Being Good Ancestors in Philanthropy: Lessons from HIP’s Webinar Series

By: Hilda Vega, VP of Philanthropic Practice and Inarú Meléndez Vázquez, Senior Communications Manager

In 2025, Hispanics in Philanthropy (HIP) hosted a four‑part “Good Ancestors” webinar series to explore one big question: How do we use our resources today to build a world we may never see, but that future generations deserve?

Throughout the series, movement leaders, funders, and strategists invited us to look honestly at where philanthropic wealth comes from, how it currently moves (or doesn’t), and what it would mean to practice giving as repair, solidarity, and long‑term world‑building rather than charity or crisis management.

We hope all of the series listeners walked away with lessons, insights, and questions they will continue to ponder as we close out the year. For our team, some key learnings and provocations took us from the far to near past, and then into how we want to build the future. A snippet of those ideas are shared below, and we invite you to share yours with us as you read this post.

Naming the Past: Wealth Built on Extraction

The idea for the Good Ancestors series was sparked by the writings of Roman Krznaric in his book The Good Ancestor, as well as by our own staff experiences learning about futures and foresight work. This learning arc has been deeply influenced by cosmovision and the role of ancestral wisdom across Latine communities of Indigenous and Afro heritage. In designing the series and thinking about the speakers, we sought not just a spectrum of experiences in philanthropy, but in the familial lessons that influence how we conceive of and practice generosity.

Across this spectrum, our guest speakers grounded their conversations in an uncomfortable but necessary truth: modern philanthropy exists because wealth was extracted—often violently—from Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color and from the land itself.

They reminded us that:

Concentrated fortunes are tied to histories of slavery, dispossession, exploitative labor, and colonization across the Americas.
Philanthropy has functioned as both a tax shelter and a tool to mask harm and legitimize power, even while claiming to serve the very communities harmed in the process.
Many in our sector have never personally relied on the nonprofits we fund, which can create a dangerous disconnect from the life‑or‑death role frontline and direct service organizations play for working‑class and marginalized communities.

When we line up cycles of time to see the waves of harm and the waves of collective and community generosity woven uncomfortably together, we begin to frame an analysis of our role in giving. We can either fall prey to the double-speak of Orwell’s 1984, or we can become a good ancestor, seeing ourselves inside both our lineage of harm and our lineage of repair. Only then can we honestly ask what healing requires us to do in the space of philanthropy.

Philanthropy’s Responsibility to Democracy

In our most tactical webinar, we turned toward the rising threats to democracy and the evolving dangers facing Latine and migrant communities right now. What emerged was a sobering picture of both urgency and resilience.

Latine communities, like most communities across the U.S., are trying to meet basic needs like housing, healthcare, personal safety, and the rising cost of living while also contending with racist scapegoating, attacks on due process, and criminalization of our existence. The organizations that serve our communities are attempting to do everything at once: offer direct legal counsel, medical-debt forgiveness, and school supplies, while also building civic power and trust. Some might be tempted to call this “mission drift” but it’s survival.

Yet these same organizations, especially those led by Latine leaders, are working under real and growing threats: doxxing, surveillance, intimidation. As noted by our speakers in this webinar (many of whom were sharing new research), support organizations often lack rapid-response funding and mental health support for staff and their members. When philanthropy pulls back—through sudden grant withdrawals or election-only funding cycles—it hollows out the very infrastructure we rely on in moments of crisis.

The message to philanthropy could not have been clearer in this conversation, yet it resonated throughout the series: this is not the time to hesitate. A “wait and see” approach now will be remembered as the moment Latine, people of color, low income, and migrant infrastructure (among many others) was left under-resourced while authoritarianism advanced.

Moving from Crisis Management to Long-Term Power Building

That warning sits within a deeper pattern our speakers traced across the last decade. Again and again, money surges when a crisis hits—COVID, police and other state sanctioned violence against communities, waves of anti-immigrant policies, political and racial polarization—and then recedes when headlines move on. Temporary funds get created, mutual aid groups get a spotlight, and the importance of organizing surges but only for a moment.

The consequences have been predictable:

Mutual aid networks become emergency infrastructure without being funded to last.
Organizing receives a cyclical burst of support but is starved the rest of the time.
Staff burn out. Infrastructure frays. Momentum dies just when long-term power could be built.

This is where another through-line of the conversations sharpened: if philanthropy is serious about defending democracy and protecting communities under threat, it cannot keep funding only in moments of crisis. The same groups providing relief, safety, leadership, and mobilization during emergencies are the ones building durable civic power the rest of the time. They are the ones we must resource consistently—not episodically.

