(UN)LEARNING TOGETHER
REIMAGINING WHAT IT MEANS TO "DO GOOD"
PRA Modular Unlearning Labs: Cycle One
Audience-specific journeys for funders, INGOs and intermediaries, and community-based and locally led organisations
.png)
The Courage to Trust: Applying Trust-Based Philanthropy Principles in Humanitarian and Development Partnerships
Jul 24 - Jul 24, 2026
4:00-5:00pm EAT
View Event →.png)
Explore Our Thematic Unlearning Labs
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 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.
Register Interest