Of Talents and Philanthropy (Full Blog Coming Soon)

What happens if communities bury philanthropy and double their talents.....?

And unto one he gave five talents…..and straightway took his journey….Then he that had received the five talents went and traded with the same, and made them other five talents….Saying, Lord…..I have gained beside them five talents more.... (Matthew 25:14–30 (KJV)

There are those who give little of the much which they have....And there are those who have little and give it all.  -- Kahlil Gibran

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Traditional philanthropy remains a mystery to many of us existing in Black Grassrooted Community Based Organizations (GCBOs). We turn to this form of philanthropy, looking to seed and fund ideas born of community necessity. But in this giving system, we bounce between two existences that simply do not make any sense. We enter Alice's Wonderland, trying to navigate bureaucratic emotional absurdity -- only to be thrown through Alice's Looking Glass, to face exhaustive institutional mirrors that strike strange cords for our community work.  

We know the seeming realities of competing for funding through grant application processes that lack grounding in the lived realities of communities we serve. We know the stresses of pushing community narratives through institutional existences that distort those lived realities. Operating in survival mode, we feel the captive pull of bending community needs towards philanthropic missions that absolve themselves in the good they think they do....Meanwhile, the stated passion of philanthropic giving glides past disinvested Black communities -- like two ships passing in the night. But still, we persist. Like Alice, we try to make sense of our communities through the language of traditional philanthropy.

But to be truly grass-rooted requires a reckoning for those of us stewarding promises of Black community healing and well-being. Our proximation to the cries-of-colorful-communities requires us to elevate community language and make it central to our philanthropic asks. And if traditional philanthropy cannot understand the language of our Black communities, then we are obliged to remove our writing-rhythms from their presence.

When we seek funding from traditional philanthropy, we must remember, they are only on the verge of understanding disinvested-Black-communities. Therefore, we must resist the lure of pretending we are "running to catch up to where we have always existed" -- and that is in those same disinvested communities. Moreover, we should never be made to prove the relevance and value of our grassrooted realities in our Black communities.

We do not need to tell tall tales just to match misguided philanthropic narratives and missions. The relevance and value of our GCBO realities is in Black community relevance and its value. And if traditional philanthropy were proximate enough to understand this point, it would be filling out applications we design, and telling us why we should let them become "allies" in our five-spaces-of-disassembled--community-brilliance: tenacity of ancestral inheritance; talented progeny; treasures of communal resources; talents of a collective; and, time commitments reflected in spaces of expressed communal willingness.

We must have courage to flip the script. Too many of us are trying to do way too much with far too little from traditional philanthropy. Like Kabuki Theater, we get puppeted to scrap against each other for funding -- contorting Black community realities to fit neatly worded application responses. In that process, we design and hand over to others our brilliance, without any guarantees of a return on our writing-rhythms. And like clockwork....the exhaustion is always in the risk of giving away and thereby losing much in that gamble. But why are we scrapping? And why are we in a strange Wonderland peering through the Looking Glass for philanthropic saviors? This is a place without meaningful rules; meanwhile, what peers back at us are images that resemble nothing of ourselves nor those communities we serve.

And what of our own organizational integrity? We spend a lot of time narrating the experiences of Black communities to obtain philanthropic funding – when we know traditional philanthropy does not understand nor take time to share these community experiences? The relationship between GBCOs (and by derivation, communities) and traditional philanthropy is based on "jumpy" matrix frameworks. Further, the relationship is inverted, where GCBO nearness to “Black community-experiences” becomes less meaningful than the philanthropic experiences of those who lack community proximity. How strange.

As we enter the Wonderland and Looking Glass of philanthropic giving systems, we lose something of our community selves when we compete for those limited dollars — especially if those dollars miss the mark. But....we do so knowing the absurdities of those systems can never contain our five-spaces-of-disassembled-brilliance. So that is a good thing. But we must do more to magnify that brilliance. Let me explain....

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