Gratitude in the realm of fundraising exists to please the donor. Those of us who work in social impact are tasked with telling the stories of our programmes — stories engineered to produce emotional affect, primarily through pity or aspiration. At the crux of it, the donor must feel good about themselves. And so, in practice, we must all be grateful for their generosity. We must perform it. We must embody it.

But after spending the first years of my career as a fundraiser — and identifying as a Jamaican-born, British woman — something did not sit well with me. Most charity in the UK disproportionately supports marginalised people of colour. And when I held that fact up against the context in which charity sits, I found it very hard to be grateful. I want to zero in on why.

I have spoken at length in previous pieces about the pride I take in my African ancestry — the sense of strength I draw from the resilience and bravery of my ancestors. That pride lives alongside an embedded rage. A rage for the profound lack of atonement from the British Empire — the empire that extracted the wealth, the free labour, the suffering, and the sheer brutality of my people, and returned it in slim pickings with feigned apologies and brief acknowledgements.

The ground I walk on in Brixton is built from that wealth. The palaces tourists gaze at were built from gold mined from landscapes I should have been reared in, if it weren’t for colonialism.

Here is the reality in a few sentences.

Scholars estimate the British Empire extracted over £35 trillion in wealth from its colonies across Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia — through enslaved labour, stolen natural resources, and the organised theft of entire economies. Britain extracted an estimated £7.5 trillion from African countries through the slave trade alone. When abolition finally came in 1833, the British government borrowed £20 million to compensate — not the 800,000 enslaved Africans who were freed, but the slave owners, for the loss of their so-called property. That debt was not paid off until 2015. Which means that Black British people — descendants of the enslaved — spent generations paying taxes that serviced a loan taken out to compensate the people who owned their ancestors. Not one penny of reparations has ever been paid to the people who were enslaved or to their descendants. And in 2014, when a coalition of fifteen Caribbean nations presented a formal reparations plan to the UK government, the response was simple: off the table. If you take the Brattle estimate for slavery alone (~$107 trillion) against the roughly $1–2 billion actually delivered for colonial-era wrongs specifically, recipients have received well under 0.01% of what’s been calculated as owed. Even using more conservative academic estimates, the delivered amount is a rounding error.

Meanwhile, today, more money flows out of Sub-Saharan Africa than flows in. In 2015 alone, over $203 billion left the continent — extracted through corporate profit repatriation, debt servicing, and the ongoing economic structures of what some researchers are now calling a second empire. The aid that does arrive — the slim pickings of donor benevolence — does not come close to covering the gap.

So. Forgive me if I’m not particularly grateful.

Because the ground I walk on and the life I live are built from ongoing extraction. Marginalised communities, in the grand scheme of things, never see that wealth returned — and the effects are intergenerational, profound, and deliberate. Perpetually impoverished. Perpetually positioned as recipients of someone else’s charity. Perpetually asked to smile and say thank you.

It is in that reality that I say this clearly: women of colour and marginalised communities around the world should not live, work, or walk in the energy of indentured servitude. We are not the recipients of generosity. We are the inheritors of what was stolen.

And let us be precise about what that benevolence actually looks like in practice.

Despite Black, Asian and minority ethnic communities making up around 14% of the UK population, independent funders — trusts and foundations — consistently fail to distribute anything close to a fair share of grants to those communities. Research found that up to 87% of micro and small voluntary sector organisations led by Black and minority ethnic people did not have enough funds to last more than three months during the pandemic — and were simultaneously the least likely group to receive financial support. Not because the need wasn’t there. Because the architecture of charitable giving was never designed with us at the centre.

When state funding for the voluntary sector declined, the reduction in income reported by Black and minority ethnic-led organisations was between 25% and 28% — significantly higher than the sector average. The institutions with the most resources pulled back furthest from the communities with the least.

And when money does come, it comes with conditions. Short-term funding cycles and exclusion from capital opportunities continue to leave many Black-led organisations in survival mode — unable to scale their impact or build lasting financial independence. You get a grant for twelve months. You spend ten of those months reporting on it and three trying to find the next one. There is no pathway to power in that model. There is only the management of perpetual crisis.

There are documented cases of Black charity leaders being consulted by funders to help design grant programmes — then rejected when they applied to those same funds. Asked for your expertise and then told you’re not experienced enough. Your lived knowledge extracted for free, your application declined. If that is not a microcosm of the entire colonial project, I don’t know what is.

White-led organisations hold budgets that are on average 24% larger than those led by Black people. And when it comes to unrestricted donations — the kind of funding that actually allows an organisation to make its own decisions — Black-led organisations receive 76% less than their white-led counterparts. Seventy-six percent. Not a gap. A chasm. And within that chasm, we are still expected to perform gratitude.

The 2020 Black Lives Matter movement produced a spike in giving to Black community organisations. But the increase was followed by a marked decrease in the months that followed — exposing the donations for what they were: conscience money, crisis philanthropy, here today and defunded by December. And still, we are asked to write a thank you letter.

Very often, marginalized and racialised communities build their organisations out of a desperate need to address a social ill that the state refuses to name, let alone fix. We create out of necessity what institutions will not provide. And then we are invited to compete — on unequal terms, through inaccessible processes, assessed by people with no proximity to our realities — for a fraction of the resources required to address problems that were, in many cases, created by the same institutions now dispensing the grants.

