Philanthropy has a blind spot. According to Otto Scharmer (Theory U), it concerns our ‘inner place – the source from which we operate when we act, communicate, perceive, or think.’ This blind spot drives a strong sense of inauthenticity that Barry Knight calls out in his blog post, ‘Let’s stop burying our heads in the sand – starting with Gaza’. We wax lyrical about decolonization, but we remain silent and paralyzed on issues like Gaza. There is a superficial and performative nature to our conversations on critical issues. We typically oscillate between politeness and condemnation. We are either too nice and avoid difficult conversations on philanthropy’s failures, fears and uncertainties. Or we are quick to judge the failures in others, playing into an ‘over there-ness’ – the belief that what needs change is ‘over there’, separate from us.

This ‘over there-ness’ also pervaded our work at PSJP. Our goal was to center the values of justice, solidarity and agency in the field of philanthropy. For over a decade, we produced a substantive and creative body of work to advance these values, but nothing changed. Philanthropy’s role in resourcing progressive agendas for a just and peaceful world remained limited at best and problematic at worst and we were forced to examine our tactics and the assumptions on which they were based. Only when the chaotic socio-political context started to affect our lives and we could no longer separate our work from the colonial and racist ideologies that govern the world, could we have an honest reckoning with our failures. We realized that our conversations about what needs to change in philanthropy, and how, needed to start in a different place – with ourselves. We had not seen that we too were entangled in the paradigms we were trying to change.

To close the gap between our words and practice, we started to experiment. The process has been a slow unfolding which has revealed a new way of doing and of seeing things, and after nearly eight years, some lessons from our journey are emerging.  

Our first lesson is humility. Our work had been focused on marshalling all the arguments and evidence to support our belief system and creating tools to help others apply it in their work. At the time, it felt righteous. Now it feels arrogant. We are not alone in this of course. Philanthropic culture, dominated by the Global North, centres its belief system and its narratives of what change should look like, even when it has laudable goals of decolonization, localization or it adopts calls to shiftpower. We talk in echo chambers that reinforce our assumptions and confirm our biases. They blind us to different ways of being and giving that are entrenched in entirely different belief systems (that were never colonized to begin with), built on interconnectedness and rooted in love, solidarity, and mutual support.

As the system around us crumbles, we need to see humility as more than just a nice character trait, but as a necessary prerequisite to recognizing that we don’t have the answers and ‘we really don’t know the way out of this’. Once we realize this, humility becomes a political act where we are called to radically reassess our norms and assumptions and concede space to those who have the answers. Practically, this is also a steppingstone to reaching the often elusive qualities of trust and solidarity in our philanthropic practice and to fostering genuine collaboration.

At PSJP, cultivating humility has illuminated our ‘blind spot,’ enabling us to see ourselves within a larger ecosystem of change that includes activists, civil society leaders and models of philanthropy that prioritize care and the philosophy or ubuntu, over our impulse to control. By moving beyond our echo chamber, we have found allies in places where we never cared to look before, and this has expanded our vision, language and methods.

Our second lesson is designing conversations for connection. We realized that our conversations were perpetuating the same tendency to separate that we criticised in philanthropy. They were not designed to win hearts and minds but to prove that we are right and the other wrong. Inspired by Bohm Dialogue that emphasises deep listening while suspending judgement, we have moved from binary and combative conversations which have us defending our case for our belief system and prosecuting other approaches for their failures, to engaging in a shared exploration. This has freed us from our assumed need to provide answers. Instead we have learned to ask generative questions that allow us to build a bridge to different perspectives. For example, when asked how can dignity be meaningfully applied to daily social change practice, we no longer sought to provide off the shelf answers. Instead of saying ‘here are three great examples of how philanthropy can advance dignity’, we asked ‘is development without dignity worth having?’ and ‘what is the role of dignity in your work?’ 

We have learned over time that questions that are formulated to connect are also an antidote to the performative culture in our sector. They invite vulnerability and elicit responses that are authentic, and grounded in our lived experiences. As Krista Tippet (host of the On being project) says:

‘It’s hard to transcend a combative question. But it’s hard to resist a generous question. We all have it in us to formulate questions that invite honesty, dignity, and revelation. There is something redemptive and life-giving about asking better questions.’

Our third lesson is holding spaces which emphasise care. We have learned that this often over-looked aspect of gathering is critical to having meaningful conversations. In the language of facilitation this is called creating a container and there is a large body of knowledge and practice on how to do this. We have come to appreciate the power of brave and safe ‘containers’ – small and respectful spaces where people can share their stories in safety and bridge the distance between the personal and political. It is only possible to be vulnerable when we feel safe. It is only when we feel safe that we can face daunting questions about philanthropy’s failures and our own entanglements in those failures.

Over time, starting our conversations in a place that emphasizes humility, connection, and care, has been transformative for us. It is helping us address the dissonance we have felt in our own work. We finally see reflected in our methods and narratives, values such as compassion, solidarity, and trust, that we advocate for in philanthropy. Using this approach has helped expand our narratives. They are now richer, more nuanced and reflect the complexity and diversity of perspectives about philanthropy, social change, peacebuilding and conflict transformation, and not just our own limited understanding of these concepts.

This is still a ‘work in progress’ learning journey for us at PSJP as there are no quick or easy fixes to the cognitive dissonance in our sector. It is slow, patient work that asks us to see ourselves as part of something more expansive. It asks us to be curious, to step into the unknown, transcend our paradigms and to accept the discomfort and risks that come with it. John Paul Lederach calls this ‘the moral imagination’ which invites us to experiment with new ways of being and of relating to each other.

What is clear is that as we experience more conflict, crisis and chaos than ever before we need radically different approaches that centre connection, compassion, and healing. We need approaches that restore human dignity. At the moment, our blind spot in institutional philanthropy makes us unfit to be the drivers of these approaches, and condemns us to more business as usual.

Chandrika Sahai is the Programme Manager of Philanthropy for Social Justice and Peace (PSJP), housed at Global Dialogue, UK.