Identity-based giving is a concept familiar to the Black community, which has long pooled and redistributed its means to support its families, organizations, and businesses on its own — using available community assets to create what it needed. Today, empowering community philanthropists to leverage available resources at every giving level creates the opportunity for us to strategically target the issues that affect us directly.
The global and regional issues in our community are many, and they are complex. You’ve seen them. Likely you’ve been affected firsthand, or know someone who has been, by ongoing racism, violence, economic, health and educational disparities or gender-based discrimination.
Community philanthropy provides an infrastructure and organized means to address these issues and create social change. Our approach is assets-based, drawing on a rich history of charitable giving in the Black community. To that end, the Penny Foundation’s roots, efforts and impact are locally managed, locally driven, and locally accountable.
We celebrate and respect our forebears who linked arms and used their places of worship, social savings clubs, benevolent funds, and penny savings banks as organized instruments to support and grow our community from within. We stand on their shoulders.