In the context of GirlDreamer’s Dream Fund, we are acutely aware of these realities — because we live them. We are ourselves a marginalised organisation. Twelve rejection letters and counting. Twelve times told, in the polished language of grant criteria, that what we are doing is somehow not quite good enough. And each time, we have had to hold that disappointment alongside the irrational, necessary, non-negotiable belief that it is. Because if we don’t hold it, no one else will.

What makes it more painful is the simultaneous task we carry: having to deliver that same rejection to multitudes of women of colour who are trying to do exactly what we are — trying to interrupt the cycle, trying to improve this broken illusion of the circular economy. The cycle of deprivation does not skip a generation because someone filed a grant application. It requires structural interruption. And yet we are perpetually under-resourced to deliver it.

Because in every facet of society, we are underinvested in. Female-founded businesses receive just 2% of venture capital funding in the UK. And when race enters the equation, the picture becomes almost incomprehensible: Black women founders raised just 0.14% of all venture capital investment over the entire decade between 2013 and 2023. Not 14%. Not 1.4%. Zero point one four percent. Over ten years. A 2023 British Business Bank report found that only 3% of individuals in senior investment positions in UK VC were women from ethnic minority backgrounds — and zero Black women were found in positions of seniority at the time of the study. The people deciding who deserves capital do not look like us. They never have. And the numbers reflect that perfectly.

From venture capital to the charity sector, from boardrooms to grant committees — women of colour are underinvested across the board. This is not a coincidence. It is architecture.

But beyond the funding gap, there is something even more insidious at work. We are all, in various ways, subjected to the longer con of indentured servitude — dressed up as opportunity.

Take the mortgage. Take a university degree. What is consistent across Western societies is the structural requirement to keep the population indebted to an elite that has no intention of releasing that debt. In exchange, you are promised a job, a home you may technically own by the time you retire, good health, security. The slim promise of eventually arriving somewhere worth calling a life. None of it is guaranteed in any absolute sense. And the cruelest part is that you are so consumed by the future — the pension, the promotion, the postcode — that you cannot be present in the one life you are actually living. We are perpetually reaching toward timestamps that don’t really exist. Chasing ideals designed by institutions that profit from the chasing. All to reach some semblance of being worth it. When worth was never the thing being measured.

So I am telling you to stop. To smell the roses. To become your own anthropologist.

Observe the world as you know it. Not as you have been told to know it — filtered through syllabuses and performance reviews and the quiet authority of people who had the luxury of deciding what knowledge looks like. Observe it as you have lived it. Form your hypotheses. Test them against your reality. The evidence is all around you. It always has been.

What was trained out of you was the ability to trust that evidence. Specifically, the evidence of your own emotions, your own worth, your own knowing. That trust is systematically extracted through education and beyond — through the constant requirement to seek validation from teachers, professors, employers, and institutions before ever being permitted to validate yourself. We are taught from childhood that our internal compass needs countersigning. That our experience only counts once an authority has stamped it credible.

That is not education. That is conditioning. And it has been extraordinarily effective.

The act of reclaiming your own witness — of saying I see what I see, I know what I know, and I do not require permission to say so — is, for women of colour especially, a radical one. Not because the knowledge is radical. But because the world has spent considerable energy convincing you that it isn’t yours to hold.

So decide for yourself what you want from life — without seeking the answer from everywhere but inside yourself. There are so many ways to live that have nothing to do with corporate slavery or performing gratitude for crumbs. Make sure you incorporate what brings you joy. Walk tall like you own the place, because in a very real sense, your ancestors built it.

Something we hear often from GirlDreamer’s Dream Fund alumni is this: we want to invest in social impact, but we will not break our backs for the cause. And they are right to say it. The charity sector is itself rigged. The amount of stress required to keep the lights on whilst trying to run the actual work is insurmountable by design. Gen Z understands this clearly — they are simply refusing to surrender their bodies and minds to employment that does not value their wholeness. The corporate ladder is no longer aspirational. And sadly, neither is the idea of working yourself into the ground for a cause, when the cause itself is trapped inside a system that ensures you can never quite catch up.

But here is where it gets complicated. And I think it needs to be said.

The progress made in Western societies over the last fifty or so years is still remarkably new. And as we are seeing everywhere — it is fragile. The freedoms that exist here, however imperfect and structurally compromised, are not universal. That is, in part, what white privilege looks like in practice: not bombs dropping on your head, but a systematic, slower dismantling — social welfare systems designed to keep you just comfortable enough not to revolt. The threat is real, but it is diffuse. And that diffusion is the point.

Which is why I am not simply telling you to rest. I am inviting you to think more clearly about what you are resting from — and what you are resting toward. Because the people of Palestine, Sudan and the Congo are not afforded the language of self-care. Neither were my ancestors. They do not get to choose between their welfare and their freedom. That is not a reason to feel guilty for resting. It is a reason to rest with intention. To let the stillness be generative rather than simply escapist.

Anything truly radical is not fought without cost. That has always been true. But the first act of resistance — the one that makes everything else possible — is the refusal to internalise the lie that you are not enough. That your ideas are not worthy. That the game being rigged says something about your value.

It does not. Your value is inherent. It was never theirs to grant. Walk tall, with pride, and understand that you have every right to be here — not because the system has decided to make room, but because the room was always yours.

Emma Bloomfield