Sunshine or Pain What is the forecast for Black Woman in Philanthropy

“Sunshine or Pain: What is the Forecast for Black Women’s Leadership in Philanthropy?,” a short talk with Dr. Yanique Redwood at GEO's 2024 Natioanl Conference on May 21, 2024.
A groundswell of studies and reports have outlined the perils that Black women face when we lead at work, including the health, mental health, and economic harms following discriminatory firings, forced resignations, and daily experiences of racially dismissive, demeaning, insensitive, and hostile racial environments. Many of us arrive in philanthropy with plans to leverage resources and power to advance equity and justice for our communities-a sort of sunshine, if you will. But we are met with the pain of racial aggression, resistance to our ambitions, a rejection of the radical, and a historically white sector that is willing to accept what Audre Lorde calls “the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, and the merely safe.” Black women are being forced out, yes, but we are also saying, “no mas” and leaving by choice. If philanthropy loses Black women, it will lose its soul. Join me as I use my own journey chronicled in my book White Women Cry and Call Me Angry: A Black Woman’s Memoir on Racism in Philanthropy to forecast scenarios for Black women’s leadership in philanthropy. Will it be sunshine? Or will it be pain?
Dr. Yanique Redwood (she/her)
Principal, Collective Work
Dr. Yanique Redwood is the author of White Women Cry and Call Me Angry: A Black Woman’s Memoir on Racism in Philanthropy. She is an expert on racial equity and racial justice and has spent her career writing and speaking on these topics for nonprofit and philanthropic audiences. Dr. Redwood spent a decade as president and CEO of if, A Foundation for Radical Possibility, and holds degrees from Georgia Institute of Technology (BS) and University of Michigan School of Public Health (PhD, MPH). Her public health training is rooted in community-based participatory research approaches and an analysis of structural racism and compounding oppressions.