Earlier this month, a new law in the District of Columbia went into effect that will allow the D.C Council to study the possibility of reparations for Black residents descended from enslaved people or otherwise affected by Jim Crow-era policies such as discriminatory housing and employment practices. This law is yet another win for the reparations movement that comes at a time when public reckoning with this country’s past is under constant attack, and the law is the result of tireless grassroots advocacy fueled in part by funders who understand that they have a role to play in the reparations movement as well. That is the subject of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy’s report Cracks in the Foundation: Philanthropy’s Role in Reparations for Black People in the DMV which was released a little over a year ago, and which is just as important today as it was then.
The assessment of changes to the sector since the release of Cracks in the Foundation outlined below could not have been done without the learning and evaluation expertise of NCRP’s former Evaluation Manager, Adrianne Glover.
Since NCRP released the report, our staff has continued to be in discussion with sector leaders about our findings and the need for additional foundations to reckon with the harm caused by their philanthropic wealth origins, and we have also held conversations with foundation leaders who are curious about how to begin doing this work themselves. While it’s too soon to know how funding levels have changed since the time of the report, we do know that grantmaking for Black communities has been reverting to its mean since peaking in 2020, and philanthropy still has a lot of work to do to adequately fund Black-led grassroots movements. There are, however, some luminaries who are leading the way.
In 2024, our report advisor Liberation Ventures announced $3.4 million to 48 organizations across the country building power for reparations, and this year they publicly released their Reparations Grantmaking Blueprint. Additionally, since the release of the report we’ve had conversations with 13 foundations across the country who have shared with us their own efforts and internal conversations around redress, some of whom have hired historians to begin digging through archives and uncovering truths about their own institutional wealth.
Another shining example is a foundation who has been on a truth and repair journey since 2023 – the Robert Wood