Alliance Extra, 9 August – launch of ‘Decolonising philanthropy’ issue topic

Decolonising ourselves to decolonise philanthropy

Cristal Campillay Alarcón and Paula Riedemann Fuentes

On situated knowledge, locus of enunciation and other migrations – the story of the Calala
Fund

We are a group of diverse women who understand ourselves as a mixed foundation. We are
natives and migrants who have committed to working in a different way – one that honours
the path of all the women we accompany, so that they can have the power to decide the life
they want to live. We are committed to learning to work at ease, or to work tasty, as we like to
say. To do what we do in the best way, while enjoying the process. Having a job that allows us
to lead a life worth living and is worth the joy. And to feel that our working place, where we
spend the most of our hours, is a safe space.

Although Calala Women's Fund has a history linked to Central America, working with women
from colonized peoples, our decolonial process itself began in depth in 2019. Firstly, at the
initiative of some migrant teammates and then, as a collective commitment to improve our
work with the groups we support, since we realized how crucial it was to ensure that colonial
violence was not reproduced in our practices, both internally and externally. In 2019, Calala
Women’s Fund had decided to carry out a study about the migrant women’s movement in
Spain, with our grantees and others, to learn how we could better support it. Even though we
were committed to conducting the study with a collaborative, feminist and antiracist approach
(we used the Movement Capacity Assessment Tool, developed by Global Fund for Women, and
we consciously chose a researcher who was herself a migrant woman, feminist and an
antiracist activist), our grantees rapidly showed us that we still had a lot to learn.

After these three years, we have learned that we truly need to listen to the groups and people
we support, actively and with a decolonial perspective, which means not assuming that we
know more about their needs than they do. We also have learned to acknowledge our abilities
as a team, attributing a fundamental value to the diversity that comes from coming from
different realities, with different backgrounds and personal trajectories. One of our main
challenges continues to be putting in place the decolonial approach in a transversal way, by
applying the lessons learned and the tools that we have collectively built, in order to prevent
and repair racist and colonial violence. We’ve told this story about how our organisation began
the work of incorporating an anti-racist and decolonial perspective across many spaces and
articles. In them, we share Calala´s decolonial process, the luminous aspects of sharing,
learning, and joy – but also the efforts, the time invested and the self-criticism that this path
has brought to the team members, especially those who are migrants, like us, the authors of
this article.

A first step into a new mindset

Incorporating the decolonial gaze includes a multitude of different elements, but

deconstructing ourselves as feminists has been the first journey that many of us have
undertaken at Calala Women´s Fund, because deconstructing feminism requires
understanding our situation of oppression in a cis-heteropatriarchal system.
And of course, our different backgrounds give us different starting points for our reflections.
For us, migration has shaped our thinking in a way that it otherwise wouldn’t have been if we
never left our place of origin, leaving behind certain invisible walls.

None of these are easy topics to deconstruct. Recognizing our privileges, or non-privileges, of
class, as well as the importance of the ‘Pantone 1 of miscegenation’, the broad chromatic
inventory that goes further than the colonial and racist white, yellow, and black, and where
value seems to lie the closer one gets to white. Becoming aware of ‘white passing’ privilege
that is, if not totally invalidated, at least very reduced when coming to Europe. Reviewing the
colonial history of our ancestry, acknowledging that our cultural capital can be part of our
privileges or simply seeing that the inequality and misrule of our countries of origin have put
us in a place of privilege or oppression... these are all matters for an organisation to reckon
with on its decolonial journey.

We realize, for example, that we tend to feel closer to people from the global South that are
part of the groups supported by Calala. As if the deep roots that unite the history of violence,
robbery, and extermination to our peoples would unite us at a much more transcendent –
some would say, less rational – level, to later recognize that on the way to inclusion in the
European society where you reside, you are distancing yourself from this same community.
Because the trace, the colonial wound, is precisely that. It is suddenly finding out that in some
cases we have lost the pride of recognizing ourselves as Indigenous, or that we re-ethnicize 2
ourselves from within to build a new identity, taking care not to fall into the same cultural
appropriation that we denounce in others. Knowing that our mother tongue, the one inherited
from the colony, the only one we speak in many cases, can be associated with oppression,
putting us in a position of victimizer.

We also realize that for some people the only language they speak does not allow them to be
read as a valid interlocutor in spaces where the Anglo-Saxon domain gives no respite. The
previous merits demanding linguistic justice to cope with the annoyance or the offense
generated by the being considered less capable for not speaking English, the hegemonic
language in philanthropy.

Undoubtedly, the journey has been and continues being challenging and nurturing for each
one of us: European whites, whitened South Americans or Central Americans, racialized
immigrants and so on for our entire foundation. This is what happens every time we allow
ourselves to be permeated by the knowledge of the epistemologies and cosmogonies of
Mesoamerica, that have nourished us in Calala since our creation. When we learn from the
experience of our colleagues from the team and the board of directors who come from or have
lived in that region, as well as when we open ourselves to the contributions resulting from the
set of experiences, learning, and life trajectories of those of us coming from South America.

