Growing a New Legacy Garden: A Framework for Social Justice Giving

“Legacy. What is a Legacy? It's planting seeds in a garden you never get to see.” 

- Lin-Manuel Miranda, Hamilton 

For a garden to have sustained beauty long into the future, it must have a combination of the following elements:

Why this combination? When we plant only annual seeds, each year we must start anew, putting in all the labor and resources to create the previous garden year after year. However, if we plant perennial bulbs that will bloom and spread with each year, and saplings that will grow roots and into great trees – we invest in a robust, interdependent ecosystem within our garden that is resilient, sustainable, and offers beauty for future generations.

Our giving works in much the same way. If we only engage in reactionary giving to respond to emergencies and crises as they emerge, we must mobilize our resources and energy event after event, year after year, much like if we only planted annual seeds.

That’s why we must additionally focus on resources on the factors that have enabled these crises to occur. We call this working on “root causes.” We can address root causes by building the systems and infrastructures that will interrupt these cycles of crisis. We also work on root causes by investing in transforming a culture that enables unjust outcomes in the first place. When we invest in addressing root causes, much like planting perennial bulbs and saplings, we’re growing a new root system to impact and transform the conditions of an ecosystem for the long term.

Social Justice Giving Plans are our New Legacy Gardens.

By bringing a layered, inter-sectional approach to investing in justice-oriented organizations and efforts, we are resourcing an interdependent ecosystem. We are nurturing a world that is resilient, sustainable, nourishing, and beautiful for our future generations. As a New Legacy Garden must be tended to year-after -year to not become overgrown with weeds, our Giving Plans must also be tended to on a recurring basis, with a multi-year vision for impact and change.

Let’s explore the elements of a New Legacy Garden:

Element #1: Annual Seeds

We replant annual seeds every year. They bring one season of beauty, and if we want them to return in the coming year, we must replant them. In spite of their need for recurring labor and resources, annual seeds are worth re-planting because they bore beautiful flowers and nourishing fruits, like sky-high sunflowers, playful zinnias, fragrant marigolds, and all our favorite tasty summer veggies. While planting annual seeds takes work every year, the garden will look and taste incomplete without them.

In a New Legacy Garden, Annual Seeds will resource a single season. In giving, it can look like reaction-based giving, mutual aid and solidarity giving, supporting individual behaviors and the interactions between people.

Examples of Annual Seeds in Social Justice Giving include:

• Participating in mutual aid efforts for individual/family access to food, housing, healthcare, transportation, etc., ideally that support those receiving aid in building individual and community power

• Giving to abortion funds, bail funds, immigrant solidarity funds, rapid response and emergency relief funds, etc.

• Supporting community-based and grassroots organizations that offer emergency resources and services to impacted individuals and communities, preferably led by individuals from those impacted communities (*see Note on Natives vs. Introduced Plants)

• Supporting individual or family GoFundMe’s, Kickstarters, and fundraisers

• Providing initial seed funds to launch new projects or events

Element #2: Perennial Bulbs

Perennial bulbs we plant once and they will likely return year after year. While they tend to be a more expensive initial investment, they build an ongoing infrastructure to your garden and will bring multiple seasons of beauty. We’re talking about our resilient early-spring daffodils, whimsical alliums, handsome irises and stunning dahlias (YES irises and dahlias are tubers, but they function similarly to bulbs).

Perennial bulbs pop up at the first light of longer days, and wither sequentially upon the end of their awe-inspiring blossom. Yet, with their natural dormancy and deeper root systems, they will likely return the next year, weathering through cold and drought with greater resilience to climate change, and adverse conditions than annual seedlings. Perennial bulls still require tending to on an annual basis, to ensure the plant is well maintained, but it’s far less resource intensive than an annual seed.

In a New Legacy Garden, Perennial Bulbs will build and resource our systems and structures that are more permanent and able to withstand sudden and persistent changes to the environment. In giving, it can look like addressing the root causes or the upstream determinants of a community outcome or issue, such as ensuring that people have access to housing, healthcare, education, economic opportunity, and healthy communities and environments. Access to these resources promote stability and resilience.

