Being a Black Community-Focused Grantmaker in a Sector Crisis
What is the key difference between being a Black community-focused grantmaker and a race-agnostic/mainstream grantmaker? That is the central question the Do it Now Now (DiNN) team have been grappling with since 2020, when we first got the opportunity to enter into this specific subsection of the charity sector thanks to funding received from Paul Hamlyn Foundation.
In July of that tumultuous year, after the public murder of George Floyd (see our recent reflection on this) in the midst of the COVID pandemic and the reckoning that came with the unmistakable disparities that people across the class divides experience, as compounded by race, we received the opportunity to elevate into this powerful position; it is a legacy we remain aware of and held accountable to.
Bayo Adelaja MBE founded the organisation in 2016 in an effort to engage in “entrepreneurial voluntarism”, she was acting out of a desperate need to take control in a system in which she felt powerless and saw the hopelessness embodied in the lives and attitudes of her Black friends and peers. She saw them trying to operate in spaces that had the promise of success and opportunity to attain social mobility, but were instead betraying them and doing so in a way that was insidious, unmistakable yet unspoken and ill-evidenced. Do it Now Now was a New Year’s resolution, a rallying cry to the people in her life and in their lives to come together and see what we could do on our own, with our own resources, create seats at our own tables, shunning the harm and hurt of the mainstream spaces to find solace together with each other.
By 2019, at 29 years old, Bayo had sunk almost £40,000 of her own money into maintaining the community project with no external funding (our applications were always rejected), and the result was that she was couchsurfing, on benefits and experiencing Period Poverty. Despite her best efforts and the best intentions of everyone who had joined her on the journey (by this time, thousands of people had attended events, and there were many press clippings and notable awards), shifting the needle felt impossible and good feeling was not translating into meaningful long-term impact. The lesson was clear - the mainstream could not be avoided. In 2019, Do it Now Now was registered as a CIC and Bayo got to work on pulling up a seat at the pre-existing table where all the powerful people sat with all the resources carefully organised at its centre.
Do it Now Now has enjoyed a rare success story, profiteering, you could say, from the happenings of 2020. There is a guilt that has come with the success of Do it Now Now, not least because it took the public murder of a human being and the systematically avoidable deaths of countless others through the pandemic, for the charity sector to respond to the historic need and hopelessness Bayo and many others had been trying to address with no attention or support for many years prior. Before 2020, being a Black founder in this charity ecosystem felt like waking up every day, throwing yourself against a brick wall, hoping the wall would break apart. Rather than shifting, opening or being impacted at all, the wall stayed intact and instead, Black founders were breaking, every day. We still are.
The existence and success of Do it Now Now and organisations like ours is not evidence that the problem has been solved. In fact, it is clear evidence that it has not. That the most financially successful organisations in the UK led by Black people are racial justice organisations seeking to deliver systems change in the sector is a problem; it is relegation. We believe that to create an equitable future for all, we need to empower those who choose to burden themselves with the responsibility that comes with entrepreneurial voluntarism in this sector - giving of their minds, time, and finances to create and sustain organisations that solve social issues that have adversely affected their own lives, moving beyond campaigning and protesting into delivering interventions that are backed by evidence and funded effectively to scale to the extent that is needed for the problem to be reduced or removed. The future needs us all.
To answer the opening question, the key difference between a Black community-focused grant funder and a race-agnostic/mainstream funder is our mandate to ensure that Black founders are taking up seats in every sub-section of the charity sector, raising their voices and being heard on all matters of society, from arts and culture to mental health and wellbeing, disabilities, climate change, and more. Our vision is to be the Black community's foremost champion, enabling the systemic development and co-production of equitable opportunities and outcomes for Black people.
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