Day two of the Summit in Bogotá, Colombia, began with a plenary called ‘Setting the scene’ with Marta Ruiz, journalist and former Commissioner of Truth in Colombia.

‘After the war, we don’t have peace – we have wrath, sadness and grief. This is why the Truth Commission is necessary,’ said Ruiz. ‘Peace building is about more than an agreement, more than the silencing of weapons and the returning of combatants. It goes beyond the isolated actions we’ve had. Peace is a moral imagination that we need to survive.

‘Born in 2016, the Truth Commission gives closure to conflict. In our case, it’s not academic or intellectual – it’s a transition from past to future. It makes us look backward and forward, process trauma and learn how to co-exist. We have to.’

Peace has not been reached, insisted Ruiz, but silence has been broken, and victims centralised. 120,000 people have disappeared, 500,000 killed and 1 million exiled. The Commission has ‘listened to more than 30,000 people, individually and collectively. We also listened to each other… children, witnesses, expats, priests, guerrillas, paramilitaries, police and more. Truth is not a reveal, it’s an historical process that takes time, emotion and the changing of ideas.’

Both the political and the economic fabric requires reflection, and the searching for truth brings back trust.

Soheir Asaad, of Palestine’s Rawa Fund, then spoke on stage. The story of what’s happening in Gaza, said Asaad, is one of ‘colonisation, stealing our lands and fragmenting the population… [it’s] completely tied to capitalism, the history of race and slavery.’

Asaad pointed out the clear role of the US and European countries in the atrocities through the billions of dollars’ worth of support in aid, as well as the complicity of the media. ‘Our lives are invisible, our children a threat… it’s a stark manifestation of white supremacy. It’s the same bodies under the rubble who are drowning, finding refuge, losing their lands and having their labour exploited.’

Decolonisation has been coopted, and Asaad said that this has also happened to Palestinians’ realities – ‘coopted by theories, frameworks and measurements. ..We are going to look at our own internal power and skills, [rather than] financial ones. Before asking for grants, we ask ourselves for our own resources… and appreciating the power of our own community.

‘Our people are not just victims, we are powerful and resilient, and we are radicalising the world. ..We cannot afford slogans and transactional solidarity. If we don’t have justice, then centres of power should never know peace.’

Ambika Satkunanathan from Sri Lanka’s Neelan Tiruchelvam Trust, spoke next. ‘How we make sense of development and philanthropy is not radical, but has been labelled so to counter mobilisations for change.

‘The philanthropy development sector is patriarchal and colonial. …When these factors exist elsewhere, we call it structural violence. Why do we not acknowledge that this exists within philanthropy?’

Satkunanathan spoke of her desire for a world where philanthropy and development aid does not exist, where we work ourselves out of a job, small community organisations gain access to international spaces and social movements are not turned into NGOs.

In an act of continuing to build community, the majority of the rest of the day was spent in ‘bucket talks’, where you could choose to:

• Look to build collective dreams and strategies for safe communities – understanding how your work contributes to safe communities
• Learn how measurement is political – shedding light on the importance of reevaluating what we measure and how it shapes our understanding of progress and impact
• Reimagining our own systems, and organisational and governance structures, in the pursuit of collective action
• More salsa dancing!
• Building collective power, and the relational work of transforming power dynamics
• Decolonisation, from narrative to practice – what do we mean and how do we get there?
• Harnessing hidden resources and negotiating new forms of power

These buckets were delivered by different individuals and organisations, and led in different ways – often interactive, always in both English and Spanish.

Collectively, we painted posters and slogans, scrawled roadblocks and slogans and solutions across post-it notes and placed them on walls; took part in breathing exercises, verbalised our most ‘idealistic’ dreams for the future, watched PowerPoints and met with hundreds of delegates across the globe in their various sectors and silos and interrogate what it means to truly shift power, promote peace, and to reimagine.

Amy McGoldrick is the Head of Marketing, Advertising and Events at Alliance magazine