Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
You're listening to TED Talks Daily. I'm your host, Elise Hu.
Chapter 2: What is the vision for a new era of philanthropy?
In her 2023 talk from TED at Destination Canada, she lays out a vision to do philanthropy differently and more equitably. After the break. I spent my whole career in the nonprofit sector.
Chapter 3: How did Rebecca Darwent's early career shape her views on philanthropy?
Street outreach, program management, fundraising, grant making, public policy, you name it. I've done it. I've seen a lot. And I'm a really positive person, so it's actually difficult to say this, but the way we do philanthropy right now, the way we've done it for decades, is broken. And here's how I found out.
Chapter 4: What challenges do nonprofits face in securing funding?
In my early 20s, I was a frontline social worker in New York City, working with people living with HIV. Many of them had multiple chronic illnesses and they were underhoused. So I'd spend my days and even some nights with them running around the city to doctor's appointments and housing agencies. The day-to-day work was hard. But the hardest part was we never had enough funding to do the work.
On Friday mornings, I'd go into the office to write up my case notes for the week, and I'd speed past front reception, not looking at the mailboxes full of blue slips. Each blue letter marked another colleague let go because of our funding crisis. Within one month, I'd lost half my team, and my caseload ballooned from 30 to over 100. And this is the reality for so many nonprofits.
They're at the mercy of their funders. And when we look at those funders, they decide who and what gets funded. And it's almost always a mystery how they make those decisions. Nonprofits spend so much time fundraising, filling out pages and pages and pages of paperwork.
And they're filling out so much paperwork that they hardly have any time to actually support communities, which is literally the thing that they're funded to do. After years of doing amazing work, improving every single metric, we'd hear things like, I'm sorry, our major donor has switched direction.
Chapter 5: How does collective giving differ from traditional philanthropy?
They're no longer working and investing in HIV and AIDS. Or, I'm sorry, we issue grants for three years max. This would never happen in the private sector. You do an amazing job for three years and then get fired? It makes no sense. So I decided to switch sides. Instead of being on the side that's asking for money, what if I went to the side that was giving money?
Help them understand what was happening on the ground and make a change. So off I went into the world of philanthropy only to discover that trillions of dollars are in donor-advised funds and private foundations, just waiting to be donated. Meanwhile, those nonprofits and community-led organizations are wasting so much time filling out paperwork and competing over scraps.
Chapter 6: What role does community-led decision-making play in effective philanthropy?
I'd hear a donor publicly support a cause like homelessness, And then behind closed doors, I'd hear, they don't really know what's good for them. What they really need is, which is code for donor knows best. I was confused. How could a donor possibly know what was really needed? Their lifestyle looked nothing like the people they wanted to help. the problem wasn't a lack of money.
Again, trillions of dollars are sitting just waiting to be put to work. But even if we unlocked every single one of those dollars, it actually wouldn't matter, because a very small group of people are making all of the decisions about funding. Their priorities, their way. Almost 70 percent of donations are directed by the top one percent of donors.
And they choose causes that resonate with their lives, like their university or the arts, and these issues are overfunded. And look, I know that donors have good intentions. I really do. But good intentions are not good enough.
Chapter 7: How does Ubuntu influence Black philanthropy?
Communities are being left behind, and we are running out of time. I wanted to shift the power dynamic from a top-down approach to a community-led model where nonprofits and donors really work together. So in 2020, I co-founded the Foundation for Black Communities with Liban Abacor, Jacob Lea Amar and Joseph Smith to do exactly that.
We were inspired by a radically different type of philanthropy. Black philanthropy. It's the formal and informal giving that happens in Black communities around the world. In some cases, it's the kind of giving that you don't get a tax receipt for. And I learned this most in my family. We do almost everything together, including Boxhand.
Boxhand is an informal savings group, and in my family, we have 13 members.
Chapter 8: What practical shifts are needed in funding decisions?
So twice a month, we all throw a hand, meaning we put $100 into the pot, and one person gets the entire thing, $1,300. The person who gets the full amount rotates, and you'll get the full thing two times a year. It's helped my family buy a new fridge, pay school tuition, and you know what? We've even put a down payment on a house using this. And sometimes we negotiate.
Oh, you need your hand ahead of me? No problem. I'll wait. Of the 13 people, some really need it, it's their only means of savings, and others would be fine without it. But here, we're all equal. There is no top or bottom. It's not about charity or pity or sympathy. The goal of Boxhand is that everybody levels up, and it's easier to level up together because we're accountable to the collective.
This practice has existed across the African diaspora since the 1700s. In Guyana, we call it boxhand. In Nigeria, it's susu. In Mali and Senegal, it's toncin. In Haiti, it's called sol. And in Jamaica, it's partner. And the cool thing is, this exists outside of the African diaspora, too. It looks slightly different from place to place.
The Haida Nation has potlatches, in Mexico there's tandas and in Cambodia there's tongtin. And communities turn to each other and use this kind of collective approach when we face exclusion and systemic racism in the financial industry. For example, black people are rejected business loans and mortgages at twice the rate of the general population.
And so when we face that exclusion, we turn to our communities and are creative in our solution-making activities. And you know, this has been passed down from generation to generation. My mother taught me this. She gives generously to our communities because they gave generously to her. Now and forever, the collective giving never stops. Black philanthropy is rooted in a concept called Ubuntu.
It's an African philosophy widely understood as humanity towards others. And we have a saying, I am because you are, or I am because we are. And that means what affects you affects me. We're all interconnected and have a shared responsibility to one another. Ubuntu would be the guiding principle for the Foundation for Black Communities.
And in order to do that, we need to make two practical shifts. Who is making funding decisions and how those decisions are made? So the who is obvious. We're looking at black community members, but we're looking for true, on-the-ground experts. And this is an important distinction. Some people will say to me, Rebecca, you're black.
Tell us what's best for black communities, which is actually ridiculous. How could I possibly speak on behalf of all black people? You can't. It's not possible. So to have real insight, we look for local experts and let them make the decisions because they know their communities, their partners and field the best. And this is what we did in our recent $500,000 youth wellness granting program.
We received 99 eligible applications from Black groups working in everything from diabetes awareness to inner-city farming and after-school programming. And just like BoxHand, we turned to the collective and extended an invitation to be part of our grant review panel. Now, the invitation was intentionally put to anybody connected to the project.
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