Interrogating Captive Care: How Solidarity Allows Philanthropy to Redistribute Power

This is a mantra I learned from a colleague at Advance Peace, in Richmond, CA, where I mentored youth and young adults caught in the grip of cyclical gun violence. We worked in an environment where firearms had become normalized as a way of settling disputes, and where many young people had inherited conditions that taught them the world was organized around kill or be killed. In that work, solidarity with the youth could not be theoretical. Young people had to know we were willing to despair with them, not observe it from a safe distance.

When I entered philanthropy, I assumed this kind of solidarity would remain a guiding virtue. Not in the same form as dodging bullets or pleading with a young man in a triggered state to put his gun down, but as a commitment to share in the risks and exposure that the communities we support must face every day. I believed the work would still require proximity, shared risk, deep understanding, and deep empathy.

But since starting this career, first as a program manager and now as an implementation strategist, I have wrestled with how easily distance becomes normalized in philanthropy. In these roles, I have been responsible for assessing, recommending, and making decisions about how substantial resources are allocated and, just as importantly, how they are not.

Philanthropy often holds deep analyses of the conditions that produce poor health, shortened lives, and preventable suffering. Yet privilege can still allow the field to move around those realities or step safely to the side. When this distance goes unchecked, cerebral expertise often obscures and silences the wisdom of lived experience, practice, care, and survival. In doing so, philanthropy risks coopting care rather than nurturing more just and equitable forms of it.