Tithing to the Future: Why Giving to Community-Led Work Is a Spiritual Practice

“I Am Because We Are” Is Not a Slogan

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The philosophy of Ubuntu — umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu in Zulu, “a person is a person through other persons” — is not a feel-good principle for organizational branding. It is a cosmological claim. It says that individual existence is constituted by relationship. That you cannot be well while your community suffers. That the boundaries we draw between “my resources” and “their needs” are, at their root, a kind of forgetting.

To forget is not a moral failing. It is what systems of extraction and accumulation are designed to produce. Colonialism, enslavement, and the economic systems that followed them were — among other things — projects of severing. Severing people from land. Severing communities from their knowledge systems. Severing the living from the ancestral networks that once held them accountable to something larger than individual accumulation.

Giving to community-led work is, in this light, an act of remembering. It is a practice of re-weaving what was torn.

What Ancestors Understood About Wealth

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Across the African continent — in the rotating savings circles of West Africa called susu or tontines, in the communal labor systems of East Africa, in the ubuntu ethic of Southern Africa — wealth was understood as relational. You accumulated not to hoard but to share, and the measure of your abundance was not what you held but what you made possible for others.

What these traditions encoded was not the logic of the gift, freely given from above. It was obligation. Reciprocity. The understanding that the one who receives today may be the one who gives tomorrow, and that the entire community is strengthened by the flow.

The ancestors did not separate the spiritual from the material. The harvest offering was both an economic act and a sacred one. The feast that followed a good season was both a celebration and a covenant — with the land, with each other, with the generations not yet born. When we give to community-led work today, we are participating in that same covenant, even if we have lost the ritual language to name it.

The Difference Between Charity and Partnership

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Most of us who give to social causes were shaped by a model of charity that is, at its foundation, colonial. The assumption: that some communities have solutions, and others have problems. That change moves in one direction — from those with resources toward those who lack them. That the donor is the protagonist of the story.

Ubuntu Village was built on a refusal of this model.

The communities we work alongside — across East Africa and in East Harlem — are not waiting to be saved. They are already building. They have been building through colonial extraction, through structural abandonment, through every system designed to make their survival impossible. What they need is not our solutions. What they need is for the barriers to be removed — and for those of us with resources to understand our role clearly: we are not the heroes of this story. We are the conditions that make it possible for the real story to unfold.

This is a spiritual reorientation as much as a programmatic one. It requires donors to release the story of their own indispensability. And in releasing it, they receive something more true in its place: the understanding that you are part of a living web of relationship, and that your resources — wherever they came from — carry an obligation to flow.

Giving as Ancestral Repair

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There is a concept in African spiritual traditions that has no clean translation in English, but lives in the logic of sankofa — the Akan symbol of a bird looking backward while flying forward. It means: go back and fetch what was left behind. You cannot know where you are going without understanding where you came from.

For many people in the African diaspora, giving to African-led and Afro-diasporic work is a practice of sankofa. It is a turning back toward what was severed. The wealth that exists in diasporic communities — however modest — was built on a foundation that includes the labor and genius of people in Uganda, in Kenya, in West Africa, whose descendants are still building today. To give is to acknowledge that connection. For those of us in the diaspora, it is to say across the water: what was taken from us was also taken from you. And what we are building now, we are building together.

For people outside the diaspora, the spiritual logic is different but no less real. The extraction that created global wealth inequity did not happen by accident. The question is not whether your ancestors participated — many did, actively, and with benefit. The question is not guilt. Guilt is static. The question is: what is your role in the repair?

Giving to community-led work is one answer. Not the only answer. But a real one — and a practice of sankofa: using what you carry to reconnect what was severed.

This Is Not About You — And It Is Completely About You

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Here is the paradox at the heart of giving: it is both selfless and deeply personal.

When you give to work that centers communities as their own protagonists — when your gift goes toward what a community has already decided it needs, not what you have decided it should want — you release the burden of being the solution. You step out of the colonial story. And in that release, something opens. A sense of right relationship. Of being part of something that was happening before you arrived and will continue after you leave. Of participating in the long, slow work of repair that the ancestors call for and the children will inherit.

This is what the old traditions meant by tithing. Not ten percent to the institution. But a portion of what you hold, returned to the flow. Offered to the covenant that says: none of us are free until all of us are free. None of us are healed until the healing is collective.

How You Can Enter the Covenant

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Ubuntu Village does not arrive with solutions. We arrive in support of the communities already building their own futures — in Uganda, Kenya, East Harlem, and across the African diaspora.

When you give to Ubuntu Village, you are funding solar access for women-led households in Uganda — because energy sovereignty is the foundation of every other kind of freedom. When the lights stay on, the healer can work after dark. The grandmother can tell her story. The child can read. The ceremony can happen.

You are supporting community health rooted in ancestral wisdom — because the knowledge systems of African and Afro-diasporic communities are not primitive precursors to Western medicine. They are living, rigorous, and generative. We build from that foundation.

You are joining a living network of solidarity across East Harlem, Uganda, Kenya, and Nigeria — where communities lead their own liberation and healing, and donors stand alongside them as partners, not saviors.

This is the covenant. It does not require you to be certain. It does not require you to understand everything. It only requires you to show up — with your resources, your attention, and the willingness to be changed by what you witness.

The ancestors are watching. The children are waiting. The work is already underway. Come join it.

I Am Because We Are. And Together, We Heal.

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Related Reading

• ‣ The Power of Spirituality in Daily Life
• ‣ On the Connection Between Life and Spirituality
• ‣ Reparations and Healing: A Public Health Argument
• ‣ African Liberation Day: Ubuntu and Ancestral Freedom