Brief We’re looking for someone - or a small group of people - to support us in our ongoing exploration of what decolonisation looks like for us in practice; to help us navigate through this ever evolving context, full of big, intersecting issues. You would be supporting us to embed and deepen our own individual and collective practice and to cultivate a healthy working culture.

We recognise we’re in a time of poly-crisis, acknowledging the ongoing harm of imperialism, capitalism, and settler colonialism, and how this disproportionally impacts and harms Global Majority peoples. We see it as a responsibility of a foundation and organisation in our position, to acknowledge and do the necessary work to ensure we’re acting appropriately, with integrity, and in solidarity with the victims of these systems of oppression, violence and extraction.

Context / our journey so far

We know that the very foundations of institutionalised philanthropy are built on systems of colonialism and capitalism and inherently extractive relationships with human and more-than-human life. Often explicitly built on the bodies of the global majority.

We are aware of these deep historical roots of institutionalised philanthropy and accumulated capital, and are explicit with all of our partners about the wealth origins of the funds we distribute. And we therefore recognise that the role and responsibility we have to play now: to challenge and displace the systems that allowed for our very existence in the first place; and to stand in solidarity with those building futures beyond colonialism and capitalism.

Thirty Percy as an organisation is only six years old. In the early days, the original team were doing inner and external work to understand more about climate and racial justice. This led to the Interdependence Festival for the wider climate and racial justice movement in 2019, and what became the Resourcing Racial Justice Fund during the pandemic. This work fundamentally shaped our strategy - both who we supported and how. One of our key funds now is our Changemaker Trust Fund, that supports individuals, with a focus on feminine leadership and explicit support of women, trans women, and women of colour.

We’re finding that more partners are asking healthy questions about what we’re doing and how we’re doing things. Honesty and openness about our origins is a first step. But we’re at a point where we know we need to go deeper. We also have a new team constellation now - with different backgrounds, experiences, and needs. And many of us weren’t part of the initial exploration around climate and racial justice, so now feels like the time to do some more explicit work together.

We’re proud of what Thirty Percy is doing and how we’re doing it. Challenging the status quo, designing from a fundamentally different set of assumptions, with care, integrity and relationships at its heart. But we know there is always more work to do.

Some questions we’re holding

• What is the work we need to do around our own relationship to money and wealth origins of the foundation?
• We’re a majority white team. Where are cultures of white supremacy / fragility / saviourism showing up in our practice? Where and how can we practice and shift this?
• How can we be more fluent as a team to talk about difficult topics and issues in a safe way?
• What are the best ways to be accountable and communicate with our partners in an honest way about our own commitment and journey? Can we model an alternative mode of communicating in the philanthropic space?
• What are the best ways/methods to bring to this internal work? Creative approaches? Embodiment work?
• How can we best represent black, intersectional, feminist principles and keep them at the core of our work?

What we’re looking for Here’s some early thoughts about what we might find supportive:

• space for 1:1 conversations as part of personal reflective practice and the emotional processing of this decolonisation work
• designing and holding of group conversational spaces around key dynamics and themes that are emerging
• some education/topic focused dialogues to deepen understanding, able to bring in different people and practices that might be able to support this
• for us to be more explicit about what we’re learning, what we’re doing, not doing and what there is still do to

These are just some initial ideas of what might be supportive for us, but we’re open to evolving and iterating this with the right partner. We know we don’t know what we don’t know.

Insights and perspectives from the team We’re a small team, coming with different perspectives on these big topics- in the teams own words, here’s some of the needs and tensions this is responding to:

Louise - ”I feel like we’re doing ‘a lot’ relative to other foundations - but I don’t want us to get complacent, or feel a sense of ‘superiority’ being the best of a bad bunch. I’d value a collective space to understand where others are and how we can support an model something else. Building up our collective muscle for practicing and modelling some of the inevitable challenges of this time”

Jon - “I think there is work for us to do individually and collectively about what it means to stand in true solidarity with the BIPOC leaders and communities we are in relation with, especially as a majority white organisation. How do we practice ally-ship? What is our role in our ecosystem? And how can we have conversations in safe spaces as a team?”

Budget We think this is a long-term commitment - but would like to try something for the coming year.

We recognise that the practitioners we are approaching with this brief are predominantly women of colour, whose work will likely have been under-resourced and under-appreciated in the past. We do not have a fixed budget for this work at the moment. We would be open to discussing what might be needed in terms of financial resources to do justice to this critical work, and appropriately resource whoever holds us as we dive deeper into individual and collective decolonisation practice.

We’d want to regularly check in and have an honest conversation with whoever we work with, to make sure this is working for you and for us as well. And iterate accordingly.