2021The Voice
Story by Tre Johnson | Photography by Poochie Collins
Amid the chaos of summer 2020 — when everything felt like an apocalypse — Edgar Villanueva had a Hollywood moment. There he was, striding forth as he emerged from a plume of black and gray smoke, surrounded by a rainbow-colored platoon of COVID-masked protesters bearing signs that read, “Black Lives Matter!,” “Defund the Police!,” and “Open Your Eyes!”.
You can see it, right? Silent police cars with their siren lights swirling, licking the faces and bodies of the protesters and the walls and windows of nearby buildings. Officers and national guardsmen with riot gear and shields pushing against the crowds. And there, in a parting of smoke and mayhem, comes Villanueva.
Even if you’re not familiar with Villanueva, a globally recognized author, activist and expert on social justice philanthropy, I suspect you can still picture the moment. 2020 in particular was in need of a healer. It needed a voice of reason — we were starved of reasonable voices — and if there’s a moniker that’s maybe best to call this healer, it might be The Voice.
Villanueva refers to himself as “a bridge” — which feels apt for someone who wrote 2018’s Decolonizing Wealth, a book that made explicit connections between not only money and oppression, but wealth and healing, institutions and oppression, and, perhaps most poignantly, conscience and budgets. It also offered hopeful alternatives to the dynamics of colonization in the philanthropic and social finance sectors, arguing that philanthropy’s operational and cultural conscience needed to be re-evaluated or, in the more popular parlance of the day, dismantled.
The book’s message resonated with many marginalized people who find themselves either working in, or receiving a slice of, the Colonizer’s American Pie; it also merged the heart and the mind to show the possibility of a wide open canvas of restorative healing by the very same Pie.
The success of the book led Villanueva to launch, in 2018, the Decolonizing Wealth Project, to “disrupt the existing systems of moving and controlling capital;” and then, one year later, Liberated Capital, a fund that “invites individuals and organizations to give through a reparations model that trusts and supports the leadership of those most impacted by historical and systemic racism.”
On the day we’re talking over Zoom, Villanueva is wearing a T-shirt with Whitney Houston’s face on it; an artist whose music was also often the source of healing; bridging stories and emotions that sometimes elude people. And it seems clear that, in this moment, we’re in need of healers and bridge builders. And making connections is something that Villanueva excels at.
Villanueva is a Southern boy who grew up in meager circumstances. But, by the age of 28, he was leading a multi-million dollar portfolio overseeing a family trust that sought to have an impact in the world through charitable giving. Villanueva has seen poverty, community, identity, wealth, giving, receiving and destruction and reconstruction. He has honed the muscle of straddling contradictory, tense, worlds. His background also means he’s developed a world of empathy and reflection that he’s now burdened to do something with — as is often the case with the marginalized. And the act of doing means that he’s a bridge, and bridges, as we know, get trod on. But if it brings the world closer to healing and provides a path to some kind of cure, maybe it’s worth it?
“Whitney was a bridge. She used her voice as a bridge,” says Villanueva. For a bit, we talk about Whitney. We agree that, as great as her songs were, Whitney struggled to tell her own story through her music, offering only glimpses here and there.
Villanueva has the sort of Southern ease and charisma of someone who is part therapist, part preacher, and the quiet pull of someone you’d spill your secrets to over drinks.
He knows a lot about the philanthropic world now, but that wasn’t always the case. Villanueva was raised by two women: his mother and grandmother. “I was the original gift”, he says. “My mom gave me to my grandmother at 18 so that she could go off to do Job Corps and be in a better position to take care of herself and her son.” Yet very early on in life, thanks to his mother in particular, Villanueva came to see the value of giving gifts, too. After they relocated to Raleigh, almost immediately his mother started spending Saturdays knocking on doors, inviting families in their community to come to church the next day. Many of the households were struggling to balance childcare, transportation and community, so Villanueva’s mother started arranging for buses to pick up children from their homes and bring them to church. At its height, Villanueva’s mother’s efforts were bringing in “300 kids every Sunday,” he says.
