November 10, 2025
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From the DWP Team
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Below are key takeaways from Decolonizing Wealth Project's (DWP) recent Moonshot conversation with DWP Founder/CEO Edgar Villanueva and Stephanie Ellis-Smith, Founder/CEO of Phila Engaged Giving. To learn more about future donor advisor events, please reach out to info@decolonizingwealth.com with the subject line: Donor Advisor.
The landscape of philanthropy is shifting beneath our feet. As we navigate the most significant wealth transfer in history—$124 trillion by 2048 (Cerulli Associates, 2024)— clients seek something far beyond traditional charitable models. They hunger for meaning, for impact, for a giving practice that transforms not only communities but also themselves.
The old paradigms no longer suffice. As Stephanie shared, we once spoke of "saving for a rainy day, but now we are drowning." Your clients know this. They feel it. And they're looking to you to guide them toward something more powerful, more authentic, more healing.
Here are five essential keys to help your clients transcend conventional giving and embrace a philanthropic practice worthy of this moment.
1. Reframe the Narrative: From Charity to Repair
True impact requires moving beyond the charity mindset toward reparative giving. This isn't about guilt or obligation—it's about acknowledging how wealth accumulates through historical systems and using that understanding to create more equitable futures.
Decolonizing Wealth Project's Reparative Philanthropy™ framework offers your clients a proven methodology for redistributing resources in ways that acknowledge the complex origins of wealth. This approach helps clients understand how historical advantages and disadvantages compound across generations, and how their giving can begin to restore balance.
Position reparative giving as an evolution—much like the progression from basic portfolio management to comprehensive wealth strategies. Clients will recognize this as the natural next step in their philanthropic journey.
2. Embrace the Moment: Unprecedented Opportunity Meets Urgent Need
Three realities define our current landscape:
The $124 Trillion Wealth Transfer: With unprecedented wealth changing hands, the question isn't whether your clients will give, but how transformatively they'll do so. Current projections suggest only a fraction will flow to charitable purposes—an opportunity for visionary advisors to shift this trajectory.
Systemic Gaps: Where traditional systems fall short in addressing inequality, strategic philanthropy can fill the void. Many of your peers in the ultra-wealthy community are already calling for systemic reform, like calls for tax reform. In the meantime, intentional giving offers an immediate pathway to impact.
Coordinated Challenges: Well-funded opposition to causes that support our inherent dignity requires strategic philanthropic responses. As Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson has said, we must fund the movement like we want them to win.
Frame this urgency not as pressure, but as a rare convergence of capacity and necessity—a once-in-a-generation opportunity to create lasting change.
3. Navigate the Edge: Productive Discomfort as a Catalyst
Excellence in any domain requires pushing beyond comfort zones. Transformative philanthropy is no different. While our instinct may be to shield clients from discomfort, Edgar noted this "donor fragility" ultimately limits both impact and personal growth.
Set expectations early: meaningful change requires friction. Stephanie offered that "it's the friction you need for the wheels to turn. Things won't move when everything is smooth."
The art lies in calibration—gently pressing clients' thinking "until we hear a squeal and there's a pushback." That point of resistance marks where transformation begins. Like a master sommelier helping a client develop their palate, you're expanding their capacity for complexity and nuance.
Think of this as you would physical training or executive coaching—temporary discomfort in service of lasting strength. Your role is to be both challenger and support system.
4. Connect to Purpose: Healing through Reciprocity and Abundance as the Ultimate Motivator
Data and logic have their place, but transformation springs from a deeper well. The most impactful philanthropists share a common thread: each has experienced a "healing moment somewhere in their journey, a spiritual moment" that fundamentally shifted their relationship with wealth and giving.
Money becomes medicine when it flows from this place of personal transformation. This isn't a mere metaphor—it's an observable reality we’ve seen as we’ve influenced nearly $1 billion in reparative giving since 2018. Donors who engage in their own healing journey unlock exponentially more resources, creating what becomes a reciprocal, collective care experience that enriches both giver and receiver.
This flow represents philanthropy at its most sophisticated place: a powerful process where individual healing catalyzes collective wellbeing. Your role is to create space for these transformative experiences, whether through curated retreats, meaningful site visits, or facilitated family conversations.
