Edgar Villanueva: Money as sacred medicine (ep337)

What would change if we viewed money as sacred, as a potential form of medicine? And how do the incentives embedded within the world of philanthropy act as barriers for it to catalyze deep transformations?

In this episode, we welcome Edgar Villanueva, a globally recognized author, activist, and expert on social justice philanthropy. Edgar is the author of the bestselling book Decolonizing Wealth and the founder and principal of Decolonizing Wealth Project and Liberated Capital.

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Musical feature: Trust The Sun by The Awakening Orchestra

“If we could use money in a different way, towards a healing, reparative purpose, then money actually can be sacred, something that could be used as medicine.”

— EDGAR VILLANUEVA

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Transcript:

Note: *Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Edgar Villanueva: I am from North Carolina. I'm an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe, which is a tribe situated in the southeastern part of the state there. That’s part of my growing up there with the type of mother that I had who was both culturally influenced by our Native culture, but also from our faith tradition [to be] a person that was very engaged in community service.

We spent a lot of time in the community taking care of people and taking care of children in the neighborhood. That was just sort of what was taught to me that I had a responsibility to give back. Although we were very poor, we were generous with what we had. I was taught different faith traditions such as tithing in the church that 10 percent of everything that you earned belonged to God. You had to give it back.

So, some of those fundamental teachings and inspiration from my mother pushed me toward a career in the nonprofit sector. It was pretty early in my career. I was coming out of grad school, having worked for a number of years in health equity, health, justice-focused nonprofits. I was recruited by a foundation and began my first role in institutional philanthropy when I was 28 years old at a foundation there, and that was kind of how it all happened. A lot of folks at that time didn't plan on careers and philanthropy, we all kind of stumbled into the field.

It's increasingly become a place where more folks aspire to work. But back then, which kind of dating myself, almost 20 years ago, we just kind of stumbled into these opportunities. Once I got into the field, I began to really understand more what my job actually was.

Kamea Chayne: I'm aware that early on, you faced an identity crisis after you began working in philanthropy, which led you eventually to the idea of viewing money as medicine. Can you talk more about the internal struggles you were called to confront and what you mean by working with money as medicine?

Edgar Villanueva: Yeah, I think at a certain point when I got inside of what some people refer to as the “ivory tower.” I was moving millions of dollars a year, which was quite an interesting space to be in as a person who did not grow up around wealth or money. There were lots of privileges and perks that came with the job, having that access to resources and power. I really took my job seriously, too, to really follow through with the mission to move money to places where I saw the need was the greatest and where people were doing fantastic work.

I began to see that things weren't always adding up. The majority of the resources we were moving were going to the same network of large, prominent organizations.

Very few people of color were benefiting from the resources, and there was no intentional work happening to direct resources in a way that was inclusive. And I, at a certain point in time, begin to feel a little bit disillusioned. Honestly, I felt like I had been sort of having my hand slapped a few times and I was told to keep my head down and do my job when I asked questions or pushed back in ways around how things were operating. At a certain point in time, I left the field for a period and was seeking counsel from an elder of mine in North Carolina named Donna.

I remember meeting with her and saying, “Donna, I just don't know if philanthropy is the place for me. I've done some good work, but it's actually just a lot of politics and things that feel yucky to me. I don't know if it's the place where I can have the most impact.” Maybe money is this dirty thing. When you're working with money, people just behave in strange ways. So I'm looking and searching for a different place where I can have influence in the world.

It was in that conversation that Donna actually said to me that the medicine that had chosen me was money and that set me on a tailspin to really understand fully what she meant. Because, you know, here I am thinking that money is something that is this evil force in the world. There were a lot of politics and power struggles around money. She was equating money to medicine, to something that is really sacred in our communities. That's something that's a life-giving force, something that restores balance.

I began to understand at that moment that I had actually been called to this work and that it wasn't about the money. It was actually about us as people, people who invented money. It was about how we have used money historically to harm communities and to cause division and separation.

