We Do Not Have to Move the Mountain Alone
Lessons from Roots of Solidaridad: A Racial Healing Gathering for California Funders & Allies
Last July, California-based funders, movement partners, and community leaders came together in Los Angeles for Roots of Solidaridad: A Racial Healing Gathering for California Funders & Allies. A gathering HIP hosted in partnership with the National Compadres Network (NCN), structured around a premise philanthropy too often forgets: relationships come before the work.
Across borders, Latine communities are facing deepening political division, community trauma, attacks on civil society, and growing economic pressure. This gathering was intentionally designed to ask a fundamental question: What would it take to move from transactional relationships to transformational solidarity?
The answer began with knowing one another.
A Framework Rooted in Culture
In planning, HIP and NCN created the agenda with ‘La Cultura Cura’, a culturally rooted framework developed by the National Compadres Network’s community healing work and grounded in the Indigenous teachings and traditional culture that many of share.
The framework moves through four interconnected stages:
Conocimiento
Before we can work together, we have to acknowledge one another. This means making space for who we are, where we come from, what has shaped us, and how we show up in community.
Entendimiento
Solidarity requires understanding our shared values, histories, and purpose. It asks us to understand not only what we are working toward, but why, and what it will take to remain aligned when challenges arise.
Integración
We bring our knowledge, strengths, struggles, and cultural wisdom together while reckoning with the histories of colonization, oppression, and generational trauma that shape our communities and uncover a way forward, together.
Movimiento
Healing must ultimately move us toward action. This means identifying what we are willing to commit to, what support is needed, and how we sustain collective work over time.
Together, these phases offered a different way of thinking about building relationships and strengthening community: healing is not separate from strategy. Relationships are not separate from action. Culture is not separate from racial justice.
Solidarity has to be practiced, not declared
Throughout the gathering, we called on the need to shift from passive allyship to transformational solidarity. That shift begins with conocimiento: taking the time to genuinely know one another before asking what we can accomplish together. It deepens through entendimiento, developing a shared understanding of our histories, values, and conditions shaping our communities.The exercises and conversations highlighted the recognition that our communities' survival is interconnected, and that solidarity asks something active and sustained of us.
Invited speakers shared what that looks like in practice: cross-cultural collaboration, shifting power, rebuilding trust, changing narratives. Participants named how scarcity can divide communities that share the same struggles, pointing to tensions between Black and Latine communities, as one example, rooted less in race and more in competition over limited resources and philanthropic attention.
Breakthroughs, participants agreed, don’t come from a perfect framework. They come from honest conversation, personal storytelling, vulnerability, and relationships built over time. As one reflection captured, the more we understand our own histories and cultures, the more capable we become of recognizing ourselves in others. Knowing ourselves and knowing one another creates the conditions for deeper understanding and ultimately for solidarity.
Communities are not problems to be solved
As the gathering moved from entendimiento into integración, participants began to ask what becomes possible when we take community knowledge seriously. A powerful observation of the current state of the philanthropic sector came out of the integración conversations: institutions too often see communities through a deficit lens, while communities already know their own strengths.
The group affirmed that community voice is data and cultural knowledge needed to be treated as expertise. They shared how developing mutual aid became a powerful infrastructure. And how healing happens through deliberate acts of storytelling, traditions, and connection, not only through formal institutions.
California's multilingual children were used as an example. Rather than treating multilingualism as a deficit, it's an asset, one of many assets communities already hold. That reframe, from what does this community lack to what does it already have, changes more than funding priorities. It changes who gets to define the problem, and the solution.
What does this mean for philanthropy?
With a deeper understanding came a harder question: What would it mean to integrate what communities were telling us into the way philanthropy actually operates?
Who participated in our gathering was intentional. We are grateful for their courage to be honest and direct about their priorities and needs. Among the calls to action for philanthropy, they named: general operating support, fewer burdensome reporting requirements, and funding that moves at the pace of community work rather than institutional timelines. The 5% payout requirement came up as a floor, not a ceiling — especially in moments of crisis, with the pandemic offered as proof that foundations can move more resources when it matters.
It’s a call to rethink philanthropy’s role.
For HIP, that means growing beyond the role of intermediary or interpreter between funders and communities — toward co-creating with community partners, advocating clearly for what communities need, and using our position to push back on philanthropic practices that aren't serving movements.
From self-care to soul care
It also means being willing to name what partners are experiencing: the need for flexible resources, the exhaustion facing movement leaders, and the urgency of defending the nonprofit and civil rights sectors. Integration also meant reckoning with what it takes to sustain the people doing this work.
Healing and sustainability emerged throughout the gathering as essential, not optional. Participants spoke candidly about burnout, particularly among younger leaders carrying enormous responsibility amid increasingly difficult political conditions.
The conversation challenged the conventional framing of self-care as an individual responsibility. Soul care asks something deeper: What does it mean to sustain the whole person—physically, emotionally, mentally, culturally, and spiritually—while doing this work?
Healing cannot be an add-on, it has to be part of the infrastructure that makes long-term movements possible. This also means investing in the next generation of leaders and creating opportunities for intergenerational exchange. It shouldn’t be rare to have spaces where mentorship, culture, and movement work come together.
From Gathering to Movement
The gathering was intentionally designed as a journey: conocimiento, knowing who we are and who is in the room; entendimiento, deepening our understanding of one another and our shared purpose; integración, bringing that knowledge, culture, strengths, and struggles together; and finally, movimiento, turning relationship and understanding into commitment and action.
The final stage, Movimiento, asked participants to turn reflection into commitment: What do we need to do right now? What do we need to stop doing? What can we commit to? How do we collaborate?
The conversation pointed toward several opportunities for continued action, including stronger coordination among California funders, deeper cross-racial collaboration, more direct engagement between funders and movement partners, and continued spaces for reflection and relationship-building. Because movement was never meant to begin with a strategy. It began with a relationship.
The gathering closed in a circle of gratitude — a reminder that the work of solidarity can feel enormous, but we don't have to move the mountain alone.
Roots of Solidaridad was meant to remind those convened that lasting change is built through relationships, through knowing one another, understanding one another, integrating our histories and strengths, and committing to move together.