America was founded on much more than the idealistic notions of freedom and liberty. Its colonial beginnings included destructive individualism, capitalist exploitation, and white supremacy. Those ideals have influenced how our country operates today, shaping its political, social, and economic systems, including those that seem to do good on the surface, underscoring the importance of decolonizing donations and the philanthropic sector.

Take, for example, our country's immensephilanthropy industry and the accompanying ways we donate and support causes for social good. The billion dollar system wasn't an ahistorical design. It facilitates funders' political and social goals, which can include helping those they deem disadvantaged. Still, philanthropy was also originally built on generational wealth made through extractive labor that profited off of the lives of Black, brown, and indigenous communities, like oil drilling or agricultural slavery that built the fortunes of white families. Although that wealth may come from different sources today, the process of giving away that wealth — choosing who is fit to receive charity — upholds vestiges of colonization. And individual donors can replicate those systems in their own donation practices, too, demonstrating the need to decolonize donations.

Edgar Villanueva is the founder and principal of the Decolonizing Wealth Project and its project Liberated Capital, which operates a network of community members and donors to build equitable, unrestricted capital streams for communities of color around the country. Villanueva himself has worked in the field of philanthropy for almost two decades, and written two books about the subject, Decolonizing Wealth and Money as Medicine. As Villanueva described, it's easy for powerful, rich, and predominantly white donors to exert power over less advantaged actors within philanthropy (consider charities, fellowship programs, grant opportunities, and other nonprofits), and he connects this directly to colonization, emphasizing the importance of decolonizing donations.

Centuries of economic privilege for white families has provided a bed of resource support for the rich and white to become leaders in this field. Predominately white philanthropic leadership upholds the lingering effects of colonization — things like systemic racism, racial wealth gaps, and educational divides between ivy league elites and the average American — through the ways charitable funding is controlled and shared, Villanueva explains.

Read the full article about decolonizing donations by Chase DiBenedetto at MSN.