The Ohlone Have Never Forgotten, and We Are Remembering
I have always had a real love for the Brown family and for our many generations in California; it is only recently that I woke up to the fact that I know very little about our family history and our relationship to this land.
My father grew up on the Sacramento River Delta in a place called Walnut Grove. He went to UC Berkeley on an ROTC scholarship and soon after stumbled into commercial real estate in the San Francisco East Bay. I thought our family’s wealth and relationship to land started there, but as I learned more about my family’s migration to this land alongside the history of the dispossession of Indigenous people from their land, it became clear that although ours might be “new wealth,” it’s built on years of generational white privilege and the deep disruption of other cultures.
In the mid-1800s, my family came to California in horse drawn carriages, joining other white settlers on their sometimes violent journeys west. Others came on steamships that sailed down past the tip of South America. Most of my ancestors first arrived in the East Bay and eventually made their way up the Sacramento Delta.
Update from the Executive Director
Happy New Year Hidden Leaf Community,
As we enter 2024, Hidden Leaf is beginning the new year with clarity, intention, and continued commitment to supporting our grant partners and amplifying their work.
Announcing our new website: With that in mind, we are thrilled and excited to launch our new website! Hidden Leaf is grateful to our partners at Change Consulting and YolkWorks for bringing this beautiful website to fruition. We hope the site will make clear what we care about and shine a light on the amazing organizations we are privileged to support. The website will also have resources on transformative change and regular updates from the field. We welcome your collaboration—if we can join forces to help share the good word about your work to impact social and environmental change, please reach out.
Sharpened Theory of Change: Since I joined more than five years ago, we've been wanting to refresh and update our Theory of Change. With support from A. E. Lynch Consulting, we’ve done just that. On our new website, you can find our new, clear and powerful Theory of Change. We want to thank Design Action Collective for the beautiful graphic representation of this work.
As part of this work, we have also refreshed and updated our mission statement, which now more clearly expresses the current evolution of Hidden Leaf and where we are going:
Hidden Leaf promotes inner awareness within liberatory movements in order to advance a more just, ecologically healthy, and compassionate society.
Shifting capital and power: Last year, as part of our five-year strategy, Hidden Leaf contributed more than $2.4 million in grants to critical frontline groups and intermediaries centering and grounding liberatory, spirit-led practices as part of their work and vision for the world we seek. Simultaneously, we made a second-year commitment of more than $1.4 million in community investments, supporting the procurement of vital land and infrastructure; shifting assets from us to important indigenous efforts as a continued effort of repair; contributing to community-led loan funds that will build and circulate capital to build a new economy that works for all and which contributes to planetary flourishing. A full list of our amazing partners can be found on the new website here.
With the leadership of board member Tara Brown, we have also rejuvenated our Investment Policy Statement, which you can find here, to reflect our dynamic approach to all of our investments: grants, community investments, deep impact investments, and more traditional investments. We hope this progressive IPS will be useful to other institutions like us and we welcome your feedback and reflections.
We look forward to updating our website regularly to highlight the important work that movement partners are doing, to be a space where conversations about deep change can be sparked, and to stay better in touch with all of you.
Wishing you all the best in 2024. May it be a year where our communities win big and we throw down hard for them!
With love,
Supriya
For Real Climate Justice, Philanthropy Must Support the Frontlines, Fund Early and Fund Big
Sewcream/Shutterstock
I write this from California, still in a record drought and paradoxically receiving enormous rain — floods and blizzards in places that have rarely, if ever, experienced such weather. And to add to the paradox, we have battled devastating fires, among many other climate-related disasters. Despite this, the actions of those on the front lines of the climate crisis continue to inspire. Because of them, I see a future that is already underway and being forged by environmental justice communities here and around the globe. It is our job as funders to enable bringing this future to fruition now.
We at Hidden Leaf know that one of the most transformative things we can do to bring this beautiful world — one in which we and other living beings in our ecosystems live in harmony with each other and the planet — into existence now is to fund early and fund big.
Power California "Op-ed: Another consequence of the L.A. housing crisis: The Fresno housing crisis"