In giving, it can also look like building systems, policies and structures that protect and nourish us, as well as building capacity at multiple levels of a system (i.e. within, between and among people/organizations/places). To effectively interrupt cycles of crises, these investments must be maintained on a recurring basis to ensure the systems and structures remain in good condition.

Examples of Perennial Bulbs in Social Justice Giving include:

• Supporting advocacy, policy, and justice organizations

• Supporting organizations that address root-causes and upstream factors, such as affordable housing, childcare, food systems, transportation access, economic opportunity and workforce development, neighborhood environments, environmental justice, etc., that are ideally also building individual and collective power

• Political giving to 501c4 organizations, base-building organizations, PACS and values-aligned political candidates

• Investing in individual organizational capacity building and infrastructure development

• Supporting regenerative environmental and agricultural efforts and businesses

• Supporting coalitions, networks, and collective efforts that build power between and among organizations, issues, and people

Element #3: Saplings

Planting a sapling is the start of growing trees and deep root systems. Trees grow slowly, and their young saplings are vulnerable to challenging conditions; but once firmly rooted, trees can be there for generations. Think of the flowering dogwoods, bountiful fruit trees, and sturdy oaks and other hardwoods that can take multiple years to establish, but once there, they define the garden’s ecosystem and possibilities.

Trees and their root systems provide canopy and shade, they slow groundwater, they clean the air, and provide endless beauty. Their root systems become interconnected systems of strength and homes for communicating fungal mycelium that detoxify the soil. The presence of saplings, especially with time, determines what, where, and how other plants can grow within a garden ecosystem.

In a New Legacy Garden, growing Saplings resources the culture that shapes the systems, interactions, values, beliefs, and norms we exist in. In giving, growing saplings can look like resourcing efforts to support culture and narrative change work, and building community and people power. It’s the efforts to transform how we relate to ourselves, each other, and the environment.

Examples of Saplings in Social Justice Giving include:

• Funding justice-oriented QTIBIPOC*/marginalized** artists, creatives, cultural workers, and organizers, including individuals, projects, collectives and organizations

• Supporting land-back and land-ownership by QTIBIPOC/marginalized folks, including through land taxes, land purchases, environmental remediation, and physical infrastructure development

• Supporting and investing in worker-owned co-operatives, unions, or collectives that are transforming power relationships in the workplace

• Investing in the creation of QTIBIPOC/marginalized-folks led institutions with the self-determination to define what is best for them

*QTIBIPOC is an acronym for Queer, Trans, Intersex, Black, Indigenous, People of Color

**By “Marginalized” we refer to a different groups of people impacted by systemic oppressions in addition to race/ethnicity and gender/sexual identity, including by immigration status, disabled/differently abled people, age-ism, poor working/class folks, and region/location.

Element #4: A Garden Path

A garden path connects the sections of the garden to one another. Unlike the rest of the garden, the garden path is typically made with non-living materials – maybe stone, gravel, or just a thoughtful clearing (although, we should talk about moss someday!).  The path requires significant labor and resource to create initially, and once there, the path is a critical artery through the garden that allows us to walk around the garden with ease, to care for it and admire its beauty.

While a relatively static structure in our garden, the paths do require modest yet continual maintenance throughout the season, pulling up stray weeds that creep on the path and raking leaves and debris that fall. Every few years, we may want to reinforce the path with a fresh layer of ground material, and, with time as our gardens grow and change, we may want to re-make our paths completely. 

In a New Legacy Garden, the Garden Path mobilizes connection to and flow among the living elements of the garden. In giving, it is the non-financial resources we commit to mobilizing in coordination with and in complement to our financial giving. It is the relational, networked, physical, and class-related resources that enhance and strengthen the impact of our financial giving.

Examples of a Garden Path in Social Justice Giving include commitments to:

• Investing in trust-based relationships with those we resource financially that acknowledge power differences

• Mobilizing our relationships with other donors or those with access to resources (i.e. donor organizing)

• Sharing our access to space, milage points, positions of power, and other non-monetary resources

• Volunteering or being on the board of an organization

• Sharing our unique skill sets as an in-kind offering

• Taking a courageous risk in collaboration and/or on behalf of an organization

Additional Dynamics: Interdependence & Complexity

The elements of a New Legacy Garden do not stand in isolation. Garden ecosystems are complex and interdependent. What happens in the climate and in the soil can affect all of the elements, for better or worse. There are often symbiotic and reciprocal relationships between different plants in the garden.

