By Romy Krämer, Graciela Hopstein and Halima Mahomed The global Corona pandemic might very well be the biggest crisis of our lifetime. The current situation has the potential to not only disrupt the status quo but to change our social, economic and political systems forever. It demands us to suspend great plans, focus on being present and think…
The COVID-19 crisis is bringing extraordinary challenges for us personally and for the communities that we serve. As we adjust and adapt to the seismic changes, there are opportunities for us to model responses to the crisis, protect the most vulnerable and build back better after it has blown over. PSJP is now using the…
These are uncertain and challenging times for people trying to push for progressive, people-first solutions to the crisis presented to us by COVID-19. Being deliberate in the way in which we communicate is essential. As progressives – or people who care about people – we want to use our words to activate values in our…
Sometimes nightmares become real and dystopias – foreseen only in novels or movies – become true stories. On Thursday 13 February, Assifero was hosting one of the five Ariadne Forecast roundtables in Europe in Como (http://www.puntocometa.org/home-eng/), Italy. We were over 40 Italian funders, discussing the 2020 Forecast report elaborated each year by Ariadne. Only one…
It’s an old adage: who pays the piper, calls the tune. In other words, if it’s your money, you get to choose. In general, it might be a good rule, but there are times when it’s worth reconsidering. Towards the end of last year, PSJP published a paper based on conversations with 14 civil society…
Indonesians began the year discovering that one in every five among them is now economically secure. According to the World Bank’s January 2020 report entitled Aspiring Indonesia , since 2002, the country’s 52-million strong middle class has been growing faster than any other income group. This matters not only for the country’s economic growth, the…
By Andrew Milner and Halima Mahomed ‘Development can be seen as expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy,’ wrote Amartya Sen. However, it seldom has. Instead, development has been reduced to much more easily identifiable numbers and targets. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Africa. Institutional philanthropy, which could potentially play a significant part…
A new paper by PSJP, Understanding Sustainability puts some substance to the concept of sustainability by talking to a group of diverse organizations from the fields of development and philanthropy about what they mean by it. It’s a worthwhile and timely exercise because, as the paper points out in its introduction, sustainability has become a…
In the last post on leadership, we saw how much importance all the organizations attached to encouraging and developing leadership among their constituencies. How do they apply that precept to themselves? Is it different from encouraging and developing leadership among the communities they serve? And how do they run or guide an organization, yet pay…
‘The happiness and sorrow; hope and despair and sense of fair treatment versus injustice in public life in any society is associated directly in part, if not whole with the culture and quality of public leadership.’ As Martin Macwan’s words indicate, few concepts are so important. But what is it? How is it practised in…