06: We launched work we knew would be impossible to finish.Wherever we are now is the right place to start.

When the Compton Foundation staff and board decided to engage in reparations work, we had only three years left to operate. We were motivated to take action not only by our understanding of the foundation’s past, but by stark realizations about the current day.

We had to confront this fact: Despite “community-centered” approaches to grantmaking, despite all our efforts toward “diversity, equity and inclusion,” we remain fundamentally alienated across racial lines at home, at school, at our jobs and in philanthropy, even while we approach each other with good intentions.

That divide persists inside the foundation’s staff and board dynamics just as it does in the wider world, despite our conscious efforts not to play that way.

We began to seek out and learn from change-makers who recognized that racial alienation is the direct result of not only historic but ongoing harms. These leaders were shifting from a narrow DEI framework toward deeper ideas of re-creation and invention. We saw they were not waiting for government funding or institutional shifts to make reparations a reality; instead, they were acting boldly, privately, in the places where small but impactful changes could be realized.

Their visionary approaches quickly revealed something vital that had been missing from the conversation, and without which reparations can never succeed: for real societal change to happen, for change to happen within institutions, it must also happen at the personal and interpersonal level. When we bypass human relationships, we haven’t really confronted how supremacy operates within all of us. Any attempts toward true reparations and healing will remain incomplete.

And that’s how, just three years from the end, we started again.

The Compton Foundation staff, board and fellows knew going into reparations work — grantmaking, cohort experiments, convening — that it wouldn’t create enough change. The grants were a temporary salve for efforts deserving unlimited support. Experimenting with a voluntary exchange of wealth between White and Black women impacted the lives and families of two dozen individuals, but couldn’t undo our racialized capital system. The practice of convening thoughtfully, allowing time for rest, connection and personal reflection, didn’t shift foundations away from hoarding wealth while nonprofit leaders beg for money to support the work philanthropy claims to do.

But this work did provide a beginning, a foothold, a real-time experiment in ways to approach each other with compassion and the desire to heal. That Compton Foundation wouldn’t be there for the end result felt like all the more reason to begin, and to trust our intertwined communities to move forward when this one organization was gone.

That trust remains strong going into 2025. We are galvanized, not distracted, by the intense turmoil in our country. Compton Foundation began with a mission of peace and ended with the same mission enacted in a different way. After all, returning stolen wealth, moving past unrecognized segregation and repairing relationships across complex dynamics are precursors to any lasting peace. Each of us who has been involved believes in the profound importance of holding these commitments steady.

As part of an imperative ecosystem with a life beyond Compton Foundation, we will continue this work.