Last year, a group called the Decolonizing Wealth Project announced a “moonshot” goal of redirecting $1 trillion in philanthropic dollars towards what it calls “reparative philanthropy” over the following decade. It defines such giving as “the redistribution of resources in a manner that acknowledges the extractive origins of philanthropic wealth (family or institutional) and how colonization, slavery and the forms of oppression facilitated the accumulation of wealth that philanthropy protects, grows and distributes.”
The “moonshot” announcement noted that the group had already influenced nearly $1 billion in grantmaking and asserted that its efforts had “fundamentally transformed how philanthropy operates in the United States and beyond.” Decolonizing Wealth has indeed attracted substantial support—both financial and ideological—from some of the largest and most well-known foundations in the country. It is therefore worth examining the group’s philanthropic philosophy and practices, both for its own sake and for what it reveals about the worldview of the sector more broadly.
Background
The origins of the Decolonizing Wealth Project lie in a 2018 book, written by the group’s founder and CEO Edgar Villanueva, entitled Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance. Ford Foundation executive vice president Hilary Pennington called it the single most impactful thing she had ever read on “the intersection between race, racism, colonization, and philanthropy.” The project is an organizational outgrowth of the book.
Villanueva has an extensive background in philanthropy. In addition to founding Decolonizing Wealth, he has held positions at the Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust, the Marguerite Casy Foundation (itself a major funder of left-wing public policy activism), and the Schott Foundation for Public Education. He has served on the boards of the Andrus Family Fund and Native Americans in Philanthropy, and is currently listed as a board member at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Villanueva is also a board member at the NDN Collective—an activist group that has (among other things) demanded that the federal government close Mount Rushmore National Memorial and return the “stolen” land it occupies to the Lakota Sioux.
Global philanthropy, according to Decolonizing Wealth, “has its roots in the legacy of colonization, [and is] built on harmful, racially biased beliefs that have long limited the power and agency of the people of color, particularly in the Global South.” The group believes that philanthropy improperly centers “whiteness as the norm,” and argues that the sector can function as a “shield for capitalism” by permitting wealthy donors to mitigate some of its supposed harms while avoiding having to confront and change “the systems that allow them to accumulate vast wealth in the first place.”
Race and ethnicity appear to be the central considerations underlying Decolonizing Wealth’s “reparative philanthropy” philosophy, and the group’s efforts to influence major grantmakers along these lines have included so-called “PhilanthropySoWhite” discussions, featuring executives from the Ford Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Nellie Mae Education Foundation, the Groundswell Fund, and the Stupski Foundation.
Grantmaking
The Decolonizing Wealth Project was a fiscally-sponsored project of the Michigan-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit Allied Media Projects until approximately 2023/2024, when its sponsorship was transferred to the Amalgamated Charitable Foundation. Decolonizing Wealth also operates a pooled fund called Liberated Capital, which Villanueva has characterized as a type of donor-advised fund. Villanueva has been highly critical of traditional donor-advised funds—calling them a vehicle that helps “uphold white supremacy”—and donors to Liberated Capital relinquish control of grantmaking decisions to “community advisors from the populations being served,” according to a recent Forbes profile.
On its website, Decolonizing Wealth claims to have distributed over $30 million worth of grants since 2020 “to Black, Indigenous-led organizations and other historically under-resourced groups.” Three-quarters of its grantees are led by minority women, and more than two-thirds are said to have budgets under $1 million. Grants are made through six different funding programs, which include those promoting the “rematriation” of land to Native Americans, supporting “culturally responsive mental health care for youth navigating intersecting identities and systemic challenges,” developing “indigenous solutions for climate resiliency and land conservation,” and advocating for racial reparations for Black Americans.
An archived version of the Liberated Capital webpage from March 2025 explains that grants are unrestricted and made “to support general operating costs, on a trust-basis.” That page and others list hundreds of different grantees, many of which are stridently left-wing (sometimes radically so) activist groups. These include:
Funders
Numerous private foundations and other grantmakers have reported making grants to the Decolonizing Wealth Project through one or both of its fiscal sponsors. These include:
- The California Endowment ($5.88 million from 2022-2024); a private foundation established in 1996 through the conversion of Blue Cross of California from a nonprofit to a for-profit entity. It reported $3.95 billion net assets in 2024.
- The MacArthur Foundation ($3.75 million in 2021); a private foundation established in 1970 and capitalized from the estate of insurance magnate John D. MacArthur, who died in 1978 as one of the wealthiest individuals in the United States. It reported $8.65 billion net assets in 2024.
- The Satterberg Foundation ($3.14 million from 2019-2024); a once-small Seattle foundation that received hundreds of millions of dollars in the mid-2010s from the estate of attorney William Helsell. It reported $425 million net assets in 2024.
