“The era of asking individuals to carry what only systems can fix is over. This next season is not about digging deeper—it’s about building wiser. It’s about repairing the foundation so people can work with energy, clarity, and enough space to breathe.” – Ericka Hines, Founder of Black Women Thriving
For years, we’ve watched brilliant leaders burn out while being praised for their commitment.
We’ve seen organizations doing transformative work while staying afloat through sheer force of will—staff working weekends, directors dipping into personal funds, exhausted community members showing up because the need is urgent and the funding uncertain.
We’ve participated in an ecosystem that lauds resilience while reinforcing the conditions that demand it, that asks for innovation on shoestring budgets and celebrates “scrappy” organizations while chronically under-resourcing them. An ecosystem that paints a smile on survival and calls it success.
It’s a depleting, unsustainable game. And Black Future Co-op Fund is operating from a different set of assumptions.
We assume our grantee partners know what they need. We’re not here to micromanage how funds are used or require performance of impact that extracts more labor. If you say general operating support is what’s needed, we believe you. If circumstances change and you need to redirect funds, we trust that decision.
We assume the timeline for transformation is longer than a grant cycle. Real systems change doesn’t happen on a foundation’s schedule or fit neatly into one calendar year. Change happens at the speed of trust, relationship-building, and collective healing. Our funding approach reflects that reality.
We assume the current environment is taking a severe toll. Organizations led by and serving communities of color are navigating relentless attacks on equity work, insecure funding, and the compounding stress of doing justice work in hostile conditions. This is not business as usual. It is a time for deep solidarity and sustained support.
We assume rest is revolutionary. We recognize that widespread, profound exhaustion is not at its root an individual issue—it is a structural outcome showing up in individuals’ lives, a self-protective response to the toxicity, cruelty, and trauma inflicted by the wider culture.
It’s time to treasure ourselves and put on our oxygen mask first. Healing work, organizational culture development, and leadership restoration aren’t “nice to have”—they are mission-critical infrastructure. We can’t build the world we need on top of a shaky foundation.
We’re inviting other funders to join us in adopting transformative approaches to giving.
What would it look like if philanthropy stops rewarding overwork and starts resourcing actual sustainability? What if multi-year general operating support becomes the norm, not the exception? What if we assess success in terms of the health and vitality of organizations and their people, not just programmatic outputs?
What if funders go beyond superficially acknowledging that times are hard, in order to deeply understand that the current reality is breaking people—and then choose to fund differently?
This is how Black Future Co-op Fund practices philanthropy, and we’re also applying these principles internally.
We are navigating our own organizational transitions—adapting to budget realities, shifting staff structures, and balancing sustainability with mission alignment. Since our formation, our vision has been to foster liberated Black futures, not just put out today’s fires and barely decompress before facing tomorrow’s.
Our resolve in 2026 is to embody our values: moving at the speed of trust, creating time for reflection, and making decisions that prioritize long-term capacity over short-term productivity.
This means that we might sometimes move slower than urgency demands. It means we’re choosing depth over breadth, relationship over transaction, sustainability over heroics.
It means we’re learning, in real time, what it looks like to lead from a place of enough rather than scarcity—even when resources are genuinely constrained.
2026 will be hard. January has made that clear. The political climate, the funding landscape, the attacks on equity work, the rampant violence of federal agents—we can’t expect things to shift soon. The crisis is real.
But urgent short-term response without a framework for sustainability is a path to failure. And we refuse to sacrifice the people doing this sacred work on the altar of immediate impact.
To pass the torch to future generations, we need to be able to carry it to them.
So we’re moving slower. Trusting deeper.
Resting when we need to. Resourcing others to do the same.
And from that rest, let us build something that lasts.
From the Black Future Co-op Fund.