Root. Witness. Reckon. Weave.
A yearlong arc for funders practicing belonging, meaning, wellbeing, and purpose.
This year’s BMWP Funder Community of Practice is a developmental arc. It invites us to face hard truths about our shared history, honor the resilience, healing, and resistance already alive in communities, and imagine and fund toward a more just future.
Two in-person immersions anchor the year. At the Legacy Sites in Montgomery, we confront anti-Blackness as living architecture, a system embedded within every institution and structure that followed slavery, including philanthropy. In Hawai‘i, we expand into healing, interconnection, and reimagined systems rooted in place and culture.
Between these experiences, virtual gatherings metabolize learning, deepen peer leadership, and translate reflection into concrete shifts in strategy, relationships, and resource flow.
“The Legacy Sites don’t just present the harm of history. A story of survival, determination, resiliency, and hope emerges from the difficulty of our past.”
— Bryan Stevenson
Four Dimensions
Four dimensions are present throughout the year that are interwoven rather than sequential. Each asks us to be changed by what we experience.
Questions to Carry
Across our sessions, we’ll return to these questions:
What are you feeling, and what does it reveal?
What is the experience asking of you?
Spring
APRIL 28 · VIRTUAL · 90 minutes · 10:30 AM–12:00 PM PT
Entering the Story: Who We Are Before We Witness
The Legacy Sites document the history of anti-Blackness and racial violence in America as living architecture, a system that continues to shape our institutions, our communities, and our work.
Before we step into that history together, we locate ourselves within it. This session creates the conditions for transformative learning, inviting you to find your own place in the narrative of the Legacy Sites.
MAY 12 · IN PERSON · 2 hours · 1:00 PM-3:30 PM CT
Landing in Montgomery: Lineage and Stepping Into the Story
Building on the foundation we established in April, this session takes us deeper into our place within the specific historical time period that the Legacy Sites document. Before we step into the Legacy Sites, we step into our own lineage.
This is the work we do the night before so that when we enter, we are connected to the history being documented and open to what that connection asks of us.
JUNE 23 · VIRTUAL · 90 minutes · 10:30 AM–12:00 PM PT · TBC
Montgomery Made It Real. Now What?
You’ve been to Montgomery. You’ve witnessed the history of anti-Blackness as living architecture, the same architecture that generated the wealth philanthropy now distributes.
This session considers what’s next. Not everything. Not all at once. But something real in how you fund, who you fund, and how your institution operates. This is where witness becomes practice.
Summer
JULY · VIRTUAL · 90 minutes · TBD
BMWP in Action: What Communities Are Making Possible
In Aspen last fall, we heard time with our community partners was incredibly generative. We are returning to that practice here.
In Montgomery, we stood inside the history of anti-Blackness and reflected on what it asks of us personally and professionally to sit within that history. In July, we turn toward what is being built to heal. This session is an apprenticeship to the communities at the heart of BMWP. In small groups, community leaders will share what they are making possible, what they are learning, and what the work asks of those who fund it. We come as peers with shared purpose and as students of practice, to listen closely, to ask good questions, and to let what we hear shape how we show up in Hawai’i and beyond.
This is the bridge between what we witnessed in Montgomery and what we will encounter in Hawai’i, the practice that is already alive, and the practitioners we are here to learn from.
Fall
SEPTEMBER · VIRTUAL · 90 minutes · TBD
Preparing for Hawai‘i
In Hawai’i, we will be welcomed onto land, into fishponds, into ceremonies, and into the presence of Native Hawaiian wisdom that has guided healing and restoration for generations. How we arrive matters.
This session prepares us to receive what Hawai’i will offer without taking, romanticizing, or extracting. We surface the questions we want to carry: What does it mean to be in the presence of wisdom that was practicing healing, stewardship, and belonging long before philanthropy named them as interests? What does reciprocity look like for funders? What are we ready to be changed by? This is the work we do before we go, so that we arrive ready.
OCTOBER · IN PERSON · In-person immersion
Healing and Interconnection: Hawai‘i
Hawai’i asks what it looks like when healing has been practiced for generations. We gather on farms, at fishponds, on the water, and in the presence of Native Hawaiian wisdom that has guided restoration and self-determination for generations. We learn from Indigenous knowledge systems that challenge punitive approaches and elevate healing, community responsibility, and right relationship with land. We meet living examples of belonging, meaning, wellbeing, and purpose, practices that did not begin with philanthropy and do not depend on it.
This is an invitation to be an apprentice to place, to people, and to ways of knowing that the dominant systems have long tried to erase. We come ready to be welcomed, ready to be taught, and ready to let what we encounter reshape how we see, feel, fund, and lead.
NOVEMBER · VIRTUAL · 90 minutes · TBD
What Now, and With Whom
We’ve spent the year together tracing anti-Blackness as past and present at the Legacy Sites, in close company with our BMWP community partners, learning from Indigenous practices of healing and place in Hawai’i, and in the questions between. The question, what do we do with it, has been with us all year. November is where we name our answers.
This is where we weave together reflection, relationship, and reckoning into the practice we co-create going forward — to repair, to heal, to imagine and fund toward a more just future. The year was meant to transform how we see, feel, fund, and lead. Now we name what’s actually shifting and how we’re going to be different because of it. Where do we move resources more courageously, and toward whom? What does solidarity look like? What is each of us moving in our own institutions? What are we doing together that we couldn’t do alone? Who are we now, as a community of practice, and what are we holding each other to? The arc closes here. We’ll carry forward the relationships, the commitments, and the cohort we have become into the new year.