Story at a glance:
- A slave-owner’s descendant gave away a six-figure donation to a Black women’s foundation.
- The foundation, Change Today, Change Tomorrow, had never received a donation of this size.
- A similar incident occurred in 2018 in Denver.
A white donor gave a Black female-led Louisville nonprofit a six-figured donation because her great-grandfather owned slaves in Kentucky.
When Change Today, Change Tomorrow, a nonprofit serving marginalized residents, received the check, its deputy director Nannie Grace Croney thought it was a scam.
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However, it was indeed a real donation — the donor was a recent graduate who earned her inheritance, but she felt bad after finding out her fortune could be traced back to her great-grandfather, who owned six slaves in Bourbon County, WHAS11 reported.
Because the names of the slaves were not recorded, the young woman chose an alternative: Change Today, Change Tomorrow.
As soon as the organization came to the realization the undisclosed, six-figure donation was real, it knew it had to put it to good use.
“So the initial emotion was like, ‘Oh this isn’t real,’ but once it was real, we knew that we had to act on it. We knew that as disruptors and changemakers, we have to challenge other corporations, foundations and individuals to really pay reparations back,” Croney said, “to really redirect those dollars and redistribute wealth to begin to fix the inequalities in this country and right here in our own backyard in Louisville.”
“It is a blessing for us but also definitely owed,” the nonprofit’s founder and executive director, Taylor Ryan, told USA Today.
Ryan plans on using 40 percent of the money to support staff. Another 40 percent will go to maintaining the organization’s community outreach programs, while the remaining 20 percent will go into reserve.
For Black-led organizations, there is a unique challenge in securing financial support from big institutions, such as foundations, in Louisville and beyond.
“We feel that other entities, specifically the foundations locally, need to get up to speed. Their practices are very, very outdated. They’re very still, you know, deeply embedded in white supremacy,” Ryan said. “And a lot of people are doing a lot of talking, but we need action.”
Change Today, Change Tomorrow is not the only Black foundation to receive an anonymous donation like this.
In 2018, a donor gave a Denver-based nonprofit called Soul2Soul Sisters $200,000 because, like Change Today, Change Tomorrow, the woman was also a descendant of a slave owner, according to The Associated Press.
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