can develop a more critical lens around how we implement these community calls to action in ways that aren’t performative, but that are truly transformative in how they play out.
What you’ve demonstrated consistently in this conversation is that the work you’re doing is complex and layered, even on its surface, and the integrated and distributed leadership approaches that you’re taking deepens those layers of complexity. To me, this is extraordinarily exciting and energizing, but I can imagine that there are days when you feel drained—intellectually and emotionally. In the spirit of Kataly’s emphasis on healing justice, how do you fill your well in those moments of depletion?
Nwamaka Agbo: Thank you for this question. I’m going to answer it, but I want to say a couple of things first about the complexity you’re lifting up. Those are the complexities that impacted communities have to navigate on a daily basis. The layers are just the day-to-day life of a person trying to survive in our country. So as philanthropy, we need to challenge ourselves to hold the complexity, to navigate how hard it may feel to do this work, and build those capacities within ourselves, because that’s the lived experience of people on a day-to-day basis. That being said, I don’t think we want people to have to continue to live in a circumstance that is so stressful and so highly complex, where you’re fighting on a daily basis for dignity and survival. The ways we try to support our grantees is by providing them with large, multiyear, general operating support grants. We’re hoping that provides some spaciousness for them to breathe in their work and do the things they know are necessary to win, not the thing they feel they have to do in order to appease philanthropy.
On our team, we support each other as whole people. It’s a talking point that is used a lot in philanthropy, but we think it’s important to recognize and understand what individuals are going through on our team on a day-to-day basis and support them accordingly. Leading with a level of patience and support is also a commitment to the work. There’s a dance we’re still figuring out as a team, as people who are navigating the impacts of COVID-19 on their families and sheltering in place while trying to work.
For me personally, there are two things that are my go-to: sleep and sweat. The ambient stress over the last year, and how it has impacted me and my family, has made it necessary to get good rest. So I have a very intentional sleeping routine and try to get eight hours a night. Then, I wake up and sweat in the morning. Exercise has been a way for me to process things in an embodied way and expel some of the toxins quite literally that keep me feeling smaller or questioning myself. It gives me the confidence I need to see myself as somebody who is worthy and deserving and capable of leading a half-billion-dollar foundation.
Mandy Van Deven is a philanthropy consultant with 20 years of experience in strategy and planning, grantmaking, organizational development, capacity building and strategic communications in the philanthropic, nonprofit and journalism sectors—with an emphasis on gender, racial and economic justice and fortifying the infrastructure for narrative power.
