From 2020 onwards, we were supporting work that was explicitly trying to nurture alternatives to colonial capitalism.

Educated by many people in our networks, we had come to recognise that colonial capitalism provided the underlying ‘why’ of inequity and oppression, including the ‘severe and multiple disadvantage’ we had been focused on previously.

Our analysis was this:

We live under a dominant economic and cultural system which relies on constant growth by extracting and consuming ever more resources. It relies on exploiting other people and their lands. It relies on violence.

This system is racialised because the extraction of social and economic value is from people of racialised identities, and the history of capitalism is based on the exploitation of colonised people. This system is political because choices are made every day to maintain it. 

This system gets presented as natural, universal and a path to progress for everyone. While it has brought benefits to many people, it has come at the expense of many – both humans and beyond human. We are experiencing interlocking social, climate and economic global crises because of this system.

It doesn’t have to be this way.  

We started to use ‘nurturing alternative realities’ as a framing and to support work centring values such as collectivism, cooperation, equity, gifting, interdependence with humans and beyond humans, mutuality, non-violence, shared governance and decision-making. This work was in solidarity with our movements work. The critical mass (push) that comes through the focus and energy of movements also needs the critical connections (pull) found in the groups and communities doing their best to nurture these alternative realities.

Alongside the work of funding those people and communities exploring how to create living and breathing alternatives, we were doing our own work to rewire our thinking to notice, question and move beyond the ‘truth’ that colonial capitalism is natural, universal and a path to progress for everyone. Many of the books we recommend helped with this unlearning/relearning process. We borrowed an expression from the Transition Resource Circle and started referring to this as the ‘ontological shift‘.

As time went on, we felt a growing sense of unease and discomfort with our position. We felt the dissonance of doing this work within a hierarchical philanthropic foundation invested in the stock market.