Reparative Philanthropy and Sacred Reciprocity

Each conversation sought to tease out what alternative models could look like, especially keeping in mind the role of good ancestors to practice humility of time, engage in ‘cathedral thinking’, undertake intergenerational justice, practice long-term foresight, learn from the past, and re-imagining our institutions to better serve the interests of both the present and the future.

Speakers offered grounded, practice-based frameworks for a reparative approach to a next generation of giving:

Redistribute extracted wealth back to Black, Indigenous, trans, and migrant communities through trust-based, barrier-free funding.
Build sustainable power through investments in organizing, leadership development, narrative strategy, and infrastructure.
Share decision-making by moving toward participatory or community-led grantmaking.
Cultivate trust—not transactions—by centering relationships, accompaniment, and accountability over paperwork.
Invest in healing and self-determination, including cultural work, rest, mutual care networks, and the practices that help communities imagine beyond mere survival.

Underlying many of these alternatives was an Indigenous practice of sacred reciprocity: the understanding that our relationships—human and ecological—must be rooted in mutual obligation, care, and balance. It is a fundamentally different mindset than the extractive models many institutions we know were built on, and it offers a guide for what philanthropy could be.

Remembering Our Own Traditions of Collective Giving

This reframing brought us full circle to a truth many of us already carry: collective generosity is not new to our communities. It’s inherited.

Throughout the series, participants named long-standing traditions of mutual care, from Black mutual aid societies and church-based freedom funds, to susus and tandas across the African and Latin American diasporas, to Indigenous potlatch ceremonies rooted in reciprocity and community obligation. These practices have sustained families, financed movements, and built economic footholds for generations—often outside of formal institutions altogether.

Today’s giving circles, collaborative funds, and neighborhood mutual aid projects are direct descendants of these traditions. Philanthropy’s job is not to overshadow or institutionalize them, but to recognize, resource, and learn from them, even when they don’t fit neatly into program descriptions or produce a tax benefit.

World‑Building, Not Just Grant‑Making

The counterpoint to remembering is creation. In our conversation about legacy, futurist Tameka Vasquez invited us to think of ourselves as world‑builders, not just program officers, donors, or nonprofit staff.

She asked us to consider:

Inheritance is not only about money; it’s also about practices, stories, and capacities we pass on—like the capacity to imagine and organize differently.

“Apocalypse” comes from a Greek word meaning uncovering or revelation. The current unraveling of systems built on extraction and disposability reveals both deep harm and enormous human potential.

To be “radical” is to return to the root—our histories, our cultures, our values—and design new worlds from that foundation.

Imagination is not a luxury; it is a necessity for survival, especially when those invested in hierarchy and control never stop designing their futures.

Vasquez’ prompts urged us to link up our histories to create new legacies. Our everyday choices in how we move money, how we show up in institutions, and how we care for each other are the building blocks that future generations will inherit.

What Being a Good Ancestor Can Look Like in Philanthropy

Across all four conversations, a set of concrete practices emerged for funders, institutions, and individual donors who want to be good ancestors:

Fund for at least a decade, not one or two years. Think in 5–10‑year arcs, if not longer. Support organizations to survive downturns, retain staff, and plan beyond the next cycle.
Prioritize multi‑year, general operating support. Let movement groups and community organizations decide how to use funds based on what they’re actually facing. This does not diminish impact, it frees organizations to achieve the impact they envision much sooner and with greater scope.
Increase payout and move money faster. Treat 5% as the floor, not the ceiling. Align investment policies with justice values.
Back frontline, BIPOC‑, trans‑, and Latina‑led organizations as core infrastructure, not niche add‑ons.
Resource rapid response and material relief such as legal defense, safety, cash, food, and medical debt relief alongside organizing and narrative work.
Invest in people, not just projects. Fair salaries, benefits, sabbaticals, personal and digital security, and mental‑health resources keep leaders in the work.
Share power inside philanthropy. Hire and promote people from impacted communities into decision‑making roles; support trustee‑to‑trustee and CEO‑to‑CEO organizing for change.
Honor community accountability. Measure your success by whether you are strengthening ecosystems and being a helpful partner, not by how many reports you collect.

The Future Is Watching

Throughout the Good Ancestors series, one refrain echoed: we are already someone’s ancestors. Whether or not we have children, we are shaping the conditions future generations will live in—through our giving, our policies, our organizing, and our everyday choices.

Philanthropy can continue to operate as a detached, crisis‑driven sector that protects its own perpetuity. Or it can risk its comfort to help communities build the futures we deserve.

The people we heard from in this series—organizers, funders, mutual‑aid leaders, futurists—are already choosing the latter. The invitation is for the rest of us to join them, now, with the resources and courage this moment requires.