With Alnoor Ladha and Lynn Murphy
Welcome, and thank you for joining us on this journey. We are the Transition Resource Circle (TRC), a collective of activists, funders, writers, cosmologists, and researchers dedicated to tackling the root causes of our meta-crisis. We foster transition pathways to guide us from philanthropy as an extension of neoliberalism to adjacent possible futures that serve Life. We work with/in/through philanthropy to alchemize and liberate capital toward post capitalist realities rooted in liberatory and post-anthropocentric values such as solidarity, relationality, reciprocity, interbeing, and animism.
We see the wealth concentrated within the opaque sector of philanthropy as the world’s shared, collective endowment, built upon the backs of countless generations and an accumulation of human, and more-than-human labor, destruction and sacrifice. All of us who are embedded in capitalist modernity are complicit (to varying degrees of course) in perpetuating the dominant culture.
Philanthropy believes it is part of the solution. And sometimes it is. Yet, all too often, philanthropy exacerbates our current exploitative system through undemocratic and unaccountable processes – for example, by increasing endowments through existing market mechanisms – and through a lack of imagination on how to support the requisite paradigm shifts.
This will require more than a paradigm shift; it will require ontological shifts in seeing, being and relating with the world. We call this work Justice Plus Onto Shifts.
This video series is based on the book Post Capitalist Philanthropy: Healing Wealth in the Time of Collapse by Alnoor Ladha and Lynn Murphy. We will delve into key themes and transition pathways. These videos guide viewers through understanding the destructive nature of neoliberalism and philanthropy, envisioning post-capitalist futures through Justice Plus Onto-Shifts, and explores the Five Element Mandala as a framework for alchemizing wealth in service to Life.
All videos were recorded in the Ma Earth studios in Aotearoa (New Zealand).