Philanthropy's Role: "From Land Acknowledgement to Land Back"
"Racism is structural; it is upheld and perpetuated by institutions, like foundations, in the ways that they operate," writes Celia Bottger, program assistant & grants manager, NorthLight Foundation in a blog for Philanthropy New York. "In addition to taking concrete steps to institutionalize racial equity in our policies and practices, we at NorthLight came to recognize that we must engage in a process of decolonization."
Bottger specifically centers colonization at the root of structural racism and racial injustice, linked to "both the physical invasion of Indigenous peoples and land, as well as the belief that White European culture is superior to Indigenous cultures." Therefore, in order to dismantle White supremacy in philanthropy, "we must actively decolonize our philanthropic institutions and practices." Bottger outlines how the NorthLight Foundation approached its own decolonization strategies, beginning with "accept that we do not know and will never fully know the answers to the question: how do we decolonize as a foundation?" and continuing anyway.
"This is what decolonization should look like: a fundamental shift in how we, as a foundation, engage with the concept of 'philanthropy' in a way that transcends the flow of money from foundation to grantee," writes Bottger. "Instead, philanthropy can be used as a tool to shift power to communities that have systematically been disempowered in order to heal generations of trauma and facilitate a liberated future."