Consider this the difference between transactional and transformational advising. You're not just managing giving strategies; you're stewarding personal evolution.
5. Craft Tomorrow's Legacy Today
Multi-generational families often cite legacy as their primary motivation. This provides an elegant opening to reframe the conversation entirely.
Challenge your clients to think more about how their legacy will end, rather than how it began. Legacy isn't a monument to yesterday's achievements—it's being written through today's choices. As Will Cordery, principal of Freedom Futures and Senior Advisor to Liberated Capital, says in his 2023 NCFP piece, “legacy...is not what you believe you did well; rather it is what the community believes you did well.”
This question cuts through complexity: "Thirty years from now, when people look back at this pivotal moment in history, what did you do?" This shifts legacy from retrospective achievement to prospective vision.
In today's environment, this may mean embracing strategic anonymity. If privacy concerns would otherwise limit giving, anonymous channels can keep resources flowing while maintaining security. The impact matters more than attribution.
Help clients see themselves as authors of history, not just inheritors of it. Their choices today will echo through generations.
The Path Forward
This moment demands more than incremental adjustments to giving strategies. It calls for a fundamental reimagining of philanthropy's role in creating the world we wish to inhabit.
Your clients stand ready for this evolution. They possess not just the resources but the vision to create meaningful change. What they need is a trusted advisor willing to journey with them through the complexity, the discomfort, and ultimately, the profound satisfaction of transformational giving.
The tools exist—frameworks like DWP’s Reparative Philanthropy™, communities of practice, and a growing ecosystem of organizations ready to deploy capital effectively. Your role is to be the bridge between your clients' highest aspirations and their greatest impact.
This is the work of our time. Not charity, but transformation. Investing in our collective future.
For advisors ready to deepen their practice, consider engaging with the Decolonizing Wealth Project's suite of bespoke consultations and resources, including the foundational text, Decolonizing Wealth, and its companion, the Money as Medicine journal. Our team is ready to support your practice with our proven 1:1 or group coaching to prepare you to facilitate the transformative conversations your clients are ready to have. Reach out to info@decolonizingwealth.com to discuss how the DWP can create tailored experiences for you and your clients.
27 organizations will benefit through Liberated Capital, a fund of Decolonizing Wealth Project, helping to uplift Indigenous efforts across the U.S. to combat the climate crisis.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – November 25, 2024 – Today, the Decolonizing Wealth Project and their funding mechanism, Liberated Capital, announced the distribution of $1 million in grants to 27 Indigenous-led organizations and tribes across the US through their Indigenous Earth Fund (IEF). The funding will support grantees’ efforts to tackle climate change and conservation through traditional Indigenous cultural practices and innovations. Grantees include local organizations working toward ancestral land return, land stewardship and conservation, advocacy, and youth engagement and education.
Since its inception in 2021, IEF has distributed over $4 million in capital to 38 Native-led organizations, and, as a result, has engaged over 200 tribes across the U.S. These grant-making initiatives reflect the Decolonizing Wealth Project’s mission to redirect resources to historically overlooked or marginalized communities, with a focus on supporting traditional Indigenous cultural practices as effective solutions to the climate crisis. Highlights of past grantees who have made significant strides through their climate work as a result of IEF funding include SAGE Development Authority creating the first Indigenous-owned utility-scale wind farm in the U.S; the creation of an Indigenous Storytelling Hub featuring digital shorts and a podcast series set to launch in 2025 by Indigenous Led; dam removal and flow restoration campaigns led by Save California Salmon, and more.
“Indigenous peoples safeguard much of Earth’s biodiversity, yet philanthropy has chronically underfunded their work,” said Edgar Villanueva, CEO of Decolonizing Wealth Project. “Our Indigenous Earth Fund addresses this critical gap by channeling resources to Indigenous climate and conservation leaders who have maintained vital ecological knowledge and practices across generations. This fund reinforces our steadfast commitment to Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination.”
“Thanks to the generous support of Decolonizing Wealth’s Indigenous Earth Fund, the Bering Sea Elders Group has continued to realize our mission of protecting our traditional ways of life, the Bering Sea, and our children’s future,”
— Jaylene Wheeler, Executive Director of the Bering Sea Elders Group.
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