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Engagement Labs - 2017

Engagement Labs are for collective strategizing on moving philanthropy to support deeper systemic change within a sector or area of work.

ENGAGEMENT LAB 1

From extractivism
to regeneration: imagining the future, identifying strategies and next steps to get there

Lab leaders:

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  • Juliette Decoster - FPH

  • Daniel Moss - AgroEcology Fund

  • Maaike Schouten - Both ENDS

  • Galina Angarova - Swift Foundation

  • Steve Brescia - Groundswell International

The rise of populism  and the pursuit of economic growth through a new generation of trade and investments agreement which increases inequalities and destroys the environment, configures a historical moment that urges us to act together as activists and funders and to respond to the question:  ¿what are we going to do, responsibly, to make regeneration happen?

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Sustainable societies based on solidarity principles  food and energy sovereignty, decent jobs, land and water justice, sustainable trade and climate, compel us all towards a system change. What challenges are behind this complexity, how to tackle it? And what should collective actions look like to shift systems towards sustainability and wellbeing.

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ENGAGEMENT LAB 2

(Re)Working Economies:
Building across rights and markets towards a just economy

Lab leaders:

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  • Laine Romero-Alston - Ford Foundation

  • Daria Caliguire - SAGE Fund

  • Jon Jacoby - Open Society Foundations

  • María Palomares Arenas - Calala Women's Fund

We may be at a rupture point for neoliberal capitalism, which functions based on extraction of labor, reproductive work, natural resources, with limits placed on human rights and on freedom of association and movement. There are unprecedented levels of economic inequality within and across countries and regions of the world.  We are also witnessing a backlash to this rising inequality, which comes in different forms.

 

There’s the reactionary – a rise of illiberal populist nationalism  a la Brexit and Trump, anti-refugee and -migrant policies, an anti-women agenda, and the closing of civic space globally.  It is also evident in new and reinvigorated social protest and political movements mass climate change mobilizations, new economic models, and intersectional movements led largely by a new generation of women of color.  In the past, solutions and agendas have been relatively siloed in the labor, human rights, and environmental fields, both in philanthropy and the field. We are seeing shifts, both because of the internal crises and transformations within each field, but also due to innovation and the need to develop intersectional analysis and a shared agenda and strategy to tack toward the larger goal of a just economy.

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The focus of the engagement lab is to look at building toward a just economy from and across the perspectives of three different fields of work - human rights, labor, and climate/environment - with a cross-cutting gender, race, class, and movement lens.

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ENGAGEMENT LAB 3

Seeds of systemic change: what can we learn from municipalism,
new relationships with money and models of commoning?

Lab leaders:

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  • Nicolas Krausz - FPH

  • Kali Akuno - Cooperation Jackson

  • Tin Gazivoda - OSIFE

  • Peter Lipman - Full Circle Foundation

  • Eilert Lund Rostup - Karibu

  • Leslie Harroun - Partners for a New Economy

As inequality and environmental degradation grow, neoliberalism is dressing itself in populism or authoritarian capitalism in its drive to consolidate wealth and power. The good news is that new models of governance and wealth-building are emerging.  

 

Innovations in municipal decision-making, new currencies and lending practices, commons-based peer production and new forms of civic ownership  are being born of need at the local level and nurtured by new technologies and a feminized political culture. But these models must be linked across communities and cities to create coherent alternative systems that can disrupt and displace our current systems.  


In this Engagement Lab, we wanted to dive into some of the most promising and ripe systemic alternatives that arose recently from bottom-up citizens' responses to the economic and democratic crises or armed conflicts in several parts of the world. We wanted to understand how they deal with the current broken governing institutions and set up new ones that shift responsibilities to the people themselves. And last but not least we wanted to identify how philanthropy can contribute to sow these seeds of systemic change.

ENGAGEMENT LAB 4

What's the story?

a lab on Worldviews and Narratives

Lab leaders:

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  • John Fellowes - Full Circle Foundation

  • Elizabeth McKeon - IKEA Foundation

  • Vivian Paulissen - European Cultural Foundation

  • Philippe Mayol - Fondation Terre Solidaire

  • Manish Jain - Shikshantar

This is a lab around the key influence of narrative, worldview and culture, in helping philanthropy reimagine and rethink possibilities for deeper structural transformation and communication.

