(UN)LEARNING TOGETHER
REIMAGINING WHAT IT MEANS TO "DO GOOD"
Meet the (Un)learning companions -CUL 2
Jim Thomas
James Thomas is an Emeritus Professor at the University of North Carolina. He has worked as an epidemiologist or public health ethicist in more than 40 countries. Reflecting on systems he participated in and has come to see as colonial, he wrote But I Meant Well: Unlearning Colonial Ways of Doing Good. He is currently writing a sequel, A Better Place: Non-colonial Ways of Doing Good. With East African collaborators, he founded Africa Rising, a mutual aid network of African community-based organizations offering an alternative to the traditional donor-recipient relationship. Professor James has been greatly impressed and encouraged by the mission of the Philanthropy Reform Alliance.
Eric Onyango
Eric Onyango, also known as Poète Noir and Papa Mali, is an international development practitioner, consultant, and arts manager based in Nairobi, Kenya. He currently works with the British Council as an Arts Project Manager for Ignite Culture and previously worked with the International Planned Parenthood Federation, supporting sexual and reproductive health projects across 36 member associations in Africa, including managing youth-focused service delivery initiatives in Burkina Faso and Senegal. His experience spans youth-led programming, knowledge sharing, project management, and adapting programmes across diverse cultural contexts. Eric is also a poet and author of *Poèmotions II: Catharsis of Love*, a multilingual collection of poetry in English, French, and Sheng exploring emotion, self-love, and healing.
Sarah Pacutho
Sarah Pacutho is a social impact entrepreneur and development practitioner passionate about strengthening communities, building systems, and championing local voices. She is the Founder and Vision Lead of Community Catalyst Uganda, a community foundation in Pakwach district, known locally as *Thobi Pa Lwak*. Her expertise spans community-led development, local fundraising, resource mobilisation, governance, and communication for change. Sarah is a Master Trainer in Local Fundraising and a certified Change the Game Academy trainer. She previously worked with the Resource Alliance and spent over a decade with the Uganda National NGO Forum, working across communications, policy advocacy, civic space, governance, philanthropy, and civil society strengthening.
Deborah Brown Majekodunmi
Deborah Brown Majekodunmi is an Institutional Funding Specialist and social entrepreneur with over a decade of experience securing and managing complex funding partnerships across Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas. She helps organisations turn complexity into strategy, funding, and sustainable growth, across humanitarian and development contexts including South Sudan, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Haiti. She is the founder of Beyond Grants, a strategic advisory and learning platform helping nonprofits build diversified, resilient income. A Mandela Washington Fellow, Clinton Global Initiative Fellow, and World Bank Women X7 Recipient, she is based in Berlin, Germany.
Imelda E. Akurut
Imelda E. Akurut is a health economist, public health practitioner, and co-Founding Steward of the Philanthropy Reform Alliance (PRA), a pan-African collective reimagining philanthropy and development through collaborative unlearning, solidarity, and locally led practice. With over 18 years of experience across primary healthcare, health systems strengthening, health financing, and policy in Africa, she works at the intersection of global health, philanthropy reform, and systems change, enabling practitioners and funders shift power closer to communities.
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