Coming Together for Sustained Investments in Black Communities

The California Black Freedom Fund (CBFF) was founded in 2020 in the wake of George Floyd’s murder to build and sustain the power of organizations serving the Black community across California. CBFF has provided more than 140 organizations with critically needed support. One grantee said that CBFF provided them with “dream capital” to transform their work.  

The Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund is a proud founding partner of CBFF. At a time when the principles of affirmative action and racial justice are under assault, the Haas, Jr. Fund spoke with CBFF’s executive director, Marc Philpart, about the need for funders to stay true to their commitments and keep investing unapologetically in Black leaders and community advocacy.  

As you reflect on the past five years, what’s your sense of the impact you’ve had and how the work of CBFF continues to be important?  

Marc Philpart: It’s been exciting to see funders and organizers come together around the issues facing Black communities in California. We are gradually moving from a reliance on crisis funding to an understanding that philanthropy needs to make a sustained investment and build a deeper connection with Black communities in ways it hasn’t in the past.

But at same time, Black people across California are still facing huge challenges. Economic constraints are pushing them out of the homes they grew up in and out of historically Black neighborhoods. And as a result, we are seeing a suburbanization of poverty and a level of isolation among Black people that wasn’t there before. The dispersion of our communities makes it that much harder to come together and amass power. Add to that the specific crises facing Black communities like Altadena after the LA fires, and it’s that much clearer that we need more resources to help people on the ground.  

Black power-building organizations are facing their own challenges, too. There’s a lot of misinformation and a lot of fear out there about their work. People don’t have the resources to understand the legal landscape and feel confident in their ability to do race-conscious programming for their communities.  

How are you responding to the challenges you and your partners face in this moment?

MP: One of the immediate things we have done in this moment is to join with the California Community Foundation to create the Black LA Relief & Recovery Fund. We believe our investments can help deliver a community-led vision for recovery grounded in the authentic voices of people living, working, praying, and learning in the area. More broadly, we are supporting all of our grantees to develop year-round political and civic education programs to help Black communities see and understand how to shape a better future for them and their kids and grandkids.  

We are also looking for new ways to uplift and support Black leadership. One example of that work is the Chinedu Valentine Okobi Sabbatical Program. In 2018, Chinedu was tased and killed by the San Mateo Sherriff’s Department. The Okobi family received a settlement from San Mateo County in 2022 and sought our help to direct the money towards honoring the legacy of their son, brother, and father, and to make a meaningful investment in the Black community. So far through the program, we’ve been able to provide three movement leaders from Black-serving organizations with funding to take a six-week sabbatical. In this tumultuous time, that is just one of the ways we’re helping to support the wellbeing of our partners who are dedicating their lives and work to building Black power.

You’ve also launched the LEAD (Legal Education, Advocacy and Defense) for Racial Justice initiative to support community-based organizations and funders with legal education and support. Tell us more about that.

MP: LEAD was born from our own experience as an organization trying to understand our work in the context of the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision in 2023. We discovered there are very few resources for folks on these issues—and a lot of misinformation too. So we developed LEAD as a space for movement groups to learn, connect, and find the training, knowledge, and support they need to keep advancing their work in a challenging environment.  

The results so far have been amazing. Ninety-five percent of the groups we have trained said they are now more confident to participate in race-conscious programming.  And now, we’re developing additional training to help funders understand the current landscape.

We’ve also been pleasantly surprised by the attention LEAD has received outside of California and are responding to that interest by expanding the model to other states. Looking ahead, we see LEAD not solely as legal support and education, but as a platform for moving people to real action on the issues affecting Black communities.  

The ultimate goal isn’t about us. It’s to help community groups that are led by and serving Black communities to dream bigger. They need a sustained commitment and steady resources so they can hire staff with more confidence, and so they can build the systems they need.

Marc Philpart, Executive Director, California Black Freedom Fund

What are your priorities for the next five years of the California Black Freedom Fund?

MP: The first order of business is to close the gap in our funding. We started with a goal of raising $100 million and we are currently at $86 million. We want to cover the rest of that ground this year, and we’re seeing a lot of momentum behind us.  

The other thing we are working on is becoming a permanent and standalone organization. The California Black Freedom Fund was established as a fund at Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and it was billed as a five-year project. But given the challenges that continue to face Black communities across the state, people feel strongly that there is still an urgent need for this organization.

So right now, we are focused on developing the policy infrastructure, the technology, and the compliance and legal framework to sustain and grow our impact. Getting to where we want means building a board and a leadership structure that gives us more visibility and also thinking more deeply about the financial sustainability of our work. We want to build toward creating a lasting endowment and an individual donor base as a shift from relying primarily on foundation support.

Of course, the ultimate goal isn’t about us. It’s to help community groups that are led by and serving Black communities to dream bigger. They need a sustained commitment and steady resources so they can hire staff with more confidence, and so they can build the systems they need.  

Sixty-eight percent of our grantees have budgets under $1 million, and a lot of these groups do not have access to traditional philanthropy. So we see ourselves as a home for the broader network of Black power-building organizations that are forming across our state.  

What’s your message to funders about standing in solidarity with Black communities right now?

MP: My message to funders is invest, invest, invest.  

Quiet capitulation and anticipatory obedience are a death knell for democracy and we can’t afford it. What is happening right now requires all of us to think about the kind of change we want to see in the world and about our relationships to communities that are being targeted. If there ever was a time to stand firm in our commitments to racial justice and racial equity, it’s now.