Blog: Applying racial justice to systems thinking

Photo by Glodi Miessi on Unsplash of the Notting Hill Carnival which represents the part of London where Tudor's offices are based.

Written by Raji Hunjan, CEO

As the summer ends and the staff at Tudor come back together as a team, we are stepping up our plans to launch our new strategy and begin making new grants. The last six months have focused on the building and bedding-in of our new board and staff, and much of our communications have centred on this. We have learned and achieved so much this year.

Living up to our value of transparency, we are now ready to begin a series of blogs to be more open about the decisions and choices we are making.

The total rebuild of a foundation which has traditionally positioned itself within the mainstream institutional behaviours of UK philanthropy has created opportunity beyond what we had expected. Tudor has often been at the forefront of trying out new ways of working – many of our friends and stakeholders will point to our longstanding commitment to unrestricted funding, and to being a relational funder. Perhaps less known, is that Tudor has always annually spent more than the interest earned on its endowment. We also adopted an early interest in social investment and ethical investments, as well as capital loans, which have had a rippled impact beyond our grant-making. All of this has created the potential to step up our commitment to thriving communities; for power and resources to be in the hands of those who are closest to the problems alongside the opportunities we are seeing in society. In practice, we are ambitious in how we want to develop all of Tudor’s policies, approaches and decision-making processes. This has taken time, and will continue to do so.

We have been open in earlier communications about our commitment to racial justice. The whole transformation of Tudor began with a process of reimagining through the lens of anti-racism. This has not been without its challenges. As a society, let alone as an organisation, we have different understandings and assumptions about what racial justice means. Tackling racism can feel so personal: for some, this means reliving trauma; for others, it is understanding how racism affects those who experience it. For all of us, it challenges our biases, our assumptions, our beliefs and sometimes our values. Exposing the differences between us is hard and requires a deep level of trust and a willingness to be humble.

At Tudor, we are practicing a systems thinking approach. This has enabled us to go beyond our personal identities and politics to explore how racism, inequity and injustice show up in wider systems. For us, systems thinking means understanding the interconnectivity of all parts of the system, and how the actions we take in one part will have consequences elsewhere. We also recognise that systems change is a spectrum – from tweaking and improving what is already there to dismantling entirely. Additionally, this approach allows us to look deep into practices across the globe, whether this is in philanthropy, in indigenous and ancestral practices, or in the building of movements.

The race riots this summer, and what this means for us as a society, is a case in point. We saw the worst in people’s behaviour in the violence, fuelled by racism and hatred. And we also saw the best, in people who stood together to show love and unity. These are the images, as a sector, we are now trying to make sense of, so that we can all work out our individual and collective responses. A systems thinking approach takes us beyond what is in front of us, to interrogating how political rhetoric, media narratives, policies around crime and policing, education, housing and more have been contributing factors to the unrest. This can be uncomfortable, because it requires us to go past blaming groups, or pointing at individual behaviour, to understanding racism as a societal problem that we can all come together to address for the benefit of everyone.

Centring a racial justice approach in the way we describe can be problematic in a context where a scarcity mindset is widely adopted in our society. Scarcity implies there is not enough for everyone, and that we must therefore fight or compete to have enough for ourselves. It fuels “we are full” narratives. If we imagine a society where is it understood that there is enough, then we can begin to explore how racial justice can be a lens through which to achieve equity and justice in ways that go much further to be intersectional and capable of reaching all communities.

The scarcity mindset is plain in many funding and grant-making practices. It means we put the onus on small organisations and groups to justify why they should receive funding. It means they are expected to compete with the very groups they may want to work in partnership with, and it continues in how they report on outcomes defined by the funders’ goals. Tudor alone cannot undo these practices and the mindsets that drive them. But our behaviour and the practices we adopt in our grant-making can help us to imagine how things could be different. It also helps us to think beyond our grant-making to how we invest, utilise our assets and maximise the collective resources that are our staff, trustees, consultants and volunteers.

It is becoming clearer to us that, as we develop our plans to make a small number of grants this year, we will be doing so in a way that is quite different to how we funded in the past. We will be developing our first grants alongside a continuation of the total transformation of Tudor, and so we will work in careful partnership with the first set of organisations that we invite to apply. This will deepen our learning, and our understanding of how we collaborate with the field. In future blogs, we will say more about our funding plans, alongside addressing our learning approach, our commitment to people and culture and using a behaviours framework, amongst other themes. Please stay in touch and sign up to the newsletter if you haven’t done so already.