6.12 | Four Models of Matriarchal Wealth Redistribution

And I wanted to talk today about decolonizing philanthropy, because up until recently, I used to drool at the thought of becoming a professional philanthropist.

I had this image of donating my time full time, and wads of money, my energy, funding women's businesses and ecological projects all over the world, and that image to me felt like the peak experience, right? Like, doing that would let me know that I had arrived.

And then when I started s- studying matriarchal economics around six month ago, and specifically wealth distribution models, I had to rethink some things, because philanthropy is the dominant model of redistribution inside the extractive economy we're all swimming in, and it's structurally designed to leave the power differential intact.

And so before I go into anything, I just wanna say philanthropy isn't nothing.

It has its place.

It funds real work.

It sustains organizations that wouldn't otherwise be able to exist.

It moves resources that would otherwise stay concentrated.

The problem with philanthropy is that the control still lives with the philanthropist, so the philanthropist decides where the money goes, when it goes, under what conditions it goes, and towards what outcomes.

And the community or the organization on the receiving end, they don't have any control over those decisions, and they are structurally dependent on the philanthropist's goodwill, their interest in the cause, and their, yeah, their continued belief that the cause is worthy, and that's pretty much the opposite of sovereignty.

And then on top of that, the philanthropist's wealth and the system that produced it isn't really questioned, and the giving just redirects a small percentage of what the extractive system produced back towards mitigating some of the damage the system caused.

And think of this as, like, let's say your boat is drowning, and then somebody gives you, like, a bucket and you are able to scoop out enough water to relieve the drowning, and then you're like, "Woof, I'm...

We're not drowning anymore.

We're still, you know, we're still swimming." But the redirection, right, the, the giving of the money provides just enough relief to release the pressure that might otherwise force you to build something that is actually sustainable, right? So, you know, to ch- have...

make structural changes.

So if you were actually drowning, you would be like, "This isn't working.

We need to do s- we need to get out of this boat and do something different," right? It would actually force you to change your situation.

And so the giver class does not fund its own dismantling, right? So in today's episode, I wanna give language, I wanna provide language for four things that get collapsed into one, which is philanthropy, and I wanna show you what it looks like to practice them within, I'm gonna say a matriarchal, but also, like, you know, s- just a matri- when I say matriarchal, I mean, like, class and racially conscious framework.

Um, and the intention here is to explore power dynamics, because, you know, ma- matriarchy is really about, um, you know, we talked about, I've talked about, you know, moving from a triangle to a circle, and that's all about power.

[laughs] That is really where, you know, where the power exists, and so we can't w- we can't not talk about class and race as part of that.

So there are four general categories of distribution, and we just talked about one of them, philanthropy.