The 30-year-old Grand Victoria Foundation is now going by a new name: A Movement Activating Repair and Abundance in Illinois, or AMARA. On Aug. 5, AMARA — which means “grace” in Nigerian Igbo — launched its new identity as a philanthropic funder dedicated to advancing racial justice and investing in Black-centered organizations across Illinois.
The nonprofit is celebrating its evolution all month long, as August is Black Philanthropy Month. One warm welcome took place at this month’s Chicago African Americans in Philanthropy (CAAIP) Annual Awards Celebration at the Obama Presidential Center. During CAAIP, AMARA took its first big step into the future when President Sharon Bush honored prison abolitionist Tanya Watkins with their inaugural AMARA Black Power Builder Award. Watkins is the deputy director of capacity building at the Illinois Community Power Fund, which has played a role in coalitions that successfully campaigned to end cash bail within the state.
“Everything about this [name change] has been very intentional. This question of are we a foundation? We’re a racial justice organization using the tools of philanthropy to support repair and abundance,” Bush told The TRiiBE. “That language is intentional because that’s a way we can sit beside our partners – even with the resources that we have, it shifts the dynamic of the relationship. We don’t have to say we’re a foundation in order to do this work. We’re all in this ecosystem of racial justice together.”
In 2019, Bush said, she asked her board of directors about using a racial lens in their decision-making process. “And there was unanimous consent to say yes around that,” Bush said. That led to the organization using the term racial justice in its work.
Then the police murder of George Floyd happened in 2020, sending shockwaves of grief and resistance across America and even in Black communities throughout the Diaspora. Simultaneously, the world suffered from the COVID-19 pandemic. Those two cataclysmic events inspired the funder to view racism as structural in nature. Bush and her team began reorienting its grantmaking around Black leadership, mission-aligned racial justice work, community power-building and systemic change.
Bush specifically did not want philanthropy to use the term “racial equity” as a catchphrase.
“The behaviors were very familiar: ‘We’re going to pour into this thing for this limited amount of time, and when the spike is over, everything will dissipate,’ and that’s exactly what we saw, right?” Bush said, speaking about the ongoing backlash to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) happening in this country under the federal administration.
“Fortunately, for us, we just stayed the course and we ended up having this expression of people-centered philanthropy. People-centered means having folks choose the things that they want, not having us decide what the important issues are that should be supported,” Bush explained.
Today, AMARA’s grantmaking is organized around 81 community areas where at least 30% of residents are Black. In this Q&A, Bush talks about the future of AMARA and how the funder can be supported in this courageous work.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
The TRiiBE: What inspired the name change?
Sharon Bush: In 2017, before I even became president of the foundation, we were asking ourselves these questions: how do we know that policies and system change efforts actually impact the people who are intended to be positively impacted by them? How might we make sure that our philanthropy is more people centered?
So we did a whole bunch of interviews, focus groups, and convenings to get people to give us ideas about what people’s sense of philanthropy might look like, what values they would want to see from us, and one of the things that came out of that was [that] it would be helpful if you guys are race explicit.
What people meant by that is: when folks are doing policy advocacy work or any other kinds of systems or structural change, they often are trying to reduce or eliminate racial disparities, right? Often, folks will shy away from race, even though that would actually be part of the work. So it’s helpful for the funder to say we care about that. We want to talk about that. This is an important piece of what systems change work looks like.
Everything that you’ve done is so brave. I hate to even call it brave because this is the work that a lot of people think philanthropy is here to do. With the ongoing political backlash to 2020, it seems that it’s becoming harder and harder to not only represent Black people but to courageously walk down this path of centering racial equity. What is philanthropy’s role in communities?
There’s a lot of conversation about that, and a lot of critique about that, right now. But from my perspective, I just take maybe a simple approach to it: with great power comes great responsibility. That means, to me, there’s a lot of power and influence in the aggregation of money and everything that money also aggregates in terms of influence. That means the responsibility is to do something that is just and right and good with it. What does that look like? That means correcting things that are wrong, investing in things that will fix those things, investing in things that are morally right.
