Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance

"I love this book. It’s beautifully written. He breaks the fourth wall by talking directly to the reader and shares his personal experiences of working in philanthropy, even when those experiences are uncomfortable to write and read about. Some of it is autobiographical, about his experience of being a foundation leader and what it feels like to be in charge of money when you don’t have money yourself. As someone who also comes from a non-wealthy background, but finds myself in the world of extreme wealth, there is such truth in what and how he writes. He’s also a clever phrase maker. For example, he talks about ‘money as medicine’—the idea that if money has come from a problematic source, such as exploitative and extractive practices— then you can, and should, use that wealth to heal the problems that it’s originally associated with. I like books that have not just analysis, but also solutions. A lot of the critics’ books don’t. Rob Reich would say: ‘Here are the problems. It’s not my job to come up with solutions, I’m a political philosopher .’ But philanthropy is not an abstract concept, it is real, it’s something that people do, that affects people so much, that’s literally saving lives—we can’t just talk about it as an abstract concept. As scholars, I think we have a duty to follow up our analysis with solutions. If we set out the problem then we need to offer some ideas on what can be done about it. And I think that Edgar Villanueva really does that in this book. It’s beautiful in both its analysis and its solutions. Yes, it is and that’s why I find it challenging, but enjoyably challenging. He’s talking about his specific experience in specific foundations, which again, can’t be generalised to all foundations. I personally think it is possible for money to come from non-extractive, non-exploitative sources. If you think of JK Rowling making money writing Harry Potter , or Anita Roddick with The Body Shop: what is it about ethically sourced peppermint foot balm that would cause us to worry about the source of that money? The idea that all wealth must necessarily come from exploitation—which is where this book pushes you to think—I don’t personally think is true. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t think very, very carefully about those cases where there is a link. If money can be clearly traced to, say, slave trading, then the distribution of money ought to go to those communities that were affected. That seems to me a very reasonable and clear point. More recently, if the money has come from, say, the company that makes Oxycontin, it makes sense that there are branches of the Sackler family who give their money to drug addiction centres to help families deal with the opioid crisis. It’s trying to find ways to connect. It doesn’t mean that tainted money can’t be used for good, but it should perhaps, first and foremost, undo the harm it is connected to. That’s the ‘money as medicine’ idea. Now the problem is that, often, the harm is much more amorphous than that. There are very few historic family fortunes in England, and probably the same in other countries, where you couldn’t find some part of the family that engaged in morally dubious activity. If that leads to the suggestion that such families can never support anything else today, that’s where I’d push back. There are still modern needs, and who would be funding COVID vaccine development or COVID relief at a food bank, if you only ever were repairing historic harms? Communities change and there are new needs that develop. It’s still worth doing other things. “People want to help each other, it’s a human instinct to act morally” But I love the idea that the trustees of the money—who could be many generations on, or might not even be descendants: sometimes these foundations become professionalised and you’ve got an entire staff—should trace a direct connection if they can. A really good development that’s happening now is foundations commissioning histories of their founder-donor, trying to understand where the money came from and having honest conversations about that. And I think Edgar Villanueva can take a lot of credit for that change. These histories were being commissioned anyway, but as a result of the energy he’s put in, foundations are taking his ideas seriously and no longer just looking for hagiographic biographies. What I also like about Edgar Villanueva is he doesn’t just write about the problems as he sees it, he’s set up an initiative, called Liberated Capital , which is an attempt to do giving in the way he advocates. Often people are all analysis and no solutions but, as I said, philanthropy is something you live. If you’re saying that structurally everything is wrong, and philanthropy is part of that, what are you doing about it? He’s somebody who clearly is living what he’s writing."