Resourcing Racial Justice was created in the UK as an emergency response to the pandemic. As a group of people of colour that were activists, innovators, and artists we knew ahead of the figures that subsequently emerged how racialized the impacts of this pandemic would be. Through every crisis, people of colour are disproportionately affected because they are already at the sharp edge of structural and systemic inequality.

We also were aware of the deep flaws of the philanthropic sector when it came to funding racial justice work and where money would and would not flow. Some of the group had already initiated a coalition at the end of 2019 working on the intersections of climate justice and economic justice with a group of funders. What we’d already begun to discuss together was how structural and systemic inequality are still deeply embedded within our society and public infrastructure. Whether we are looking at where philanthropic wealth has come from or the sectors current investments today we can see that many philanthropic funds have drawn and benefited from exploitative structures at the expense and detriment of communities of colour.

The last six months have been humbling and as we make our final grants we can see there is so much we have learnt along this journey and so much that has been affirmed. The scale of innovation and visionary resistance by people of colour across the UK was undeniable in the applications we received. While how deep seated structures of racism are from legal frameworks to how money moves was also held up. Racial justice is always seen as deeply political and risky. It is the notion of risk that is both used to maintain racism but also to exclude radical and progressive work.

Our work increasingly became about not just redistributing resources towards racial justice but building transparency around the risks to our communities that becomes the barrier in accessing charitable funding. Rather than passing this on we are starting to understand how we can become responsible for holding this risk and undoing these structures. Many of the unregistered groups we have funded have already told us that our funding has helped them to secure mainstream funding for the first time as we have managed to reduce the risk connected to them.

Read the full article about funding racial justice by Nusrat Faizullah and Farzana Khan at Alliance Magazine.