The caller told Benson to check her email. Her organization, Community Resources for Enduring Wellness, was receiving a grant. The new
While Benson’s organization, known as CREW, had recently received charity status from the
Benson, then a senior at Rock Hill’s
CREW needed substantially more money to get up and running.
“$40,000!” Benson shrieked with joy and disbelief after opening the email several hours later. “This took CREW from an idea with a 501(c)(3) to an actual organization that can position itself to get funding.”
The fund saw the potential to create long-term sustainability while developing a rarely used approach to philanthropy.
The fund exceeded its goal, raising
So far, the
“It gets the money out of the hands of institutional philanthropy and into the hands of people who actually know what is happening and are doing the work — in ways that are not restrictive,” Henderson said. “There were a lot of intersecting crises and many of the organizations we funded were the social safety net that was literally saving people’s lives.”
“There is resistance of foundations to support social justice, social change, etc., at a level that actually penetrates and does something about the inequities that almost all foundations list in their missions as something they want to change,” Williams said. “What they often support is more aligned with charity that, despite its best intentions, maintains the status quo and doesn’t bring about change.”
Research shows philanthropies routinely fail to fund the types of groups that
Last year’s seminal events, which motivated the country to examine the longstanding socioeconomic dimensions of racial inequality, drew attention to the funding issue. Henderson said many people with large funding groups may have been shocked by disparities, but grassroots groups weren’t.
“It was a catalytic moment for philanthropy,” Henderson said of Floyd’s murder. “Philanthropy had to see that we were telling the truth for years. It should be shameful that it took this much cumulative Black deaths to prove to philanthropy that there was a level of crisis that needed to be paid attention to.”
Benson’s group and most of the nonprofits that received support through the
“These groups were doing some beautiful and amazing and creative and critical work that is completely underresourced,” Fisher-Borne said. “We just want to move resources in a way that is actually useful to organizers on the ground.”
CREW is using part of its grant to create a database of Black health and wellness providers, an idea that partially grew out of Benson’s personal need for help.
She posted on social media last year about how she had been struggling emotionally. Benson described it as more than feelings of pandemic isolation. The racial inequality that the pandemic and Floyd’s death highlighted brought on her distress.
Benson, who has enrolled in a master’s program in public health, said she was outraged by the health disparity issues raised by African Americans dying of coronavirus at higher rates. When people asked her if she knew of any Black psychologists and other mental-health professionals, she started compiling a list.
She spent several days working on the list, primarily by combing the websites of health systems and other providers in
Now CREW is using the grant, the first it has ever received, to create an online database that will be expanded to include other Black health-care and wellness providers, eventually also in
“The goal is really to be like the Green Book of public health for Black folks,” she said referring to the guidebook used extensively by Black travelers during segregation to find safe places to eat and sleep.
“I wanted a Black woman therapist,” Curtis said. “I had been to a white therapist, who could understand superficially but wasn’t able to empathize and help me find the language to deal with microaggressions and those types of things.”
In
What’s more, Russaw said, people who had lost jobs due to Covid-19 were having difficulty collecting unemployment benefits, and food pantries were overwhelmed. TOPS saw a gap and sought to fill it.
“We wanted to make sure the communities that we serve got what they needed,” she said.
The 20-year-old group based in
“One of the greatest lessons of the
“We have seen firsthand how organizing and advocacy that takes place in the South can transform lives and impact the entire nation,”
Meanwhile, grantees say the trust that the
Benson, in
“I wanted to first make sure I was a good steward of the money,” Benson said. “My main concern was that we are able to do the most with this money to make this organization and this project as sustainable as possible.”
In
Henderson recalls the pleasant surprise from many grassroots leaders when she called to tell them about receiving the grants last year.
“That was my favorite part of the whole darn thing,” Henderson said.
Many grantees were convinced that the news of the grant was a prank.
“They couldn’t imagine that there was a fund that would have connections to the grassroots and radical legacies and traditions of Southern organizing that really was just giving them money with no strings.”
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