About This Episode:
Vanessa kicks off season seven with Supriya Lopez Pillai, President of the Libra Foundation. Supriya contributes to an inspiring discussion about how philanthropic leaders can meet the challenges we face today. Their conversation touches on the importance of reflection on the origins of wealth that is being deployed through philanthropic organizations, and the stories we tell ourselves about how it was generated. They discuss living and practicing the kind of social systems we want to exist in the future, remembering that our work today is one piece in a long line of people fighting for a better world.
About Supriya Lopez Pillai:
Supriya Lopez Pillai is President of the Libra Foundation and a philanthropic leader with extensive experience in social movements and twenty years in institutional philanthropy. She combines grassroots organizing experience with strategic vision to support community-rooted organizations working across racial, gender, climate, and economic justice.
In her words…
“In this moment our job is to survive, to thrive as much as we can, find our joy, and hold those stories, if we have to hold them even underground. They are going to outlast. They are going to outlast this moment.”
“We don’t know how long this will go on for, but this story can never be erased.”
“It’s not just fighting against bad pollutants or fighting against poor policies, but it’s with a vision of a world we want to build towards.”
“What does it look like to care about interdependence? Literally, we care for each other. We tether and we hold each other.”
“One of my strongest beliefs is that money, like all resources, needs to flow like water. And in this moment, in this time in history, it is dammed up.”
Transcript
Vanessa Wakeman: Hello, and welcome to the Social Change Diaries. I am your host, Vanessa Wakeman, and I am thrilled to be back with season seven of the Diaries. First, I want to thank all of our listeners and supporters. The feedback to the podcast has been incredibly kind and strong. Thank you for tuning in as I explore my own curiosities at the intersection of social change and communications.
This season’s theme is Righting and Writing History. As America gets ready to celebrate its 250th birthday, I could not think of a better topic than this. The concept of righting and writing history looks at our past, present, and future. When I think about righting history, I am speaking about correction; what do we need to fix? And writing history; we are focusing on authorship. I am going all in on this topic with my guests. I will be in conversation with leaders of some of the most influential philanthropic organizations in the country, as well delve deep into the role of foundations in protecting, preserving, and strengthening our democracy.
This is a question that I’ve been wrestling with in my head and in conversations with clients and colleagues. For this season, I get to have those conversations with our audience listening in.
For today’s conversation, I am speaking with Supriya Lopez Pillai, the president of the Libra Foundation. Supriya is a philanthropic leader with nearly three decades in social movements and twenty years in institutional philanthropy. She combines grassroots organizing experience with strategic vision to support community-rooted organizations working across racial, gender, climate, and economic justice.
I am delighted to kick off this season with you. Welcome Supriya.
Supriya Lopez Pillai: Thank you so much, and thank you so much for inviting me to this conversation.
Vanessa Wakeman: Thank you for saying yes. I have so many questions. And so I guess I want to just jump right in, and then you’ll slow me down or speed me up based on your answers. I think that philanthropy overall has a complicated historical relationship with democracy. It has generously funded its expansion, while in some ways it could be argued that it’s enabled its suppression, right? As someone who has been inside both movements and foundations, how do you hold that contradictory history, and how does it shape what you believe is Libra’s responsibility today?
Supriya Lopez Pillai: Yeah, this is a great question. Thank you, Vanessa, and way to jump into the deep end! You know, the thing about contradictions is that we have to actually name them and acknowledge them. There’s a way in which we can be purists and say a thing is right or wrong or black or white. And in fact, we have to be able to say, in this moment, this institution holds a great deal of wealth, it is trying to right the wrongs of history by deploying those resources. And many of the communities that we support, the vast majority of the communities we support, do not have access to those resources. That in and of itself is a contradiction. In my younger days, I would definitely think of myself as more of a purist. I never even thought of myself as sitting in a seat of a foundation, an institutional foundation. And that was because of this purist sense of right and wrong and black and white and all of those sorts of things. And in fact, what I’ve learned over these many years is that we have to walk this path by naming the contradiction. There is no perfect answer. We have to be aware of and name the tensions we’re holding.
