Amid a Backlash Against Equity Work, This Racial Justice Fund Is Just Getting Started
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Racial justice protest in los angeles, June 2020. danna kinsky/shutterstock
The summer of 2020 was poised to be a turning point when it came to racial justice in the U.S, including in the philanthropic sector. After the death of George Floyd and the civil unrest that followed, numerous foundations pledged impressive amounts of support for the cause, promising to fund organizations working to advance racial justice and equity.
Back when IP revisited these pledges two years after Floyd's death, one that stood out was the California Black Freedom Fund, a five-year, $100 million initiative to support Black power-building and movement-based organizations in the state. Now, even as work toward greater diversity and racial justice has come under attack, this pooled fund has announced that it is here to stay.
The California Black Freedom Fund was initially established as a temporary fund, drawing support from more than two dozen funders, including the Akonadi Foundation, Annenberg Foundation, The California Endowment, California Wellness Foundation, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund, Libra Foundation, and a recent investment from the state of California. Now known as the Black Freedom Fund, leadership announced it is fundraising for an endowment to establish itself as a standalone foundation and ensure it can continue to provide much needed support for the state's Black power-building ecosystem.
“It's impossible to dismantle systemic racism in a five-year period as an initiative,” said BFF's executive director, Marc Philpart. “These are 400-year-old problems that we're grappling with. There's no way that an organization is going to effectively turn the tide in a five-year period. We really need a multigenerational entity that's going to be able to exist in perpetuity and safeguard the rights and freedoms of Black people and be able to be an effective kind of catalyst within the racial justice movement.”
In order to address longstanding funding gaps between organizations led by people of color and organizations led by their white counterparts, the fund focuses its support on Black-led organizations, incorporating a trust-based approach to its grantmaking, providing flexible, general operating support for grantees. Its latest, seventh round of grants moved $3.5 million to 75 organizations in California.
Grantees include A New Way of Life Reentry Project, Anti Police-Terror Project, Black Alliance for Just Immigration, Black Futures Lab, California Black Health Network, and Inland Empire Black Worker Center. These organizations represent regions across the state and work across a variety of issues, including immigrant rights, maternal health, economic advancement and environmental justice. The fund has awarded more than $37.7 million to 178 groups since its inception in 2021.
Pushing back against the backlash
According to Philpart, the idea for the fund's evolution into an endowed foundation stemmed from a series of conversations with other leaders and organizers.
“As we went out to community partners and funders in the field, it was clear that people saw a real need for us to exist for the long term and to be an entity that serves Black Californians and Black people more broadly,” Philpart said. “Those conversations are just starting. We expect that there will be a pretty open embrace once we establish ourselves and are prepared to do the work to ensure that people are aware of the opportunity to support an entity like this for the long term.”
Despite the hope that 2020 would signal a turning point in funding for racial justice work, a number of funders and organizers have expressed concerns — privately and increasingly more publicly — that such support is backsliding, in part due to the Supreme Court's anti-affirmative action ruling last year. There’s been a general backlash against efforts to expand diversity and equity and counter systemic racism in recent years, but the SCOTUS decision (which only directly impacted college admissions) opened the door for lawsuits against racial- and gender-focused work.
“The reality is, many of our organizations are under attack. They're facing funding cliffs due to the instability of the economy, due to concerns from philanthropic leaders who were never really firmly committed to racial justice, due to the circus that is occurring in some of our courts throughout the state, throughout the country, where you have these right-wing litigants who claim focusing on serving the Black community is racist,” Philpart said.
Two of BFF's grantees, one that supports expectant mothers and another that supports trans people, are dealing with lawsuits over their guaranteed income programs, which are co-managed by the city of San Francisco. These lawsuits, Philpart said, are preying on some of the most vulnerable people to make political points in the hopes of “unravel[ing] the bedrock of racial justice.”
“There's so much possibility. There's so many beautiful things happening, but yet there's this rising tide of hate, of fascism, of anti-democratic values that we have to stamp out and we have to speak out against,” Philpart said.
BFF has been expanding its programmatic work to support leaders legally and otherwise, including a sabbatical pilot program to sustain Black power-building leadership and a State of Black California report and conference, which has been commissioned by the California Legislative Black Caucus. The fund will also be working alongside other legal experts and funders, including Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law (LCCR) and Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) to educate and defend the legal rights of Black organizations.
While the California-based BFF is regionally specific, national funders and leaders in other parts of the country have expressed interest in having the fund be present in their own communities. “Whether it's in New York or whether it's in Michigan or whether it's in Louisiana, people see value in a philanthropic institution committed to Black people,” Philpart said. “We're in the era of Black Lives Matter [but] we haven't seen an entity that exists to meet those needs.”
Philpart added that there is an opportunity to be strategic and thoughtful about how the fund can be a national, place-based philanthropic institution, and while he doesn't see that happening immediately, there is an interest from other stakeholders who can help build the fund's constitution to potentially take on that role someday.
“There's a considerable amount of work to do, but I believe that we will win because I believe we're on the side of justice,” Philpart said. “We'll counter this hate-mongering and negativity in a way that is filled with love and participation.”
