For many white leaders in the social impact world, 2020 has been a year of reckoning with systemic racism. For Black communities across the country, little of what’s emerged is new information. In fact, many have been calling attention to the needs of their community members for decades, if not longer. 

Philanthropy has not answered those calls, according to a new report, Unfunded: Black communities overlooked by Canadian philanthropy. The researchers surveyed 40 public and private foundations and found that only six funded Black-serving non-profits between 2017 and 2018. Only two funded Black-led organizations. 

The researchers identified a clear need for a foundation dedicated to this work — and so the Foundation for Black Communities launched last week alongside the Unfunded report. Future of Good sat down with Rebecca Darwent and Liban Abokor, working group members for the foundation, to learn more. 

The following conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Kylie Adair: What brought you both to this initiative?

Liban Abokor: In my day job, I’ve been the executive director of a not-for-profit organization called Youth Leaps. Our mandate is to support young, Black men and women to access employment and educational opportunities. We spend as much time trying to get resources to sustain ourselves as we do, unfortunately, actually offering programmatic supports to the youth population. I think that’s a significant burden on Black-led and Black-serving not-for-profit organizations. I think we should be spending our resources doing work and not in the pursuit of resources. 

Rebecca Darwent: In my day job, I work as a consultant and partnerships lead for a company called Purpose Co. We’re a workforce development firm that works with non-profits and industry organizations, tracking and creating training programs that allow for better access to well-paid jobs. I started out my career as a frontline street outreach social worker, and have worked on all aspects of the non-profit sector, and spent time as a grant maker, both on the operations side and on the governance side. What is really powerful about the Foundation for Black Communities and the report is the potential to move to community-driven philanthropy: who is at the decision-making table? Why are decisions being made the way they are? And what would it look like if we were in an environment that is led by Black communities for Black communities?

Kylie Adair: What does it mean to each of you personally to step into this leadership role? And what does better representation for Black communities in philanthropy mean for the sector?

Rebecca Darwent: I think that it’s really important to just recognize that systemic anti-Black racism exists in all sectors and while a lot of media attention has come around what it looks like in the corporate sector, maybe the criminal justice sector, It’s really important to recognize that the exclusion of Black communities is happening also in the philanthropic and charitable sectors, despite having a reputation for doing good work and having good intentions. The lack of representation ultimately affects decision making.

Liban Abokor. When it comes to leading philanthropic foundations, we can probably count the number of Black individuals that are on boards. Senator Ratna Omidvar right now is looking at a survey around the diversity of boards, and Black women, specifically are probably the smallest minority of board members. I think for a very long time, we’ve been comfortable with participating in, but not necessarily leading the conversations. We’re mindful that in a moment where COVID has disrupted the very fabric of our normal lives. I don’t think the Black community is focused on building back better. I think what we’re trying to avoid is being dug down deeper. We know that when this is all said and done, the outcome is going to be either significant wealth transfer and some prosperity. Or the worry for Black communities is that we’re going to be prescribed even further poverty as a result of inaction or status quo. That’s something we cannot afford. 

Kylie Adair: There’s a distinction throughout the Unfunded report between Black-serving and Black-led grantee organizations. How important is it that funding goes to the intersection of those two: Black-serving organizations with Black leadership? 

Rebecca Darwent: It’s crucial, it’s essential, because there is a real white saviour complex in the non-profit sector. You can’t have this conversation without acknowledging that. It’s really important to understand why white leaders are trusted with money and Black leaders are not. Why is it comfortable to fund those organizations and not Black-led organizations? What is that dynamic? The entire sector is really rooted in social welfare ideas of charity, who deserves charity. It’s not actually that it’s complex. It’s just naming that. 

Liban Abokor: Most of my staff who I work with are Black. And frankly, the reason we do that is because most of the youth we serve are Black. I don’t think that we need to explain that. There’s a reason why certain women-only spaces are required to serve women. And this is the same for LGBTQ communities — you need folks with that lived experience, attached to knowledge, to be able to understand and relate to the folks that they’re serving. I don’t understand why that’s even a question, not for you specifically, but I wonder why that isn’t just an axiomatic truth in our community. Being a member of the community allows you a certain tacit knowledge, certain experience, a certain cultural fluency that allows you to place yourself in the recipient’s shoes, but also have a bit of sensitivity that I think, frankly, others may have blind spots to. It’s as simple as that. 

Kylie Adair: The report identifies a clear need for disaggregated, race-based data on community needs and leadership — the lack of which is a systemically racist problem. At the same time, does philanthropy rely too much on data?

Rebecca Darwent: Absolutely. There’s often a call to have data, there’s a call to ensure that it is validated, that it’s double-checked, that all the T’s are crossed, but there’s a real dire state that Black communities and organizations are in. In addition to the report, we also did a national survey of Black-led and Black-serving organizations. We surveyed 110 organizations, and what we learned was that 63 percent of survey respondents will run out of funding to sustain themselves in less than six months. Six months is a very short period of time. And when those organizations are no longer in existence, what is the gap that is there? I think that it’s easy to say, where’s the data, where’s the data? It’s a lot harder to say, what are we going to do now?

Liban Abokor: Anecdotes should have been enough. Communities are saying there’s a crisis. We’ve been abandoned and neglected. That should have been enough. We know that’s never enough when it comes to the Black community. Everyone wants us to verify, statistically, through data, which often doesn’t exist, what’s happening in our lives. And in the cases that we do do that, the results never surprise Black communities, but for some odd reason, oftentimes shock those within leadership of whatever system that we’ve now shone a light on. [When it comes to data on Black leadership in the sector,] do you really care if it’s 1 percent or 2 percent? We’re spending time collecting information that we know is going to be fundamentally in line with where we all feel and know. Let’s get to the work.

