Love of Humanity

When I entered institutional, wealth-based philanthropy[1] in 2008, I was wholeheartedly eager to advance equity at a scale larger than anything I had ever done previously. My career prior to philanthropy consisted mostly of working on projects funded via grants and contracts, with clear parameters and a defined beginning, middle, and end. In philanthropy, I would have the opportunity to zoom out, look at the entire system, and think about how to shift it. To have direct access to resources that I could leverage to work with partners to dismantle conditions that sustain and perpetuate inequities was an absolute dream come true.

I have worked in philanthropy for over a decade and am extremely proud of the work I have done. I am grateful for the amazing colleagues and partners I have had the honor of learning from and working with – individuals who are fully committed to bending the arc towards justice. The icing on the cake is the privilege to be in community with a subset of folks who are actively standing in their integrity as they challenge the status quo in society, the sector, and their organizations.

When I reflect on my time in philanthropy, I can recall many positive experiences that bring back incredible feelings of accomplishment and joy. Accompanying these positive experiences are also ones that leave me questioning whether advancing equity in this sector is worth the toll it takes on some of us, especially those of us from marginalized groups.

As a Black Puerto Rican woman who had examined the effects of racism on Latine birth outcomes for my doctoral work, I was wholly unprepared for what philanthropy had in store for me. It’s not that my previous work environments were free of individuals engaging in harmful actions. It’s that in philanthropy, these actions were normalized as the price of doing business and occurred at a volume and scale that I had not previously encountered. As Kevin Nadal has discussed and written, microaggressions are anything but and Ruchika Tulshyan and Jodi-Ann Burey rightly recognize, imposter syndrome is misattributed as an individual-level phenomenon among women and women of color, when the actual problem is toxic, dysfunctional work environments.

For example, I and/or others have experienced the following in philanthropy:

• Colleagues and managers advising one to remain silent and align one's position to whatever is politically expedient when one holds a perspective that does not align with someone in a senior-level position.

• Board members and senior leaders shutting down conversations on potential areas of work and rejecting proposed initiatives solely based on their personal preferences; very, very few of which have actual experience in the work or reflect the communities who would benefit.

• Colleagues (yes, more than one) touching my hair and one pulling one out of my head because it was bothering them.

• Managers and senior leaders hiring and promoting individuals into roles they are not qualified to perform, while overlooking qualified individuals, performatively encouraging them to apply, and/or pushing them out the door.

• Colleagues and managers passing off someone else’s work as their own and blaming others for their own mistakes and failures.

I know these experiences are not unique to philanthropy. In retrospect, I was completely caught off guard because I naively assumed that the missions and values that undergird the work would manifest in people’s actions. After all, the root meaning of philanthropy is love of humanity. My lack of preparedness is why I left the sector in 2015. It was the work, my community, and the unromanticized perspective I gained from time and distance that led to my return in 2019.

I recognize that philanthropy was birthed out of the very same inequitable and oppressive systems that produce the outcomes it seeks to address. However, I do not believe philanthropy’s origin has to be its destiny. To demonstrate love of humanity, philanthropy needs to engage in purposeful, collective action. Board members and executive leaders need to take a deep look inward to understand how their actions and inactions might be harming staff and creating environments that perpetuate harm; to recognize that their staffs’ experiences are inextricably linked to the world they seek to create. After all, how can philanthropy advance love at the societal level if it does not practice love within its own organizations?

Let’s dive in and unpack the reason why terms like “golden handcuffs” and “gilded cage” exist – these often-used descriptors for why staff find it hard to leave toxic, dysfunctional environments. Let’s engage in truth, reconciliation, and healing for the ways in which actions and inactions have done harm. Let’s minimize practices that inflict harm and maximize practices that heal, nurture, and advance love.

Last, let’s stop removing philanthropy from the issues it seeks to address and recognize that it is both part of the problem AND part of the solution. As Kyle “Guante” Tran Myhre states in his 2014 poem, “White supremacy is not a shark; it’s the water.” Let’s acknowledge that philanthropy is also the water and let's all work together to transform the water we are swimming in before we all drown.

As you think about your time in philanthropy, what are the different ways you have been harmed? How would philanthropy need to change to create environments that support staff to practice love? How would you need to heal so you can practice love?

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[1] This entire post is focused on institutional, wealth-based philanthropy. However, for the sake of simplicity, I use "philanthropy" as a short-cut.