TL;DR
The Decolonizing Wealth Project had grown from a bestselling book into a nationally recognized movement. We helped its leaders make sense of the possibilities ahead, align around a five-year vision, and turn that direction into a practical roadmap and donor narrative.
Decolonizing Wealth Project
Client
Scaling vision and growth strategy
Description
Experience Design, Strategy Design
Contribution
Challenge
Edgar Villanueva’s Decolonizing Wealth began as a bestselling book and quickly grew into a broader movement. Through the Decolonizing Wealth Project (DWP), that movement was reshaping conversations around philanthropy and reparative giving while directing millions of dollars toward Black and Indigenous-led communities.
With greater visibility came new opportunities and increasingly complex decisions. DWP needed a clear strategy that could align leadership, guide those decisions, and communicate where the organization was headed next. They asked us to help define that future.
Insight
Leadership shared a common mission, but there were multiple paths the organization could pursue. Before deciding what to do next, we needed to create a shared understanding of what success could look like.
Rather than jumping straight into strategic planning, we brought the team together for a working session to explore three distinct futures and build the direction together. This gave leadership a way to examine the possibilities, understand the tradeoffs, and identify the path that could create the greatest long-term impact.
Exploring Three Futures
Rather than debating abstract ideas on slides, we created three distinct environments that allowed leadership to step into and explore possible futures for the organization.
Each environment translated strategy into something participants could see, touch, and discuss. This made the possibilities more tangible and helped the team evaluate not only what each future might look like, but what it would require and how it would feel.
Future 01
A New Model for Philanthropy
A suspended installation of handwritten letters made the connections between people, resources, and change tangible: touching one element affected everything else. Alongside the letters, a seven-foot artwork depicted a $100 bill being stretched and elongated, with its color running and transforming into a rainbow—an expression of how money can move beyond transactions to create lasting, expansive change.
Future 02
A World-Class Destination
Using spatial and interior design as a lens, we imagined what it would look like to go all in on creating a world-class destination for healing. We envisioned an incredible building and explored the materials, architectural details, and interior environments that could bring it to life—from the textures and finishes to the experience of living, eating, gathering, and growing together as a community of change.
Future 03
A Global Movement
We prototyped a self-sustaining facilitator’s toolkit designed to bring DWP’s principles and practices into classrooms, organizations, and communities. With exercises, worksheets, and a digital companion, the toolkit made the ideas accessible and actionable. It would help more people learn from the work already making waves and creating impact while allowing the movement to grow beyond a single organization.
Turning Vision into Strategy
After experiencing the three futures, leadership used the possibilities to clarify DWP’s ambitions and begin translating them into a focused five-year strategy.
Together, we translated that vision into a five-year strategic roadmap connecting long-term aspirations with practical action. We identified priority initiatives, sequenced major opportunities, clarified the capabilities the organization would need, and built a framework leaders could use to make decisions as DWP continued to evolve.
The roadmap gave leadership a shared understanding of where to focus, what needed to happen next, and how the pieces connected.
Results
The engagement gave DWP a shared five-year vision, strategic roadmap, and donor narrative that leadership could use to guide decisions, communicate its ambitions, and build support for what came next.
In the years that followed, DWP grew that vision into significant action. The organization reports:
Nearly $1 billion facilitated for social justice efforts
More than $30 million granted through Liberated Capital
More than 270 Tribes and 11,000 Indigenous young people reached
More than 17,000 acres returned to Tribal stewardship
A new 10-year, $1 trillion Moonshot for reparative giving
Those outcomes belong to DWP, its partners, and the communities leading the work. They cannot be attributed to any one engagement. Still, they reflect the scale of the future this work helped DWP imagine, articulate, and begin planning toward.