Why Investing and Funding Systemic Change Builds a Culture of Solidarity over a Culture of Pity:
A lot can come to light in an election year— especially in the midst of multiple active genocides. The ideas of democracy, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press exists, despite 90% of people being unable to voice their support for human lives without facing discrimination, loss of funding, loss of their jobs, harassment, doxxing, and or even loss of their lives is deeply hypocritical and misguided. Further still, beyond the rise of fascism, censorship and ongoing debilitating disasters, a cultural change is taking place: the normalization of what used to be considered “too radical” has now shifted in the center of many conversations. Folks who had no idea about colonialism and its consequences on human life and our climate, are now fluent in connecting the dots between gun violence in schools in the United States and the bombs dropped on schools in Gaza.
The world has inevitably changed—and with it, our systems must follow suit. Currently, our systems are being upheld by harmful investments that extract from people and the planet, who make billions of dollars from weapons and wars that rely on fracking and the oil industry in order to extract wealth. This wealth is then used to generate more harmful investments, where only a small percentage of this wealth funds the philanthropic scheme.
Philanthropy relies on charity, pity and disaster to justify its very existence. By and large, philanthropic funds are used to support band aid solutions that act to support the very systems designed to create disaster upon disaster. In fact many charities invested in “narrative change” or “cultural change” spend significant amounts of money either pretending these systems don’t exist or that they are the solution to these problems while not having frameworks of change to support a transition from said harmful systems.
Slow Factory has made it clear that systemic problems require systemic solutions and that it’s not as complicated as it seems, as long as we have the right tools to enact systemic change, including how to visualize and understand the main catalysts of change that can (and are!) transforming systems.
Investing in systemic change in a sustainable and long term way is the only solution to efficiently address climate change and human rights violations.
Systems rely on four things to exist:
- Education
- Culture
- Media
- Policies
Without any one of these, systems fall. And they have fallen, and news flash: are falling now.
So when philanthropy stubbornly refuses to invest in systems change while benefiting from a pity-driven economy that stems from white supremacy and systemic oppression (whether financial or cultural), it is participating in climate change and human rights violations. Because championing big bandaids atop of a bleeding system will never truly heal it—will it?
Addressing these systems from a holistic framework is the only way forward. It’s time for philanthropy to catch up to what it is responsible for and heavily invest in systemic change— starting with Slow Factory’s framework for Collective Liberation. Years of work— labor, data, studies, and visualization— have led mainstream to these conclusions. If philanthropy allocated 50% of their funds towards systemic solutions, we would be in a whole new reality —we would be deeper into adaptation and a just transition would actually be happening. The time is now. It has been “now” for more than twelve years.