So, a really good concrete example in how philanthropy has been navigating this, and we’re all in different places, is that often philanthropy is investing in things that are counter to the very things that they support through their mission. So on the one hand, an institution can be investing in private prisons or businesses that pollute. And on the other hand, they’re doing their grantmaking, moving money towards environmental causes, community safety, or criminal justice reform causes. There’s obviously a school of thought that feels like, hey, you make as much money as you can so that you can fund the good work in the world. And then there’s others, and I will count myself in this camp, that you have to align where you’re investing to move it in the same direction as what you’re funding. Your mission is across all things. There is a full spectrum across the wealth that you hold, the power that you wield, and the power that you share.
So this is something that I do think philanthropy has been shifting more around, maybe not enough, but this is a way in which we move. And even in the move, it’s not like people make the leap to making all great investments because it’s just a whole—it’s a whole—industries have to move alongside. You’re not just your philanthropic institution. You have wherever it is that you’re holding your resources, your endowments, your financial advisors, your legal counsel. So that shift means that as we’re moving towards greater alignment, we will always be holding this contradiction. We will always have spaces where we are continuing to divest from the very things that caused the harm in the first place. Does that make sense?
Vanessa Wakeman: It does, it does. And so when you talk about holding the contradiction and the ecosystem and resources that are required to be in agreement around the shift or the change, as you just mentioned, that takes time. Are there places within those decision-making processes, like as the contradiction becomes more visible internally, or you sort of see the tensions sort of, you know, becoming increasing, do you see any value in communicating that to the sector? Like, I’m thinking about some of the frustrations, curiosities, or worries that nonprofits sometimes have, which are focused on like, are we still in agreement on these things? And so what would you say to that? Is there a communications entry point in this?
Supriya Lopez Pillai: Absolutely. I will say this. One thing that’s really important to me is that we hold everybody’s dignity intact. So, why do I say that? Well, first is when we name our contradictions, we are making them visible. People tell themselves stories. I tell myself stories. You tell yourself, we all have a story. We have a story that we hold in who we are, how we came to be.
Vanessa Wakeman: Mhm.
Supriya Lopez Pillai: In philanthropy, a lot of times, people have stories about how the wealth came to be. And it is a story that a family, if you work in a family foundation, interrupts the narrative around looking back some generations and saying, well, really, how did we come to settle in this country? And really, if we are a white-owning class family, what is our relationship to race in this country?
These are very uncomfortable conversations that we have internally. And I really work hard to ensure everyone’s dignity is intact as we’re having those conversations. The history of philanthropy in and of itself in this country, a charity model, we did good works, people did things to seem to have a brand or a name or recognition for their family or their business. What I want to say here is that the idea of having social justice philanthropy in this moment is a recognition that the idea of charity to philanthropy working alongside movements has been part of that long shift and change, and it takes time.
And what happens when we make visible these contradictions and say, “hey, look, you’re doing something charitable”. And actually, that charity is whitewashing money so that it’s overlooking some of the causes of how that money was earned. If we do a kind of call out culture around that, it doesn’t allow for people to actually make the leap with you. You’re like, how do you make it clear? What is the right moment to kind of name these contradictions externally? That’s something that I feel one needs to be very strategic about, and one needs to be very careful about guarding one’s own dignity and the dignity of others in that process. And I say that because I’ve actually witnessed in my time in philanthropy, walking with people who are willing and wanting to look at their history and make those changes. Maybe not at first, maybe not at first. Maybe at first you have a narrative around, you know, here are the ways that we’ve been helping move and shift this democracy. And it’s always often external. It’s like, this is the good works we’ve been doing in the world. And then when you turn that story inwards, well, what’s your story? What’s your relationship to this wealth? What’s your relationship to democracy? What’s your relationship to change? We can start to go deeper, and people can start to unearth some truths, some hard truths, some difficult truths, some unsavory truths. And as we sit with those, well, what do we want to do?
