The new European Union’s Anti-Racism Strategy 2026-2030 has reignited debate about how structural racism is addressed at policy level, and crucially, where non-state actors can close the gap between ambition and impact. For Europe’s philanthropic community, this is a moment not only to fund programmes, but to back corrective action that makes systemic change more likely and more durable.
This article sets out why that role matters now - and how donors can respond with intentional, leadership-level action. It is informed not only by the European Network Against Racism's analysis but also by the input coming from a network of more than 140 grass roots organisations all across Europe.
A strategy that names racism, but not the system
The new EU strategy retains important commitments, including structured collaboration with civil society and national action plans in Member States. Yet many social and racial justice organisations argue that it does not sufficiently confront the scale and systemic nature of racism across European institutions and policies.
In particular:
Structural racism is too often framed as an accumulation of individual experiences, rather than as something embedded in laws, institutions, society, and governance systems.
The strategy fails to properly address how policing, migration governance, and securitisation frameworks reproduce racial hierarchies across Europe, and the urgency and scale of these issues.
While it acknowledges Europe’s colonial history, it stops short of meaningful commitments to reparatory justice or redress for ongoing material consequences.
Civil society inputs repeatedly stress the need for a genuinely systemic approach: one that embeds intersectionality and decolonial perspectives across migration, climate, digital rights, economic governance, and beyond. These critiques do not make the strategy irrelevant: they identify where complementary actors must step in. Philanthropy has unique characteristics that allow it to move faster and go further.
Why philanthropy is pivotal to corrective action
Philanthropic capital can influence which issues gain traction, which organisations survive or thrive, and which knowledge frameworks shape policy debates. However, existing funding patterns frequently mirror the very inequalities they aim to address.
Research and sector reflections highlight persistent problems:
Grassroots and community-led anti-racism organisations remain chronically underfunded, in part because funding decisions are made far from the lived realities of racism.
Funding ecosystems still show clear disparities in allocation to minority-led organisations, prompting efforts to collect demographic data and build greater accountability.
Emerging European research is mapping gaps in the availability, accessibility, and impact of racial justice funding, with the aim of reshaping the overall funding landscape.
Large actors such as the Open Society Foundations have already shown what strategic, long-term commitments can achieve: for example, dedicating around €100 million to Roma communities through a specialised foundation that combines grantmaking, movement building, and advocacy. Far more could be achieved if a wider range of philanthropic actors brought not only their resources but also their networks, approaches, and learning into shared, coordinated strategies.
These trends show that philanthropy can function not just as a gap-filler, but as a systemic force by shaping norms, institutions, and policy agendas over time.
Lessons from Europe’s current context
Corrective action must be grounded in Europe’s specific historical and institutional realities.
Recent institutional inquiries across Europe have documented the legacies of colonial exploitation and racial pseudoscience embedded in universities, museums, and other institutions, including evidence that major universities profited from slavery-linked activities and helped entrench racial hierarchies. These findings make it clear that structural racism is not an abstract concept; it is materially rooted in assets, endowments, and institutional cultures that remain influential today.
Addressing structural racism in this context demands historical accountability, redistribution or repurposing of legacy resources, and sustained investment in structural reform. These are precisely the areas where philanthropic actors can act as catalytic, risk-taking partners by testing solutions, supporting community leadership, and modelling practices that the public sector may be slower or less willing to adopt.
Pathways for philanthropic corrective action
Drawing on analysis of the EU strategy, the responses of racial and social justice organisations, and current funding debates, five concrete directions emerge for philanthropy that aspires to real leadership.
1. Shift from charity to power-aware funding
Philanthropy that treats racism as a problem to alleviate, rather than a power structure to transform, will always fall short. Trust-based and community-led approaches help rebalance power asymmetries, enabling responses that align with real needs and movement priorities.
Action:
Provide unrestricted, multi-year funding that allows organisations to plan, adapt, and build power rather than chase short-term projects that keep them locked in a power imbalance and cycles of uncertainty.
Co-design priorities and funding criteria with affected communities, ensuring that those most impacted shape both strategy, selection, decision-making and accountability.
2. Strengthen the financial ecosystem for anti-racism organisations
Corrective action requires not just isolated grants, but a robust ecosystem in which anti-racism organisations can thrive, collaborate, and sustain long-term work. Mapping funding gaps and aligning donor strategies with movement needs are central to this.
Action:
Support independent, participatory research that tracks where racial justice funding currently goes and where it is missing.
Coordinate funding strategies across borders and across thematic areas, bridging work on migration, climate, digital rights, culture, and economic justice.
Invest in infrastructure and capacity building, including leadership development, communications, security, organisational care, and financial sustainability.
3. Invest in data transparency and accountability
Without better data, funding systems will continue to reproduce inequities by default. Improved demographic and organisational data can expose disparities and guide more equitable allocation of resources.
Action:
Adopt shared reporting and classification frameworks that allow complementary action across foundations and funds.
Commit to understanding the specific funding needs of anti-racism organisations, especially grassroots groups and movements operating in increasingly high-risk and hostile environments.
Publicly share aggregate data on who receives funding, on what terms, and for what kinds of work, and use this to drive corrective action over time.
4. Support reparative and structural initiatives
Philanthropy can back redistributive and restorative interventions that public policy may avoid or only slowly pursue. This moves beyond symbolic recognition of past harms toward material forms of redress.
Action:
Fund historical redress programmes, including those led by communities directly affected by colonialism, slavery, and racialised violence.
Support institutional reform initiatives in universities, cultural institutions, and other bodies with legacies tied to racial injustice, including governance and endowment reforms.
Invest in community wealth-building strategies: from cooperative ownership models to community land trusts, that shift assets and decision-making power.
5. Protect civic space and movement resilience
Across Europe, civil society organisations, particularly those led by racialised communities, face growing scrutiny, legal restrictions, and public hostility. Supporting their resilience is a precondition for any serious anti-racism agenda.
Action:
Provide emergency and resilience funding to organisations facing legal, political, digital attacks and increasingly even physical violence.
Philanthropy should support efforts that pursue binding legal protections and accountability mechanisms regarding police violence, racial profiling, and migrant criminalisation.
Back advocacy, strategic litigation, and legal protection work that defends civic space and challenges discriminatory laws and practices.
Invest in coalition-building among anti-racism, migrant rights, feminist, climate, and economic justice movements to strengthen shared agendas and collective defence.
From policy alignment to sector leadership
Europe’s anti-racism strategy cannot depend solely on public policy cycles or institutional goodwill. Structural transformation requires complementary actors willing to experiment, absorb risk, and centre community expertise.
Philanthropy has this flexibility. Realising it, however, requires a shift away from traditional, detached models of giving toward participatory, accountable partnership with racial justice movements. The question for the sector is no longer whether to align with the EU’s anti-racism strategy, but how to actively shape its outcomes by supporting the organisations and movements addressing its blind spots.
Donor networks also carry tremendous influence: they can engage EU grant programmes as peers, they can pool their resources together to scale impact or cover under-resourced areas and lastly to learn from each other. They can draw on existing sector guidance, particularly Philea's Philanthropy and Equality: A Framework for Sharing Power and Addressing Inequalities", which sets out practical approaches for embedding power-sharing, equity analysis and structural accountability into philanthropic governance and grantmaking practice.
Corrective action is possible. But it demands intentional shifts in funding power, practice, and perspective and a philanthropic sector prepared to claim its responsibility as a structural actor, not a bystander, in Europe’s anti-racism agenda.
