(UN)LEARNING TOGETHER
REIMAGINING WHAT IT MEANS TO "DO GOOD"
Foundational Stream: Reimagining What It Means to “Do Good”
From saviorism, charity, and technical fixes to solidarity, justice, and human flourishing. This module unpacks the foundational assumptions that shape how “doing good” is understood in development and philanthropy. It challenges the savior mindset, including white saviorism, hero narratives, beneficiary framing, dependency assumptions, and the belief that solutions must come from outside communities. It also questions the elevation of charity as the highest moral good, where transactional giving, paternalistic generosity, and short-term relief are prioritised over dignity, justice, and structural transformation. Finally, it unpacks the framing of development as a purely technical project, critiquing over-reliance on expert-driven, linear models that overlook culture, relationships, and lived experience—treating people as problems to be solved rather than partners in flourishing. Together, this module invites a shift toward solidarity, justice, and locally rooted transformation.
Register InterestCUL 1: Power and Coloniality
This stream explores how power is embedded, reproduced, and legitimised within development systems, and how it continues to shape whose knowledge counts, whose voices are heard, and whose decisions matter. It unpacks the colonial roots of development and aid, including racial hierarchies, imported solutions, and deficit narratives about Africa that position communities as recipients rather than co-creators of change. It also challenges knowledge hierarchies, where Northern expertise, academic credentialism, and extractive research practices often overshadow indigenous and lived knowledge systems. At the level of practice, the stream examines who gets to decide, highlighting how decision-making is frequently concentrated in donors and institutions, with communities included through token participation rather than meaningful influence. It further interrogates institutional superiority, including INGO exceptionalism, capacity-building as a one-way “fixing” exercise, and assumptions that larger organisations are inherently better positioned to lead change. Together, this stream invites a shift from hierarchical, colonial patterns of development toward shared power, epistemic justice, and genuinely locally led systems of change.
Register InterestCUL 2: Spiritual and Moral Imagination
This stream explores the deeper ethical, moral, and relational dimensions of development and philanthropy. It challenges the idea of value-neutral or purely technical approaches, inviting a return to moral imagination, meaning, purpose, and human flourishing as central to how change is conceived and practiced. It questions dominance-based models of power rooted in control, status, institutional prestige, and ownership of outcomes, and instead promotes power-with approaches grounded in humility, shared responsibility, and relational accountability. The stream also unpacks the language and practice of “helping,” challenging the distance and hierarchies it creates between giver and receiver. It invites a shift toward belonging, solidarity, and mutual recognition of shared humanity. Finally, it critiques narrow definitions of success driven by scale, growth, and institutional survival, and instead reimagines success as collective flourishing, wellbeing, and meaningful transformation within communities and systems.
Register InterestCUL 3: When Money Moves: Unlearning Scarcity, Control, and Extraction
This stream examines how money, resources, and accountability shape power within development and philanthropy. It challenges assumptions of resource ownership, restrictive funding practices, and compliance-driven relationships that often undermine trust and local agency. It also explores cultures of scarcity that fuel competition, hoarding, and fear-based organisational behaviour, while interrogating extractive fundraising practices that rely on poverty narratives, trauma storytelling, and the commodification of suffering. Finally, the stream questions the dominance of metrics and reporting as the primary measures of value, inviting a shift from counting outputs and extracting data toward learning, relationships, trust, and meaningful transformation. Together, this stream reimagines resource flows through the lenses of **stewardship, abundance, solidarity, and transformational accountability.
Register InterestCUL 4: Shifting Power : Beyond Localisation Theatre
This stream examines the gap between the rhetoric and reality of locally led development. It challenges forms of localization that stop at representation or implementation while leaving decision-making, resources, and power concentrated elsewhere. The stream explores how deficit-based assumptions about local organisations are reinforced through conventional capacity-building approaches, capacity assessments, and one-way models of learning. It invites a shift toward mutual learning, reciprocal exchange, and recognition of the strengths, knowledge, and leadership that already exist within communities. It also interrogates common partnership narratives, uncovering the hidden power dynamics that often shape collaboration. Moving beyond transactional, compliance-driven relationships, the stream explores what it takes to build partnerships grounded in trust, mutual accountability, shared power, and genuine solidarity.
Register InterestCUL 5: Whose Knowledge counts?
This stream explores how knowledge is produced, validated, and applied within development and philanthropy. It challenges cultures of certainty, expert authority, and predictability that often leave little room for curiosity, adaptation, and learning. The stream questions the pursuit of "best practice" as a universal solution, examining how replication and standardisation can overlook context, complexity, and local realities. Instead, it encourages approaches that embrace emergence, experimentation, and context-responsive learning. It also critiques extractive research practices that treat communities as sources of data rather than partners in knowledge creation. By shifting from studying communities to learning with them, the stream promotes more ethical, participatory, and locally owned approaches to knowledge and evidence generation.
Register InterestLeadership Stream
This stream explores the leadership norms and organisational cultures that shape how power, responsibility, and recognition are exercised within development and philanthropy. It challenges command-and-control approaches rooted in hierarchy, positional authority, and fear-based accountability, while inviting a shift toward stewardship, trust, and shared responsibility. The stream also examines invisible and often gendered forms of labour, burnout cultures, and the expectation that sacrifice is a measure of commitment. It questions dominant notions of professionalism that prioritise performance, perfectionism, and respectability over authenticity, wellbeing, and purpose. Finally, it unpacks cultures of individual heroism, including founder syndrome and celebrity leadership, and explores pathways toward collective leadership, shared ownership, and more relational ways of leading change.
Register InterestGender, Justice & Human Dignity Stream
This stream explores how development and philanthropy engage with questions of gender, inclusion, power, and human worth. It challenges approaches that focus on representation and participation without addressing the deeper structures and systems that produce inequality. The stream examines the limitations of checklist approaches to gender and inclusion, tokenistic representation, and diversity efforts that leave existing power relations untouched. It invites a shift from inclusion as presence to transformation as power, ownership, and systemic change. It also questions narratives that tie human value to productivity, economic contribution, or measurable outputs. By centering dignity, justice, and human flourishing, the stream encourages a vision of development that recognises the inherent worth of all people beyond what they produce or achieve.
Register InterestTowards Kindred Partnerships
This stream reimagines what it means to work together in development and philanthropy, shifting from transactional engagement to deeply relational and interdependent ways of partnering. It explores relational accountability, grounded in accountability to communities, mutual responsibility, and shared stewardship rather than upward reporting alone. It also engages with trust-based philanthropy, emphasising trust, flexibility, and long-term accompaniment over compliance-driven funding and short-term project cycles. The stream extends into ideas of collective liberation, centering interdependence, solidarity, and shared futures as the foundation for meaningful collaboration. Finally, it envisions flourishing systems—regenerative approaches that nurture community wealth, ecological stewardship, and human dignity as core outcomes of development practice.
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