Our Work
The Black Donors Project began with an inquiry into Black giving and the role Black donors play in sustaining Black arts, culture, and social change.
Black giving moves differently because it often comes from inside the community. Many Black donors give to people, places, histories, institutions, and struggles we are connected to by lineage, geography, culture, grief, joy, kinship, and shared risk. The gift carries money, and it also carries memory, protection, obligation, and consequence.
Dominant philanthropy can afford distance. Black giving often cannot. Our giving is tied to communities we belong to, communities we have watched be harmed, communities that have held us, and communities we are trying to keep alive. That makes the act of giving politically and spiritually charged. It asks more of us than generosity. It asks for discernment.
Where the inquiry began
The Black Donors in the Arts survey is where we began. We wanted to understand how our communities think about giving across time, talent, treasure, care, cultural labor, and community responsibility. The survey opened a window into how Black donors, artists, nonprofit workers, and cultural organizers understand their roles in sustaining Black arts and movement work.
The responses showed that giving was deeply relational. People were thinking about money, yes, and also about trust, safety, leadership, visibility, burnout, accountability, and the long history of Black communities caring for one another with limited institutional protection.
That first inquiry made one thing clear: a survey could collect information, yet the questions deserved conversation. The answers carried too much lived experience to remain in data form alone.
Where the data became dialogue
Conversations for the Community created space for Black donors, artists, cultural workers, nonprofit leaders, organizers, and community members to gather around the questions raised by the survey.
Across these conversations, participants named concerns about giving, safety, trust, visibility, responsibility, and the pressure Black communities carry when resources are scarce and needs are urgent.
People spoke about the emotional, spiritual, political, and practical dimensions of giving. They also named the weight of decision-making inside Black-led spaces, especially when care, money, survival, and accountability meet.
Through these conversations, two themes rose with consistency: rest and reparations. Reparations surfaced as a demand, a framework, and a long-standing political necessity. Rest surfaced as an immediate need already moving through Black arts and cultural communities as practice, metaphor, ritual, and organizing language.
Preparing for What’s Next—Before It Happens
Black Prompts is a virtual, intergenerational peer-to-peer learning journey designed as a collective experience for Black donors to explore along with Black-led nonprofits and organizers to understand and prepare for challenges before they happen.
We believe that by creating a space for situational simulations, we can work together to navigate challenges, anticipate obstacles, sharpen strategies, resources and invest in networks together ensuring we are not siloed in a crisis.
These simulations helped define the intersection Black donors want to invest in rest and reparations which led to building Testing Rest investment infrasturcture sustainability
When donors are from the community
We tend to source solutions
Black Prompts simulations surfaced burnout across nonprofit and mission-driven organizations as a structural crisis. For Black donors, that raised a necessary question: how do we support Black arts, culture, and movement work without reinforcing organizational frameworks that reproduce the same extraction, overwork, and scarcity our communities are trying to survive?
Participants recognized that workers were carrying emotional, financial, and operational strain while organizations were being asked to meet growing community needs with limited staffing, unstable resources, and few real pathways to rest.
Testing Rest grew from what Black Prompts made impossible to ignore: Black donors are giving into systems already shaped by labor, pressure, scarcity, leadership strain, movement organizing demands, and organizational strain. The question became whether our support helps protect the people carrying Black arts, culture, and movement work, or unintentionally feeds the exhaustion that keeps them overextended.
How We Heal
a statement not a question
Our goal was to understand how we give across time, talent, treasure, cultural labor, protection, and community responsibility and whether the structures surrounding our giving were actually serving us or quietly costing us.
The survey opened a path into deeper questions about trust, safety, fear, trauma, visibility, burnout, and accountability around individual giving and what Black donors are asking to understand before placing their resources into people, organizations, and causes. What the survey made clear was that the questions beneath the giving were as important as the giving itself.
Those insights led to Conversations for the Community. In those gatherings, Black donors, artists, organizers, cultural workers, nonprofit leaders, and community members named the realities surrounding the gift: scarcity, fear, exhaustion, hope, responsibility, healing, and the desire to support the work without feeding the same systems of extraction our communities are working to survive.
Those conversations led to Black Prompts, a simulation practice where Black donors and Black-led organizations could rehearse difficult conversations, scenarios, and decisions before urgency, harm, or crisis arrived. Rehearsal matters because it creates the conditions to think clearly to regulate our nervous systems and operating systems while practicing healing-centered frameworks, choosing them deliberately rather than defaulting to trauma as the only available language.
Through those simulations, we grew deeply concerned for those carrying the work. Burnout surfaced as a structural reality, and rest became an investment question one we took seriously enough to study. Using participatory action research, we tested what rest actually makes possible. We asked: what good is our giving if it moves into the same extractive and inequitable frameworks our communities are working to survive and what becomes possible when we refuse that pattern?
Our goal now is to move with what we have learned together. To turn our everyday giving into coordinated support for Black art, culture, and movement work. To stay accountable to the people, histories, and communities our gifts are tied to. We are building pathways for small-dollar giving to move with protection, discernment, healing, and shared purpose so our support can meet this political moment without repeating the extractive patterns our communities have already carried.