Anthony Bruce’s great-great grandparents had founded Bruce’s Beach in Manhattan Beach, Calif., but it was seized about a century ago through eminent domain. Los Angeles county officials returned the property to the Bruce family’s descendants in July 2022; earlier this year, the family sold the land back to the county for $20 million.
AFP via Getty Images
The Minnesota-based Bush Foundation approved two community trust funds totaling US$100 million in 2021 to issue grants that tackle racial wealth gaps affecting Indigenous and Black communities in its region, including the Dakotas and 23 Native-American nations within those states.
The foundation, which was established by Archibald Bush—an executive at the multinational company that became 3M—and his wife Edyth, created the community funds to address “the result of generations of unjust policies” that have harmed these communities.
“There are direct through lines from broken treaties to unemployment rates, slavery to incarceration rates, redlining to homeownership rates,” the foundation said at the time.
The funds—which are being overseen by community-based groups—represent one way philanthropy can approach reparations, a huge topic that, simply defined, includes restitution and repair, according to research from the Bridgespan Group, a global philanthropic advisory nonprofit, and Liberation Ventures, a field catalyst and intermediary working to accelerate the Black-led movement for racial repair.
In a recent paper, titled “Philanthropy’s Role in Reparations and Building a Culture of Racial Repair,” the nonprofits focus on Blacks in the U.S., but their findings hold parallel lessons for Native Americans and others who have suffered from inequitable U.S. policies. Research for the paper included interviews with more than 45 movement leaders, academics, and funders, and a survey of senior philanthropic leaders.
The “north star” for the reparations movement is federal comprehensive policy that “addresses the legacy of slavery and the centuries of documented race-based policies”—such as Jim Crow laws and redlining that marginalized Black homeowners, according to the report. “Inextricably linked” to creating a federal policy—which report author and Liberation Ventures co-founder Aria Florant says is a 25-year goal—is “building and sustaining a culture of racial repair.”
“When I talk about reparations, I’m talking about both financial and non-financial; I’m talking about holistic repair,” Florant says. A good example of what this looks like is in Germany, where the memory of the Holocaust is built into its culture, she says.
“You cannot grow up in Germany not understanding the Holocaust and not understanding what made the Holocaust happen,” Florant says. “There’s a capacity being built in a citizenry related to how you build for a more just and equitable world. That’s what we’re talking about.”
Specifically, the paper describes “repair” as a multifaceted solution to the racial wealth gap that includes but goes beyond compensation to learning how harm was caused, to being willing to take responsibility for benefiting from inequitable systems, and to acknowledging that harm was caused.
What Donors Can Do
Philanthropy’s role is not to achieve reparations alone, but it can begin to close the financial and cultural gaps that exist in creating a pathway for reparations to take hold, the authors argue.
A big way is by tackling the estimated US$11.2 trillion wealth gap between Blacks and whites, as the Bush Foundation is aiming to do. Closing the gap will not only support Black communities, it will add an estimated US$1 trillion or more to the U.S. economy, the report said.
To get there means addressing the fact that Blacks aren’t benefiting from the estimated US$84 trillion intergenerational wealth transfer underway between the baby boom generation and their heirs. According to the report, this lack of wealth transfer drives 60% of a US$330 billion annual disparity in wealth flow between white and Black families.
The US$16 trillion expected to be transferred from baby boomers just in the next decade is 43% more than is needed to wipe out the Black-white wealth gap altogether, the report said.
Philanthropy—often funded through intergenerational wealth—is therefore in a good position to turn the tide.
For that to happen, institutional philanthropy, meaning foundations large and small, will first need to “reckon with the history and origin” of their wealth, says Tonyel Edwards, a partner at Bridgespan who co-wrote the research paper.
Many philanthropies already are. Researchers spoke with an individual who went through this process of investigation, and though their family didn’t own slaves, there was the recognition “that they benefited from the policies and practices that have been in place,” Edwards says.
Next, philanthropies should look at “resourcing the reparations ecosystem,” which is underfunded and often relies on volunteers.
The report begins with the story of Bruce’s Beach in Los Angeles, which was taken from a Black couple—Willa and Charles Bruce—more than 100 years ago by local government officials. When the land was finally returned to Bruce’s heirs in 2021, the Board of Supervisors said the injustice of seizing the property wasn’t just inflicted on the couple, “but generations of their descendants who would, almost certainly, be millionaires today if they had been allowed to keep their beachfront property.”
The injustice only received attention because of the work of several women volunteers. “There’s something kind of perverse about the idea of unpaid labor working to get to this place,” which is why resourcing this work is needed, Edwards says. A lead organizer of the effort, Kavon Ward, has since established the nonprofit Where Is My Land, and, according to the report, has a waiting list of 700 Black families with similar “compelling claims.”
In addition to land ownership, the report details organizations that are addressing reparation and repair in the criminal legal system, in the media, and in education, where organizations are fighting against a well-funded movement to erase history and “the root causes of inequity.”
Edwards emphasizes that philanthropies don’t need to abandon their missions to address education, housing, climate, democracy, or arts and culture—or any number of important issues—to tackle reparations.
“If you do the work to get to the root of where things are, reparations are at the root of it, and it aligns with most portfolios,” she says.
Foundations can also re-examine where they are investing their endowment assets outside of the 5% that federal law requires be granted to nonprofits each year. Those assets can be invested with Black-owned investment managers and directed to mission-related investments that support Black communities.
“Philanthropy has an important role to play in supporting the movement and to helping build that culture of healing and repair,” Edwards says. “If you want to get to a thriving multiracial democracy, then this is an imperative as a part of the portfolio.”
In doing research on donors who had succeeded at “big, at-scale culture and policy change efforts,” Florant and others realized many had collaborated with a group of like-minded funders with long-term goals. “They were giving in alignment with each other as well as with the movement,” she says.
In response, Liberation Ventures is co-creating with a steering committee of movement leaders a “Reparations Grant-Making Blueprint,” a 10-year strategic plan expected to be completed early next year that can serve as a focal point for a donor collaborative, Florant says.
“We will be creating this tool knowing that so many funders are going back to their boards, their families, and advocating for this issue, [and] we want to make it as easy as possible for them to do that,” she says. The idea is for funders working in various realms to understand the scope of reparations, and to recognize, “this is my piece of the puzzle and I can see how it fits into everything else.”