If we could use money in a different way, towards a healing, reparative purpose, then money actually can be sacred, something that could be used as medicine.

Kamea Chayne: What a beautiful reframe to honor and recognize its potential to aid our collective healing. A critical part of your work has been to situate the role of philanthropy inside of the historical context, which essentially gave way to its birth and rise. What made this backdrop so important for you to center in discourses on philanthropy—perhaps to remind people what it really should be about?

Edgar Villanueva: When I started my career, I was working at a foundation that was the office was on an old plantation in North Carolina, and it was literally that physical presence of everyday driving into this plantation, to this beautiful place, and knowing the history there and understanding that through the taking of land from Indigenous folks in that community, through the labor of slaves that had built wealth for this family, this dynasty of old money tobacco, the Reynolds family, all of the policies and systems that have been built to privilege this family that led to the vast accumulation of wealth.

I could not, for the life of me, understand or justify, when I began to try to fund in Black communities, why it was so hard, right? I literally could see the direct correlation between that history and the contributions that people of color made that led to this wealth, and now those communities who not benefiting in a fair way from that wealth. So for me, that's such an important element for us all to understand...

Behind money, behind wealth, and behind the privilege that we all enjoy at some level in this country, there is a history.

We now see it even more in the past couple of years and really in 2020 with the pandemic, where the richest folks in this country got even wealthier while folks who really have been struggling saw more and more poverty. There's a history behind this wealth gap that we see. There is a reason that this gap continues to grow and especially why people of color, Black and Indigenous specifically in the communities that I work in, grossly disproportionately experience that gap.

So I truly believe that in order to change the future, to come up with solutions, and to create a world in which we all can thrive, that deeply depends on understanding how we got here and understanding the wrongs that need to be repaired so that we don't continue to repeat that history.

Kamea Chayne: Right. So it's really raising the important questions, like how these few individuals and corporations and foundations have amassed so much wealth to even be able to give back today.

As a part of your vision of how we can heal, you bring in the role of apologizing. Especially within a field like philanthropy, I think people might feel like this work is all about giving and doing good. So what is there to apologize for?

I'd love for you to share more about how you've witnessed the power of accountability and apologies in support of healing beyond just the transaction of providing funding and how perhaps you've seen people's mindset shift from giving to a firm once superiority and power over towards seeing this work as giving to heal and make amends?

Edgar Villanueva: Yeah, it's the steps to healing that I often talk about in my work—one of them being apologizing—that are really rooted and grounded in thinking about how we repair relationships and they come from Indigenous practices of restorative justice. Apologizing is just really critical, and it is really an expression of deeply understanding and taking accountability and ownership for what has happened in the past.

So when it comes to money and foundations, we have to be honest that although philanthropy does all types of good in the world...

I'm not anti-philanthropy. I can go on and on about the critical role the sector plays in advancing all types of good in the world. But we also have to hold the complexity that philanthropy, as it exists as a $1 trillion dollar industry in this country, is a byproduct of an economic system that has been extremely extractive and harmful to communities.

So in order to repair the relationship with community in philanthropy, and with many other sectors that I've seen following suit around taking ownership and apologizing, we have to acknowledge and apologize for where the wealth came from, almost always from the theft of land and resources and the exploitation of low-wage workers. I think apologies are due for how wealth has been maneuvered out of appropriate taxation and really how a lot of folks with wealth have shirked their responsibility for paying taxes and providing for the common welfare and putting resources into the public system that would pay for infrastructure and public schools and eldercare and all of that.

It's really about acknowledging and saying you're sorry for what has gone down, for being complicit in that system that continues to benefit a small number of people in this country. As with any relationship, if there's something that's broken, if there's something that's misunderstood, if there is something that has been done that hurts the other party, apologizing is a profound step that we can take to begin to repair those relationships.

Kamea Chayne: And certainly, just giving apologies is definitely not enough. But I also feel like it can't be glossed over because there's the important human element of healing relationships through taking accountability and responsibility for the traumas that certain people may have disproportionately caused.

