abdiel lópez: When thinking about what needs to change to advance the just transition, we must look also at the culture and the structures that philanthropy upholds, specifically in their day-to-day programming and the way they connect—or not—with grantees, investees. And in one of the frameworks, we really discuss how philanthropy’s charity mindset still upholds an extractive cultural practice by still having that charity, oftentimes paternalistic, mindset.

Philanthropy’s charity mindset passively or even actively accepts the wealth and accumulation and power inequality. It protects donor intent, and it maintains the enclosure of wealth and power.

To divest from those cultural practices that lead to philanthropy’s charity mindset, we recognize at Justice Funders that we have to engage everyone from the board to the staff level in these institutions to really invest in new cultures and structures. Again, hospice us out of the old system and into the new.

How do we do that? I think some of the ways that we’re seeing already with some of our funding community members is that they act in solidarity by bearing the risk, being first in capital with nonextractive terms like [Fernando Abarca] just mentioned. Moving assets to meet the needs of frontline communities, rather than dictating what those needs look like for the frontline communities. So, it’s inviting grantees, inviting investees, into the co-creation process of resource allocation, grantmaking, et cetera. It’s investigating and responding to the legacy of wealth as well, deconstructing philanthropy’s charity mindset.

We have seen in the JTIC—the Just Transition Investment Community—that many of the foundations, the funding members, actually trace back the origin of their wealth, and from there, move toward a sort of dreamlike state of asking: “This was our past. What can we do to repair the harm and to move forward to actually seed the future, invest in the seeding of the futures that our frontline communities are doing?”

Read the full article about overcoming philanthropy's charity mindset by abdiel j. lópez at Nonprofit Quarterly.