Welcome to the uncertainty

I’m still dreaming. 

That may sound strange amidst the uncertainty of a global pandemic, but it’s important to keep imagining what’s next, especially when it may feel like everything we know is crumbling or under some perceived threat of oblivion. 

Because it’s not. It’s just changing. 

What I hope will be changing the most in the international aid and philanthropy sector is this: The falsehood that we as individuals or as organizations are singular – that we can just ideate or program or consume our way to a better world, and that we can do our work without transforming the roots of the economic and political systems that drive inequality and the climate crisis.

I’m dreaming because COVID-19 is offering some lessons that could fuel changes to how the sector fundamentally operates. As individuals, we are being invited to understand more fully our vulnerability and our interdependence. The question is now, can we apply this to our work?

Can we allow COVID-19 to finally upend our notions of “giver” and “receiver”?

Can a deeper knowing that a stranger’s survival is bound up with your own welcome in the new skills needed to revolutionize our sector?

So as I’ve been imagining the future this week, I’ve also been jotting down the things to which I am recommitting during the changes ahead. I’m sharing them here in hopes that they resonate with you as well: 

Make sure I’m moving from rhetoric to catalytic action.

There is safety in asking the “big”, high-minded questions. It serves those with privilege to appear as if they are aligned to change, but requires nothing of them. Living and loving the questions means listening to my guts/intuition, taking risks and taking action that reduces my comfort and convenience and power. It means embracing the both/and of life, expecting both beauty and accomplishment, amidst grave disappointment and setbacks.

Give that big brain a rest.

Even though we will try, it is still too soon to try to “make meaning” about what is or is not happening on national or global scales. I may not be able to think my way out of anything. So even if I must “do something,” let it be preparing the way by supporting the strategies of people coping with sorrow, despair, uncertainty, and yet summoning the courage – every day – to keep fighting for everyone’s liberation along the way.

Remember, I am “new.”

I fully recognize that while no one is immune from this crisis, it will nevertheless impact people and places differently. As a woman who identifies as white and having grown up in the U.S., I must act accordingly, in reverence and deference to people who built lives of love and joy and dignity for us all, amidst stress and struggle and oppression, for generations. This means continually accepting that I may have more to learn than I will contribute, and understanding the risk I run of re-creating harm. I recommit to listening until I know how to prevent that as much as and whenever I can.

There is much to grieve. So much.

This is so much of the work we must now undertake, in order to usher in something new, is to acknowledge what has been lost – how racism, patriarchy and capitalism break our connection to ourselves and each other and lives, so many lives lost and the potential within each. To *know* privilege and acknowledge my privilege and my ancestors’ complicity and/or direct role in where we are now (an ongoing inquiry), it must be felt and releashed, not just thought about. I learned a lot about grief last year, and I also learned that the space it creates is for courage. 

Know the sources of my own strength, not just “inspiration.”

This work is no longer about me or anyone else “making a difference.” This work is about reckoning with myself and others while building something together that does not yet exist. That requires me to dig deeper, to understand fully whose shoulders on which I stand, and my own relationship to Spirit, so that I can take the next lighted step, so that more people can survive this crisis. 

Know that no one can be fully “prepared”, nor is anyone alone.

We will all be learning together how to trust each other, and not rely on the false promises offered by systems or structures rooted in racism, patriarchy and capitalism. As I step away from what I “should be“, or “should do”, I should expect to feel unmoored – marginalized from those whom I love or with whom I identify. This is what the installers and maintainers of oppressive systems would have us believe – that we are alone. And it’s not true. 

Move the money.

It’s time to get serious about moving more unrestricted money in more disbursed ways than ever before. Recommitting to fighting for the right of all people and beings to the dignity of a good life means sharing what I have – fast and without strings – and asking and supporting other people in my position and in other organizations to do the same. 

The roots of this sector were formed for people like me in rich countries to respond to crises in which they were not directly impacted. (Though, they were certainly implicated.)

Now amidst this global pandemic, we are part of this crisis.

So what am I, and what are we – those who make up the social good sector – going to do now? 

Let me love, grieve, dream…all the while acting against injustice and anything that goes against my own soul.

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