 

Human culture is never static; it arises from worldview, refined and redefined by stories. What is healthy and unhealthy in the dominant frames of today? What are the ‘givens’ we need to challenge? If we call out the worldviews stuck in domination, separation, artificial scarcity and control, can we change the wider political and economic outlook? Can we transcend our limited layers of identity: of self, race, class, gender, species? Can we free ourselves from what we ‘know’, to allow new stories to emerge?

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And they will all live happily ever after.

ENGAGEMENT LAB 5

Progressive philanthropy:
where we've been;
where we can go

Lab leaders:

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  • Romy Kraemer - Guerrilla Foundation

  • Mutisya Leonard - UHAI EASHRI

  • Ariane Shaffer - Indie Philanthropy Initiative

  • Isis Amlak and Rose Longhurst - Edge Fund UK

  • Chung Wha Hong - Grassroots International

  • Amanda Gigler - Mama Cash

  • Maria Amalia Souza - CASA Socio-Environmental Fund

Join us for three sessions where we will be collectively activating how we can push our own edges for personal, organizational and systemic transformation. Join us to shed assumptions, build new bridges, and make commitments to reshape our field to support systems change.

 

This lab will be a peer learning space where participants will be challenged to be radical-practical. We will share analysis of the history and origins of wealth, current challenges, best practices and opportunities, and how it can evolve to better meet the needs of transformative social change and true empowerment of social processes and movements.

 

The lab used “system thinking tools” to help us evaluate where we are, and what we need to do to get where we collectively want to be.  We will  look at the tools and approaches that progressive philanthropy can use to move forward beyond the confines of current philanthropic practices to transform itself to better reflect the kind of transformative movements we are supporting.

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ENGAGEMENT LAB 6

"Starving the Old, Building the New" Strategies to Move Capital Towards a Just Transition

Lab leaders:

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  • Matthias Fiedler - Bewegungsstiftung

  • Anna Fink - Amalgamated Bank 

  • Diana Van Maasdijk - Equileap

  • Carolyn Hayman - Margaret Hayman Charitable Trust

  • Jennifer Near - Shake the Foundation Collaborative

  • Tom Harrison and Sian Ferguson - Mark Leonard Trust

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Influencing capital and markets will be key pillars in moving toward a just transition and will require foundations and investors to make bold decisions in relation to their capital. It means divesting the money from the old broken economic system and investing it into a new economy that is emerging. In this lab, we will look at lessons learned from the the past and discuss our collective vision and strategy for moving forward. For example, in the German context, foundations and private donors have supported the anti-nuclear and anti-coal movements for decades, at the same time it was their investments into renewable energies at the beginning - when nobody dared to invest - that has built up a new system of renewables.

 

But investment strategies should not stop here as this is not yet the systemic change that we need to see. It is up to us to develop strategies on how our investments can support a just transition across divestment and reinvestment as well as thinking about the necessary change in our thinking about how we view the capital that we have at our disposal.

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ENGAGEMENT LAB 7

Movement building
in times of far-right populism

Lab leaders:

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  • Fiona Montagud - Calala Fondo de Mujeres

  • Amy Morris - Fund for Global Human Rights

  • Donal Mac Fhearraigh - OSIFE

  • Tyler Hauger - Karibu

  • Guppi Bola - Activist and Organiser

  • Sarah Christiansen - Solidago Foundation

  • Marko Ulvila - Siemenpuu Foundation

  • Anne Petermann - Bob H. Johnson Family Foundation

We live in changing and tumultuous times, where faith in our politics, economy and society continues to erode. Movements of all kinds have thrived across the globe, expressing a distrust for the existing system. And yet, it is the far-right populist movements that have gained political power.

 

With this shift we see a threat to the lives and dignity of the world’s most valuable communities; LGBTQi, women, indigenous, disabled, asylum seekers and many others. The success of our work is measured on centring these communities at the heart of our movements. What impact has traditional donor behaviour had on movement building? How do we help build power in the most effective and affected spaces? What does a winning movement look like in the face of right-wing populism? How do we confront these daily challenges whilst holding onto our vision of long term systemic economic and political change? .  

 

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