Giving Compass' Take:

• Edgar Villanueva argues for the use of money as medicine to repair the hurts of inequity and outlines 7 steps to recovery. 

• How are philanthropists complicit in an inequitable system? Where has progress already been made on this issue?

• Learn how to get rid of unconscious bias.

With few exceptions, funders reinforce the colonial division of us versus them. The statistics also speak for themselves: Ninety-two percentof foundation CEOs and 89 percent of foundation boards are white, and only 7-8 percent of foundation funding goes specifically to people of color

The same dynamics basically hold true across what I call the loans-to-gifts spectrum, including bank loans, venture capital, municipal bonds, and even social and ethical finance, impact investments, and humanitarian aid.

Yet there’s a silver lining in this cataclysm. Those of us forced to the margins are the very ones who harbor the best solutions for healing, progress, and peace, by virtue of our outsider perspectives and resilience. When we reclaim our share of resources, when we recover our places at the table and the drawing board, we can design our healing. We can create new ways of seeking and granting access to money. We can return balance to the world by moving money to where the hurt is worst.

Money is like water; it’s a precious, life-giving resource. Money should be a tool of love that facilitates relationships and helps us thrive, rather than something that hurts and divides us. If we use it for sacred, life-giving, restorative purposes, it can be medicine.

It also requires that individuals and institutions take a series of steps toward healing:

  1. Grieve: Stop and feel the hurts we’ve endured.
  2. Apologize: Apologize for the hurts we’ve caused.
  3. Listen: Acknowledge the wisdom of those excluded and exploited by the system, who possess exactly the perspective and wisdom needed to fix it.
  4. Relate: Share our whole selves with each other and understand we don’t have to agree in order to respect each other.
  5. Represent: Build whole new decision-making tables, rather than setting token places at the colonial tables as an afterthought.
  6. Invest: Put all our money where our values are.
  7. Repair: Use money to heal where people are hurting and stop more hurt from happening.

Read the full article about money as medicine by Edgar Villanueva at Stanford Social Innovation Review.