While the Trump administration has ignited diversity, equity and inclusion policy rollbacks across corporations, philanthropic foundations and higher education institutions, one Chicago-based foundation has strengthened its commitment to racial justice.
Grand Victoria Foundation launched a rebrand Tuesday — changing its name to A Movement Advancing Repair and Abundance, or AMARA — that centers investment in Black-led organizations and those with missions that promote racial justice. Despite the new name, AMARA President Sharon Bush said the work is the same.
“We’ve been funding this work probably since 2021,” she said.
One year after the racial reckoning catalyzed by George Floyd’s murder, AMARA commenced a study to identify 81 municipalities across Illinois that had a population of at least 30% Black residents. Bush said the 2021 study allowed the foundation to “learn where people are, so we can figure out how to best focus our efforts.”
“The board provided us the opening when it said to us in 2020, ‘We want to really be in this for the long-term. We don’t want to do temporary measures,’” she said.
In those early years, when philanthropic institutions and corporations committed to racial justice, AMARA’s board, too, leaned in.
The board learned about what equity and justice work meant and looked like, and how long would it take.
“We’ve had conversations that have been about, what does it mean to focus on Black communities? What does it mean to focus on building the power and agency within those communities, to focus on the things that they think are good and right for their communities?” Bush said.
The foundation listened to what organizations said they needed and how they could support them. Two key values — abundance and repair — were common themes AMARA heard during their listening sessions. Both values seek to address narratives that Bush said shapes how the Black community is supported and viewed.
“Repair begins with recognizing that current inequities were shaped by long-standing systems, policies and institutional decisions, not by individual failure,” Bush said. “We think about Black abundance as a way of moving beyond narratives of scarcity and crisis to center more opportunity, wealth, safety, creativity, political power and self-determination in this age.”
AMARA has a $200 million endowment, with an annual payout rate of 6%-7%, roughly $10 million a year. Some of its funding partners include Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a national funder, that helped AMARA establish a lot of its work, particularly the 2021 study. It has also partnered with the MacArthur Foundation to build out its narrative change work that will change the stories being told about Black communities. This priority is still being researched.
Bush said “both funders have been really critical to what our transition has been over the past several years.”
Thirty-five percent of AMARA’s 2025 grant awards were made to organizations in the Chicago area, according to a foundation spokesperson, Landon Williams. KOCO Chicago, Southside Together, Black Roots Alliance, and Organized Communities Against Deportation are among its Chicago-area grantees. Bush said investing in immigration may “seem to be a non-Black issue, [but] underneath, it is,” pointing out that there are Black immigrants. She said, “These other organizations … might have different kind of leadership, but they hold centering Black power within the ways in which they work.”
AMARA’s rebrand will be celebratedThursday at the Obama Presidential Center, when Chicago African Americans in Philanthropy celebrates Black Philanthropy Month.
