After Aid: Reimagining the Material Base for Civil Society and Social Movements
Hosts: Global Fund for Community Foundations, #ShiftThePower, Global Greengrants & Global South House
We are living through a moment where existing systems feel visibly exhausted and where change so often starts and stalls. Transformation feels close yet unachievable, and yet those who have long laboured at the edges carry a clarity that legacy systems cannot muster.
Possible Now is an emerging conversation that is taking place in both global south and north begins in this reckoning: uncertain and emergent but alive with potential. What if change was less about “grand bargains” and “new agendas,” and more about connecting the small but powerful things already happening around us?
As international aid continues to decline, civil society faces a choice: continue clinging to shrinking external resources or reimagine the foundations of its financial and political legitimacy.
Around the world, communities and their organizations have already been turning to alternative resources — mutual aid, rotating savings, remittances, solidarity economies, and community philanthropy — to fund and sustain their struggles and their ambitions on their own terms.
Alongside the financial aspect, these practices are organized in ways that build trust and new forms of collective power and citizen organizing.
The session will open with a short film that paints a global picture of alternatives that already exist. It will be followed by an open discussion aimed inviting ideas and forging potential pathways as to how different kinds of activities of the edge of the mainstream can be woven into a global broader tapestry that is the good society.
This venue has a capacity of 90.