As 2025 draws to a close, we wanted to pause and thank you for being part of what has become an extraordinary community of practice.
Over this year, we convened 16 dialogues. Not panels. Not webinars. But dialogues – spaces where we tried to think together about what is breaking and what might be built. Conversations that refused to look away, to grasp at easy answers; that held tension without forcing resolution and that created what one participant called “warm knowledge” born of shared struggle and authentic encounter.
Early this year, Gerry introduced the metaphor of Senterej – Ethiopian chess. In Senterej, the opening phase is different: both players place their pieces simultaneously, rapidly, before the formal game begins. It’s a moment of plasticity, where the board is being constituted even as strategy unfolds.
We’ve been living in that phase. The rules that governed development finance, philanthropy, international cooperation – they’re not holding. Aid is collapsing. Trade architectures are fracturing. The multilateral system is under coordinated assault. Philanthropy is being challenged from within and weaponised from without.
Our dialogues this year tried to make sense of this: from Lucy Bernholz’s “90 days to save US democracy” to Albie Sachs’ distinction between anger and rage; from Beth Sawin’s multisolving to Patricia Miranda’s anatomy of the debt trap; from the radical honesty of Naila Farouky and Halima Mahomed on philanthropy’s contradictions to Indy Johar’s notion of pre-emptive peace and our Planetary Antarctica Inquiry asking what security means when planetary boundaries are the threat.
We started this year with Lucy Bernholz and her Blueprint 2025 – her fifteenth annual scan of the philanthropy and civil society landscape.
Lucy has always understood that language matters: language is how communities think together. Each Blueprint tracked the emergence of new terms; the words people were reaching for to name what they were seeing. This tradition reminds us to pay attention to what’s being coined in these conversations – words like Senterej (the Ethiopian chess metaphor for moments when rules are being rewritten), or blickering (Mark Brown’s term for skimming over half-thought ideas without truly challenging our own thinking) come to mind from this year’s dialogues.
One of Lucy’s buzzwords in 2025 was dandelion – the idea that what we seed may scatter and take root in unexpected places. Whilst we are very sorry not to be ending the year with her Blueprint 2026, we have been encouraged to hear of emerging ideas for ‘blueprints’ seeded during this year’s conversations. So, to Lucy we say your dandelion fields are flourishing. We’ll continue to capture these dialogues and reflect on how we might carry forward the blueprint tradition – documenting not just what’s happening, but the words people are finding – or creating – to make sense of it.
On the theme of langue, Indy Johar recently articulated something that resonates with what many seem to be feeling:
The default state now is drift. And because the default is drift, ‘doing nothing’ is no longer neutral. It is degenerative… The work is not just to build, but to continuously re-instantiate what is being built: to keep re-stitching alignment, renewing legitimacy, repairing feedback loops, and tending the structures that allow collective action to persist across shock, noise, and fatigue.”
This is what we’ve tried to do together. Hold a vector. Maintain orientation under volatility. Create a space where, as Halima put it, we can “hold hope despite despair”- not as feeling but as practice.
When we asked whether these dialogues should continue, what we heard would suggest the answer is yes. Comments like “We need this space.” “There aren’t many spaces like this.” “This is a place of warm knowledge” are deeply appreciated. They help us also hold hope that these spaces are meaningful.
As Gerry says, Aluta Continua. We have been working on threads from this year’s conversations and we’re inviting you also to share any thoughts ideas or questions for dialogue. If you are sitting with any of these, please reply to this email. This community is shaped by who shows up and what you bring.
Until then we will you we wish you a peaceful passing of the time between years