Broadly speaking, as we discussed, inside of this extractive system, those who have the most financial wealth to give away or give back are those who have historically exploited, extracted, and stolen the most. So with this in mind, I've been thinking about the idea of being a changemaker or a change agent, and that a lot of wealthy philanthropists of the one percent are striving to set the agenda of what change for our future may look like.

This gets me to question, is philanthropy really an industry of change where the idea of doing good is what is being bought and sold, shaped, and then funded and materialized? And by extension, given how philanthropy came to be and who was behind a lot of this giving disproportionately, might the idea of what doing good even means been watered down or influenced to align with the extractive system so that it doesn't fundamentally challenge those feeding these resources in the first place?

Edgar Villanueva: Yeah, I mean, there's a lot to unpack in there, and I think questioning the net value of philanthropy, in general, is sort of what you're getting at. I think it's a very valid question.

Philanthropy as an industry does a lot of good, right? However, within the same confines of this industry, there's a lot of bad things that are happening or that are actually, in real-time, harming communities and perpetuating injustice. So it's really challenging to kind of exist in the system and to hold those complexities, where we're doing good with our right hand, but with the left hand, we are doing things that sort of undermine the good that we set out to do.

I give these examples where there are really well-meaning foundations out there in the world who are doing and funding fantastic, really important work, like criminal justice reform, for example, and are bringing a justice lens to that. But these same foundations have investments and endowments that are wrapped up in all types of extractive and harmful industries, including private prisons, which really makes absolutely no sense to me when that's happening.

But it's an industry where the incentives are aligned with capitalism and are aligned with wealth building, which is really focused, for the most part, on getting out of paying taxes and investing in Wall Street to build up these endowments more so than actually putting money into the community. The vast majority of philanthropic capital —money that has escaped taxation, where corporations and wealthy folks get a major tax write off, the vast majority of that capital—we're talking about a trillion dollars here—actually never sees the light of day and never even gets to the community. It's actually invested in private industry to build more wealth.

So that's where the nuance of injustice lies for me. I think we can look at the grant-making and the money that actually gets to communities to point out all types of ways to improve that and to bring a justice lens to that. But the industry overall has a lot of work to do to kind of align with a charitable purpose.

This is what's dangerous and what undermines our democracy: when a wealthy few and corporations can put money into this vehicle, get the tax benefit, without any public benefit.

For the resources that do actually have public benefit, really bring an agenda that can influence our public systems in ways that may be counter to the way that we want to see our society function. So there's a lot in there with the good that philanthropy does. There's a lot of things that we need to be aware of, that we need to kind of call out and hold the sector accountable for.

Kamea Chayne: Certainly not to paint a broad stroke, but to name the more concerning and questionable side. I've been thinking of the Walton family with their interest in wanting to privatize water and the Colorado River and their Walton Foundation, which has given away so much money to organizations working on research and conservation of the river, who have essentially become reliant on that funding. And as the Waltons continue to pursue their agenda of gaining control over the river, those who've been working most closely with the river are becoming metaphorically muzzled in fear of their funding being pulled. And one group actually did have their funding pulled when they became outspoken against other funded projects working to build dams, for example.

On a similar note, I'm also thinking of the Gates Foundation, which gave away an over $11 million grant to MasterCard, whose own revenue tops $15 billion a year, for their initiative to financialize Nairobi, Kenya, and beyond—basically, creating a system where big money can eventually extract wealth out of every financial transaction within local communities.

So these are the types of giving that have been very concerning for me because they are taking advantage, as you said of the tax incentives of giving to set the stage pry open or established markets to then be able to profit off of through their other, for-profit investments and ventures. So with this said, I'm just curious to hear your experience and thoughts on how prevalent this is, relative to the work that is truly in support of healing and regeneration, and any other insights you might share on this in general?

