●
Insights
This is some text inside of a div block.
Philanthropy Should Help Us Thrive, Not Just Survive
7 takeaways from a compelling conversation between Mia Birdsong and Jessyca Dudley
7 takeaways from a compelling conversation between Mia Birdsong and Jessyca Dudley
At Bold Ventures' 5-year anniversary celebration this June, our founder and CEO Jessyca Dudley sat down for a public conversation with Mia Birdsong--futurist, author of How We Show Up, and founder of Next River, an institute for practicing the future.
What followed was not your typical, light-and-polite fireside chat. It was an exchange between two women who pose hard questions and pursue truth with clarity and purpose, both with each otherand in their work with others. At the center of the conversation were reflections about the values philanthropy claims to hold, the ones it actually operates on, and the distance between the two.
You can watch their full conversation here or start with seven big ideas from their exchange that we've complied below.
Mia opened the conversation by posing a challenge: can the people in the philanthropy sector actually picture--not just believe in, but actively picture and feel--the just, liberated world they say they're working toward? Her answer was blunt: "Philanthropy isn't funding the creation of that world; it's funding the survival of this one."
The distinction matters. A strategic plan, a three-year grant cycle, a portfolio built around what's urgent right now: these add up to survival work that doesn't necessarily build toward the world philanthropy should be creating. As Mia put it, building a truly generational vision "is not just a nice-to-have--it's a strategic imperative." We didn't arrive at today's disparities through a single bad decade. We got here over generations. The vision for changing course has to match that timescale.
Jessyca scrutinized the business of philanthropy from a similar perspective. Big philanthropy, she noted, tends to treat itself as separate from the economic system that produced it. But the truth is tougher:
"To amass more than you need... your profit is driven by paying people less than the value they create for the company. Or you've externalized your cost by extracting from the environment. That's how you create a profit."
The severing of such profit-making from philanthropic giving isn't incidental. It's an enabling condition. It lets people doing philanthropy avoid reckoning with their ultimate accountability to the people and communities who generated the wealth in the first place.
The conversation took an unplanned turn into shame--a subject that shows up often in this work, even if it isn't always named and addressed. Jessyca pointed out that shame shows up on both ends: in donors avoiding the origins of their wealth "at the pace other people are telling them they need to."
Mia offered a reframe from her own therapy: shame and fear live in the same old, survival-oriented part of the human nervous system. Shame is basically the fear of being cast out, tied to the fact that, for most of human history, banishment meant death. It's real, and it's motivating. At the same time: "It's not long-lasting, and it's not very effective. People will eventually turn away from it, because it's so uncomfortable."
Since shame isn't a sustainable engine for change, something else has to be.
Mia noted that philanthropy overwhelmingly funds policy, services, and--if we're lucky--organizing. But culture is where norms actually live and change: "in your neighborhood, your workplace, your community, the places your frequent."
Using homelessness as an example, she made the point plainly. We already know how to house people. We simply haven't built a culture willing to prioritize housing people over protecting private property.
"If you're not thinking about culture," she noted, "you're planting something in toxic soil. It won't grow."
Jessyca connected the sector's comfort with slow, incremental change to its own history. Philanthropy became coded as women's work, she explained, because it was seen as low-risk. It provided a public role for women who were kept out of boardrooms and investment decisions. That pattern hasn't fully disappeared: "We've worked with families where the sons are on track to run the business and the daughters are on track to run the foundation. It's wild. Still happens."
Understanding that history helps explain why philanthropy so often default to caution--and why the real risk-taking repair may lie beyond the sector's familiar, inherited instincts.
Mia made the case for taxes as a purer, more collective form of what philanthropy claims to be: "If we thought of taxes as care, how powerful would that be? What would we be doing, what would we be voting for, if be believed taxed are how I love other people?"
Jessyca picked up on a crucial resonance: care for others, after all, is philanthropy's original definition. Long before it became institutionalized and tied to individual donor discretion, philanthropy was about charity, caritas, love.
The difference, as Mia put it, is who gets to decide: "Instead of some rich guy's wife deciding who gets what, it's what we, the public, decide together."
The conversation kept circling back to a key word: accountability. Not as a punishment or a box to check. As a question every person doing this work should ask repeatedly: Who am I accountable to, and how should that change what I say and do?
Mia closed the evening by tying that question directly back to love:
"I think of accountability, like taxes, as a form of love...it's extending the potential for a kind of love to the people you're being accountable to."
What we stand to gain by taking that view, Jessyca added, is simple: joy. Not the sacrifice we're taught giving requires, but the genuine fulfillment of mutuality, the deep and well-deserved joy inherent in creating a better future together.
A thought worth sitting with long after our night of celebration.
For the team at Bold Ventures, this conversation was an ideal way to mark five years of working to advance a better future through reparative philanthropy. We are deeply grateful to Mia Birdsong for thinking boldly, encouraging us, and pushing everyone in the room to ask big questions about our shared future.
Onward. Together.
