First-ever by-Indigenous for-Indigenous platform launches to help boost donations for Indigenous initiatives across the country
Why It Matters
Many settler-led philanthropic organizations want to boost their financial support for Indigenous-led projects, but some lack relationships with Indigenous communities and don’t know where to start.
[aesop_image img=”https://futureofgood.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/unnamed-5-1.jpg” panorama=”off” align=”center” lightbox=”on” captionsrc=”custom” caption=”Feast House, a new website hosted by The Circle on Philanthropy, aims to connect donors with Indigenous-led and Indigenous-informed initiatives across the country.” captionposition=”left” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”]
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Last week, the Circle on Philanthropy, a national Indigenous philanthropic charity, launched ‘Feast House’ a new, first-of-its-kind website, aiming to connect donors with Indigenous-led and informed projects across the country.
“This is really a home for Indigenous peoples and organizations to share their origins and share their purpose and to have their work amplified,” says K‘aayhlt’aa Haanas (Valine Brown), member engagement and accountability manager with The Circle. “And it’s also space for a settler philanthropic audience to join us and to be a witness to that.”
In recent years, many foundations across the country have expressed a desire to boost their support for Indigenous-led initiatives. Since its creation in 2015, more than 80 Canadian foundations, funders and other philanthropic organizations have signed The Circle’s philanthropic declaration of action, committing to share their networks, voices and resources to include and benefit Indigenous people.
Individual donors, too, have shown signs of wanting to boost their support for Indigenous-led initiatives. A recent CanadaHelps report, for instance, found that the rate of giving to Indigenous causes through online donations grew faster in 2020 and 2021 than any donations to any other social cause.
Yet despite the movement, the overall volume of donations to Indigenous groups remains persistently low. A recent report by a team of researchers found that just 0.7 percent of all donations over $30,000 from Canadian charities and foundations to other charities went to Indigenous-led groups. And despite the growth seen in individual online giving, too, CanadaHelps found that in 2021, just 3.3 percent of all online donations went to Indigenous causes, despite Indigenous people representing nearly 5 percent of the population.
In response, Feast House aims to curb one of the barriers that may be getting in the way of some would-be donors: a lack of knowledge of Indigenous-led projects to give to.
Brown says the platform is aimed at creating a “clear pathway” for settler philanthropy, institutional and individual donors alike, to support Indigenous projects.
At launch this month, the platform presented 15 Indigenous-led or Indigenous-informed initiatives seeking financial support. Among them is Swiilawiid Sustainability Society, a non-profit in Haida Gwaii focused on renewable energy, Savage Society, a non-profit Indigenous-led theatre company in Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh territories, and Indigenous Perspectives Society: Centre of Excellence in Community Education, a Lkwungen territory-based charity and social enterprise, that offers a wide variety of workshops for Indigenous and non-Indigenous learners.
Karman Lippitt, business development coordinator for Indigenous Perspectives Society says her team is thrilled to be listed on the platform, where generating unrestricted dollars will allow their organization to “be truer to our own aspirations and to support self-determination.”
Lippitt’s team is fundraising to be able to offer, among other things, free or reduced-cost workshops to Indigenous youth who are in, or have aged out of, the child welfare system and to their communities, including training on understanding and healing lateral violence, conflict transformation and supporting Two Spirit and Indigenous LGBTQ youth.
“We know that they’re a vulnerable group,” says Lippitt, of her team’s work with youth who have been in the child welfare system, “and we know we have something we can offer them to try and support.”
When it comes to making a donation, the platform supports donors to give directly to each initiative through a link to the appropriate place to make a donation. The Circle does not collect funds on behalf of projects. “This is for organizations to receive financial contributions directly,” says Brown.
Lippitt says the process of becoming listed on the platform and co-developing the organization’s profile on the platform was collaborative and consensus-based, creating a feeling of comfort.
“We’re always trying to navigate the mainstream business world and the mainstream cultural norms, while, [being] true to our own values and Indigenous ways of beings and cultural understandings,” says Lippitt. “I think it’s important for us to work with Indigenous partners like The Circle because it’s a different approach…We’re part of their circle and they’re part of ours.”
For Brown, this relational approach was central to the purpose of the new platform. “We wanted to create a space for strength-based storytelling, by Indigenous people, for indigenous people,” she says.
The platform allows would-be donors to search by Indigenous nation or impact theme keywords, such as Heiltsuk or child welfare. It also lists the articles of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples that each project upholds. (UNDRIP is the most comprehensive international instrument on the rights of indigenous peoples.) The web page for IPS, for instance, notes that the organization upholds UNDRIP Article 20 — that Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain and develop their political, economic and social systems or institutions.
The website’s logo was created by Jade Roberts, an Indigenous artist based in Treaty 6 territory. On the platform’s website, Roberts says the logo’s design elements, which feature a bowl, sage, berries, trees and the sun, were chosen to “represent Indigenous wealth, abundance, and connection.”
The platform encourages potential donors to “feast” by engaging with the “wealth of knowledge, power, and strength” found in the profiles of projects listed on the platform and collection of stories also featured there.
In the coming weeks and months, the Circle’s member engagement manager says she and her team are keen to add additional Indigenous “kin” to the platform.
To be eligible, organizations must be Indigenous-led or Indigenous-informed, based on the Circle’s ‘definitional matrix’ for Indigenous-supporting organizations. To be Indigenous-led, an organization must have Indigenous leadership at all levels of decision making within the organization. To be Indigenous-informed an organization must “hold Indigenous leadership” at some levels of the organization and be committed to Indigenous recruitment.
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