I’ve been thinking about accountability a lot lately – how it is practiced, and why it matters – on individual, interpersonal, organisational, and field levels. I’ve come to understand that the process of accountability is actually quite simple and straightforward, and, when done fully and with care, a practice of accountability can unlock a depth of relationship and felt sense of integrity and ease second to none.

So you can imagine how eager I was to attend the breakout session at GEO2026 on Reparative Philanthropy with Joana Jackson, President and CEO at Weingart Foundation; Maisha Simmons, AVP, Equity and Culture at Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; Jen Reedy, President of Bush Foundation; and Edgar Villanueva, CEO of the Decolonizing Wealth Project. This conversation gave us the rare opportunity to learn about their institutions’ efforts to be accountable by courageously interrogating the sources of their wealth and exploring what repairs are called for.

Edgar Villanueva’s book Decolonizing Wealth was one of a number of call-ins to the philanthropic sector in 2018 to change its mindsets and practices, helping to launch a field-level inflection point. Since that time, the Decolonizing Wealth Project has had outsized impact, materially and culturally. The speakers on this panel were there to tell the stories of their journeys in reparative philanthropy, many informed and inspired by the vision and frameworks from the Decolonizing Wealth Project.

At its core, reparative philanthropy asks institutions to do what we already know how to do in our closest human relationships: tend to truth, acknowledge harm, and make genuine efforts toward repair. We know — as partners, as friends, as family members — that relationships cannot be healthy when harm goes unnamed. We know that repair requires honesty before it requires anything else. What the leaders in that room were asking is simply this: why wouldn’t we expect our institutions to experience the same benefits from engaging in authentic repair? Accountability is not a mechanism of punishment but is an act of love — one that requires honesty, relational courage, and commitment to staying in relationship through hard things. Reparative philanthropy is accountability practiced at institutional scale.

Read the full article about reparative philanthropy by Rachel Humphrey at Alliance Magazine.