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What does solidarity ask of us? And what does it make possible?In the newest episode of Becoming the Vision, we sit with a word that gets used often in movements for justice, philanthropy, and collective action—and ask what it means to actually practice it.Drawing on our recent experience at Collective Acceleration, a gathering held at the Detroit People's Food Co-op, and years of learning alongside leaders, organizers, elders, and communities in philanthropy, Detroit, and beyond, we explore the possibilities and difficulties of building across difference.The co-op itself offers a powerful example of what solidarity can make possible: a shared vision made tangible through years of collective effort. Gathering there gave us an opportunity to reflect on the relationships that sustain solidarity, the work it requires, and what can emerge when we come together despite our differences. Subscribe to our newsletter!

Chera and Trinel sit down with Fiona Kanagasingam, Vice President and Chief Equity and Culture Officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, for a wide-ranging conversation about power, institutional change, and what it really takes to move philanthropy toward racial equity and collective liberation. What does it mean for philanthropy to confront its own history honestly? Who benefits when a foundation examines the origins of its wealth and the interests it has protected? How do power, identity, and institutional culture shape who gets to lead transformation? -- EPISODE TRANSCRIPT -- Join us on Substack @ freedomdreamsinphilanthropy

In this conversation with Edgar Villanueva, founder and CEO of Decolonizing Wealth Project, we explore listening as a transformative practice—from listening to our own experience and the wisdom of elders, to listening for spirit and the quiet intuitions that guide us toward healing, courageous leadership, and institutional transformation.Edgar reflects on his Southern childhood, where countless Saturdays at the library sparked a lifelong curiosity about worlds beyond his own. He also shares about his Indigenous roots, the elders who grounded him, their teachings on healing, and how listening helped him recognize his calling to transform money from a source of harm into a form of medicine. Together, we explore how these experiences intersected with difficult institutional realities, inspiring Decolonizing Wealth and opening a conversation that gave voice to stories many in philanthropy had lived but few had spoken publicly.Edgar also reflects on the spiritual dimensions of his journey, including his time in seminary, the heartbreak of becoming estranged from institutional religion, and the path of reconnecting with inner guidance through nature, intuition, and spirit. Along the way, we consider how institutions can shape the stories we tell ourselves about where guidance comes from—and what becomes possible when we learn to listen again. As Edgar reminds us, listening is more than hearing. It is a practice of grounding that can reconnect us to wisdom, clarify our calling, and open new possibilities for personal and institutional transformation. --- TRANSCRIPT --- Join us on Substack @freedomdreamsinphilanthropy

In this episode, Chera and Trinel explore the role of confirmation in the work of transformation: those moments, relationships, encounters, and insights that remind us we are on the right path, especially when the road ahead is uncertain. Drawing on stories from their own journeys, from first meeting more than a decade ago to unexpected encounters with fellow travelers in the work of justice and liberation, they reflect on how moments of confirmation can reinforce our sense of purpose, deepen our connections, and sustain us across the long arc of change.Along the way, they ask: -How do we recognize confirmation when it appears?-What happens when we act on it?-What relationships, opportunities, and possibilities might be waiting just beyond our hesitation?-And how might confirmation help us trust in our collective capacity to build the future we deserve? At its heart, this conversation is about faith, possibility, and the courage to follow what calls us forward. Join us as we reflect on the people, questions, and unexpected connections that helped shape Freedom Dreams in Philanthropy—and the confirmations that continue to guide the work today. Subscribe to our newsletter @ https://freedomdreamsinphilanthropy.substack.com/

The work of Freedom Dreams in Philanthropy is, in many ways, a gesture of faith: faith in the capacity of aligned leaders and lovers of justice in the philanthropic sector, faith in ourselves and our questions, and faith in the sector’s ability to answer back. In this episode, Chera and Trinel explore faith not as religious doctrine, but as belief in what is unseen: the trust that transformation is possible even amid uncertainty, backlash, and constraint. We reflect on how faith and agency are intertwined, why real questions matter, and how faith helps us remain courageous, grounded, and aligned along the long arc toward justice. Join us for a conversation rooted in the origins of Freedom Dreams in Philanthropy and the lived and field-gathered insights that continue to shape our work. Watch this episode on Youtube! Find us on Substack @ Freedom Dreams in Philanthropy

The future we long for is possible. Not because it arrives, or even will in our lifetimes, but because we learn to live into it now. In this conversation with ⁠Mia Birdsong⁠, we explore what it means to practice the future: in our organizations, our rituals, and in the ways we move through and make meaning of time. Mia shares how ⁠Next River⁠ is creating room for the world it seeks to build, from rethinking organizational calendars and rhythms to grounding freedom in deeper humanity, purpose, and community. We move beyond nostalgia for a different time and into the work of practicing the future now. Along the way, we locate each other as fellow travelers on the arc toward justice and liberation, and invite others to join us in the unfolding of our freedom. Together, we move back and forth between future and present, exploring abolition and invoking ancestral memory to ask what it means to practice freedom in an unfree world. As Mia reminds us, “what we practice is the world we’re building.” ---