To move in the same direction towards change, move in the same direction towards, if this is the direction we’re moving towards, sharing power for the sake of the whole. And so I think that there is a way in which we have a call out culture that I am careful about, myself. My younger self loved to call out.
Vanessa Wakeman: Hahaha!
Supriya Lopez Pillai: You have to say, I have a job to do to walk and hold hands with people who I believe can make the leap towards the world we’re seeking. And that’s my job in this machine of philanthropy, in this moment. And I’ve actually seen it work. I’ve actually seen people say, “hey, look, my story, my history, my relationship to this money is not this clean, clear narrative”. And it allows for us all to be free, when we can move in that way.
Vanessa Wakeman: Thank you. You are a perfect guest. It speaks directly to the theme of this season’s podcast, which is writing and righting history. So, when we talk about “writing”, we’re talking about the authorship and then “righting” as in correcting what’s been distorted. And you just spoke about the righting with the capital R. Righting and allowing people to take that corrective action. For you, to me, righting history requires courage and a willingness to name what was wrong and who was harmed and what is owed. And you’re saying you’re seeing people, you know, attempting to reconcile with those narratives and those stories. And then the other writing with a W requires vision and a willingness to imagine and resource a future that doesn’t yet exist.
Based on where you sit now, and even from your younger self who was calling things out, which of those feels more urgent for you right now, and which feels more difficult?
Supriya Lopez Pillai: My goodness. That’s a good one. And I’m going to throw a wrench in this one, Vanessa. I don’t know that it needs to be a duality, right? I think that we can do both. By the way, I’m actually writing a novel. It’s historical fiction. It’s based on my family and a big historical event that happened. But at the crux of it is individual stories, at the crux of it are people and their lives. You could live through, and one could write a book about, the Civil Rights Movement, right? But what really grabs us is the story of your people in that, and who were they, and what was the role of women, and where was my mother in that story? So I say all that to say that I am compelled by both. I am deeply compelled by both. I am compelled by and believe that it is absolutely necessary in this moment that we hold a long arc vision. And by long arc vision, and I have been very much schooled by indigenous thought that says, let’s look back seven generations. As bearers of this long arc, we have a responsibility to hold the story of our ancestors, blood, and otherwise, the benevolent ancestors and the not-so-benevolent ancestors; we need to be able to hold that story to know where we came from. And we need to be able to articulate that story today. We need to be able to look back and feel in the ways that maybe don’t always come in the head space, but that we feel with our hearts, experience it through the food that comes through the generations that sits on our plate today, you know.
Really be able to hold that seven generations back, and be able to understand and reckon with the pain points, the challenges, the contradictions that brought us to this point. We have to hold that story to be able to live in this present. And I very, very, very, very much believe that we must be practicing today the world we seek and we must be ready for the openings when they emerge, even in these really heinous times that we find ourselves in. There are openings, there are moments in which governance will fail. And if we’ve been practicing good governance with each other, and we’ve kept an eye on that practice towards the seven generations to come, towards the future descendants, and our responsibility to them, we walk into that opening with the practices that can now come into actuality. So what does that mean? I believe in the practice of governance, we practice in our communities, we fund and resource communities that believe in interdependence, that believe in love as deep connective tissue. We practice that so that when the opening comes, and the government collapses, our government with a capital G in this day and age collapses, we step in, and we see this beautiful thing sometimes like mutual aid.
What we’ve seen in places where government has collapsed, whether it was from COVID or whether in this current moment, we see mutual aid efforts coming forward where communities are stepping up for each other. That’s the world I want my kids to be living in. And how do we expand that? How do we make that be a possibility so that those seeds are planted well, and they can bloom well into the future? So I think we hold both of those things and they’re deeply, deeply connected. I can’t imagine a future world without holding and honoring the ancestors at my back. Those things just go together to me.
