05: We kept moving through challenging work and difficult relationships.Necessary work gets messy. We’re here for it.
Confronting our own history wasn’t the first “messy work” Compton Foundation had embraced. If you’ve read the other bits of this story, you know that controversy over the decision to spend everything created a fracture in the foundation and ultimately in the founding family. This tangled, painful process was worth every moment because it cleared the way for equity among the remaining trustees.
By extension, reconfiguring the board made possible the frank self-examination that led us to the final work we needed to do: invest and participate in racial reparations.
In addition to retaining June Wilson as executive director, we expanded the Compton Foundation team to include three Fellows: Audrey Jacobs, C’Ardiss “CC” Gardner Gleser and Caitlin Brune. Acknowledging that federal reparations policy is a distant prospect, we looked for experimental models showing how individuals, institutions and communities can heal and repair harm now. With the Fellows’ help, we focused on three new initiatives that centered relationship-based reparations or what we call “relational repair.”
First, Compton Foundation sought out movement-building and cultural institutions who were brokering a thoughtful return of material wealth, stolen land and cultural assets to Black and Indigenous people. We made reparative action grants to a small set of these organizations and involved some of their leaders as advisors helping guide us toward what to do next.
Reparative Action Grants
Acts of Reparation follows two friends — one Black and one White — as they explore the legacies of their families in the Southern U.S.
Beloved Economies amplifies co-created economic solutions that bring balance and prosperity to everyday people.
Brioxy promotes home ownership, provides seed capital and encourages other wealth-building pathways for BIPOC and LGBTQ+ youth.
Dignity Restoration Project compensates Black homeowners whose properties were unfairly foreclosed by the City of Detroit.
The Highland Project offers Black women leaders community and capital to rest, dream, and build multi-generational visions.
Land Justice Futures works with Catholic sisters to heal relationships and return Indigenous land stolen by the Catholic church.
Liberation Ventures gathers resources to support reparative learning and action through strategy, storytelling and organizing efforts.
Museum of Us is working with Indigenous and other communities to return plundered artifacts and change the way cultural belongings are displayed.
Next River collaborator Mariah Rankine-Landers is developing an art exhibition on the embodied experience of repair.
Three Black Men tells the story of men from the U.S., Brazil and Ghana coming together to reconcile the harms of enslavement.
Second, with the Fellows deeply involved, we hosted and participated in experimental circles of women willing to confront differences in what it means to live in a black, white or indigenous body in America today, and how the realities of both historic and ongoing harms affect each of our lives. These “relational repair circles” began working together through highly personal discussion and discovery. In some cases, White women who hold wealth transferred some of their capital to Black women, recognizing the ways they have been systematically excluded from the mechanisms that build generational wealth in our country. Just as importantly, they began expanding insular networks, mobilizing their relationships to partner with Black women in different ways.
“The wealthy White women in the group had access to circles we weren’t in. They had to realize if someone is asking to be supported in their work it’s not always about money, it’s about social capital.”
Third, a “Gathering by the River” convened advocates, nonprofit leaders, funders and individuals involved in these and similar initiatives. For five days in New Orleans, Louisiana, participants explored local Black and Indigenous history, shared information about their reparations efforts, told stories about the impact on their lives of committing to cross-racial relationships, and developed both individual and collective dreams for the future.
Nothing was simple about any of these efforts. To engage in truly reparative partnerships requires those who have benefited from harm throughout history to earn and sustain the trust of those communities who were harmed. Within the relational repair cohorts of black- and white-bodied women, tensions could run extremely high even while participants formed close bonds with one another. During the Gathering by the River, White folks were reminded of the real risks Black and Indigenous people take any time they choose to engage with white-bodied people, whether as individuals or through organizational partnerships. Some conflicts arose and were resolved; others never will be. The power of this work hinged on each participant’s willingness to move through, not around, layered complexities.
“Backlash, whether personal, editorial, verbal or potentially violent, is another sign that reparations is truly a movement and not a ‘debate’ or ‘conversation’ anymore. Momentum isn’t lost when we are challenged — it grows.”
Eighty years ago, just before starting a foundation to promote peace in the world, Dorothy and Randolph Compton embraced complexity by taking a trip to Iola, Italy, where their son had died. We don’t know exactly what happened during that visit and won’t romanticize it as convenient fiction, but we do know they donated money to help restore the village’s Church of Santa Maria Maddalena, which had been built in 1635 and destroyed in the battle that claimed Dorothy and Randolph’s 20-year-old son. Thinking about the shifting role Italy played in World War II, the unspeakable pain of a young son’s death, the appalling destruction of a 300-year-old village church and who-knows-how-much other human loss sustained in that local, lethal battle...that visit must have been anything but straightforward for all involved.
Whatever actually happened, our imperfect founders Dorothy and Randolph clearly were willing to step into the messy unknown, approach healing as a mutual process, and release financial resources to help redress wrongs that were both immediate and historic. Compton Foundation reflected that legacy to its last day as we worked in community to heal harm, repair relationships, return stolen treasure, and unite our segregated lives.