In this special episode, Chera takes us back to the time she met Nikki Giovanni, as a twenty year-old undergraduate student at the University of Virginia. This is a story about putting yourself out there a little more than you thought you could and what happens when people in positions of power reach back. Chera offers us a glimpse into one of the roots of her freedom dreaming. --- TRANSCRIPT

Autumn Brown is an artist, facilitator, mother, and theologian. The front woman of the eponymously named soul-pop band, AUTUMN, she is a queer, mixed-race Black woman, a gifted facilitator and orator, and a freedom worker who grounds her approach to building movements for liberation in her belief in the innate capacity for healing that emanates from the human heart. With her sister, adrienne maree brown, Autumn hosts the beloved podcast, How to Survive the End of the World. In 2026 she'll release her new book, Temper: A Fugitive Guide to Freedom. (Pre-order here). Chera and Trinel dive deep into Autumn's creative origin story, her concept of fugitivity, the generative potential of sabbaticals and the importance of embodied practices, like aikido and yoga in navigating this complex moment.

Happy New Year!   In this episode we’re joined by Angelique Power, President & CEO @ The Skillman Foundation for a conversation about seeding change and embracing the power of people.Power for a conversation about seeding change and embracing the power of people. Angelique reflects on her Chicago roots, ancestry, and the importance of owning what makes you unique—learning to hold being both apart and a part as a source of strength and grounding for leadership. We talk about her place in a lineage of leadership at the Skillman Foundation, where she is the third Black woman, in succession, to lead the organization—following Carol Goss and Tonya Allen. Angelique speaks candidly about what becomes possible when women of color lead, and how she carries forward the impact, vision, and inspiration of those who came before her. We explore how Skillman stands on vision and with visionaries. Angelique shares a pragmatic look at the foundation’s People Powered Education initiative, underscoring that social change requires both grassroots and grasstops strategies. She speaks about partnering with Detroiters—who deeply own the identity of their city—in shaping education policy rooted in lived experience. We also talk about Detroit youth: their desires for change, their hope for the future, and their insistence on building new systems rather than waiting on old ones to deliver.Angelique describes her role in this moment as creating the conditions for authorship, agency, and lasting change to take root in Detroit.

In this episode of Becoming the Vision, we sat down with Chung-Wha Hong and Sara Mersha, co-executive directors  of Grassroots International, for a timely conversation on what it means to be in solidarity with social movements. Drawing on decades of experience supporting collective efforts to transform systems in service to justice, they offer the concept of “Solidarity Philanthropy” to reimagine philanthropy’s role and relationship to social movements and activate the sector’s transformative potential. In the conversation, we discuss solidarity as not an end state, but an ongoing practice and active commitment that goes beyond grantmaking. True solidarity with social movements  involves the sector interrogating its own relationship to power, listening to those most proximate to injustice, seeking alignment on core values, and organizing itself in peer networks defined by  deep collaboration. In this vision, philanthropy emerges as more than a benefactor, becoming a comrade, ally, and protagonist in the struggle for justice.

In the midst of injustice and a culture that glorifies hustle, what does it mean to slow down? And how might slowing down be necessary to make justice possible? In this episode, Chera and Trinel are joined by Repa Mekha, founder and CEO of Nexus Community Partners, for a deep and timely conversion about rest as a radical act of care, resistance, and transformation. Together, they illustrate how rest is not retreat, but a reclamation of agency and authorship that is both personal and collective: a way to see the scripts we’ve inherited, to heal, reconnect with identity and calling, and build toward the futures we dream of.

Becoming the Vision is back! This season, we’re Dreaming Forward—reflecting on our lineages and transforming them into legacies of freedom and justice for all. In this episode, the show’s producer, Zak Rosen, turns the mic on our hosts, asking the same question they’ve posed to so many others: What are you meditating on in this work of collective liberation? In our conversation, Chera channels the audacity of her grandmother—who, with steadfast faith in better days ahead, left behind a treasured pair of boots for the next little girl who might need them, as her family sought new opportunities in the segregated South. Trinel shares his practice of return—to self, to purpose—speaking on the reclamation of his personal magic as a daily act of vulnerability: risking embarrassment in service of connection, and daring visibility for the chance to be truly seen.  We learn that Freedom Dreams in Philanthropy emerged from and is grounded in Chera’s deeper exploration of education for liberation, further catalyzed by her lived experience in philanthropy and her curiosity about how other leaders of color were seeing and making possibilities from where they stood. This resonates with Trinel’s interest in how we turn these possibilities into practice: creating new ways of seeing, being, and doing, that open pathways for systems level-change This conversation makes clear that freedom dreaming is both lineage and living practice—a way of holding possibility and making it real through daily acts of dreaming, boldness, and agency. As we Dream Forward this season, we invite you to reflect on the stories, people, and histories that shaped you—and to consider how they can be seeds of liberation for yourself and others. Join us for this intimate conversation as we trace the roots of our work and practice the futures we’re imagining together. #BecomingTheVision #FreedomDreaming #Philanthropy #Leadership #DreamingForward #CollectiveLiberation