Vanessa Wakeman: So in these few moments that we’ve been together, I feel like you’ve already given us a sketch of what you see in your vision and your responsibility in philanthropy and in the world, the story that you want to be written, right? It requires looking back and including the ancestors and honoring those contributions, yet also the pain and the harm done, and then thinking, what could we create for the future? From a structural or an organizational level, where does that fit into foundations and their endowments? I know you’ve called for foundations to transform how their endowments are invested. That shift that you’re calling for, what does that do? How does that help us to create what you sort of see as the path forward based on what you just shared?
Supriya Lopez Pillai: Yeah, well, let’s take a look back. Let’s say, okay, where did our resources come from? What’s the history? What’s the connection? And often when you look back, even if it’s like, hey, these were resources that were earned in a generation, or these were resources that were made from someone’s hard luck coming into this country and making a business, and that business succeeds, often when you really examine the story, it’s a deeper story. It’s a deeper story where you have to be able to work with people. Like, I don’t just choose to go into any foundations. I think part of my wisdom, hopefully at this moment, is that I am effective with people that I can work with, run with, people I know that I can move with. And so this isn’t gonna be the cup of tea for every single philanthropic institution, what I’m sharing here. But I have found some unique individuals who I think at the end of the day want more people like them. Meaning I wanna look back at where this money came from. I wanna look back and understand how it amassed its wealth. And there’s a story of, you know, grit and often like hard won victories, but there’s always also the story of whose backs were those resources made on? And when we can examine in that way and get really truthful and honest about that, well, what can I do today to honor, to reconcile, to be in relationship with the fact that money is not stagnant. In fact, one of my strongest beliefs is that money, like all resources, needs to flow like water. And in this moment, in this time in history, it is dammed up, right? It is for the few. I, as a woman of color in the position that I am in in philanthropy, believe my job is to go knock on some of those doors and say, “Can you open it up and tell me how the machinations work in here?” Because I don’t actually understand all this investment speak. Tell me how this works. And as we kind of join forces from people who have historically held this wealth and people who have had access to certain halls of power to amass wealth and build wealth, as we move from a charity model to a model which sees itself alongside communities, alongside movements, and we examine the story, we then say, okay, what different things can we do with this resource?
Well, we’ve been moving grants. This is also where I’ll say we can look to the future, and I’ll come back to that in a moment. What are the ways in which my family or my business benefited from being in this country, and how can I move some money now that is both in alignment with righting that wrong, but also in alignment with the current communities? I know, Vanessa, at the heart of it, I think about reparations. I think that there is a way in which these resources can move to create repair for past harms that were done on a greater scale. What does it look like to reinvest in land, land that has been taken from communities, land that has been stripped, land that has been developed on the backs of folks that were stolen from the places that they came from to build it in this country? And how can we move resources with that knowledge? So, I believe that there’s a strong role that philanthropy can play in looking back and repairing and offering something today, not just as a one-time act, but as a continuous offering to recognize that for 250 years, there are many communities of color from whom this land has been stolen or taken or not even invested in to have a leg up. So that’s one way. And then the other thing I think about is as we look forward, it’s this thing about, I really believe we are funding and investing in communities that are living the future world that we seek. And that same thing that I shared with you before, I turn to so many organizers. They don’t just organize against the problems that are happening today. They have a sharp, clear vision of the world we seek. And sometimes it sounds so Pollyanna-ish. It sounds so like, really? You care about interdependence? What does that look like? Literally, we care for each other. We tether and hold each other.
We don’t have a paternalistic government that makes decisions completely on our behalf, but we are sharing in a true democracy and making those choices together. And those are the kinds of communities that we invest in with our grant dollars. What will it look like to invest with other resources to create entrepreneurial opportunities, revolving loan funds, and worker cooperatives that demonstrate that vision that many of the communities and organizers we support have. Let’s make it real. And those are the kinds of investments we can move today that build towards that future world. It’s not just fighting against bad pollutants or fighting against poor policies, but it’s with a vision of a beautiful world we wanna build towards. Does that make sense, Vanessa?