Many people are familiar with the name Grand Victoria through the casinos. Did you face any challenges or resistance in your move to change the name from Grand Victoria Foundation to AMARA?
There are lots of conversations that we have amongst ourselves, and amongst others, about what it means to do this. We had to have conversations about what it means to use these words of Black power together. You begin to think about the gaze on your organization. Are we going to be perceived as radical like 1960s radicalism and all of what that comes with? Will that be distracting to the work that we want to do? We wanted to just do the work. We don’t want to be distracted by that. It’s an education to think about how to be precise and consistent with how you want to define terms and how you want others to define those terms too.
When we say Black power, we’re [asking], how are we building people power? How are we building community power and agency? We had these conversations about, well, if we are talking about Black-centered efforts, then does that mean others need not apply? No, we think this work is everybody’s work. We say that internally all the time. Anybody who’s down with this mission, we don’t care what you look like. You can support it, and if our missions are aligned, you can be supported. So we’re not exclusive in this. We believe everybody can be part of the mission. There was a lot of conversation at different levels of our organization and within our community that were both challenging and created opportunities for more openness.
Something that really excited me about the name change and the evolution of the organization is leaving out the word “foundation” and adding the word “movement.” Was there intentionality around taking out the word foundation?
Everything about this [name change] has been very intentional. This question of are we a foundation? We’re a racial justice organization using the tools of philanthropy to support repair and abundance. That language is intentional because that’s a way we can sit beside our partners – even with the resources that we have, it shifts the dynamic of the relationship. We don’t have to say we’re a foundation in order to do this work. We’re all in this ecosystem of racial justice together. That’s a lot of conversation that we’ve had amongst partners.
The keynote speaker at the CAAIP Annual Awards, McKnight Foundation President Tonya Allen, mentioned this need for us to build institutions within Black communities in order to get Black communities back in this place of thriving. To me, it seems AMARA is going in the direction of building an institution.
I’m just gonna say this. Everything Tonya was saying, we’re doing it. When she said that, I’m like, yes, we need to build new institutions, and we see ourselves as part of institution building, and as part of being a Black institution that is working on racial justice. We talk about that. We need to support the old ones to partner along with the new. We need all hands on deck. We need to protect these institutions fiercely. We have to do that.
We certainly want people to see us as [an institution]. We can do grant making. We can use our power to bring people together. We’re trying to figure out how to talk about what Black abundance actually means? How can we define this and how can we move toward what that looks like and incorporate elements of repair into what that looks like? That means building out a narrative arm for ourselves because we can do that work too, and we can fund others so that a collection of people are moving. What is the narrative for Black communities that we want people to get right? And when we get that right, that’s good for everybody.
As a Black woman leader in the philanthropic space and at AMARA, what do you need? How can people support you? How can communities support you? How can communities protect the institution that you’re building?
To not be abandoned at the first moment when there’s a threat. It’s like being out on the front lines. We know everybody’s not going to do philanthropy or the work the way we’re doing it. We want to inspire people to make shifts, but realistically, it just took us six years to do something, and that might not be everybody’s jam, right? But we have decided to do that, and it provides cover for other people to do other things to make changes. That’s what it means to be allies. That’s what it means to be in coalition. That’s what it means to be in formation.
[Another thing is] creating unity within the Black community. How do we all let all the flowers bloom where we can see the garden and the beauty and the resilience that all the diversity within that garden can bring?
If we can think about what a tangible future could look like in the vision of AMARA, what does that look like for you? What does the future look like?
We’ve talked about this [as a] team over the last couple of years. It doesn’t necessarily look like generational wealth. It just looks like I literally can walk down the street, and there is no fear of my body. I can step into places freely with all of the power and all of the brilliance that I hold as a person. I want that for everybody. I want that for Black people particularly, because then you can get health, wealth, joy. To not feel the threat of a Black body in all of the different contexts and all of the ways that that’s being attacked right now, that would be a true feeling of liberation.
Is there anything that you would like to add that I didn’t ask you?
I just think that we really have this chance in philanthropy to stop managing scarcity, to see each other’s humanity, to think about power more than we think about risk and the aversion of that.