Season Three of Becoming the Vision is here! This season, we’re Dreaming Forward—turning lineage to legacy and purpose into practice.  In the first episode, we sit down with Joanna Jackson, President & CEO of the Weingart Foundation. A New Yorker by way of the famed High School of Performing Arts, Joanna shares how her early training in drama shaped a leadership rooted in vulnerability, voice, and imagination. Descending from a family of organizers and activists, her story reflects a deep belief in the personal as collective—the understanding that our individual striving can serve freedom and justice for all. Joanna's leadership journey is one of evolution, not arrival. As a testament to the importance of staying on purpose—doing the work from where you are, letting it be the guide—Joanna now leads the mission she helped to establish across her various roles at the foundation since 2008.  Her story illustrates how purpose can align with practice when the organization isn’t static, which Joanna credits to Weingart’s commitment to organizational learning as a posture.  Even amid political noise, Joanna focuses on the signal: the hope and solidarity emerging across Los Angeles and California. She names the opportunity and responsibility of this moment: to deepen collective visioning and practice as institutions, as leaders, and as people. Our conversation becomes a meditation on meeting the moment—using everything you have, even that 95%, in service to collective liberation. #BecomingTheVision #FreedomDreaming #Philanthropy #Leadership #DreamingForward #CollectiveLiberation

As we work on our new season of Becoming the Vision, we're thrilled to feature an episode from the new podcast, Nonprofits Now: Leading Today from the good folks at The Chronicle of Philanthropy. SUBSCRIBE TODAY! -- As nonprofit leaders grapple with increasingly dire threats to their funding and missions, it’s more important than ever to understand what it takes to lead resilient organizations. For a look at what skills are most important, we hear from Vanessa Priya Daniel, who interviewed 45 social-justice leaders for her new book, Unrig the Game: What Women of Color Can Teach Everyone About Winning. Daniel combines her extensive research for the book with her own experiences as an organizer and founder of Groundswell Fund and Groundswell Action Fund — which together have distributed more than $100 million to over 200 organizations led by women of color and transgender people. In a conversation with Chronicle CEO Stacy Palmer, Daniel says her interviews led her to identify three all successful change agents possessed: • Bold ideas. Incremental solutions don’t add up to enough to solve the tremendous challenges of today and tomorrow.  • Generosity. Daniel says an “ethos of rising by lifting others” is what makes the women she interviewed successful. • 360-degree vision. There’s never just one cause of a problem that’s complex and worth solving. --- You can find a video version of this episode at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugOjpCJ3ChE&t=81s Nonprofits Now: Leading Today is hosted by Stacy Palmer. It’s produced by Emily Haynes at the Chronicle of Philanthropy and from Reasonable Volume, Mary Dooe is the producer, Mark Bush is our engineer, and Rachel Swaby and Elise Hu are executive producers. Additional support comes from Margie Fleming Glennon, Andrew Simon, Nick Adams, Krista Niles, Amaya Beltran, and Kyle Johnson.

The Freedom Dreamers are thrilled to welcome Dimple Abichandani—philanthropic leader, lawyer, and author of A New Philanthropy: Ten Practices to Transform Wealth Into a More Just and Sustainable Future. Dimple also serves on the Board of Directors at Solidaire Network. In this conversation, Dimple reflects on “community”—for her, it’s where doubt lifts, purpose returns, and change begins—not only for individuals, but for the future of philanthropy itself. She speaks candidly about her journey to writing the book, including the impostor syndrome that nearly kept her from doing so. “Who am I to write a book?” she asked herself—before finding affirmation and solidarity in the Unicorn Authors Club, a community for authors of color. That support became an example of what it takes to answer the call anyway—and what it means to be lovingly witnessed into your voice. Dimple also recalls a chance encounter with a portrait of Andrew Carnegie, which led her to investigate the roots of institutional philanthropy. What she learned—a legacy built on extraction, segregation, and exclusion—sparked a bold call for a new era: one where wealth isn’t just redistributed, but transformed into justice, and where philanthropy serves community over capital.