Vanessa Wakeman: That makes a lot of sense. I have two comments before I ask my next question. The first is a request that when you are knocking on doors and having the conversations about let’s open up the dams and let the money flow, please make sure that some of it is allocated to communications and to The Wakeman Agency specifically, because I find that there are so many times that we’re not effectively communicating about things that can help to sort of draw people in through like culture and identity and belonging. So, I would love for that conversation to also prioritize how we can communicate and talk about things, and how do we help audiences? How do we support our grantee partners? And then the second part, when you talked about not just sort of fighting against, but building for, I couldn’t help but think of ancestral traditions. Ancestrally, we have always focused on community and how we figure out what’s best for some of us versus the individual. And so the return to that is really returning to like who we are naturally and how we can live in peace and you know, a world of possibility which feels amazing and incredible and very different from the sort of systemic sort of training that we’ve had, and the individuality and sort of, you know, just looking out for ourselves phenomenon. There’s been some erasure of culture and all of these things. And so I love this idea of the grantee partners that you all are working with are thinking about community power building as a way for sustainability and also longevity, which I think is beautiful. And so my question is, based on that, we know, I think we would agree, as well as our listeners, that we are in a period of deliberate historical revisionism.
Supriya Lopez Pillai: Yes.
Vanessa Wakeman: We see the erasure of stories, the suppression of voices, the rewriting of what happened, the banning of history in books. The organizations that leave refunds are on the front lines of resisting that erasure. Like you just said that, like, hey, they are clear on what the work needs to look like. What does it cost them? And what does it cost philanthropy when foundations go quiet during this period? Nonprofits and foundations have really grappled over the last 12 to 18 months with at what level should they continue to be vocal about the work? Should they go quiet to sort of minimize any risk, threats, and vulnerabilities? What are your thoughts about that? You know, even just speaking about Libra and what you all have done, like what is the cost to organizations when for six months or a year, there’s nothing happening, but we know that disinformation is constantly filling in all of the holes where those voices are no longer there. How do we recover? What are your thoughts?
Supriya Lopez Pillai: Right, oh my goodness, this is really so timely. So timely. You know, this to me, we have to remember, I’m gonna go a little off script here and ask you if you saw or listened to this interview that Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates had.
Vanessa Wakeman: Of course I did.
Supriya Lopez Pillai: It was such a good example of, you know, Coates is saying, I am in a long arc tradition, and Klein is saying, I’ve worked so hard in this lifetime, and I see it all being erased, and Coates says, my takeaway from that conversation was like, no, I come from a long tradition of people who, you know, it’s cumulative, it’s cumulative. My people fought for me to be here, and they didn’t even see the light of freedom in their lifetimes, but they fought for me to be here. And it’s this idea of this long arc. We’re not just in a moment of revisionism. I think in my lifetime, I’m so lucky that I got to live through a period of, I get to write, I get to write the story, and actually the vast majority of the history of this country has been about trying to maintain a mononarrative about what its history is. It’s more than erasure. It costs a great deal when foundations go quiet. We’re investing now in what will outlast philanthropy. That’s what I’m interested in. I’m interested in how we’re building community wealth, how we’re supporting self-determination, and how we’re lessening reliance on philanthropy.
At the end of the day, the communities have been fighting for freedom and self-determination long before philanthropy existed. I don’t doubt whether or not philanthropy will weather the storm in quite the ways that it needs to in this moment. I don’t doubt that the fights that we need and that vision for that future will endure because it did before I got here, generations before I got here.
