At this week's Round Table, Jack, Kenisha, Kris, and Madeline spoke with Michaela Latimer, Winston Churchill Fellow and Community Manager at Genesis, helping move New Zealand to a sustainable, low-carbon future, powered by renewable energy. Michaela was visiting us as part of her international Churchill Fellowship to learn about community and philanthropic organizations involved in positive youth development in the U.S. and U.K. to inform positive youth development frameworks in New Zealand. We had a great conversation about global philanthropy and its strengths and limitations. Michaela is very cognizant of critiques about philanthropy–and also feels that targeting really big things like poverty and hunger can’t be done piecemeal. She feels philanthropy should be about generosity and making things happen, and is focusing on helping corporations work in the service of creating authentic systemic change. Nonprofits have so many constraints around funding that constrains scale, which she feels has to change given the urgency of issues of our times. She is inspired by a Māori cultural tradition oriented around being a thriving people in a thousand years time–and now we are too. When you think in terms of a thousand years, you make very different decisions, which we as a society need to do. We emerged from our conversation recognizing that while we tend to THINK things are local, there’s a lot more that’s global and there are a ton of common issues across our work and our world. Thank you for listening!
