Welcome to this new – and new look – issue of Alliance magazine This issue includes a special feature on leadership in philanthropy. Too often, our focus in popular depictions is on the lifestyles of elite philanthropists or the views of big personalities in our field.   But what about the committed individuals working in or leading philanthropic foundations? Often, they’re tasked with difficult judgements about allocating resources, navigating between family members and professionals, and managing teams. This special feature is guest edited by two exceptional women leading by example, Zimbabwean Tendisai Chigwedere, who is transitioning after six years at TrustAfrica. …

Few would disagree that the loss of almost 30,000 Palestinian lives in Gaza (at the time of writing) and the massacre of 1,200 people in Israel on 7 October 2023 are moral failings of huge proportions. Who is responsible for this failure? And how much worse could things get? Those questions were on the minds of philanthropy leaders, peacebuilding nonprofits and diplomats at a hastily convened meeting in Belfast in February organised by the Social Change Initiative for donors responding to violent conflict. Western foreign policy has failed on Israel/Palestine. Faced with a fork in the road in 2006, it …