The fusion of experiences and situated knowledge that are intertwined with the professional
expertise and the academic and non-academic training of all of us shaping this organization,
places each of us at different locus of enunciation. Nowadays, at Calala we recognize ourselves,
we observe, read, and write with a multiplicity of points of view and ways of doing. We are

1
Pantone ® is a color classification and coding system that is the most widely used worldwide.
Brazilian artist Angelica Dass' Humanæ project was the first project to use these codes to show the breadth of color diversity as a
way to combat racism.
2
Re-ethnification is a term used in social sciences and history, which refers to a process of cultural recomposition, through which
individuals belonging to an ethnic group associate values and meanings with new or pre-existing cultural practices.
sure this will take us to places that we are yet to discover, as we go slowly because we want to
go far.

On the impact and successes from this experience

One relevant aspect we would like to highlight at this point is the deep commitment and
political will that those in directive positions at Calala have shown since the beginning of this
process. They have been careful and rigorous in the right measure, so that the necessary steps
contained both in our new Theory of Change and in our Decolonial Work Plan are carried out.
We call this our ‘Plan Alebrije3‘, for the magic emerging from a conformation endowed with
diversity that transforms, fluctuates and grants very particular powers to the foundation. That
organizational commitment and political will have led us to spare no effort, time or money for
making this challenge a constant anti-racist and decolonial affirmation. For example, by being
careful in the selection of both Calala's permanent staff and in the search and selection of
external collaborators, so that they have lived experience and, as far as possible, also
professional experience and specific knowledge on decolonial feminisms.

The challenge of decolonising ourselves to decolonise our work as a Fund has impacted us in
many ways: it has had an impact on our way of understanding our own work, on our
relationship with money, on our values, on our relationships with our peers, collaborators and
the groups we accompany. It has had an impact on how we address the issue of collective care,
the less rational and more transcendent understanding of the role of a Women's Fund, and it
has had an impact on our relationship with ourselves. It has also impacted the way we
understand power, how to identify it, manage it, (re)distribute it and grant it. As such, sharing
leadership is part of what Calala has been doing, with great achievements and material and
human gains, despite the many challenges.

Abundance comes from sharing

‘Solidarity is the tenderness of peoples’4 goes a well-known phrase – and today we are living by
it. Not without first acknowledging that, to work in the field of philanthropy and other fields
that are part of a policy of redistribution of wealth and social justice – it is necessary to be
aware of the needs emerging from the groups we intend to support. In order to be able to
contribute to reparation5, we have to understand otherness as a legitimate otherness,
assuming that we have a lot to learn from each other and thus establishing virtuous circles of
reciprocity.

As a women's fund, becoming aware of how truly fair it is to contribute to the redistribution of
wealth is also reconciling ourselves with the value of money to repair or compensate for
damage. A damage that can be as concrete as the case of women who are persecuted,
murdered, degraded, and violated in all possible ways, in a context of suffering and vulnerable
living conditions caused by exclusion, socio-political instability, armed conflict, scarcity of
natural resources and impoverishment.

3
This plan contains measures to incorporate a decolonial perspective in all our policies, to work towards a more horizontal
structure, to strengthen our individual and organizational capacities.
4
This phrase is attributed to Gioconda Belli, a Nicaraguan poet based in Spain who has been able to subtly express the human
dimension of international relations.
5
Under the decolonial perspective, ‘reparation’ is based on the idea that when damage is done, it must be repaired. If it is
recognized that colonization has been the origin of mass crimes, then there needs to be a reparation. If this reparation is denied, it
is because the criminal nature of colonial crimes is being questioned.
We encourage other donors who are considering decolonising their practices to take this very
seriously. Such a process will not only improve their relationship with the groups and
organizations they accompany, it will also provide them with more and better skills for their
overall work. It will show them a new comprehensive way of understanding the continuity of
inequity, inequality and global injustice. It will also show them that this reality is transversal
and affects all of us, and that a lack of awareness makes us just part of it.

Finally, we invite them to build concrete tools allowing to take care and be taken care of along
the way. This will be relevant anticipating the difficulties that will arise, as well as the
aggressions or microaggressions that may occur during the process, due to the unconscious
effect that colonialism has on every person. In our case, we identified the need to create our
Protocol Against Racist Violence, which was developed in conjunction with great fellow
decolonial activists. We understand that even as a racially mixed organization that works with
migrant women, descendants of indigenous people, we can reproduce this violence outside
and inside our foundation. And that it is our responsibility to work on the prevention of
violence and the promotion of racial justice, as well as to provide all of us sharing work spaces
with tools for taking care of ourselves and for counting on specific competencies for the
prevention and resolution of conflicts.

Authors:

Cristal Campillay Alarcón and Paula Riedemann Fuentes live in Barcelona, Spain, and work at
Calala Women’s Fund as collective care responsible and program manager. They jointly
authored this article from their perspectives as a migrant woman with Diaguita ancestry from
northern Chile and as a migrant woman from central Chile.