Across the world, reparations have been employed to address a wide range of human rights injustices. Last year, New Zealand made reparations to the Ngāti Maru, one of its Indigenous peoples. After World War II, Germany started the work of societal healing and also paid more than 80 billion euros to survivors of the Holocaust. In South Africa, a truth and reconciliation commission spearheaded by Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela is praised for the public airing of the harms apartheid inflicted on Black South Africans. However, accountability and redress fell short: reparations payments were minimal, and no perpetrators were prosecuted, while some received amnesty.

In the US, momentum for reparations is building as the nation grapples with a history of policies that created and sustained racial inequity. Currently, reparations and racial repair activities are happening across all 50 states. In 2021, Evanston, Illinois, became the first city in the US to create a reparations plan for its Black residents in the form of housing grants targeting some of the population affected by housing discrimination. A consortium of more than 90 universities across the United States, United Kingdom and Canada are investigating their own institutions’ ties to slavery and the legacies of racism in their histories.

Many funders come to reparations from a desire to shrink the US racial wealth gap. If the current wealth of white US households remained stagnant, it would take Black families 228 years, more than 10 generations, to catch up.

As momentum grows, there is a massive opportunity for philanthropy to fund US organisations that see reparations for Black people and building a culture of racial repair as the missing pieces to a more equitable future for everyone. ‘This work aims to heal our past so that we can fully experience our thriving future,’ says Vanessa Masson, principal at Omidyar Network, who leads a new repair portfolio. ‘By cultivating the soil for repair, we can all benefit from the holistic range of remedies taking root.’

Because of that opportunity, The Bridgespan Group, a global non-profit that advises philanthropy, NGOs and impact investors, and Liberation Ventures, an intermediary organisation and donor committed to reparations, collaborated on a report on the role that philanthropy could play in the movement for reparations and building a culture of racial repair. The research included interviews with more than 45 movement leaders, scholars, and funders, a literature review, and a survey of senior philanthropic leaders representing more than $12 billion in assets.

Many funders come to reparations from a desire to shrink the US racial wealth gap. If the current wealth of white US households remained stagnant, it would take Black families 228 years, more than 10 generations, to catch up.

Because of the size of the gap and the race-based policies that created and sustained it, some, like economist William Darity at Duke University, argue that a federal reparations programme is the only way to close it. ‘My response to philanthropists who resist this idea [of reparations] is, whatever else is proposed, by indirect or universal strategies, is not going to do it,’ says Darity.

The Bridgespan/Liberation Ventures research highlights three key roles for philanthropy:

Building a culture of repair

Though often overlooked, building a culture of repair in your own institution is central to the reparations movement, which seeks healing from harm done. Liberation Ventures offers one way of thinking about racial repair through an ongoing, iterative cycle of reckoning, acknowledgment, accountability, and redress. Below is how those components might look for philanthropy:

Reckoning: This may include understanding the roots of the inequities your philanthropy seeks to address as well as reckoning with your personal or institutional wealth origin or the context in which your endowment was created. Another approach involves reviewing historical and current investment practices to understand potential harms, unintentional exclusion and negative impacts for Black communities those investments might have led to. Importantly, reckoning does not have to precede your reparative giving.

Acknowledgement: Acknowledge wealth origin and past mistakes to key stakeholders. For instance, the Bush Foundation, a regional private foundation that was founded in 1953, talks openly about the harms done to Native American and Black communities from broken treaties, slavery and Jim Crow laws and the connection of these race-based policies to the racial wealth gaps in its region of investment. That acknowledgment paved the way in 2021 for its board to approve a new $100 million initiative for Black and Native American communities across the region, recognising that these communities have experienced the most longstanding harm.

Accountability: Shift approaches in governance and decision-making to be accountable to movement leaders and communities you aim to support. For their initiative’s design phase, the Bush Foundation reached out to a few dozen community and philanthropy leaders for feedback rather than making decisions behind closed doors. A panel of community leaders from across the region interviewed finalists and advised the foundation on which organisations to select. Black-led Nexus Community Partners and Indigenous-led NDN Collective were chosen to steward the new funds for their respective communities.

Redress: Engage in acts of restitution and bring a reparative lens to all of your funding. Nexus created the Open Road Fund, which will provide $50,000 grants to at least 800 Black residents in the region to ‘create tangible pathways to liberation, prosperity, and healing on their own terms.’

The journey to racial equity through reparations work can seem daunting, but philanthropists have taken on big challenges before and won

Resourcing systems of repair and reparations  

Philanthropy is currently underinvesting in the movement for reparations despite the variety of potential entry points. The 31 organisations with a focus on reparations in Liberation Ventures’ 2023 portfolio reported a combined annual revenue of less than $20 million in 2022, or about one-thousandth of the annual revenue of the five largest non-profits in the United States. The following illustrate some ways of resourcing the reparations ecosystem:

Integrate Reparations and Repair Strategies into Your Existing Portfolio

Whatever your portfolio’s focus, there is an opportunity to consider how reparations and repair may be integral to achieving the social change you seek. The mission of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) is to build a culture of health in the US to ensure that everyone has the chance to live the healthiest life possible. The funder sees the collective work to dismantle structural racism as key to achieving that goal. ‘Our reparative work comes from understanding root causes,’ says Maisha Simmons, senior director at RWJF. Its funding to the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard was used to explore reparations as a public health strategy to help eliminate racial disparities in health outcomes and achieve health equity.

Support Place-Based Reparations Efforts

Local reparations efforts like the one in Evanston are not the final destination or a way to absolve federal responsibility. However, they are a first step. Evanston Community Foundation (ECF) CEO Sol Anderson says, ‘For ECF and any foundation in this work, we have to recognize that our proper place is backing leaders and members of the Black community in our locales and across the country to do the work they think is most prescient and important to repair the harm that was done.’

Create New Portfolios

Omidyar Network, a social change venture, is to announce a portfolio this year that explicitly seeks to strengthen a culture of repair in the US at a time when, as the funder says, diverse communities are acknowledging the ‘foundational harms of colonialism and slavery, and their modern-day legacies’. Omidyar Network sees this as multi-generational work and plans to collaboratively invest in the growing ecosystems of Black-led and Indigenous-led repair and healing efforts including organisations that advance relational, cultural, spiritual, and material approaches to repair.

Another means of funding the reparations ecosystem is to increase the use of Black asset managers and Black-owned investment firms. Since 95 per cent of most foundations’ wealth is invested rather than distributed in grants, shifting endowments to mission-related investments will benefit Black communities and contribute to racial repair. ‘Pick any gap. At what rate do you close it at 5 per cent?’ asks Dorian Burton, managing partner of the Southern Reconstruction Fund.

The journey to racial equity through reparations work can seem daunting, but philanthropists have taken on big challenges before and won. Take marriage equality in the US. Today, American support for reparations is about as popular as marriage equality was in 2004 – just a decade before same-sex marriage became legal nationwide. It took strategic organising, state campaigns, narrative change, advocacy and philanthropy, which played a critical role as a funder, convener, and amplifier of the movement.

Imagine what the next decade might bring if philanthropy embraced the reparations movement as the investment in the future.

Tonyel Edwards is a partner at The Bridgespan Group and Aria Florant is CEO of Liberation Ventures, they are co-authors of A Reparations Roadmap for Philanthropy. Ivy Nyayieka is Bridgespan’s racial justice media fellow.