BIPOC-led organizations call for equity in funding

Chicago Peace Fellow Alumni, which consists of 30 BIPOC-led organizations from the South and West sides, are calling for more equitable funding from philanthropic organizations. PHOTO PROVIDED BY CHRISTI LOVE
Chicago Peace Fellow Alumni, which consists of 30 BIPOC-led organizations from the South and West sides, are calling for more equitable funding from philanthropic organizations. PHOTO PROVIDED BY CHRISTI LOVE

 BIPOC-led organizations call for equity in funding

By Tia Carol Jones

The Black Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC)-led organizations on the South and West sides are calling for equitable funding when it comes to funding community organizations in the grant process.

These 30 organizations participated in the Goldin Institute’s Chicago Peace Fellows. They started to think about issues that impacted all the organizations that were involved. They saw that there was an inequity in funding. It happened when COVID-19 was at its highest, during a time when there was a rise in violence and civil unrest.

“As an organization we were not empowered to really serve the community in the way we really envisioned because we lacked the resources and funding. We also saw such a difference in the way foundations were funding the work,” said Cosette Nazon-Wilburn, founder and executive director of the LUV Institute.

Nazon-Wilburn saw that foundations were funding white-led and founded organizations that were doing Black initiatives, but they weren’t funding Black and Latino organizations led by people of color. The 30 organizations saw that as an opportunity to keep those foundations accountable and put a system in place that would highlight the inequities to see a change in the future.

The organizations came up with a Funders Pledge, an open letter to call on Chicago Foundations to pledge to take action to address the racial inequity. The steps included equitably funding community-accountable BIPOC-led organizations on the city’s South and West sides; engaging in authentic relationships that prioritize transparency, truth and humility; providing easy-to-access, multi-year, flexible, and full cost funding; and resist the urge to scale without respect for the community expertise and let organizations define their own measures of success.

La’Keisha Gray-Sewell, founder and executive director of the Girls Like Me Project, heard funders talk about how much they supported and funded organizations on the South and West sides. But, when it was added up, it amounted to pennies on the dollar to what other organizations were receiving in funding.

“This pledge is not just about funding, in terms of dollars. It is about resources, it’s about making sure we have the capacity and the operational capacity to scale up, or even do what we’re doing so that we’ll be solvent. So we can hire staff, we can have research, we can have evaluations. We’ve not seen that,” Gray-Sewell said.

The goal of the letter is to be a call to action for the philanthropic community and an opportunity to create a shift, to provide pathways to really support Black and brown communities. Jessyca Dudley, founder and CEO of Bold Ventures, serves as a consultant and liaison for the organization and the funders.

The organizations hope that by sharing case studies of inequities within the philanthropic community, funders understand how their practices work against BIPOC-led organizations. Nazon-Wilburn and Gray-Sewell want these foundations to right the wrongs and work with the organizations. The organizations are putting together a report card that will look at what foundations are funding BIPOC-led organizations, as well as how much is being given to those organizations. They also want to disrupt the tax write-off model where foundations give enough money to receive a tax write-off.

There are foundations that have agreed to speak with the organizations. The next step is for the foundations to sign the letter. And, after a year look at the progress. The data collection has started.

“Organizations founded from the community, for the community, by the community, know best what to do for the community. There’s no outside entity that can tell us better what we need,” Gray-Sewell said. “Listen to us, our experiences are our expertise, and what we’ve been doing is generational and a tradition. What has kept us safe in our community, what has kept our families together is the traditions that we know are native to us.”

To read the open letter, visit https://tinyurl.com/msatt3ds.

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