The best thing you can do is go and sit in a community. Participate in a feast day. If you feel a tug of the heart that there’s something special there, fund it. By funding, you’re opening yourself up to receive, so it becomes reciprocal. I say this as a critique. But it’s more of a sadness for me that we’re not opening our hearts and minds to receive and learn and be in relationship with communities.

Funding rules are also often decided without an analysis of race and place. I was working in a foundation that decided only to fund organizations with a budget of $500,000 or more. In foundations’ defense, they often have small staffs and processes exist to be able to move money quickly, but sometimes the rules end up pushing people out instead of letting people in.

D.B.: You write that people of color who work in philanthropy often hold back authentic expressions of themselves. What have you seen?

E.V.: You know the movie “Titanic,” when Jack, the poor guy, falls in love with the rich girl, and she brings him upstairs to dinner. That’s kind of how it feels. Folks are looking at you like, “How did you get in here?” And there’s a culture of assimilation. I worked at the Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust, in North Carolina, which had an explicit mission of helping low-income communities. I was told early on that I needed to dress and conduct myself in a certain way. And they implied that I needed to get rid of my Honda Civic. What was so crazy was that the foundation had a bank of cars — so I wasn’t even driving my car for foundation business.

In philanthropy, everyone’s kind of looking at diversity, but we’re still behind the curve. The culture is so mainstream white dominated that it’s hard for people of color to be successful. I’ve heard stories: black women asked not to wear their hair a certain way, a Native woman who was asked not to wear Native jewelry to work because it made other people uncomfortable. For me, I’ve been sort of accused: “Which side are you on? Do you work here or do you work for the community?”

D.B.: You argue that this diminishes the effectiveness of philanthropy.

E.V.: Yes, because it leads to a lack of proximity and understanding. I come from a lower-income community of color. When I worked at Kate B. Reynolds, I drove through rural counties in eastern North Carolina and found people doing work out of their churches and homes — amazing, innovative work that was not funded by philanthropy or connected to a mainstream nonprofit. By not investing more in communities of color, philanthropy, venture capital, impact investing and finance are missing out on rich opportunities to learn about solutions.

D.B.: You have a lovely phrase in the book: “listening in color.” Can you elaborate on it?

E.V.: The No. 1 thing that nonprofits have said to me over the past 14 years when I asked them, “What do you wish funders would do more?” is just listen. How is it that we have all this wealth and our job is to make smart investments with it, and we’re going to communities and not listening more than we’re talking? I think it goes back to this notion of a white dominant culture. When you hold power, the disposition often is one of: “I have an Ivy League degree. I know the answer.” So listening in color is about opening your heart and mind to a different outcome. It’s putting aside your judgments and conclusions, and putting yourself in the other person’s shoes and trying to understand the world through their lived experience, and just trusting the wisdom that you’re receiving.