Edgar Villanueva: Yeah, you know, it's a “both, and” situation for me. There are absolutely folks who are abusing the system. It's almost hard to say “abusing” because the system exists and it's legal. We the people allow it to exist, but they are taking advantage of the loopholes and the system has zero accountability on the philanthropic sector. There's such a lack of transparency that even to understand and know about some of the stories you've named, it's really hard to kind of uncover because...

Philanthropy has provided lots of vehicles for people to move money in ways that go under the radar.

The very DNA of this sector in the United States, and for folks who hear this, they should understand that the philanthropic sector in the U.S., is really a unique thing here, but we don't see this in other countries, right? Because it really, absolutely is a wealth-building, tax-avoidance kind of thing that was created here in the States and in the very DNA of this sector where our rich people decided to use money as a P.R. cover-up for very bad things that were happening with their companies. Then those same rich people went to Congress and said, “Hey, we should also get a tax write-off from this.”

There was the birth of this philanthropic industry, which is both covering [things] up and P.R. reputational laundering, as my friend calls it, thinking about ways to actually benefit and build wealth off of those so-called charitable acts. So those motives are in the DNA of this industry.

All that being said, at the same time, I will acknowledge that there are a lot of people who have wealth in this country who are on the right side of history, and especially, I'll tip my hat toward a lot of younger people who are inheriting wealth, who just happen to be born into a family, not by their choice, we don't choose which families we're born into, and they're just handed like large amounts of wealth that are being passed down.

We're seeing the largest generational transfer of wealth happening right now.

Lots of those folks are really thinking about and acknowledging this system that's been rigged in their favor and they want to try to right those wrongs by redistributing that wealth, especially to communities of color, in the form of reparations.

I will say in the last three years with the work that we've been doing, I have been really astonished by some of the ways I see the industry beginning to change, especially with individual donors who I see stepping up. Some of the demands that I made or ideas that I put out into the world three years ago, frankly, I didn't think anyone would ever do them. I was just trying to push buttons and to get people to imagine a different way to use resources. I'm really excited to say that there are a number of organizations that are following through with some of these ideas.

So I'm hopeful. There's a lot of work to be done. I don't want to be naive about that. Definitely, I think the motivations for a lot of people with wealth are in the wrong and are really off, but there are many who are trying to shift this and to use money in a different way. That gives me some level of hope.

Kamea Chayne: That's very affirming for this to come from you. You touched on this earlier, but even for philanthropies that are giving back with principles of reciprocity and really honoring community leadership and self-determination, philanthropies across the board are required to give five percent of their financial capital, and they often invest the rest of the 95 percent in order to have some revenues, so they might at least cover the five percent that they do give.

So I guess my question would be, are investments seeking an ROI in the form of financial gain inherently extractive, given the limiting ways that our current economic system understands and assigns monetary value? And otherwise, how could philanthropies invest the 95 percent in ways that are aligned with healing so that their investments do not end up working against their giving?

Edgar Villanueva: This is like the multi-billion dollar question here that's so important. And you're right.

There is an act of Congress that requires foundations, private foundations to pay out five percent of a three-year rolling average. What's interesting just about that part of the story is that foundations were being started and they weren't even making grants. It took an act of Congress to force foundations to pay out a minimum amount of money, and that five percent that is called the minimum payout rule has become the ceiling that's what most private foundations payout. There have been a number of campaigns to push foundations to do more. Some do. There have also been campaigns to ask Congress to increase the minimum payout rule beyond five percent, which was put in place in 1976. Any time those campaigns start out, foundations organize themselves to squash and kill those bills.

But your question around what's going on with the 95 percent, we know from research that the vast majority of these endowments, these investments are invested actually in harmful and extractive industries. About 85 percent, I believe, (that was the last number that I saw) of the investments are tied up in making weapons, private prisons, fossil fuels. So literally money that was donated, where folks get tax relief, is being invested in private markets that are actually hurting us, which is really the hardest thing for me to get my mind around and to see any type of rationale behind this. We should be taking this to the streets to demand that change.

