It was three years ago – in what feels like a very different world – that a small group of community development activists and practitioners from Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and the UK met up in London.
Are you interested in supporting broader efforts to shift power and build the (civil) society we want by helping to connect the dots between innovative and emergent practices around the world?
I spent more time on logical frameworks, understanding donor and back donor compliance requirements, preparing and amending contracts, reviewing budgets, writing proposals and reports – thinking that these are the important and productive tasks.
In my humble opinion, ICOM’s story is worth telling because of what we managed to achieve in terms of building a culture of giving in Florianópolis.
Speaking up is also an opportunity to continue the virtuous cycle of compassion for the many researchers in low income countries struggling to navigate power, decolonization and the violence of it all.
International aid as a form of reparations by former colonial powers to their former colonies has remained a popular notion amongst development enthusiasts. Particularly as calls for greater equality among foreign donors and their recipients increase, as do the brutal truths of white philanthropy and racism in the sector.
Conventional child sponsorship, like a lot of other development work, is designed to position recipients as static, helpless, and uninvolved in their “rescue” by donors.
We reimagine what the world and international development would look like if we de-linked power from wealth that creates artificial barriers between communities in the Global South and North.
Some philanthropic players have spoken up against vaccine discrimination toward the Global South but most are still silent.
Over the past two years, participants in the #ShiftThePower movement have created a vibrant, living, and evolving network map of the community on the Pando platform, made up of more than 500 organizations and nearly 1,000 relationships. Originally created as a visual tool to understand both participation and representation within the #ShiftThePower community and strengthen global collaboration, the network map also offers a way to grow the movement by centering the power of relationships.