And the question that you are asking about, some people feel as though they need to go quiet right now. We have to be strategic. When we communicate, and you know this as a communicator, there’s different ways of communicating. There’s the outward communication, the external communication, and then there’s the internal communication, the strategy. Sometimes we have to go underground. Sometimes we don’t want the target on our back. Sometimes the target is inevitable, and I’m going to speak because the target is inevitable. So I think that there’s a variety of strategies at play, but ultimately in the meta of your question, in the bigger history and the bigger purpose behind your question, this erasure right now, I don’t know how you feel, Vanessa, but people I organized with saw this moment coming so clearly. I remember when I was with, it was actually this academic, Manuel Pastor, it was 2008, it was around the Obama moment and we were so excited to be organizing young people who were turning out, not only were young people turning out in record amounts to vote for Obama, but people turning out who couldn’t vote at highest levels to organize other people to vote. It was a beautiful moment, right? And we were feeling it as someone who supported youth organizing, and it was all about organized young people of color. I was so excited about this future world we were building and how this moment was adding up to that future world. And Manuel Pastor says “demographics isn’t destiny”. By the year 2030, the majority of young people in this country will be people of color. Yes, by 2050, we will be a majority of people of color country, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to get the democracy that we want.
Remember that white supremacy is a powerful thing, and it is going to hold on. This is the vice grip to the bitter end, which might be my lifetime. It might be your lifetime. You know, we don’t know how long this goes on for, but the story can never be erased. The desire to go backwards. It doesn’t stop that to this day, to this moment, my child is flabbergasted that this administration wants to say transgendered people don’t exist because the boat has already left the station for my young child. Transgendered people are part of her life and her worldview. That does not change. So while the powers that be want to suppress and want to return to, I don’t know, 1776, I don’t know. The train has left the station, the boat has left the dock. We are already on the path, and this is a moment, and we have to, in this moment, our job is to survive, to thrive as much as we can, find our joy, and hold those stories if we have to hold them underground. They are going to outlast. They are going to outlast this moment.
That’s what I believe firmly in my heart.
Vanessa Wakeman: Thank you. I would agree with that. That’s a beautiful sort of rallying cry and also observation and experience to share. So thank you. I don’t want this interview to end. I know it must. I’m going to ask one final question, and it’s a little personal, but it also lends to your work. You are a writer. And in doing my research in preparation for our conversation, I read where you said you described writing as essential to feeling fully alive. And I so get that. I enjoy writing a lot as well. What is the sentence that you want to be able to say you helped write through your work at Libra?
Supriya Lopez Pillai: That we did everything we could in this moment. That we built our deepest awareness of the power at our disposal, and we used it to amplify movement. That we used it to amplify those who are building the world we seek. That we ensure we did everything we could to work toward the long arc view of a world in which our children and their children are thriving. All children. We didn’t take just the crumbs. We didn’t just take the grant dollars; we used every tool to build power and to share power in this moment. I always look back to look forward.
Vanessa Wakeman: Beautiful. Supriya, thank you so very much for your time, for your insights, for your foresight, your encouragement, for the work that you’re doing at Libra, and all of the experiences that you bring to that. I know that our listeners will be inspired by this conversation. And so, just thank you again for your time.
Supriya Lopez Pillai: Thank you so much. It was such a pleasure to talk to you. And I can’t wait to see what you’re writing, Vanessa.
Vanessa Wakeman: Well, folks, this concludes the first episode of seven 7. I hope that everyone listening enjoyed this conversation as much as I did. Supriya shared a lot, and there is so much to digest and think about, but the one thing she said that I scribbled down as we chatted was in response to what she wants to be able to say that she helped write through her work with Libra. That we did everything we could in this moment. I think that is exactly right. I think this reflects both a personal and organizational stance for how we need to show up and show out. This is exactly how we right and write history. We do everything we can in this moment. Communications is so central to this. We have to continue to tell the stories, share the facts, and document our experiences so that when future generations look back, they’ll say, “they did everything they could in that moment.”
Make sure to follow the show on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen so you never miss an episode. Be sure to tune in next week for my conversation with Kevin Walker, CEO of the Northwest Area Foundation. See you then!