The Web of Transformation

I first became fascinated by the power of communities to organize themselves as a summer health volunteer in Costa Rica in 1990, supporting local health promoters to vaccinate kids and teach women about breast cancer. I later worked in the devastated Eastern seaboard of Honduras after Hurricane Mitch, awed by the way in which local communities, led by teachers and municipal officials, organized themselves to rebuild one home and school at a time in villages razed to the ground.

Growing up in Seattle, Washington, I was particularly influenced by my hometown’s long connection to activism and protest, history of counterculture in everything from coffee to music, and deep ties to other parts of the world, including the Pacific Rim and Central America. Drawn to social change and influenced by the above experiences, I went on to center my career on the power of communities and collective action. I was stunned by the injustices some communities face and often overcome, spending my first summer of graduate school working with the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina – the lauded group of mothers and grandmothers who spurred a movement to address forced disappearance by advocating for information about their children and grandchildren captured during Argentina’s Dirty War.  I then worked for several years with the Berhorst Partners for Development, a departmental public health organization in Chimaltenango, Guatemala, accompanying leaders and community members as they better understood and addressed decades of trauma and resilience wrought by a devastating war.

Over two decades of practical experience working with international institutions and grassroots NGOs in humanitarian emergencies and fragile, violence, and conflict-affected countries, I watched these organizations try to piece together funding – or worse, have to fire staff and shut down programs – because the international community had decided that Colombia and not Kosovo was the priority, or that funding police training was more important than the psychosocial effects of violence. From 2011 – 2017 I managed a portfolio of donor funds in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor at the US Department of State (DoS) to support civil society organizations working in violence-affected countries. Many people – my DoS team included - constantly scramble to address these funding gaps, but the reality is that despite decades of talk, support to local action isn’t a systematic priority for the international community – and the system is wearing and prohibitive no matter where you sit. I left the DoS with a determination to do better to support local actors, often working in some of the world’s most difficult and dangerous situations.  

My search for new revenue streams and strategies led me, tentatively, into the world of finance. As I got further into this work, it became clear to me what others have known and been working to address for a long time - the challenges are not only about money and the tools that generate new money. While more resources for local actors are needed in an absolute sense, money is really a proxy for our values and priorities and one piece – a big piece – that drives the current power dynamic between the international community and local organizations. Radical Flexibility Fund was borne out of this need.