A single twig breaks, but the bundle of twigs is strong. – Tecumseh
The tradition of giving runs deep in African American communities. From the mutual aid societies formed during enslavement to the church collections that funded the Civil Rights Movement, Black Americans have always understood that our collective survival depends on our willingness to invest in one another. Yet somewhere between necessity and aspiration, we’ve lost the language to teach our children that philanthropy isn’t charity—it’s power.
Teaching African American children ages 5-18 about philanthropy means doing more than dropping coins in a collection plate. It means helping them understand that strategic giving builds the institutions that will protect, educate, and employ them throughout their lives. It means showing them that every dollar they contribute to Black-led organizations is a vote for their own future.
Starting Early: Philanthropy for Elementary Ages (5-10)
Young children understand fairness instinctively. They know when something isn’t right, and they want to help fix it. This natural empathy creates the perfect foundation for introducing philanthropic concepts.
Begin with concrete examples from African American history. Tell them about the Free African Society, founded in 1787 by Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, which provided mutual aid to Black Philadelphians. Explain how enslaved people pooled resources to purchase freedom for family members. These aren’t abstract concepts they’re survival strategies that became institutional frameworks.
Create a family giving jar where children can contribute a portion of their allowance or gift money. Let them research and choose a Black-led organization to support quarterly. This could be a local youth program, a historical preservation society, or an HBCU scholarship fund. The key is giving them agency in the decision-making process. When children see their small contributions combine with others to create meaningful impact, they begin to understand collective power.
Use storytelling to illustrate how institutions are built. Talk about how HBCUs were created because white institutions excluded Black students. Explain how Mary McLeod Bethune started a school with $1.50 and turned it into Bethune-Cookman University. Show them that great institutions often begin with small, consistent contributions from people who understood the long game.
Middle School: Understanding Institutional Building (11-13)
By middle school, children can grasp more sophisticated concepts about how money moves and how power is built. This is when we introduce them to the difference between charity and institutional philanthropy.
Charity addresses immediate needs—feeding the hungry, clothing the poor. Institutional philanthropy builds the structures that create long-term change: schools, hospitals, community development corporations, legal defense funds, policy organizations. Both matter, but only institutional philanthropy shifts power dynamics.
Teach them about the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, established in 1940. Explain how sustained philanthropic support allowed lawyers like Thurgood Marshall to develop the legal strategy that led to Brown v. Board of Education. This wasn’t a one-time donation it was years of investment that transformed American society.
Introduce the concept of endowments and investment income. Too many African American organizations operate in perpetual crisis mode, chasing donations year after year. Show students the difference between an organization with a $100,000 annual budget that must be fundraised every twelve months and an organization with a $2 million endowment generating $80,000 annually in investment income. The second organization can focus on mission instead of survival.
Start a philanthropy club at school or in your community. Let students identify a need in their community and develop a giving circle to address it. They should practice everything: setting fundraising goals, researching organizations, making collective decisions, tracking impact, and understanding how their contributions grow through consistent giving. This hands-on experience transforms abstract concepts into practical skills.
High School: Strategic Power Building (14-18)
High school students are ready to understand philanthropy as a tool for social, economic, and political empowerment. They can analyze power structures and recognize how institutional support or the lack thereof shapes outcomes in Black communities.
Teach them to read institutional budgets and annual reports. Show them how to evaluate whether an organization has sufficient reserves, how much goes to programs versus overhead, and whether they’re building long-term sustainability. This financial literacy is essential for effective philanthropy.
Explore the concept of investment income in depth. Many students don’t realize that major institutions—universities, museums, hospitals—operate primarily on endowment income, not annual fundraising. Harvard’s endowment generated approximately $2.3 billion in investment income in recent years. Imagine if HBCUs collectively had similar resources. Explain that building Black institutional power requires moving beyond the donation mentality to an investment mindset.
Discuss how philanthropy intersects with political power. Show them how think tanks, policy organizations, and advocacy groups are funded. Explain that when Black communities don’t adequately fund our own policy organizations, others define the agenda affecting our lives. The Tea Party movement and its affiliated organizations received hundreds of millions in philanthropic support that reshaped American politics. What might be possible if African American communities invested similarly in organizations advancing our interests?
Examine collective philanthropy models. Traditional philanthropy often centers wealthy donors making large gifts. But collective giving where many people contribute smaller amounts has always been the African American philanthropic model. From church building funds to contemporary giving circles, we’ve understood that our strength lies in numbers. Today’s technology makes collective philanthropy more powerful than ever. A thousand people giving $100 monthly creates $1.2 million annually enough to endow a scholarship, support a community organization, or launch a new initiative.