Rebecca Darwent: Usually it’s in short order, after the numbers come in on leadership, that the question automatically comes to pipeline. I think it’s really important to just clearly and plainly say: there are leaders all around the sector. There are people who are not promoted, who are not given opportunities, who are not seen in the light of ‘leader.’ There is not a lack of pipeline. There are strong Black leaders from coast to coast to coast who can sit on boards, who are able to speak to the needs of their communities very well. The lack of inclusion, the lack of bridge building, that exists in the philanthropic sector is alarming. 

Kylie Adair: Your research also points to a clear need for more community-led philanthropy, a model the Foundation for Black Communities will adopt. Is that a way to, as you say, get to the work faster without needing to pause to collect data from the outside?

Rebecca Darwent: It’s important to say that we know that there are multiple Black communities across this country. We have African, Caribbean, Afro-Indigenous, Black Pioneers, mixed Black representatives across the country, in addition to all of the intersectionalities of gender, religion, age, orientation. So we recognize that this community led approach is very, very multifaceted. In your question, you asked, is it going to be faster? And in some cases it won’t be faster. A community-driven, distributed decision-making model may not be faster, but we believe very firmly that it will have quality outcomes. 

Liban Abokor: We’ll use a very participatory grant-making model where in different regions across the country, we have grant advisory committees. Those committees will be made up of local community members. Let’s say the focus is employment — how it plays out within the Prairies is going to be different than the way that it plays out within the Atlantic region. We have an understanding of the key areas that I think transverse all Black communities, whether it’s employment issues, healthcare issues, criminal justice issues. But they play out differently. 

One example that I can give you is that there is a community in Toronto called Jane and Finch. I was on the advisory committee with a granting foundation, and we had two proposals at the table from the same community. We funded the first one, and about six proposals later, the second proposal for the same community came up, and it was summarily dismissed. Why? Because we’d already funded a project in that community. If the advisory committee had a relationship with that neighbourhood, or the Black community who live there, they would have realized that the neighbourhood is in fact divided North and South. It takes tacit knowledge from lived experience to guide similar decision-making. So it wasn’t intended to neglect the community. The lack of relationship resulted in us not understanding the diverse, distinct needs of Black communities.

Kylie Adair: We also know that not all funding is created equal, and the kind of funding that’s offered really makes a difference to whether it is accessible or applicable or practical for an organization. What kind of funding do Black-led and Black-serving organizations need, and what kind of funding will you provide through the foundation?

Liban Abokor: Our survey respondents said they need long-term, multi-year funding and strong investments in not only operational, in other words programmatic, supports, but they need capacity-building supports. An overwhelming number of these organizations are volunteer-run or volunteer-driven. However, the only reason why many of these organizations are volunteer-run is because they don’t actually get support for staffing positions. They only get programmatic dollars. And that’s why you end up seeing all these organizations come up, come online, and then the exhaustion for which our sector is renowned for hits, and then that organization or that program or that initiative, it goes under. And then two, three years later someone says, hey, there’s a gap in my community. And the cycle, which is quite insidious, continues. 

Kylie Adair: What about some of the even earlier barriers to entry, like resource-heavy application processes? 

Rebecca Darwent: Something that is really frustrating at a minimum, infuriating at a maximum, is how exclusionary the language of philanthropy is, how confusing grant applications can be, how time-consuming it can be. It came through loud and clear in the needs assessment that these are barriers and need to be addressed. 

Liban Abokor: There’s a really poor job around marketing to our community to let them know these funding opportunities exist. And then if those opportunities do exist, in large part, we’re excluded from them because of the requirements to be charitable, or a very cumbersome application process. Even if they do apply, they’re not going to get funded because we know that the foundation world works on relationships and our communities don’t have the relationships, because those individuals within the leadership are really quite white. And what they end up doing oftentimes is funding the new projects that are familiar to them, that look familiar, sound familiar. That’s just a natural default of us as human beings. But as long as Black communities are erased from participation in decision-making, we’re going to find that funding goes to those who look, feel and sound like those in decision making positions. Black communities might not apply, because they’ll do a quick calculation and say, yeah, this isn’t for us.

Kylie Adair: What does trust-based philanthropy mean to you?

Rebecca Darwent: Funding should be innovative. It should allow for exploration. The risk aversion in the philanthropic sector is often mind-boggling to me. I think that it’s time for really investing in creativity, investing in things that are new, investing in things that haven’t been invested in before. And in some cases, it’s reinvesting in things that have been proven year after year, because there’s a double-edged sword: sometimes it’s like, we’ve invested in this organization for three years — I don’t know if we should keep investing in them. And then funding is pulled and those institutions fall. 

Liban Abokor: There’s a launch and land problem in this sector. What I mean by that is this sector has done a great job of launching a bunch of different organizations and projects, but it does very little to sustain them. If you think about launching an organization as an airplane, that plane is going to run out of fuel at some point. And you want to make sure that it has a safe landing. Our projects just continue to operate in the air until they run out of gas. And then there’s just a very violent crash, and that’s the experience of most Black organizations. When they get funding in some way, it’s oftentimes not long-term, it’s sporadic, and it’s uncommitted. And it cannot be about, well, this is a proven model? And does it have 10 years of research? That’s absurd. Our communities oftentimes have emergent issues and these issues need to be investigated just as much.

Kylie Adair: I’d assume those emergent issues are at a high right now, right? Everyone’s using the word unprecedented. 

Liban Abokor: Unprecedented or just long, long ignored?

Rebecca Darwent: Long ignored. 

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