She was doing exactly what was asked of her, yet still began to ask: What do I want? What is my voice in this?

Freedom Dreams in Philanthropy was created at the intersection of personal voice interrogation and sector inquiry.

Freedom Dreams in Philanthropy was a personal return to real questions and eventually a sector-wide invitation into deeper transformation.

Why do I do what I do? What am I being called to?

I had to find my way and continue to find my way back to what do I really want?

What is my voice in this that’s not mitigated through an organization, people telling me what to say?

What do I sound like, and what do I want in this?

Personal questions became a field-level inquiry:

What do philanthropic leaders of color really want? What future are they actually trying to build?

I started with black CEOs - listening to CEOs of color; kind of broadened it quickly.

But it was, what do people really have to say about why they are where they are?

In these early conversations, it became clear that, like Chera, leaders of color were holding more expansive visions and bringing far more personal and professional insight into their work in philanthropy than what we typically hear in sector conversations.

Creating space to share and learn from them wasn’t just helpful, it was part of the way forward for philanthropy—and beyond.

Freedom Dreaming as a Rallying Cry

I don’t know that I knew what I was doing, except to say that I carried around Freedom Dreams and How We Get Free for the better part of 6 months when I was traveling.

I remember putting them in my grey, travel work backpack, and I remember bringing them with me everywhere. Sitting them on nightstands in hotels, and picking them up on planes, and reading passages and thumbing through them, and just having them beside me.

Then it was about overlaying freedom dreaming and the black radical imagination conceptually…because it offers a way to bring people in and rally around something that can be shared.

Kelley had originally used “freedom dreams” as a noun to describe the visions for society and community life that catalyzed and sustained black radical movements, yet a new generation of activists, organizers, and lovers of justice transformed it into a verb, “freedom dreaming” to describe and uplift the importance of an ongoing practice of collective envisioning as part of social action.

It’s calling in a shared consciousness, right?

It was like, what, what’s the rallying cry?

What’s an organizing principle that I think people have heard of?

I really thought more people would have heard of it, honestly, that actually has been a surprise to me is how novel freedom dreaming as a concept actually has been to so many people in the sector.

Kelley reminds us that freedom dreaming isn’t just about dreaming; it involves taking action toward more just visions of the world.

2020 as an Accelerant

Minneapolis police officers murdered George Floyd in broad daylight. The world watched.

We were living inside overlapping crises: pandemic, grief, racial violence, fear, and a global uprising for justice.

In that moment, Chera found herself asking not only what individual leaders wanted, but what philanthropy itself might become if it stopped treating crisis as an anomaly and started treating it as a call to remember who it could be at its best.

Where has philanthropy been?

In moments of crisis and crisis around race, around injustice, did philanthropy stand back, and when did it act?

I remember the Ford Foundation being involved in the anti-apartheid movement, you know, and so I just started looking up a few more examples. Kind of jotting them down and then writing them in, and said, essentially philanthropy, hey, you know what?

We’ve actually been here before.

And at our best, we step in.

We step in, we show up.

So what will it take for us to fully be in this opening that is here for us?

We had, in fact, been here before. And in earlier moments of rupture, philanthropy had sometimes stepped forward with courage.

So what would it take to do so again — more honestly, more boldly, and with greater alignment between values and practice?

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