Black Philanthropy Month, Far Beyond August, Rolls Year-Round at #BPM365

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Last August was the ninth year running of Black Philanthropy Month, a designated stretch of observance that both amplifies and compresses a lot of history, justice, injustice, and joy. That month’s haul was the largest ever. More than 18 million people from 60 countries have participated since its inception, and it continues year-round at #BPM365. I spoke with the movement’s founder, Jackie Copeland, by Zoom shortly after Donald Trump’s defeat in the presidential election.

Copeland told me she’d launched the campaign less as a finite financial pitch than as a movement to cultivate acts of giving and reframe philanthropy as a practice instead of a one-off gesture. “The intent of Black Philanthropy Month 2020 was to move from mobilizing and talking to taking action,” she said.

Less than 1.3 percent of global assets are managed by people of color, and “denial of equal access to private capital has been an instrument of economic oppression since the founding of many countries,” she said. “That’s one of the reasons we see wealth levels in African American and Black Brazilian communities are so much smaller than in others, because we’ve had histories of laws that prevent us from capital and wealth. In the case of women it wasn’t long ago that you couldn’t get a loan unless your husband signed for you.”

Women are the core driver of another movement she founded, the WISE Fund (Women Invested to Save Earth). Her new WISE You Community is a virtual network to fund Black and Indigenous climate change organizations in partnership with the tech startup Flerish. Her program’s members get live and AI-based coaching, “something sorely needed by donors disrupted by COVID,” she said. “There’s a degree of health and economic carnage because of COVID and it coincides with a range of uprisings around human rights abuses in Brazil and political injustices in Nigeria,” the two most-populous Black countries in the world.

Brazil features heavily in the WISE Fund. It’s a partner of Brazil Foundation, whose president and CEO, Rebecca Tavares, joined us on the call. Tavares told me she’s “gathering solidarity and support for the access of women of African descent to digital technology for addressing climate change.” She wants to “formalize the rights of domestic workers in Brazil because the great majority are Black women whose rights have been violated on every standard, including sexual violence and abuse, labor rights completely ignored, way overtime working. As informal workers they haven’t had recourse.”

Also joining our Zoom were co-architects of Black Philanthropy Month Tracey Webb and Valaida Fullwood, who is the founding member of New Generation of African American Philanthropists. Fullwood said she wants to “engage funders particularly in the South to sign a pledge like Brazil Foundation and WISE Fund. I got into some of this work through Tracey. She’d founded a blog that featured Black philanthropy stories, a first of its kind. Working as a writer for her introduced me to Jackie and gave me a line of sight on all the things happening in the US and globally around Black giving.”

Even the definitions of philanthropy are changing: “The word was hijacked and used in ways that focused solely on money and dollars and not as much on impact and relationships,” Fullwood said. “Part of my work is making it more accessible not just to high-net-worth people but as commitments of time, talent, treasure, truth. Those can be as powerful as any grant. I define and break down philanthropy as love of what it means to be human.”

“‘Philanthropy,’ the actual term, has always been a culturally specific Western way of organizing acts of giving and mutual support,” Copeland told me. “But if we look at the term more broadly, it’s about community impact and helping someone else. That’s an overlay on ancient giving structures, principles, and philosophies. A lot of successful movements across the Black world—abolition, underground railroad, civil rights movement, anti-apartheid movement—were supported first by Black people giving each other what they had.”

I asked Copeland what she makes of certain corporate billionaires who donate as acts of reputational self-laundering, a public-relations move to purchase the appearance of caring instead of changing structurally. “It’s a legitimate critique,” she said. “That’s certainly a dimension of some institutional philanthropy. Philanthropy has been a way to ‘clean’ money and wealth that may have been accumulated through dubious means. That’s an undeniable factual part of the history that continues. Sometimes philanthropy has been overcommercialized and lost that essential human-rights heart of giving—the whole notion of love for humanity. I think there’s a countermovement now.”

Copeland’s team is looking ahead to the month’s 10th anniversary this year, whose theme is TENacity: Making Equity Real, with an ever-growing focus across countries, communities, and sectors.

Copeland joined me from Flagstaff, Arizona; Fullwood from Charlotte, North Carolina; Webb from Washington, DC; and Tavares from New York City. Share more good news at recharge@motherjones.com.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate