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CONTACT (S):  Russell Roybal rroybal@ncrp.org 
                           Jennifer Amuzie, jamuzie@ncrp.org

NCRP Showcases Community-led Effort to Hold
Billionaire Climate Funders Accountable to Frontlines

“Good, Bad, Bezos, and Beyond” tells the story of how communities can respond to  
billionaire climate funding models that under–resource impacted communities and movement groups

WASHINGTON, DC – As the world commemorates Earth Day this week, the latest report by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) offers an important case study in how power-building intermediaries are mobilizing to hold billionaire climate solutions accountable to impacted communities.

Co-published with the Regenerative Economies Organizing Collaborative (REO), Good, Bad, Bezos and Beyond: Climate Philanthropy and the Grassroots aims to shed light on the complexities of climate funding, particularly in the context of initiatives like the Bezos Earth Fund (BEF). The report details the unprecedented movement organizing that went on in the wake of the Bezos Earth Fund announcement in 2020, explores some history of philanthropy’s relationship to grassroots funding, and identifies some of the attempted early shifts in responding to the rise in billionaire climate philanthropy.

Recommendations include a powerful call to action for grantmakers to make bold and meaningful investments in grassroots leaders, organizations, and solutions.

“This report helps answer a frequent, but simple question – how can philanthropy navigate its role in addressing the climate crisis while ensuring equity, justice, and community empowerment?” says NCRP VP & Chief External Affairs Officer, Russell Roybal.  “By examining past efforts, highlighting grassroots interventions, and presenting actionable pathways, this report invites funders and activists to critically engage with the dynamics of climate philanthropy and its effect on impacted communities.”  

Cover of NCRP 2024 Report, Good, Bad, Bezos and Beyond: Climate Philanthropy and the Grassroots, designed by Darius Wilmore.

Click here to read the report online

 

 

The report was written by writer and philanthropic consultant Jennifer Near and designed by artist Darius Wilmore, in collaboration with NCRP and REO.

IMPORTANT LESSONS FOR PHILANTHROPY 

Good, Bad, Bezos and Beyond: Climate Philanthropy and the Grassroots focuses on how climate justice leaders and allies mobilized quickly to resource frontline needs. The report also describes how collaboration among stakeholders led to the formation of the Fund for Frontline Power (F4FP) as a grassroots-led vehicle for supporting community-based, equitable climate solutions.

The organizing effort after the initial BEF announcement moved $141 million into grassroots-accountable intermediaries which represent over 500 grantee partners. While this doubled U.S. climate philanthropy for equity via intermediary funds, it was only a fraction of the cumulative $500 million in grants that five already disproportionately resourced, predominantly white–led, Big Green organizations directly received.

The examination in community action and intermediary power building and sharing has strong implications for funders’ future organizing in partnership with movement leaders. Jacqui Patterson, organizer leader of the Chisholm Legacy Project and a TIME 100 Person of the Year, sees a lot of important lessons in the report.

“One must only look at the annual reports/impact statements of The Hive Fund, The Solutions Project, NDN Collective, and other recipients of the Earth Fund to see the proof of concept that when we resource the frontlines, we all win!” says Patterson. “Through facilitation by the Climate Justice Alliance, these groups were able to utilize these resources with the blessing and collaboration with worker groups such as Athena that comprise some of the very Amazon workers who are being egregiously harmed in the production of the profits that wrought this funding.”

CENTERING FUNDING DECISIONS ON COMMUNITY EXPERTISE 

Patterson applauds setting a sunset for the the inception of a fund, agreeing that more funders should recognize that “waiting until a rainy day to spend is a bit antithetical to the fact that we are currently in a deluge, literally and figuratively.” She also applauds the “willingness to break away from the formulas mired in the old unproven ways of philanthropy that have system scale transformations on environmental and climate justice hampered by lack of investment.”

“Ultimately, we need all funders and donors to take more bold actions and release control of philanthropic resources as well take a consultative stance at the outset, rather than forcing grassroots leaders to intervene,” adds Patterson. “This is a lesson in what’s needed in terms of frontline organizations speaking truth to power unapologetically, and philanthropy paying heed and following the lead of the frontlines!”

Good, Bad, Bezos and Beyond is part of  a multi-year NCRP campaign encouraging grantmakers to prioritize a just transition away from an extractive to a regenerative economy that invests in frontline community power, redistributes resources equitably, and upholds deep democracy and self-determination. The report is just the latest example of how, working with funders and non-profits, NCRP researchers and organizers amplify intersectional efforts that are leading the shift away from false solutions and toward community-centered, grassroots projects.

“Without much public fanfare or resources, frontline organizations and organized impacted communities are finding some success in building community resilience and pushing back against some of the worst impacts of climate crisis,” says NCRP’s Movement Engagement Manager for Climate Justice Senowa Mize-Fox.  

ABOUT NCRP
The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) has served as philanthropy’s critical friend and independent watchdog since 1976. We work with foundations, non-profits, social justice movements and other leaders to ensure that the sector is transparent with, and accountable to, those with the least wealth, power and opportunity in American society.

Our storytelling, advocacy, and research efforts, in partnership with grantees, help funders fulfill their moral and practical duty to build, share, and wield economic resources and power to serve public purposes in pursuit of justice.

 

ABOUT THE REGENERATIVE ECONOMIES ORGANIZING COLLABORATIVE (REO) 
The Regenerative Economies Organizing Collaborative (REO) is a group of domestic and international funders working to shift philanthropy to support locally-rooted Black, brown, Indigenous and working class-led movements through political education, peer-to-peer-organizing, joint action and collective thought pieces, calling in philanthropic colleagues toward accountability, transparency and solidarity with frontline communities.

Black Broad Branch Project Co-Founder Mariana Barros-Titus
Mariana Barros-Titus

When Washington, DC was established as the capital of the United States by the Residency Act of 1790, the city’s framers aimed to build a beacon of democracy for all the world to see. In its role as the federal city, DC was meant to serve as the national symbol for democracy.

In many ways, their vision for the city to serve as a national manifestation of America’s democratic values has come to fruition; even if not exactly as they originally envisioned. Always, the local history of democracy in the District of Columbia has been a fractured one; its promise deeply warped by the nation’s struggle with systemic exclusion and racism.

In fact, if democracy is, at its core, about representation and voting rights, then today’s residents of the District continue to have woefully limited access to full democratic standing. Furthermore, one’s positionality dictates the degree to which individual Washingtonians experience the impacts of the lack of full representation. Depending on an individual’s unique identity, including racial and economic factors, access to democracy certainly looks different.

However, democracy is meant to be not just a form of government, but an accessible vehicle across social classes to achieve stability through choice. As detailed in NCRP’s Cracks in Foundation report and other materials, for Black Washingtonians, the experience of democracy and choice has historically been complicated and often interrupted.

TROUBLING EXCLUSION RIGHT FROM THE START

From the beginning of colonial contact with the native tribes that used to call this area their home, land and land ownership have been used to shape the development of the metropolitan city we know today. Its roots are firmly embedded into—and fueled by—the exploitation of cheap labor and resources.

The 17th century land grabs yielded tobacco exportation, which solidified the area’s early economic powerhouses. Local production of tobacco was very successful in the 18th century. However, it was a labor-intensive crop that also depleted the land’s nutrients.

Black and enslaved labor was used to create the high yields of the early tobacco industry, but by the turn of the 19th century, the crops yielded were fewer and fewer. This forced plantation enterprises to adopt new economic models away from crop production and toward extracting value from the exploitation of their enslaved labor. The economic dynamics of Washington’s early years, which baked enslavement and inequality into their foundations, created social and political systems in the area and the legacies of inequities that we are grappling with today.

BLACK PLACE-MAKING IN WASHINGTON

Prior to the turn of the 20th century, the federal city of Washington was limited to the original L’Enfant plan (L’Enfant-Ellicott Plan). Most of the land that had been donated to the federal government by the state of Maryland remained rural farmland into the late 1800s. This created rural enclaves of freedmen and women who were living in what was known as Washington County, often around the former sites of Civil War era forts.

 

Picture of Black children playing outside Washington, D.C.'s Barry Farms Housing Development in 1944.
Photo of Black children playing outside Washington, D.C.’s Barry Farms Housing Development in 1944

This was the case of the Pointer/Harris and Dorsey/Shorter families who lived on Broad Branch Road NW, in what is current-day Chevy Chase DC. Their ancestors, just a few generations back, had been born into enslavement and achieved their freedom through manumission prior to the Emancipation Proclamation.

The Black Broad Branch community [then known as Dry Meadows] preceded the establishment of the Chevy Chase Company by nearly 50 years. They began to form as an African American enclave that thrived on community support, entrepreneurship, and the relative freedom of living outside of the city’s imposition of the racial codes that dictated Black life in Washington.

In the build-up to the Civil War and in the years immediately following it, Washington’s population and federal presence saw a rapid spike. The friction between the economic interests behind the system of enslavement and the sovereignty of American democratic ideals came to a boil and brought people to Washington for different reasons.

In the 19th century, the population in Washington County grew quickly as formerly enslaved people sought freedom. For Black men, joining the military offered them an opportunity to gain the rights of citizenship. For those who did not have access to the military route, including many Black women, freedom petitions and the purchasing of one’s freedom became ways to achieve manumission. Whichever way it was achieved, relative freedom was possible for Black residents of Washington, DC before most anywhere else in the country.

Cover of NCRPs report, Cracks in the Foundation: Philanthropy's Role in Reparations for Black People in the DMV
Find Out More About NCRP’s report on Philanthropy and Reparations

For four generations, the Dry Meadows community thrived along Broad Branch Road NW and cultivated the land both for their own nutrition and to sell cash crops. The Dorsey-Shorter family also built an addition to their family farmhouse that housed the neighborhood’s first grocery store. The families also traveled to nearby Georgetown to sell their crops and goods in more densely populated markets.

Beginning in the 1890s, they watched as the neighborhood around them transformed from the rural farmland of Washington County to a developed residential neighborhood similar to what we know Chevy Chase DC to be today. This made their land plots much more appealing to the burgeoning white community that would increasingly find multiple ways to encroach on their lives — and land.

DESIGNED EXCLUSION

Like many other cities in the United States, today’s demographics and economic—and thus, political—distribution of power in Washington, DC have been shaped by the use of the process of eminent domain in the early 20th century. Eminent domain, coupled with racially restrictive covenants, was used to intentionally create segregated neighborhoods well into the 1960s.

In 1929, this practical cocktail was used to forcibly remove the Black Broad Branch families by the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC). This is the same process that was used in the neighboring Reno City as it was enveloped into Tenleytown. The area surrounding the Dry Meadows community on Broad Branch Road NW became more densely populated and exclusively white. Large plantations in the upper Northwest, including the Belt estate and that of Horace Jones, were subdivided into single family lots that implemented racial covenants in their deeds.

 

As the developers attracted more white residents to their new enclaves, the new residents organized and lobbied through white citizens associations for segregated schools. Congress and the local Commission acquiesced and used the process of eminent domain to raze the lots inhabited by Black families on Broad Branch Road NW and developed Lafayette Elementary School, intended to be a white-only school. The interruption of Black place-making and the decoupling of Black communities from choice and self-sufficiency through racially exclusive political processes was repeated in the nation’s capital time after time throughout the 20th century.

In the Dry Meadows community, the Dorsey/Shorters were the last ones to give up their land to the NCPC. Subsequent generations of the Pointer/Harrises (who by then also had the surname Moten) ended up spread out across the rest of the city. Many of them, like the Scott family from the community displaced to make room for today’s Meridian Hill Park (also known as Malcolm X Park), were impacted by eminent domain yet again in future generations.

MAKING THE UNSEEN VISIBLE AGAIN

Current-day descendants from the Pointer/Harris and Dorsey/Shorter lineages have been traced down and interviewed by the Black Broad Branch Project, a public history project. The project collected 16 oral histories from 8 descendant-narrators and used those as a means to document the generational implications of being forcibly dislocated from their land, along with asking the descendants to define what redress would look like for them. Their definitions of redress were then used to create a strategic plan for reparations. Oral history, as a methodology and as a philosophy, can be a powerful tool to engage narratives and experiences of historically under-represented communities.

Written documents cannot capture the totality of someone’s experience. They are often limited in capturing the full details and nuances of quotidian life. In addition, documenting daily life in written form may not be part of a communities’ cultural traditions. As such, orality as a method of capturing life histories and experiences, allows for the democratization of cultural narrative-shaping. The oral history process allows such histories and perspectives to be included in repositories, where cultural institutions shape historical narratives. Such historical narratives deeply impact how individual people in Washington, DC navigate their spaces.

In the case of Black Broad Branch, oral histories allowed for descendants to illustrate the material and spiritual/intangible impacts that forced dislocation left in its wake. Their oral histories were used to capture generational outcomes that many Washingtonians have suffered from as a result of patterns  of land dispossession and the weaponization of policy and private equity partnerships in the 20th century.

BETTER UNDERSTANDING OUR SHARED HISTORY

The generational arc captured by projects like the Black Broad Branch Project, offers a case study in reflecting how wealth creation and land dispossession have shaped the conditions that predominantly Black communities in Washington navigate today.

The interruption of Black placemaking (and choice) is at the crux of how Washington, DC came to be the city we know today. Racialized social norms informed racially exclusive political policies that then created harmful material and economic dynamics in the lives of Black Washingtonians.

Understanding these processes and being transparent about the systems that have resulted from their legacies, is a necessary first step to uproot the inequities that the city is grappling with in the present. It also serves as a microcosm for exploring how the nation as a whole has come to be in the present.

If a shared goal for us is to create a more equitable future, what would it look like for this history to be shared widely and honestly? The end goal should not simply be to cast culpability on victors and declare victims, but rather to understand that regardless of lineage and ancestry, all of us have inherited this shared history. Grappling with it is our shared responsibility.

 

Corey Shaw, Jr is a DC native with lifelong roots in Ward 7. As a graduate of both Anacostia Senior High School and the University of the District of Columbia (UDC), Shaw has a passion for comprehending the needs of communities and helping them advocate and mobilize for structural change.

Corey first got his start working with communities in Washington, DC as the Co-Founder of the Black Broad Branch Project. In his capacity as an oral historian and chair of the policy implementation working committee, Shaw has advocated for reparations for two families whose ancestors were displaced from Chevy Chase, DC in 1928. He continues to support the project, engaging with descendants to mobilize a coalition of scholars, DC residents, and community organizations toward the goals of Acknowledgement, Compensation, and Education. With the collective efforts of the coalition, the Black Broad Branch Project has succeeded in constructing educational curriculum for 3rd, 6th, and 12thgrade students in DCPS, testified before the DC City Council, and presented in many forums ranging from the realm of academia to the United Nations.

Corey has joined the team at Empower DC as the DC Legacy Project Director. His focus is preserving the Barry Farm Historic Landmark which Empower DC won alongside the community in 2020. Shaw manages relationships with key and prospective stakeholders to ensure that a cohesive coalition is invested manifesting the community’s vision of an uplifting space is realized. He has taken the vision for Barry Farm, its history, into spaces across the city to include the Undesign the Redline exhibit, Ward 8 Health Council, and the DC Initiative on Racial Equity. Corey is committed to working alongside the former residents of Barry Farm and the community of Ward 8 to bring a new, dynamic, and enriching resource to Ward 8.

CONTACT (S):  Russell Roybal rroybal@ncrp.org 
                           Elbert Garcia, egarcia@ncrp.org 

NCRP:  Philanthropy Must Play An Active Role in Reparations for Black People

Cracks in the Foundation: Philanthropy’s Role in Reparations for Black People in the DMV, the newest report from
the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, examines grantmakers’ role in repairing the harm
created by the wealth generated from the systemic exclusion and exploitation of Black people in the Washington, DC area. 

WASHINGTON, DC – At a time when so many are willing to give up any discussion of America’s past in exchange for a false semblance of civil discourse, a new report from the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy makes the case that foundations have an immediate opportunity and responsibility to address society’s past harm in order to help communities heal and thrive. 

Cracks in the Foundation: Philanthropy’s Role in Reparations for Black People in the DMV details how the disparities in areas like education, income, employment and housing for Black residents in the District of Columbia, southern Maryland, and northern Virginia areas (commonly known as the DMV) are not random or natural occurrences but are a string of conscious choices that repeatedly harmed communities.  

Cover of NCRPs report, Cracks in the Foundation: Philanthropy's Role in Reparations for Black People in the DMV
 Download the full report to read more

Using publicly available quantitative and qualitative research, the report details how the great wealth that later made philanthropy possible in the DC area came at the expense of the social stability and economic success of Black residents. The report examines these harmful actions in four distinct sectors: media, housing, employment, and healthcare. It also provides a framework for foundations to not only understand their past, but how they may start acknowledging and addressing these harms with community residents.

The report is available for download at ncrp.org/reparations 

“Despite individuals and some organizations being generally aware of the historical exploitation of Black people in this country, philanthropy has never really reckoned with how the ill-gotten gains from systemic discrimination and exclusion were the seed capital for so many modern grantmakers,” said Dara Cooper, a national strategic consultant and organizer. “This report helps us connect the voices of the past with the data of the present in order to give foundations little excuse to address and redress historical and ongoing exploitation of Black DMV residents and families.”

“We hope that foundations in the DC area will acknowledge these stories of harm and use the tools included in this report to establish and deepen connections with local groups and organizations and contribute financial resources and social capital for reparative action,” said NCRP President and CEO Aaron Dorfman. “These collective efforts are crucial for the immediate and long-term healing of impacted Black communities in the region.”

Regional funder if, A Foundation for Radical Possibility, is one of eight foundations included in the report  as illustrative of the role that the sector has historically played in the systemic limiting of opportunities of local Black residents. They provided the lion’s share of funding for the report soon after embarking on their own journey into the foundation’s wealth generation and past actions.

“This report illustrates if’s commitment to racial justice, which requires accountability for injustice, both past and present. We are holding ourselves accountable for the harm we have caused,” said if Co-CEOs, Hanh Le and Temi F. Bennett. “Addressing anti-Blackness is ground zero for racial justice in America. Given the backlash to the alleged “racial reckoning” of 2020, our sector is in fight or flight mode. if is fighting, always. We invite others to join us.” 

Although discussions about reparations for Black people have existed since the U.S. Civil War, the current movement for reparations has picked up steam in recent years with cities like Evanston, Ill. and states like California creating their own commissions and reports to help quantify the harm done and propose healing solutions. In philanthropy, recent articles by the BridgeSpan Group and Liberation Ventures and webinars by Justice Funders,  Philanthropy Northwest and Decolonizing Wealth  have made additional cases for reparations role in building a culture of repair and redress as foundations more deeply explore the impact of their initial seed capital.  

Local organizers, like DC Movement for Black Lives Policy Table Coordinator Christian Beauvoir, see foundations’ role in reparations both as natural moral and practical extensions of their charitable missions.  

“Every institution that claims to value Black people has a responsibility to make right every time that it has not,” said Beauvoir. “But reparations is more than just a legal framework for responding to harm. It says I see the violence that your ancestors endured when they deserved care, I see the discrimination they experienced when they deserved homes, schools, or doctors and because these histories still live in your DNA and in the institutions that surround you, I am committed to repairing what I have destroyed.” 

“Philanthropy’s history of wealth generation presents a unique opportunity and responsibility,” says report author and NCRP Research Manager for Special Projects Katherine Ponce. “We hope this report and its community-centered research framework persuades – and, if necessary, pressures — decision-makers to shifting social and economic resources back to those whose rights, livelihoods and safety have been unjustly stripped away through historical actions reflecting structural anti-Black racism.” 

The Need to Acknowledge and Address Past Harm Directly 

Past research by NCRP and others have noted philanthropy’s general underfunding of Black communities and Black-led institutions and non-profits. Yet increased funding to Black communities and racial justice work – while critical – is not the same as reckoning with harm done to specific Black people through the wealth origins of an individual institution.   

Cracks in the Foundation looks to catalyze that process by (re)centering the conversation on those most impacted and harmed back by the wealth that was directly and indirectly generated through systemic racism and discrimination.  

“By compiling, contextualizing and publishing biographical and other historical information about the origins of philanthropic wealth, the stories of harm experienced by Black people become unavoidable and, more importantly, actionable – especially for funders with a commitment to racial equity or racial justice,” writes Ponce. “Research that connects and centers stories of local Black communities can generate energy, opportunities, and concrete actions for foundations to engage in reparations and healing efforts. This report is both an invitation and a roadmap for local foundations – studied and otherwise – to do exactly that.”  

DC native and NCRP Board Chair Dr. Dwayne Proctor sees the report as a crucial tool for funders to both address past harms and create a more equitable future for everyone.  
 
“This report speaks to generations of history of Black people in the region and the throughlines to their oppression. I am encouraged to read a report that not only tells these stories but applies them to new and tested frameworks,” said Dr. Proctor, who also services as the President and CEO of the Missouri Foundation for Health. “If readers can connect the overlaps between the social determinants of health and the necessary healing of Black families today – real and transformative conversations about repair can begin.” 

Local Feedback and Input 

Ponce and NCRP researchers consulted with local academics, community leaders and oral history experts like the DC History Center. In cases where researchers could connect sufficient public evidence to a specific foundation, NCRP offered those foundations an opportunity to respond and identify current levels of related funding.  

For previous Horning Family Foundation Board Member Andy Horning, conversations into the past are both personal and professional as the family foundation wades through a year of reflection and paused operations. As place-based foundation whose grantmaking is explicitly dedicated to centering Black people and Black communities in Washington, DC, he understands that there is no way around the vulnerability that comes with facing and doing something about the past.  

“For white people, undoing racism and understanding white supremacy is a critical first step when they engage in philanthropy.  It isn’t easy work,” says Horning. “Expect a direct challenge to who you are and have seen yourself to be.  It requires incredible courage to step forward into the discomfort AND deep self-compassion when it inevitably becomes difficult. Its a reckoning, a grappling with the hard new reality of understanding ourselves and the world white supremacy has created.” 

Dorfman acknowledges that the report will be uncomfortable even to the most progressive leaders and board members.  

“We understand that for many organizations, this report will be personal. Founder legacies are complicated and this kind of reckoning process forces everyone connected to a foundation to be vulnerable,” says Dorfman. “But we also hope that foundations both mentioned and unmentioned will seize the chance to not only to exercise responsibility, but to also provide courage to those in their sector who may want to act, but do not know where to start.” 

Although the report’s immediate focus is the Washington, DC area, the report’s methodology and recommendations can also serve as a model for funders and organizers in other cities and regions. The framework, community-centered process, and suggested actions also have potential applications not just for philanthropy, but for any institution in the public or private sector grappling with these uncomfortable, but necessary questions. 

“This research stands on the shoulders of the generations of advocates that have been dreaming and implementing interventions in philanthropy that disrupt and transform the status quo,” says Jennie Goldfarb, Director of Operations & Strategic Engagement at Liberation Ventures. “Right now, foundations have a chance to model holistic repair. This report is the first step and I’m so proud of everyone involved in bringing this across the finish line. My hope is it fuels a movement of funders committed to truth telling and being in right relationship with each other and the organizations they fund.” 

ABOUT NCRP 

The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) has served as philanthropy’s critical friend and independent watchdog since 1976. We work with foundations, non-profits, social justice movements and other leaders to ensure that the sector is transparent with, and accountable to, those with the least wealth, power and opportunity in American society. 

Our storytelling, advocacy, and research efforts, in partnership with grantees, help funders fulfill their moral and practical duty to build, share, and wield economic resources and power to serve public purposes in pursuit of justice.