DEFINING SOCIAL JUSTICE PHILANTHROPY: WHAT'S YOUR FAVORITE SHADE OF PINKO?
Albert Ruesga on Courtesy White Telephone Blog
Those of us in the business of grantmaking often get so caught up in the mechanics of our work that we lose sight of the transformed lives and communities we strive to bring into being. We forget the good we set out to accomplish. This is a great shame. But next to losing a sense of the good we can accomplish through our work, the worst evil that can befall us is to have little sense of anything else. We need not only a vision of the world we want to see, but a bracing clarity about the how of social change. Good intentions will not transform complex systems that keep whole classes of people in abject misery while their neighbors live in splendor.
I know this sounds hopelessly retro, but I’m convinced that one of the first steps toward effectiveness as a grantmaker is conceptual clarity, beginning with clarity about what it is we mean by “social justice” and, by extension, “social justice philanthropy.”