In a New Legacy Garden, the annual seeds, perennial bulbs and saplings organizations, organizers and efforts we give to likely have relationships and partnerships with one another. Similarly, the work of one organization, organizer or effort may touch on multiple elements or issues.

Examples of complexity and interdependence in Giving:

• Trust that recipients of your resources know how to best allocate their sources, even if that may be different than what they initially said they’d use the resources for

• Inquire about relationships among the recipients of your resources, and how you might best support their collaboration and partnerships

• Support cooperative rather than competitive approaches to resourcing organizations

A note on Native vs. Introduced plants in a New Legacy Garden

There’s an active movement encouraging gardeners to plant Native plants instead of Introduced (or Invasive) plants. Native plants are better adapted to local soil and climate conditions and are vital parts of local ecosystems that enable the survival of local pollinators, flora, and fauna, especially in the face of climate change and adverse conditions..

Introduced plants, on the other hand, have been brought into an ecosystem - either intentionally or unintentionally. While they may be beautiful, they also can cause unintended impacts, such as invasive growth or damage to soil ecosystems. They lack the complex and evolved relationships that support an abundant and resilient ecosystem.

In a New Legacy Garden, there’s been a similar movement to support and invest more significantly in work led by people of impacted communities and/or by organizations and efforts that have grown and evolved naturally within a place or community, rather than continue to support efforts and organizations created and led by people from outside of a community or without lived experience that may assume they have solutions for others.

Examples of planting Native over Introduced Plants in Giving:

• Supporting grassroots efforts led by community members instead of “highly-effective” predominantly-white led organizations

• Supporting organizations with real and meaningful leadership by community members rather than just input, advising and receival of services

• Investing in skill building and leadership training for people with lived experiences and from impacted communities, with pathways toward leadership and access to resource

• Reflecting on if the leadership of the organization (not only program staff) meaningfully reflects the communities and populations it serves

Let’s get planting!

A simple faith of gardeners is that if you put something in the ground, it will grow. Conversely, if you don’t put anything in the ground, nothing will grow. And sometimes, when you put things in the ground it doesn’t grow as well, or as planned. Or maybe, it’s the perfect condition that planting season, and the thing you planted thrives and produces utter abundance. As a gardener, you must begin somewhere and try to grow something. It will take time, patience, tending, and love. Whatever emerges will be beautiful and worthy.

In a New Legacy Garden, we similarly invite learning, curiosity, patience, questioning, and practice. Your giving must begin somewhere, and you may not get it right the first time around. That is okay. In giving, we offer our “Current best thinking” and we embrace the idea of Praxis, of learning through doing. The important thing is that we show up and try.

With that, let’s begin planting our New Legacy Gardens!

Annual Seeds to resource the single seasons and respond to crises

Perennial Bulbs to build the systems and structures that address the root causes that interrupt cycles of crisis

Saplings that transform culture and environments that shape the systems, interactions, values, beliefs, and norms we exist in.

A Garden Path of Non-financial resources we commit to sharing in complement to our financial giving

Together, these elements will grow a garden with sustained beauty long into the future.

A backyard garden with a path, a large oak tree and a small child sitting in the grass.

Resources that inspired the New Legacy Garden:

• “Upstream-Downstream” model for Health Equity

• AORTA white supremacy culture “Manifestations of White Supremacy Culture in our organizations”

• “Spheres of Influence Model”, Adams, Bell & Griffin, Teachings for Diversity and Social Justice. Routledge, 2007

• Tema Okun, white supremacy culture website

• “3 - Levels” Model from Dismantling Racism Works

• Ibram Kendi, We Give Summit 2023 and “How to be an Anti-Racist”

• “Ladder of Citizen Participation” by Sherry Arnstein

• CDC’s Social Determinants of Health

• Emergent Strategy, adrienne maree brown

• The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, Robin Wall Kimmerer

• North Carolina Cooperative Extension “NC Extension Gardner Handbook; 12. Native Plants”

• Innovation for Liberation Conference, March 2025, produced by Community in 

• Partnership