Church of England Organizes $128M Fund Addressing Ties to Slave Trade

The Church of England has created a group to oversee a 100-million-pound ($128 million) program in a bid to atone for underwriting transatlantic slavery in the 1700s.

The Church Commissioners, the charity organization that manages the CofE’s $13 billion portfolio, set up the oversight group to disburse the money over the next nine years. The group will have at least 10 members and be led by Rosemarie Mallett, the bishop of Croydon, a borough of London. Before her ordination as an Anglican minister, she worked as a research sociologist.

Others named to the group include: Vice Chair Geetha Tharmaratnam, chief impact investment officer of the WHO Foundation; Roy Swan, director of mission investments at The Ford Foundation; and Tara Sabre Collier, director of impacting investing and sustainable finance at Chemonics UK.

The fund will be earmarked for projects aimed at “helping communities adversely impacted by historic slavery,” the commissioners’ announcement said, although it did not specify exactly what or who would be funded. The money also will go to further researching the church’s role in promoting the slave trade.

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A report on the church’s involvement, initiated by the commissioners, estimated that a business it backed, the South Sea Co., transported 34,000 slaves “in crowded, unsanitary, unsafe and inhumane conditions” during its three decades of operation. By 1777, a church investment fund of the day, called Queen Anne’s Bounty, invested the current equivalent of $925 million into South Sea.

“Transatlantic chattel slavery is an appalling evil, whose consequences still affect society today, and we have a responsibility to respond to our historic links,” said the Right Rev. David Urquhart, one of the commissioners, who oversaw the forming of the oversight group, in a statement. “We take seriously our commitment to do that collaboratively, listening widely, with sensitivity and accountability.”

In the U.S., various religious and academic institutions have set up funds to funnel reparations to Blacks via scholarships and community outreach efforts. In 2020, the Episcopal Diocese of Texas pledged to pay $13 million in reparations to descendants of slaves. The U.S. Episcopal Church stems from the CofE but is an independent body.

The Virginia Theological Seminary, the Princeton Theological Seminary and Georgetown University are among those to pay slavery reparations. In July, Citigroup disclosed that some of its predecessor companies had ties to funding slavery. This resulted from a study the bank launched after the 2020 death of George Floyd. Citi has not announced any reparations payments as a result.