Encourage students to start giving now, even if it’s $5 monthly to an organization they believe in. The habit matters more than the amount. A teenager who gives $10 monthly from age 16 to 66 contributes $6,000 in direct donations, but if that money is invested and earns average returns, it represents tens of thousands in institutional support.
Teaching African American youth about philanthropy means helping them understand its components and how they work together to build institutional power.
Educational Institutions: HBCUs, independent schools, scholarship funds, and educational support organizations create pathways to opportunity and preserve cultural knowledge. Sustained philanthropic support allows these institutions to build endowments, improve facilities, and attract top faculty and students.
Economic Development: Community development corporations, Black-owned business incubators, affordable housing organizations, and loan funds build wealth and economic stability. These institutions require patient capital and sustained support to create generational impact.
Legal and Policy Organizations: Civil rights organizations, legal defense funds, policy think tanks, and advocacy groups shape the rules that govern society. Inadequate funding in this sector means Black interests remain underrepresented in policy formation.
Cultural Institutions: Museums, historical societies, arts organizations, and media companies preserve our stories and shape narratives. Control over our cultural narrative requires institutional infrastructure that only sustained philanthropy can build.
Health and Social Services: Community health centers, mental health organizations, and social service providers address immediate needs while building the institutional capacity to serve Black communities long-term.
Each component requires different funding strategies. Some need operating support, others need capital for buildings or technology, many need endowment building. Teaching youth to think strategically about where and how they give helps them maximize impact.
The most important lesson we can teach African American children about philanthropy is that it’s not optional it’s essential. Every community that has built institutional power has done so through sustained, strategic philanthropy. Jewish communities support Jewish institutions. Asian American communities support Asian American institutions. African American communities must do the same.
Start conversations early. Make giving a family practice. Teach children to evaluate organizations critically. Help them understand that building Black institutional power is a marathon, not a sprint. Show them that their contributions, combined with others, create the schools, organizations, and institutions that will serve generations to come.
This isn’t about guilt or obligation. It’s about power, self-determination, and legacy. When we teach our children that philanthropy is institution-building, we give them tools to shape their own future rather than waiting for others to determine it for them.
The question isn’t whether African American communities can afford to invest in our institutions. The question is whether we can afford not to.
HBCU Money 
Charlamagne Tha God & Jemele Hill: The Debate They Both Got Right and Wrong
“If you don’t own anything, you don’t have any power.” — Dr. Claud Anderson
When Charlamagne Tha God proclaimed, “Wake your ass up and get to trade school!” after NVIDIA’s CEO Jensen Huang suggested that the next wave of American millionaires will come from plumbers and electricians, he was not simply shouting into the void. He was echoing a national frustration, one rooted in the rising irrelevance of a degree-driven economy that no longer guarantees stability or wealth. Student debt has grown into a generational shackle, corporate loyalty is dead, and a working class once promised a middle-class life for earning a degree has found itself boxed out of the very prosperity it was told to chase. Charlamagne’s message resonated because trades feel like a lifeboat in an economy where white-collar work has become overcrowded, uncertain, and increasingly automated. But Jemele Hill’s response, “There’s nothing wrong with getting a trade, but the people in the billionaire and millionaire class aren’t sending their kids to trade schools” was the kind of truth that punctures illusions. She was not critiquing the trades; she was critiquing the belief that skill, in isolation from ownership, can produce power.
Her point hits harder within African America because our community has historically been guided into labor paths whether trade or degree that position us as workers within someone else’s institutions. It is not a coincidence. As HBCU Money examined in “Washington Was The Horse And DuBois Was The Cart”, the historical tension between industrial education and classical higher learning was never about choosing one or the other. It was about sequencing. Booker T. Washington understood that African America first needed an economic base, a foundation of labor mastery and enterprise capacity. W.E.B. DuBois emphasized intellectual development and leadership cultivation. But Washington was right about one thing: without an economic foundation, intellectual prowess has no institutional home. And without institutional homes, neither the trade nor the degree can produce freedom. African America today is suffering because we abandoned Washington’s base-building and misinterpreted DuBois’s talent development as permission to serve institutions built by others.
Charlamagne’s trade-school enthusiasm fits neatly into Washington’s horse, the practical skill that generates economic usefulness. But Hill’s critique reflects DuBois’s cart understanding how society actually distributes power. The mistake is that neither Washington nor DuBois ever argued that skill alone, or schooling alone, was enough. Both ultimately pointed toward institutional ownership. Neither wanted African Americans to remain permanently in the labor class. The trades were supposed to evolve into construction companies, electrical firms, cooperatives, and land-based enterprises. The degrees were supposed to evolve into banks, research centers, hospitals, and political institutions. What we actually did was pursue skills and credentials not power. We mistook competence for control.
