Join a funder peer follow-up to the special 2021 SAFSF Forum session Decolonizing Food Philanthropy. This follow–up conversation on Monday, November 1 is available only to funders who participated in the special Forum session. For other funders, note that we are exploring a repeat of the original conversation in spring 2022.

This session has the following goals:

• Reflect: Hear from participants about their experience at the May workshop. Are there any learnings or new relationships that influenced your thinking or brought up questions in your work?

• Check in: Discuss what has happened since the workshop – did you stay in touch with your accountability partner? How have your goals advanced? What new challenges have you faced, and what have you moved forward?

• Look forward: What do you see as your “next right step,” as Navina Khanna put it during the Forum session? What challenges are you facing?

• Connect: Are there specific ways SAFSF – or other members – might be able to help, or new ways you’re interested in working together?

The session will be a facilitated conversation with breakout sessions. Participants must complete a self-reflection survey before the session. As with the Decolonizing workshop, the session will not be recorded, but we will be looking to share high-level takeaway and insights with our broader membership (without attribution, and/or with permission).

About the session name
You’ve likely noticed that we renamed this follow-up Solidarity Philanthropy, rather than Decolonizing Philanthropy, the name of the original forum session.

We made the change because we seek to use language that is clear, respectful, and not appropriative, especially as non-Indigenous People and in particular, as white women. Together, we are learning from the article “Decolonizing is Not A Metaphor,” especially Tuck and Yang’s opening comment, “Decolonization brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools.” 

We are also learning from the powerful guidance brought forward by Native American philanthropist Edgar VillaNueva (Decolonizing Wealth and Liberated Capital), which includes a powerful critique of many forms of institutional philanthropy and also offers steps for healing and getting things right: grieve, apologize, listen, relate, represent, invest, and repair. These are important aspirations for us all in this moment of deep interconnected crises, and deep openings toward healing and repair.

We chose to focus on Solidarity because we feel it captured the heart of what we’d set out to discuss with the speakers from the Open Letter Group–how as funders to stand with our colleagues in BIPOC- and frontline-led organizations in authentic and accountable ways.