- The Chicago Community Trust ($3 million in 2021); a community foundation that also serves as a donor-advised fund provider—despite its name, according to its most recent tax filings only three of its top twenty domestic grant recipients were located in Chicago. It reported $5.98 billion net assets in 2024.
- The Ford Foundation ($2.7 million from 2019-2024); one of the largest, most well-known, and most thoroughly left-wing foundations in the country, its endowment originated from wealth created generations ago by Henry Ford. It reported $14.9 billion net assets in 2024.
- The Pivotal Philanthropies Foundation ($2 million in 2022); the largest of at least five different private foundations associated with the Pivotal philanthropic network controlled by Melinda French Gates and recently capitalized with billions of dollars from her ex-husband Bill Gates. It reported $6.9 billion net assets in 2024.
- The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation ($1.78 million from 2023-2024); founded in 1936 by the onetime president and chairman of Johnson & Johnson, the foundation still holds over $1.2 billion worth of the company’s stock. It reported $12.48 billion net assets in 2024.
- The Skoll Foundation ($1.5 million from 2022-2024); a private foundation established by the first full-time employee and former president of eBay Jeffrey Skoll. It reported $810.2 million net assets in 2024.
- The Omidyar Network Fund ($1.175 million from 2020-2024); a private foundation established by the billionaire founder of eBay Pierre Omidyar. It reported $378 million net assets in 2024.
- The Weingart Foundation ($1 million from 2023-2024); a Los Angeles-based private foundation established in 1951 by real estate developer Ben Weingart and his wife Stella. It reported $848.5 million net assets in 2024.
- Magic Cabinet/Ken Birdwell Foundation ($1 million from 2023-2024); a private foundation established by longtime Valve Corporation software engineer Ken Birdwell. It reported $146 million net assets in 2024.
Excluding the Chicago Community Trust as a donor-advised fund provider, the combined 2024 total net assets of the remaining ten major private foundation funders of Decolonizing Wealth totaled nearly $49.5 billion.
On top of this, grantmakers that have given at least six figures to Decolonizing Wealth over the years include the California Wellness Foundation, the Christensen Fund, Working Families Power, the Bafrayung Fund, the NoVo Foundation, and the Kresge Foundation. In 2021, MacKenzie Scott also gave an undisclosed amount through her Yield Giving philanthropy.
Other grantmakers appear to have designated funding specifically for Liberated Capital without mentioning Decolonizing Wealth. For example, Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund gave $500,000 to Allied Media Projects to support Liberated Capital in 2020, while the Bafrayung Fund contributed $1 million in 2021 to Liberated Capital at the address of the Social Good Fund, which was accepting donations on Liberated Capital’s behalf at the time. In 2024, the Amalgamated Charitable Foundation (Decolonizing Wealth’s current fiscal sponsor) reported making $4.03 million worth of grants to a limited liability company called Decolonizing Wealth Project Inc. It is unclear whether this simply reflects its sponsorship activities, or something different.
Thoughts and questions
The ordinary American taxpayer who is incentivizing philanthropy through the tax code probably has a relatively traditional (if perhaps vague) understanding of what it is, where it comes from, and the sorts of things it should generally be funding. Contemporary Big Philanthropy is frequently at odds with this understanding, and Villanueva is regrettably accurate when he observes that instead of helping, philanthropy “often further divides and destabilizes society.”
That said, what could be more divisive and destabilizing to society than a politically charged $1 trillion philanthropic “moonshot” that is largely predicated upon the skin color of the recipients and/or who their forebearers happened to be? This appears to be the central purpose of the Decolonizing Wealth Project, and it has been embraced by some of the biggest philanthropic names in the country.
Villanueva contends that “settlers and their descendants” must “grieve the lives of their ancestors, the culture that made their acts of domination and exploitation even imaginable, possible, and acceptable.” He believes that “poverty is the product of public policy and theft, facilitated by white supremacy,” and that philanthropic dollars have “been twice stolen: once through the colonial-style exploitation of natural resources and exploited labor, and the second time, through tax evasion.” Though he doesn’t quite believe philanthropy is beyond salvation, Villanueva “empathize[s]” with the view that “the colonial system of wealth consolidation based on white supremacy has caused so much damage and suffering and is so intrinsically rotten that anything related to it, including the ostensibly altruistic worlds of philanthropy or aid, cannot be fixed, trusted, or saved.”
Do the Ford, MacArthur, and Robert Wood Johnson foundations believe that the perpetuation of their ancestral endowments constitutes tax evasion? Do Pierre Omidyar and Jeffrey Skoll believe that their wealth was acquired through colonial-style exploitation? Does Melinda French Gates believe that her philanthropic network has been built with money that has been stolen twice? This is certainly what their seven-figure grants to the Decolonizing Wealth Project suggests.
What are those of us who collectively incentivize their philanthropy through favorable tax treatment supposed to make of that?
