<span class="vcard">Shift the power Director</span>
Shift the power Director

The grapevine that grew in adversity

Carrying on in the middle of violent conflict requires skill, resilience, and nous.  For the Palestinians, the last 100 years have brought colonisation, expulsion, and military occupation, followed by a long and difficult search for self-determination and for coexistence with the nation they hold responsible for their suffering and loss. 

The Alliance of Funds: Collaborative philanthropy under construction in Brazil

Although collaboration is an old practice among philanthropic organizations, the idea of “collaborative philanthropy” in Brazil is relatively new and is a concept still under construction. Here in Brazil, collaboration is creating new relationships in the field of philanthropy for social justice. It all started in 2021.

A different way is possible: Re-imagining development in Mozambique

Working in civil society in Mozambique is a challenge.  Not only is the country classed as repressed by the Civicus Monitor, but the northern province of Cabo Delgado has been subject to an armed insurgency since October 2017, claiming thousands of lives and displacing an estimated half of the province’s population.

The birth of #ShiftThePower

The deliberate use of the hashtag #ShiftThePower was intended to provoke. Frustrations about the shortcomings of philanthropy and development aid are nothing new. However, it has always been very hard – and there have been few incentives – for those on the receiving end of aid to call out the practices and behaviours of funders and other big international players, let alone suggest that the power that they wield might be contributing to the problems that they are meant to be solving. In that sense, a truly global summit could provide a space to start such a conversation: if it was going to work, the elephant in the room – ‘the P-word’ – needed to be named loudly and incontrovertibly from the start.

The winner takes it all

These are real-life situations that are purely hurtful where the Global South organisation encounters three hurtful behavioural patterns – superiority, arrogance and dominance. In these situations, one chooses to either exercise extreme humility or risk not having funding for their organisations. These scenarios might appear normal to some organisations especially in this environment where civil society might be competing for funding or where funding is on the decline