Now there is, given this terrible problem, this is where we see the most opportunity for improvement. There have been a number of foundations that have committed to aligning their investments 100 percent with their mission and there have been more and more folks who are doing impact investing and those types of things. The truth, though, even with those commitments, it's actually hard because the investment side of the house is completely 100 percent aligned with financial markets and the same type of incentives. So, you know, I've talked with these foundations who have said we're going to invest 100 percent in a way that's mission-aligned, and it's hard.

So folks have kind of settled on where it’s, “well, this is the least amount of harm that we can do,” acknowledging that it's just really hard. I think where we have to go with that is in the short term, continue to push foundations to disclose where they're investing. Many don't even share that information publicly. It should be public. Two, I think we have to continue to push them to divest and to invest in different ways. And three, also just question the perpetuity of foundations.

Why are foundations all about wealth-building and growing endowments versus moving money?

I think more foundations need to examine the need for doing that and to think about spending down and redistributing that wealth and just handing it over to people of color versus building walls around wealth and protecting wealth and being focused on growing endowments. With that extra scrutiny, this is why we see the rise now in donor-advised funds because foundations are beginning to have more and more equity.

So now, instead of starting a foundation, people with wealth can actually go to a fidelity or to any fiscal institution and create a donor advice fund where there are zero restrictions or mandates around payout on DAFs, the donor-advised funds, and now the vast majority of philanthropic capital actually sits in those vehicles. Fewer people are starting foundations like they did years ago.

Kamea Chayne: I was also curious to hear, from your experience and knowledge, are philanthropies generally growing in the overall financial capital that they steward, or are they usually decreasing in the amount of money that they hold with an intention of maybe one day, fully embodying and becoming one with the decentralized work of healing and regeneration that they're giving back to?

So in other words, if the intention were to give back in support of healing wounds from historic violence, extraction, and exploitation, can or should we expect institutional philanthropies—at least the ones committed to decolonization—to be working themselves out of existence?

Edgar Villanueva: That's the goal.

Any foundation that's serious about decolonization needs to embrace a radical shift in the ownership of those resources.

We're going to see their resources being redistributed and then handed back over to the community. There are many foundations now, as a result of our work, who are doing that examination and sort of reckoning with their histories and trying to think about ways to right the wrongs. We've seen foundations committing to paying out reparations in direct alignment with what's coming to light from those times of reckoning.

But the challenge is, even foundations who are making a large commitment are getting that money back the next year and a return. So foundations are getting larger and larger because most foundations, even progressive foundations, are not willing to give at a rate that is going to cause their overall level of assets to decrease dramatically.

So giving tends to flow with the market. What we saw right before the pandemic, when the market was dropping at a time where communities were majorly in crisis, a lot of foundations pulled back on their giving and even took a year off from giving. Then, of course, during the pandemic, the market started soaring, as it was earlier this year, and foundation giving was up.

So the justification that these organizations make is “we have to make smart investments, and as the market goes up, then that's going to generate more money for grantmaking in the future.” There's truth in that, but it's also like imagining sitting in a warehouse of sandwiches and [they’re] not wanting to give someone something to eat right now because they're basically saying that in the future, there will be people who are hungry, so I need to hold on to these sandwiches.

It's a mindset of scarcity, thinking that there will not be wealth around in the future.

There will always be wealth and resources, and so to hoard them now, when people are in crisis is really counterintuitive, and it's really kind of getting back to some of these tenets of fear and greed that are connected to colonial ways of being and thinking about money.

Kamea Chayne: This really leaves me with this difficult question that I'm sitting with, which is does philanthropy, in the forms that they exist in today, create a dynamic where their continued ability to support healing and justice is contingent upon continued extraction and exploitation elsewhere and in other forms? Is it just the nature of how philanthropy might, perhaps, disproportionally fund projects that are seeking more immediate outcomes? With all this in mind, are they capable of actually aiding change across deeper time and helping us to get to the roots of addressing the underlying sickness of modernity beyond just alleviating their symptoms?

