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Funding and supporting nonprofit resilience is a key component in sustaining our nonprofit ecosystem. How can lean funders magnify their capacity building work to strengthen their nonprofit partners?

This third session of the Foundations of Racial Equity Series focuses on the importance of healing justice as a strategy, framework, and way of being within philanthropic institutions. The session will focus on internal organizational practices and external opportunities for philanthropy to resource healing justice strategies.

This program is an opportunity to learn more about Sierra Health Foundation’s Community Economic Mobilization Initiative (CEMI) that works to build the capacity of frontline communities to advance equitable, regional economic development and climate resilience. 

2024 promises to be a momentous year for democracy—locally, nationally, and globally. Over 4 billion people are living in countries with major elections this year. In the United States, we will also face familiar but obstinate challenges, including the dearth of local news and youth disaffection with voting and institutions. We will also face challenges that are new in this digital era, namely disinformation turbocharged by generative AI that has enormous power to deceive voters, undermine trust, and destabilize our information ecosystems.

In this second session of the Foundations of Racial Equity Series, we explore racial capitalism, which describes the current economic system of extracting social and economic value from people of color. Racial capitalism is based on the theft, exclusion and exploitation of the land, labor, and capital of people of color. Philanthropy—as a social, political, and economic strategy of society’s wealthiest people, mostly white men, and institutions that “do good” while moving wealth without tax exposure— upholds racial capitalism.

Over the next 20 years in the U.S., $35–70 trillion in wealth will transfer from one generation to another in the largest generational wealth transfer in history, mostly moving within wealthy white families. The policies that make possible this protection and accumulation of wealth are situated within the legacy of land theft, genocide of Native people, enslavement of Black people, and exploitation of natural resources. This context of racial capitalism has also given rise to wealth accumulation that, in part, birthed the philanthropic sector.  Paradoxically, many of us working within philanthropy aim to contribute to changes in systems, structures, and outcomes that address the harms of interconnected systems like racial capitalism that favor some at the expense of others and the planet.  

In the last year alone, Californians have experienced the impacts of multiple climate disasters including severe drought, extreme heatwaves, earthquakes, catastrophic wildfires, and now several back-to-back Atmospheric Rivers. Climate change will only continue amplifying the risk that Californians face from natural hazards. We can’t keep doing business as usual philanthropy to meet the scope of our current reality.