‘What if the way we respond to our problems is part of the problem?’

– Bayo Akomolafe

The Global Greengrants Fund, the Zambian Governance Foundation have recently shared articles describing their journeys of transformation. These are part of a participatory initiative for reforming international development, part of a bigger story of what is needed to change the system. Both speak of deep-inner changes that resonate deeply with our own journey at Philanthropy for Social Justice and Peace (PSJP). These are not self-referential or quaint accounts of personal and organisational growth. They are stories about changing the way in which we relate to one another in philanthropy and international development and collectively they are about creating the conditions for the emergence of new and more compassionate attributes of this system.

At PSJP our goal has been to centre the normative values of justice, solidarity and agency in the field of philanthropy. For over a decade we worked to provide philanthropy with tools and arguments that would help to do this. We focused on topics like evaluation, understanding and taking risk, understanding social justice, and developing grantmaking practices. Our modalities and tools were targeted at helping the field understand itself, its cognitive dissonance, its assumptions, biases and misconceptions but also its strengths and the role it could play in society. We sought to highlight that philanthropy must pay attention to and address the power dynamics in society and the underlying root causes of complex societal problems in order to have lasting impact on justice and peace issues. We operated through a closed network called the Working Group on PSJP, bringing together like-minded individuals and seeding our relationships in a shared vision, in commitment to the work, in creativity and in joy.

We collected data and evidence and distilled it into instructive tools, workshops at sector conferences, working papers, provocation pieces, stories, even a play. Our tangible body of work from this period is creative and substantial. Yet when we weighed it against the changes we wanted to see in the world, we always came up short. Philanthropy’s role, relationships and engagement with change actors and processes in a context of rising conflicts, authoritarianism and closing space for civil society, poverty, inequalities and polarisation in our societies, and an unfolding ecological crisis, remained limited at best, problematic at worst.

Slowly, a growing discomfort that was shared within the group led to a profound realisation. We just didn’t need new tools and new strategies to be more effective, they needed to be seeded in a different paradigm. Despite our commitment to our values, our ways of working were deeply ‘entangled’ (Anthea Lawson) in the ways of the very field that we wanted to change. We had been operating within the logic of the same paradigm that we were critiquing – that prioritises results that can be counted over the quality of relationships; approaches that ignore the integrated experience of being human and focus on facts and rationale; and narratives that shy away from a language of care and compassion which is what we truly want to build into the system. Like the system we wanted to change, we too played into a separation between object and subject, us and them, into the belief that what needed changing was ‘over there’, separate from us.

We have carried this realisation into all areas of our work. The Working Group which had come to be seen as an exclusive group of ‘experts’ trying to influence the field of philanthropy was dissolved in 2017. We shifted to a smaller and more inclusive operation that offered no answers (and now had the humility to realise that it didn’t have them) but which sought to learn from different actors from all spheres of the civic space (and no longer limited to philanthropy) about what makes a good society and to help connect, support and amplify these voices, ideas and narratives.

A significant shift in how we work has been in our network approach which became less about bringing together people based on what they knew, instead is now more centered on their lived experiences. We have tried to create safe spaces that can hold a diversity of experiences and views, are about authentic connection, learning together and showing up in solidarity than about forming echo-chambers or transactional collaborations. The process of holding and facilitating these spaces (based on Bohm-inspired dialogue) embodies the philosophy of Ubuntu ‘I am because you are’ and helps to transcend the arbitrary boundaries that exist between people, groups, geographies, organisations.

This focus on safe-space, authentic connection and dialogue has had a pivotal impact on our narratives which have slowly expanded to include topics like dignity, the everyday nuances of community peacebuilding processes, and trauma among others. If our narratives do not speak of things like compassion and dignity or strive to unpack and understand concepts like peacebuilding and resilience so that they have richer and more contextualised meanings, how can we develop systems that serve these goals meaningfully? Years of top-down approaches and measuring only what’s tangible erodes these goals and enables what in systems thinking is called ‘drift to low performance’ (Donella Meadows).

More critically, the shift has allowed us to appreciate the conditions for deep change – to understand that these go beyond good intentions and the limits of thought. This awareness helped us see clearly that our power lay in service of the voices, knowledge and wisdom of those closest to the ground, instead of speaking for them (Halima Mahomed). Understanding and embracing these shifts has demanded an attunement to our inner world and those of others, to become learners, listen deeply, enter the realm of not-knowing and let the narratives emerge not from our ‘expert knowledge’ but from the wisdom of lived experiences, our relationships and our interactions. It has also meant being uncomfortable, learning to live with ambiguity, not having tangible measurable results, giving up control on the time frame of change.

We are humbled by the naivety of some of our early assumptions and our mistakes. In our sixteenth and final year, as PSJP sunsets we are now beginning to feel a deeper alignment between our own methods and the things that we want to see in the fields of international development and philanthropy and in society broadly – a culture of care, compassion, solidarity, respect for the lived experience and political agency of those whose lives are impacted by the systems that we are trying to influence. We have come to understand that fixing the world or even fixing international development and philanthropy means healing ourselves and each other (James Scurry).

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