Years later, when he was out in his hometown shopping at the grocery store, some of the kids who had been on that bus route would stop him and thank him and his mother for the gift of community. They would remember how Sheila and a young Villanueva, who was often dressed as a clown and giving out candy, got them super excited about the idea of boarding the bus.
It’s perhaps crass to say that dressing in a clown suit and passing out candy might have set Villanueva up well for eventually working in philanthropy. Other things helped too: the years of formal education at places like the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the years he spent with his mother knocking on doors.
“I saw a lot of stuff during that time,” says Villanueva. “I’d walk through people’s homes, stepping over beer cans.” But, Sheila and her son were also poor and struggling, and they never judged the people inside those houses. “Our lives were helping those kids,” he says.
There were also the years he spent accompanying his mother when she cleaned the homes of wealthy people as a domestic worker. While you might expect Villanueva to have had an uncharitable read of the rich people whose possessions his mother wiped and waxed, he managed to see something different. He would ask the homeowners how they had got the houses, the diplomas, the networks, the wealth. And he began to see beyond what they possessed to see who they were. “I also saw that people with money had problems,” he says. “They lost kids, they had pain, they went through divorces”.
As we talk, Villanueva, who turned down Princeton to attend a seminary school in Jackson, Mississippi, pauses, much as a priest might do to underscore his ministry. Then he continues: “When you think about the humanity of people, folks who have money experience pain, loss. You understand that pain is pain and that pain is real for everyone.”
George Floyd’s nearly nine-minute long slow murder and Breonna’s death were tipping points for people of color and their barometer of what they would no longer tolerate. Aggravating all this was the series of slights, of small charities that less-affected people began to tithe during the moment: the endless “no need to reply” texts; the unsolicited, surprising notifications of a money transfer; the sudden proliferation on social media of somber black squares; the forest of Linktree listings in social media bios. In in-boxes, there was an almost daily barrage of everyone from your pet-store chain to your wireless carrier issuing reflective, earnest statements vowing to recognize the moment and to do better. Seemingly overnight, the entire world became a gift-giving foundation, and, within our microbubbles and communities, there was a sleeper-cell effect as many guilted and gregarious gestures turned our coworkers, college friends, close friends and common folks into mini-program officers, granting Black and brown people all manner of gifts.
Another cell was awakened too. In droves, Black and brown people, long silent and suffering among the same forces and friends that now wanted to be seen as healers and helpers after a long history as overseers and oppressors, began pushing back. “Black @___” pages took hold on Instagram. Stories of Black people resigning, walking out, and speaking up about their communities and their workplaces abounded.
The media began listing the anemic numbers around representation and diversity within various industries, as well as in their own organizations. A call for everything — from boards of trustees, CEOs, mastheads, chancellors, to restaurant groups — to be unseated, reseated, shutdown, re-examined, and held accountable started right-sizing the do-gooder narrative that was overtaking the moment of reckoning.
Villanueva was familiar with all of this, and he watched as the narrative he had experienced, and documented in his book, played itself out on a much bigger national stage. As a recovering philanthropist (after years in philanthropy’s culture, “it was so bad I developed alopecia”, he says), he understood why and where these cries were coming from.
Villanueva says that during his time in various roles at prestigious institutions and foundations focused on charitable giving and ‘social impact’ he was constantly put in his place. “I was punished in these places for getting out of line,” he says. When he went off — off institutional script, off on his own script that was based on his values, off an implicit pact of compliance — he was often reminded that “thousands of people would be happy to take my place”.
Decolonizing touches on these traumatic stories and those of others like him, like us: suited and booted to sit in seats of presumed power, yet constantly assaulted by the everyday oppression that comes with trying to bridge identities, impacts, values and liberation. For a man who saw the ability of money and wealth to transform lives, Villanueva began to wonder if the work was doing him and the communities he cared about more harm than good. He didn’t want to give up philanthropy, but he saw that the pain caused by the industry was no longer in his ministry.
To continue on, he had to look inward.
“If we think about money and wealth and the pain that it has caused — built on the backs of Black people in this country, land grabs, and genocide, is there a world where wealth can be flipped on the paradigm and used to actually repair that harm?,” he says. “We can’t undo it, but it can be used to repair it, if we are moving money to where the pain is the worst, because we know it’s the worst in communities of color.”
