Blog (By Tatiana Garavito) Over the many years I’ve spent navigating both activist and philanthropic spaces, I’ve come to realise that philanthropy often serves as a band-aid solution. My colleagues at the foundations I work with wouldn’t necessarily frame it this way, and it’s certainly not their intention, but sadly, that’s often the reality. The issue with band-aids is that they’re temporary—they address the immediate urgency but fail to tackle the root causes of the wound. Short-term emergency grants, project-based funding amongst others often miss the broader picture;…

A collection of jaw dropping funding practices and of what you should not do as a donor (By Flaviano Bianchini) After almost 20 years of working as an activist in the field, and after almost 12 years of being the founder and director of an international NGO, I have come across a couple of wonderful donors and dozens of horrible ones. I decided to collect the worst cases just to highlight a few examples of what a donor should not do. The list goes behind the classic “do…

(By Martin Modlinger) To date, our Leap Ecosystem has brought forward a Climate Justice Experiment, a Decolonising Philanthropy Experiment, and is developing a Radical Care Experiment and a Migrant Justice Experiment. The reason I am talking about the „Leap Ecosystem“ and not just Leap is twofold: First: Leap is fluid. Some of the experiments emerged in the current Leap Facilitation Group, some are carried by former Leap members with just some support by the current group, some have developed halfway externally, but are now anchored in the current…

The past four months in the LEAP universe have been intense. Following a series of group and individual consultation calls from October to December, we had to step into a lower gear at the end of 2020. We realised that we had fallen into the trap of wanting too much too fast and not making enough time for the essential things: bridging differences and finding ourselves as a team and reflecting upon all the amazing and critical input that we received — So we stopped ploughing ahead and…