This is why the trades-versus-degrees debate is meaningless without ownership. Becoming a plumber or an electrician provides income, but not institutional leverage. Becoming a lawyer or an accountant provides upward mobility, but not institutional control. A community with thousands of tradespeople and thousands of degreed professionals but without banks, construction firms, land ownership, hospitals, newspapers, media companies, sovereign endowments, or venture capital funds is still a community of laborers no matter how educated or skilled.
This structural truth becomes even clearer when viewed through the lens of how the wealthiest Americans use education. HBCU Money’s analysis, “Does Graduate School Matter? America’s 100 Wealthiest: 44 Percent Have Graduate Degrees”, observes that while nearly half of America’s wealthiest individuals do hold graduate degrees, the degrees themselves are not the source of wealth. They are tools of amplification. They work because the individuals earning them already have ownership pathways through family offices, endowments, corporations, foundations, and networks that translate education into power. Graduate school matters when you have an institution to run. It matters far less when your degree leads you into institutions owned by others.
African American graduates rarely inherit institutions; they inherit responsibility to institutions that do not belong to them. So the degree becomes a ladder into someone else’s building. And trades, stripped of the communal ownership networks they once fed, become a ladder into someone else’s factory, subcontracting chain, or municipal maintenance operation. We are always climbing into structures that someone else owns.
This cycle was not always our trajectory. The tragedy is that HBCUs once created institutional ecosystems where skill and knowledge were used to build African American economic capacity—not merely transfer it outward. As HBCU Money argued in “HBCU Construction: Revisiting Work-Study Trade Training”, many HBCUs historically operated construction, carpentry, and trade programs that literally built the campuses themselves. Students learned trades while constructing residence halls, dining facilities, barns, academic buildings, and infrastructure that the institution would own for generations. That model kept money circulating internally, built hard assets, created institutional wealth, and established capacity for African American contracting firms. It produced not just skilled laborers it produced apprentices, foremen, entrepreneurs, and business owners. It produced Washington’s economic foundation.
The abandonment of these models created a void. Trades became disconnected from institutional development. Degrees became pathways to external employment. And HBCUs which once trained students to build institutions were transformed into pipelines feeding corporate America and federal agencies that rarely reinvest into African American institutions at scale. This is why the trade-school-versus-college debate is hollow. Both are simply skill paths. Without ownership, both lead to dependence.
Charlamagne’s sense of urgency comes from watching African American millennials and Gen Z face an economy with fewer footholds than their parents had. But urgency alone cannot produce strategy. Hill, consciously or unconsciously, pointed out that the wealthy understand something we have not fully grasped: the ultimate purpose of skill, whether manual or intellectual, is to strengthen one’s own institutional ecosystem not someone else’s. The wealthy do not send their children to college to find jobs; they send them to college to learn to oversee family enterprises, influence policy, govern philanthropic endowments, and maintain social capital networks. A wealthy family’s electrician child does not go into electrical maintenance he goes into managing the electrical firm the family owns.
This is the distinction African America must confront. We keep choosing roles instead of building infrastructure. We choose jobs. We do not choose institutions. We chase wages. We do not chase ownership. This is not because African Americans lack talent or ambition. It is because integration disconnected African America from its economic development logic. In the push to integrate into white institutions, we abandoned the very institutions that anchored our communities—banks, hospitals, insurance companies, manufacturing cooperatives, and HBCU-based work-study and trade ecosystems.
The future requires rebuilding a Washington-first, DuBois-second model. The horse that is the economic base must return. The cart that is the intellectual class must attach to institutions that the community owns. Trades should feed African American contracting firms, electrical cooperatives, and infrastructure companies that service Black communities and employ Black workers. Degrees should feed African American financial institutions, research centers, HBCU endowments, political think tanks, and venture funds. Every skill, trade, or degree must be tied to institutional expansion.
Otherwise, we will continue mistaking income for empowerment, education for sovereignty, and representation for ownership. Trade or degree, individual success means little when the community remains institutionally dependent. Wealth that dies with individuals is not power; it is a temporary advantage. Power is continuity. Power is structure. Power is ownership.
The choice before African America is not between trade and degree. It is between labor and ownership. No skill, not plumbing, not engineering, not medicine, not law creates power without institutions. We are not lacking talented individuals; we are lacking the institutional architecture that turns talent into sovereignty.
Charlamagne spoke to survival. Hill spoke to structure. Washington spoke to foundation. DuBois spoke to leadership. The synthesis of all four is the path forward. Without institutions, African America will always remain the labor in someone else’s empire even when the labor is highly paid, well-trained, and excellently credentialed. Only ownership transforms skill into power, and without rebuilding our institutional ecosystem, we will continue to debate trades and degrees while owning neither the companies nor the universities.
Ownership is the only path. Without it, neither the horse nor the cart will ever move.
Disclaimer: This article was assisted by ChatGPT.
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