Villanueva began to see a way forward when he took a break from philanthropy and went back home, to North Carolina, where, in a spiritual conversation with an elder, he told her, “I didn’t know what to do with my life.” But she did. “She told me ‘that money was my medicine’, which threw me for a loop.”
Money has been a huge part of our musical narratives, especially in music genres like hip-hop and R&B. It has been the source of pain, freedom, corruption, and power, particularly in communities where the presence or absence of money can mean the difference between meals, lights, college, clothes, walking or driving to work, housing, being seen, being heard.
Villanueva was familiar with this. When he engaged with historically and systemically negatively impacted communities, the shade and the mistrust he received at times were painful, real and valid.
“I got it,” he says, as he talks about the experiences of being close to people who often felt like, or were his own. “Colonization, exploitation, the patronization of rich people giving to poor people and the dynamics around it made it really hard for people to believe in this construct and imagine that there could be anything other than pain and trauma,” he says.
But being proximate to wealth made him understand there were possible solutions. “Decolonizing Wealth gave a language and framework and a place to have conversations that actually surprised me — naming white supremacy explicitly has become the norm. It really opened the door for some deep reckoning about the way philanthropy has been problematic and perpetuated colonial dynamics in communities,” he says. At the book’s core — and it is part of his ongoing work — is a steadfast belief that “money is medicine.”
When it was released, the book was in lockstep with the early murmurings of a racial reckoning. Movements like #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter meant that American society was, albeit uncomfortably, losing its innocence and avoidance of its much darker truths and places of pain. All around society, old structures, figures, statues and beliefs were being shaken to their core. And the country had a renewed vigor for division and disorientation.
“When it came out, I feel like there was this period of reckoning. For the first time, maybe ever, in the philanthropic sector, the lights came on,” says Villanueva. Since then, those lights have, of course, flickered occasionally as threatened organizations and individuals of power seek to regain their footings all over again.
The last few years have given Villanueva some measured optimism about how we’re building a bridge to a potential new world. Liberated Capital has generated a fund that, in less than two years, has donated millions of dollars to organizations focused on liberating and sustaining historically and systematically oppressed communities.
The summer of 2021 we saw the publication of a second edition of Decolonizing Wealth, just as the country begins to emerge from, or perhaps return to, the constraints of the pandemic and the inequalities it exposed. As the smoke clears this time, though, Villanueva and a choir of healers seem more poised to address the crisis we’re in.
“‘Didn’t We Almost Have It All’ is my favorite Whitney song”, he tells me. “I mean, it’s a song I go to for every occasion, moment, transformation, good time, bad time I’ve ever been in. I sing it all the time.” As we talk more about Whitney — about her voice being a gift and curse; a liberatory tool of hope that often expressed some hard truths about what it meant to be both seemingly powerful and yet still under the control of others — we both wonder about how this time, or as you often see and hear in critical healing conversations, This Time, Will Be Different.
“I’m no fool”, Villanueva says in his disarming Southern drawl. “I know these companies and organizations don’t always mean it. But things feel like they’re getting better. I’m doing some work with private companies, with foundations, with some entertainment people in Hollywood. There are still, at the end of the day, a lot of conversations and actions that are happening. A lot of people are waking up and realizing that this shit” — he waves around to indicate the world beyond our computer screens — “isn’t working anymore, you know?”
Villanueva leans back and, for a moment, Whitney’s euphoric face comes into sharper focus on the screen. Her eyes seem to look skyward and there’s a light in them. Villanueva exhales and she sinks back into the recesses of his shirt. “And that gives me hope,” he says. U
To learn more visit www.decolonizingwealth.com | Follow Edgar on Instagram.
Tre Johnson is a writer focused on the connective tissue of who we are, how we live, what we consume and what it means through examining race, culture and politics, his work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Vox, The New York Times, Slate, Vanity Fair, The Grio and other outlets. Tre has provided media commentary via appearances on CNN Tonight with Don Lemon; CBS Morning Show; PBS NewsHour; NPR’s Morning Edition and various podcasts. Tre is an alum of Pahara NextGen and the 2019 Jack Jones ‘Culture, Too’ Writing Fellowship.