Rona Glynn-McDonald:
The origin story goes back a long time. It starts before colonisation with the First Nations ways of finding balance with country and within our communities, and then the dispossession and inequity that have developed since colonization, especially within our economic systems.

This is the story that I was born into, and the one that the generations before me spoke about. When I started interacting with philanthropy as a young person setting up not-for-profits, I realised that this system was very relational. First Nations people didn't have access to those relationships, so I knew that if we wanted to access funding for First Nations Communities, we needed proximity to white privilege.

That led to 2020, when a collective of us came together to look at how the Black Lives Matter was playing out in Australia. Suddenly non-Indigenous folk were beginning to recognise that it wasn’t enough to just talk about injustice, we all needed to put our money where our mouth was. There was a huge influx of philanthropy going into First Nations areas during that week in June 2020, and it was a big spark for myself and my co-founder, Louis Mokak. 

First Nations Futures started as a conversation around how we would create mechanisms for ongoing redistribution through collective giving. We wanted to level the playing field and make it possible for more First Nations people to get  access to un-tied funding, that supported self-determination and encouraged non-Indigenous folk to be part of that rebalancing and shaping futures grounded in economic justice.

Rona Glynn-McDonald:
We call on all Australians at any scale of generosity, to co-invest in our platform. Currently we work with eight partners, who are incredible First Nations-led grassroots initiatives and organisations. They are working across the country with a focus on young people, intergenerational change, and cultural revitalisation. Each organisation puts Country at the centre of their work and any money that is received through the platform is redistributed equally to these partners. 

Our collective giving is centred around bringing everyday Australians together to invest, at every scale.  Not just extremely wealthy individuals.  We’re also calling on anyone who might be redistributing wealth to non-Indigenous spaces within their community, to also choose First Nations Futures as a space to help us find that reciprocity and balance again. 

Rona Glynn-McDonald:
I feel like this model, in its simplest form, isn't something we've seen before locally or globally. There are a lot of different models that have elements of what we’ve created, but not the whole model itself. There are First Nations-led funds that call upon the upper-end of the philanthropic scale and then GoFundMe campaigns that create short-term project-based funding, but they don’t bring together the transparency, partnership and collective giving in the way we do. We know it is going to take many models operating at different scales, regions and intersections to create widespread economic justice for First Nations communities. 

When we first started thinking about it back in 2020, we saw this huge opportunity to build on that groundswell and now, with the number of co-investors we have, we can just continue scaling. Our vision is for all people who are living on stolen land to redistribute a portion of their wealth on an ongoing basis. And I think beyond First Nations communities, this is the kind of model that we want to see in all areas of giving – one that puts people who are closest to the community and with lived experience, in the driver's seat to determine where the money should go. 

Rona Glynn-McDonald:
We have about 400 co-investors, and it’s a mix of individuals, philanthropists and organisations. We target philanthropists who are already giving in First Nations areas and have strong strategies around their giving. We are grappling with this constant tension of keeping our operational costs low so we can distribute as much money to the partner organisations we’re backing. We're also launching a fund which philanthropists can put money into, to help build a corpus and intergenerational wealth base that we invest, manage and redistribute for generations to come

Rona Glynn-McDonald:
The use of language is really important. Redistribution is about creating balance. When people benefit more than others, they have a responsibility to redistribute that benefit. And I’m not just talking about money, but also resources, power and labour. Philanthropy can often be a pat on the back for the people who give, but if we're benefiting more than other people in the community, then we have an obligation to be redistributing. 

Another important reframe is using ‘co-investment’ rather than ‘donation.’ When you're redistributing and investing in community, that doesn't just benefit other people, it benefits you and the ecosystems of people and place that we're all connected to. 

Rona Glynn-McDonald:
We give through centering trust based and relational philanthropy. We want to level the playing field and reduce the power dynamic between us and the organisations we support. We’re not perfect and we’re constantly learning new ways to decolonise philanthropy and move away from mindsets and ideas that are harmful. . There are still things that we feel deeply uncomfortable about, and we’re always working to enable that balance of power by centring First Nations values and methodologies.

For us data sovereignty and telling stories of impact is an important part of how we want to do things differently. We support organisations to tell their own stories of the impact that they're having rather than burdensome reporting or trying to fit their story into the one that we want to tell. 

Beyond that, the model relies on strong cultural and place-based governance to thrive. We lean on local community members to vouch for us and to put forward our partner organisations. As a national organisation we can't be connected into all these different regions, so we make collective decisions about who we bring in because it’s important that the organisations we're supporting, are held up in their communities.

Another important part of our work is to ensure that once we partner with an organisation, it's not grant-based. We want them to continue as partners for as long as they need to, and we’ll create a process for them to opt-out when they feel like they're at the scale where they no longer need our support. We must keep growing the pie so we can redistribute to more places and intersections.

Rona Glynn-McDonald:
The impact that I'm most excited about is shifting the narrative and moving towards a story of economic justice and collective responsibility. That narrative might not be happening yet, but in a couple of generations, when the kids are going to school and all their parents are all redistributing wealth to First Nations communities, this will be how we move beyond reconciliation towards reparations and restoring that balance. 

And this impact goes beyond just resourcing. It’s about putting First Nations knowledge and cultures at the centre of resourcing and shifting the power to them to self-determine their work. We've already seen this impact with our partners in terms of their confidence. When they don’t have to constantly ask for money, it shifts the whole philanthropic ecosystem. There's a deeply entrenched power dynamic in philanthropy, so for them to have a First Nations  organisation backing them and trusting them – it helps them build resilience along with resources and assets. 

Rona Glynn-McDonald:
The conversation around pace is an interesting one. We’re constantly in a dance with time and we’ve moved slowly and intentionally, at the speed of trust, to develop this model. It’s been important to create the foundations where this model could thrive and hold up in our communities. 

But there is also this tension between having those foundations and wanting to scale.  There's an urgency to get money to the ground and support our communities, while maintaining this intentional slowness. We're trying to get everything right before we move onto the next horizon, but I think sometimes you have to move through something to learn it. It’s these opposing methodologies of flying the plane while you're building it versus building the plane before you fly it.

There must be a dance between the two.  We've often been in the’ build the plane before you fly’ mode, but we're getting to a point where we've got to fly some things before they're fully formed. For example, we spent six months developing the model for our futures fund in 2021, and we’ve had this amazing scoping of all the Indigenous-led funds globally. Money has been a big ethical consideration because there are currently no First Nations funds within Australia where we could put our money, knowing that every single dollar will be invested into something that centres our values and Country. We've spent a long time not moving forward because the fund structure didn’t exist yet.

But recently a funder offered us the first million for the fund so we can start testing things out. And we were like, wow, we could try to create the best model that we can, knowing that it’s not going to be perfect until we've had time to develop it. This tension between the slow pace and the urgency is something that I'm constantly grappling with because we want to get things right, but we don't want to stop the opportunities that are flowing in. I see this tension across philanthropy, and it means there’s a lot of missed opportunities in getting money to areas that need it most.

Rona Glynn-McDonald:
I want to continue supporting our communities to drive their own self-determined futures. We want to scale our model and create more  money to flow, like a river. One way we’re looking at doing that is through corporate partnerships and developing a suite of opportunities for people to really put their money where their mouth is and make public statements around how much they're going to redistribute to First Nations communities through our platform. We've got big visions for where we want to go, but for me, the north star that keeps me going is the development of our fund, which I hope will be half a billion dollars in the next couple of decades.