Inside a Community Foundation's First Moves to Close Its Region's Racial Homeownership gap

Normally, a one-year, $200,000 grant might not merit much notice. But for the 10 Black families in the Richmond, Virginia, area who will be the initial recipients in a new Economic Mobility and Black Homeownership Pilot Program, the assistance they receive will put them on the road to building the kind of generational wealth that many of the area’s white families have had access to for decades. And if the organizers behind the Amandla Fund for Economic and Racial Justice at the Community Foundation for a Greater Richmond have their way, this pilot will be the first step toward closing the racial gap in home ownership in the Richmond area by 2040.

The Amandla effort is nowhere near the same size and scope as GroundBreak, a multisector initiative in Minneapolis/St. Paul whose goal is to address racial disparities by creating a kind of alternative financial services sector in the area to fund everything from home ownership to affordable rental housing and commercial developments. But it is proof that it doesn’t take a massive grant outlay or a complicated, multisector initiative to start making changes that could well have a significant and lasting impact on stubborn demographic disparities.

Addressing a philanthropic need in a philanthropic way

The Community Foundation for a Greater Richmond partnered with two Black-led giving circles in the area, SisterFund and Ujima Legacy Fund, to create the Amandla Fund in response to the 2020 police murder of George Floyd. (Amandla, an Nguni word meaning “power and strength,” was used by the African National Congress and its South African allies during the struggle against apartheid.) Rather than moving money immediately, the fund’s organizers instead first launched Giving Black, a study of “the trends, capacity and impact of Black philanthropy in Greater Richmond” that included data from over 350 surveys of local Black philanthropists, focus groups and several interviews. The report, which was released in 2021, found that economic equity was the most important social issue for a solid majority of the survey’s participants.

The community foundation’s VP for diversity and engagement, Stephanie Glenn, told me, “We said, with social justice through an economic mobility lens, how can we address this philanthropic need in a philanthropic way? So we looked at generational wealth — and in America, how do you do that? Most likely, that’s through home ownership.”

The adverse impact of slavery, Jim Crow and subsequent decades of redlining and other systemically racist policies on Black home ownership and generational wealth are well documented across the country. Despite evidence that racial discrimination in mortgage lending has declined overall, the racial gap in home ownership is wider today than it was in the Civil Rights era, while the racial gap in home mortgage denials widened last year. Add CNN’s December 2023 report about the shockingly disparate mortgage approval rates for white versus Black applicants at the country’s largest credit union, and it’s easy to see why philanthropists looking to target racial wealth disparities might want to focus their efforts on home ownership.

“What we’ve realized, and what the research has shown, is that working-class Black American [families] who are dual-income, who might have earned two degrees to obtain that American Dream, were being left out of home-buying opportunities,” Glenn said.

At the Amandla Fund, she said, they refer to themselves affectionately as “an institutional auntie,” because they act as the auntie, or parent or grandparent, who has historically been able to provide so many white couples with the wedding gift, graduation gift, or even an inherited home to help them get a head start in life. “Whereas, because of systemic racism and generational wealth gaps, we haven’t been able to do that,” said Glenn, who is Black.

“If one rises, we all rise”

After vetting several potential nonprofit partners to administer the pilot, Amandla chose the Southside Community Development and Housing Corporation, a 35-year-old veteran in the field, to provide both funding and wrap-around assistance to the families who will be chosen to participate. Dianna Bowser, president and CEO of Southside, said that in addition to helping the families with down payments, her organization will provide services ranging from assisting them with improving their credit score to choosing a lender and assessing how much home they can afford to buy.

By starting slowly and “going deep” with the families in the initial pilot, Glenn said, the Amandla Fund wants to get a clear picture of what the down payment support might mean, not just for these first families, but also for the generation that comes after them. The ultimate goal, she said, is to learn how Amandla can help make it possible for Black families to own “generations of safe, secure homes,” leading to advantages like better education and access to more economic opportunities, and eventually closing the area’s generational wealth gap.

These are lofty ambitions for a fund that so far has raised just $1.4 million and attracted $2.1 million in pledges against its 2025 goal of $10 million — much of that coming from individual donors. It’s particularly daunting considering there are reportedly 30,000 mortgage-ready Black households in the Richmond region. On the plus side, Glenn said that Amandla hasn’t yet done any significant fundraising and that the “sheer passion and belief” of the organizing committee alone is responsible for the initial money raised.

It also looks like Amandla is in this for the long haul. “We want to use the power of endowment,” Glenn said, to eventually accrue the roughly $50 to $100 million it will take in perpetuity to “exponentially change the pendulum” on home ownership disparities in the area.

What might that look like? “Supporting 5,000 households into home ownership has the potential to increase Black family wealth through home equity by over $1 billion in the next 35 years,” said Jovan Burton, executive director of the Partnership for Housing Affordability and a member of the Amandla Fund’s leadership committee, in coverage by Next City. Burton’s organization advocates for affordable housing in the Richmond area, and one imagines local policy advocacy must also play a key role here. So might the Amandla Fund’s other main priority: expanding Black leadership in regional nonprofit roles.

Whether or not Amandla can realize its eventual goals, it’s encouraging to see a smaller funder take this kind of leap — particularly given the ongoing backlash against racial equity efforts across the country. As Glenn said, this effort may be focused on getting Black families into homes, but improving the stability and generational wealth of any family can strengthen whole communities. “If one rises, we all rise,” she said.

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