Edgar Villanueva: I want to think at some level, it's possible, but we have to be realistic. I mean, looking at history, we know that philanthropy has always played a major role in supporting social movements. We know through research that even during the civil rights movement, there were individual philanthropists and institutional funders who were supporting work that was, even at times, off the radar. It takes money for social movements to grow and to build power and have infrastructure.

Social movements have to be very aware of what's happening, about who you're taking money from, how the money was made, and where people are now.

For me, I try to hold all these complexities every day, because I think, for me, a lot of it is connected to “what is the intent of the donor in this moment?” If money was somehow earned in a way that was extractive in the past, is there at least an acknowledgment and apology and a way to think about and use money differently now that’s going to help atone in some way for that money?

All money is dirty on some level when you begin to trace it back. But we also have to be wide awake about how some philanthropists and corporations and foundations are trying to invest and move money now. For folks who are working in social movements, for example, to be really having some discernment around who we take money from and what their intentions are because there are absolutely folks who want to throw money here to appear to be on the right side of history, but have no intentions of making any change within the way they're using money or extracting resources from communities.

So it is quite complex. I think that even the most radical, progressive foundations who really work hard to be in solidarity with movement, when you begin to peel back the layers of the onion, you're going to see that there's going to be some investments that are tied up in whack stuff. Giving up that last stronghold of power and ownership of making decisions about that money, there’s still probably going to be a rich white man somewhere at the bottom of that who’s signing off and giving permission and approving things. So that's where it's really hard to define and find the right justice in all of this.

I do think it's possible and that it's going to have to come down to redistribution.

What we saw and what we know during times of crises like the pandemic is that in community, we know how to take care of each other, right? We know how to protect each other, keep each other safe. We know how to do mutual aid in ways that really center value and relationship and the planet. So I think that if we can transfer our capital and resources into other places, we're going to see philanthropic money being able to be moved and used in a way that does align with social justice values and will help advance justice.

And more foundations are tuning into these networks and thinking through ways to redistribute capital in that way, because it's just really hard for these big institutions, who have been doing things a certain way for, some of them, hundreds of years now.

Kamea Chayne: On this note, perhaps to speak to our possibilities, from my recent conversation with Konda Mason of Jubilee Justice, we explored the different forms of currencies there are and what we've lost as financial wealth has been extracted, privileged, and centralized. And so for listeners who haven't listened to that episode, I mentioned my observation that broadly speaking, as sovereign communities, as demand and supply of their needs and goods become commercialized, as various roles become professionalized, and the as the production of food and other products become industrialized. On paper, we'll likely see a rise in the financial wealth of the community.

But in reality, through all of these processes, the other, less quantifiable forms of wealth, like social, relational, spiritual, and love capital seem to be compromised and exchanged for the more transactional currency of financial capital. So I wonder if you've thought about the idea of money as medicine, that you shared in the beginning, as a way to honor and see money for what it is, which is merely a representation of value. So we might work harder to revive other forms of capital through how philanthropic money and reparative resources are being given back or utilized.

Edgar Villanueva: Yeah, I'm going to have to go back and listen to that conversation. I have so much respect for Konda, and that sounds like it was a lit conversation. Yes is the answer to the question. I think that kind of gets back to what money even is, right?

Money is not even a real thing. It's paper, it's zeros and ones, it's data. And it really is about people.

I think what we try to do at Decolonizing Wealth Project is really center everything in relations. Before we had these systems of exchange that were so steeped in transaction, we know, like in Indigenous culture, that it was very relational. A lot of the problems that we have in communities now as a result of capitalism and colonization didn't exist before, right? And it's funny, I'm going to say something that I hope does not come across as insensitive at all, but as a Native person, because relationship is such a deep, deep, deep part of our culture in the way that we see the world, in the way that my family interacts, I've never, even spite of financial struggle in the past, I've never worried about becoming homeless.

