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Seven Actions Toward Community Agency This Black Philanthropy Month

August is Black Philanthropy Month, a global celebration and campaign to elevate African-descent giving and funding equity. Every year, the campaign invites philanthropy to confront a truth it has been slow to acknowledge: Black people have never been simply beneficiaries of generosity. We have always been the ones giving, organizing, and sustaining our communities.


Our tradition of giving runs through the mutual aid and burial societies that organized care before any foundation existed, through the church collection plate, and our elders' kitchens. It runs through Maggie Lena Walker, who stood in front of the Independent Order of St. Luke in 1901 and told the members to pool what they had and lend it to each other. It runs through Fannie Lou Hamer, who bought 40 acres in the Mississippi Delta in 1969 and started a pig bank where each family that received a sow raised the litter and returned the pigs so that the next family could receive one.


The time has come now when we are going to have to get what we need ourselves. We may get a little help, here and there, but in the main we’re going to have to do it ourselves. - Fannie Lou Hamer

Last August, the movement mobilized more than $11.5 million for Black-led organizations; this year's theme is Many Voices, One Movement, and the month closes with Give 8/28 as a national day of giving, all of which are worth celebrating and participating in.


What we keep noticing, though, is that the tradition we are honoring has never been charity so much as it has been building. Walker did not raise money to help Black Richmond; she chartered a bank and put the deposits back out to her own community, and Hamer did not run a food program; she bought land and designed a system where the resource kept circulating after she was gone. Every institution in that lineage was created so that our communities would not have to ask, and that is a different project than generosity.


Nwamaka Agbo, who runs the Kataly Foundation, describes the goal of her Restorative Economics framework as community ownership paired with community governance, on the reasoning that ownership without governance is still dependency while governance without ownership is still advisory, and that framing sits comfortably inside this tradition because it names what Walker and Hamer were already doing with the tools available to them.


So the question this month raises for us is not whether to celebrate but what the celebration asks of us, because if we are the inheritors of people who built banks and bought land rather than waiting to be resourced, then honoring them well means continuing to build, and there are seven places we would start.


1. Change your posture toward the money.


A lot of us were trained to approach funders as though we are asking for a favor. It shows up in small ways: how we soften a request, how much we thank someone for taking a meeting, or the apology that slips into a sentence about needing more.


Here is what is worth holding on to instead: foundations exist to direct resources toward charitable work, and your organization is part of why that work can happen. So, your proposal is not an interruption of someone's day because finding credible organizations doing meaningful work is part of the job.


Many funders are genuine partners who care deeply about the communities you serve. You are both bringing something to the table; you are allowed to know that when you walk into the room, and you can respect the funder's role without forgetting your own.


2. Count how much of your funding you control.


Run the numbers and track this metric annually: what percentage of your revenue can you spend at your own discretion? If it is under half, most of your year is already spoken for before it begins.


Unrestricted funding is not inherently better, but the flexibility gives leadership room to respond to what the organization needs, rather than being confined to a shortlist of activities a funder has agreed to pay for. If you want more control over your resources, you need to know how much control you have right now.


3. Build revenue nobody can withdraw.


Earned income, fee-for-service contracts, membership dues, and community investment all share a quality that grant funding does not, which is that nobody can withdraw them because a program officer left, a board shifted priorities, or your work became politically inconvenient.


We have all watched what happens when institutional funding moves suddenly, and the organizations that hold steady are generally the ones with revenue they control outright, which is the whole argument for building some.


4. Move from operating dollars toward assets.


An asset is anything your organization owns that continues to generate value without a funder renewing it, which makes this category broader than land and endowments. Cash reserves are an asset. So is a curriculum you developed and can license, a training methodology other organizations will pay you to deliver, an email list you built yourself, equipment that lets you stop renting, and the credibility that turns into consulting revenue when someone asks you to advise on work you already know how to do.


Most of us will not be buying buildings this year, and that is not the point. The point is that grants fund activity for a defined period, while assets keep working after the cycle closes, and almost every organization has something it could convert into the second category.


So, what do you already have that could be generating revenue, and what would it take to build one month of reserves?


5. Put governance where the money is going.


Most of us can name what we want from funders in this area. We want decisions made closer to the ground, we want the people affected by a strategy to have a say in shaping it, and we want authority that goes beyond being asked for input after the direction is already set.


The same standard is worth turning toward our own organizations, not as a critique but as a design question. Who sits on your board, what decisions belong to them, and where do the people you serve enter the process? There is a meaningful difference between a community advisory council that reviews a plan and a board seat that carries a vote, and both are legitimate choices as long as the choice is deliberate rather than inherited.


Participatory models are more established than they were a few years ago, and they range widely in how much they ask of an organization. You do not have to restructure your governance this quarter to move in this direction. You do have to decide what authority you are willing to share, and then build the structure that makes it real.


6. Fund each other.


Giving circles are the fastest-growing form of philanthropy in the country. In Abundance, the 2024 study from Philanthropy Together and the Johnson Center found collective giving grew to roughly 4,000 groups and $3.1 billion between 2017 and 2023, and identity has been central to that growth.


What makes them structurally different is not the pooling but the deciding. Members contribute, research together, and vote on where the money goes, which means the people giving and the people closest to the need are frequently the same people. You will recognize the model, because it is the one your grandmother was already running.


Circles are a funding source most organizations have never prospected, and if none exists for your community, starting one is more achievable than most institutional fundraising. The Community Investment Network has been organizing Black giving circles for two decades.


7. Refuse what costs more than it returns.


Some money is not worth what it asks of you, and most of us can name the specific grant we mean. It might be the one that would quietly reshape your programming to fit a funder's theory of change, or the funder who wants your community's story for their annual report more than they want to resource the work, or the application that would eat three hundred staff hours for twenty thousand dollars you could raise more easily somewhere else.


Saying no to those feels like a luxury, and we understand why: when money is tight, every opportunity looks like one you cannot afford to pass up. But turning something down is one of the few forms of autonomy available to you right now, without waiting for a funder to change or a policy to shift, and it costs you nothing but the thing that was going to cost you more.


What Black Philanthropy Month Celebrates


Not all of these will be available to your organization this year, and none of them has to happen at once. What they have in common is that each moves a little authority back toward the people doing the work, which is the direction the tradition has always pointed. This month, we are honoring people who understood that waiting to be resourced by institutions built to exclude us is not a strategy.


So celebrate loudly, give on the 28th, and let that giving be one part of a longer practice of generosity and movement-building.



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