It just wasn't even a thing that I thought would be possible because of relationship, right? My family, my community, would just never allow it unless it was my choice, right? If I just refuse to receive the help or the shelter that they would offer. That's just the way that it is because it is very relational. That is a big part of what's missing at the end of the day, people and our connection to each other and our connection to this planet is just really the richest form of wealth.

How many of us know people who have plenty of money, but they're actually really sad and they question the motives of everyone around them and they lack authentic relationships in their lives? So I think it's really important. One of the things that we do as part of our work, we talk about money a lot, we do workshops, we speak to all these issues, we support donors, we're thinking through moving money with a racial justice lens. But we undergird everything that we do in healing. We have an Indigenous healer on our team. We hold ceremony, we hold healing summits and we acknowledge the trauma that money has caused.

And it's not because of the money, right? Again, it's because of people and the way people have treated each other because of money and the scarcity mindset and the greed. Those types of bad behaviors also exist in communities where people are very wealthy, right? The isolation and the lack of intimacy that can exist in some of those circles. So we are all about healing the human relationship and bringing ancestral wisdom into conversations and spirituality, honestly, to undergird everything that we're doing and talking about with money. Because ultimately, it is about relationship and money is just a proxy for an exchange of energy. It's not even that deep compared to what's really important, which is people and our connection to one another.

*** CLOSING ***

Kamea Chayne: What's an impactful publication you follow or a book that's been really profound for you?

Edgar Villanueva: This is probably a strange answer, but I think that everyone should read, if they haven't, How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. I talk about this book in my book, and it's not because I think a lot of Dale Carnegie. I actually don't know a lot about him as a person. And hopefully, he’s not too terrible of a person. But this was a book that came out in the 1930s. As a child, I came across it because my mom was a domestic worker, and I picked it up in some house that she was cleaning.

But what I think is fundamental about this book, and I've been thinking about it a lot lately, it really is about how to build relationships with people. How to Win Friends and Influence People is really how not to be a jerk, how to actually listen to people and be genuinely interested in them. I feel like something has changed in the world with not only the pandemic and everything moving online, but also social media more and more. We're just getting super disconnected. I've noticed that the ability to really listen to be present with people is like a lost art form. There's nothing that's more important, kind of getting it back to our conversation about relationships.

So it really is something I tried to practice as a kid, and I think that it has paid off for me. To kind of put some of those things into practice. Dale Carnegie talks about in that little book.

Kamea Chayne: What is a personal motto, mantra, or practice you engage with to stay grounded?

Edgar Villanueva: I'm from the state of North Carolina, and our state motto, and I may be mispronouncing the Latin, is “esse quam videri,” which means to be rather than to seem. That is something that my mom used to actually quote that to me growing up. So it's really to be authentic and be real and just genuine as much as I can be at all times versus trying to put on a performance and be someone that I'm not. So that's my goal in life.

Kamea Chayne: As we should all strive to be as well. And what gives you the greatest source of inspiration right now?

Edgar Villanueva: I'm super inspired by my people, by Native American folks. November is Native American Heritage Month, and I've just been thinking about all that's happened this past year, and I've never been just so inspired by my contemporaries and the women who are in public office and Secretary Holland, who’s in the cabinet. We have folks who are killing it in the entertainment industry with these amazing TV shows. For the first time ever, we have all Native casts and all Native writers for shows like Reservation Dogs, which is which is on Hulu and amazing. I'm so inspired. I remember as a child not having Native people that I can look up to, and now I'm just surrounded by the brilliance of relatives who are just killing it across so many different industries. So that is just making me smile every day.

Kamea Chayne: And I'm sure so many Native children are looking up to you as someone who is breaking barriers within the field of philanthropy as well. Edgar, thank you so much for joining me today. It's been a pleasure and a huge honor to have you here. What final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?

Edgar Villanueva: Think about your own healing and what you need to do to get on a healing journey—so that you can be well enough to support other people in the healing journey.