By Ashanti Kunene, Poetic Provocateur and Founder of Learning 2 Unlearn
I wear many hats but today I come to you as an art activist with the loving intention of planting sacred seeds in your spirit.
And I pray that these sacred spoken seeds find fertile soil in the ground of your soul
And as has become my traditional opening, I ask you all to take a deep breath in
And inhale the privilege of being in my presence today
And exhale out any entitlement you think you have to that privilege…
I begin not with words but with breath
Which is the first currency. The original endowment.
I invite you to close your eyes if you are willing.
Breathe in, breathe out
Feel the weight of your body in this chair
Feel the fabric of your clothes against your skin
Feel the subtle hum of this beautiful place.
Now bring your awareness to your hands.
These instruments of holding and release.
What do they cradle today?
What weight do they hold? Could it perhaps be the smooth, cool weight of a grant approving pen that has signed a thousand promises?
Feel the history in your hands.
Remember the lineage of decisions that led to you being here, in this room, holding this philanthropic power.
Now. Place a hand over your heart. Feel its rhythm. That stubborn, faithful beat.
Drum drumming along, The most profound and personal grant you have ever received. Your heart.
It asks for no application. No justification. No qualification. It requires no reporting. Nor any quarterly monitoring and evaluation. It simply gives.
Life.
To you.
It simply gives, as a thankful giver
Not expecting thanks from its receiver.
Now I invite you Feel for the space… the quiet, often-ignored gap… Between that loving life giving heartbeat— and the measured, cautious, quarterly pace of your ahistorical funding strategies.
Feel for the space – the quiet, often ignored gap…, Between the fierce, loving impulse that made you say, “I must help, I must fund, I must make the world a better place” and the polished egoic frameworks that say, “We must assess, we must evaluate, and we must mitigate risk, we must closely monitor.”
Just feel for that space. Sit in that dissonance. That is not a strategic gap. That is a soul gap, beloveds It is the spiritual reckoning of our current transition out of our polycrisis into regenerative futures.
It is the somatic truth of a question we are always too polite to ask:
Does the rhythm of our care… match the rhythm of our crisis?
Open your eyes, you are not alone in that gap…
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Beloved, Capitalist Saviour… you are not alone in that gap. It is why
I write a love letter to you, beloved. For You really should not exist. For If you do your work really well, there would be no need for you.
Beloved, Capitalist Saviour, Don’t you know that no money is good money? Are you aware that while your pockets are deep, your heart is shallow? There is abundance in your banks but scarcity in your spirit.
You are caught between old extractive logics and a regenerative, emergent consciousness.
And in that in between gap space, you are asked what really is the purpose of your purse? How do you keep your purse locked on purpose in the midst of all this chaos?
For the world is burning. And mother earth, she is tired of our extractive churning. And you are the ones responsible for funding the building of the future. But are your imagination infrastructures up to the task?
Are they really up to the task, when your heart flutters at the sounds of historical truth? Your stomach and chest get tight at the naming of white supremacy and racial capitalism. Why is that? Do you know?
What futures can you possibly build when you think the work required to reimagine the future because of the past seems unnecessary, if not impossible? The problems you seek to solve as philanthropy are your origin story.
And to distract us all from the truthful telling of that story you serve us wine and cheese.
We do not care for you wine and cheese. Just share your resources because talent is universal, but opportunities and access are not.
So just Give to the horses with horns.
Share wisdom Unrestricted.
Be full of trust in those that will live in the future.
Grant with no conditions. Liberate the future’s ability. Stop reducing the future to your ideas and your shape simply because you currently hold the power of resources you had no right to hoard in the first place.
The power plays between the haves and the have-nots are uninteresting. The ego, needing detailed reports for access to funding that can build the future, is deeply disturbing.
An ego death is required, beloved capitalist saviour.
So…Disrupt yourself. Go deep into the not knowing. Sandbox some strange things. Create more possibility out of the seeming impossibility.
So…You must rupture.
With the fiercest love imaginable, you must disrupt the deeply ingrained inherited stories. Because What is the greater risk? A well-resourced activist with a salary and proper health insurance. Or a burning planet?
Is the real risk to the future a failed pilot project or continued systemic oppression?
You are fretting over the politics of risk and impact. But the future, The future is solving for X.
And X is the variable of your courage. X is the willingness to be truly disruptive, transformative, regenerative.
The polycrisis is not waiting for your grant cycles. Or for your fancy polished report. Nor is it waiting on your belief that the existing systems do not work.
Much like the sun does not need your belief to rise each day, the polycrisis exists and it
is a fire that feeds on your hesitation,
it feeds on your dissonance,
it feeds on your impatience,
it feeds on your ignorance,
it feasts on your lack of courage.
So…You must rupture the myth of your fortress. Wealth is not a fortress. It is water. And water, held too long, becomes stagnant. A poison.
And so,
It must flow. It must find the watershed. It must reach the parched earth of injustice.
So how do we satiate this thirst of the earth for true justice?
We satiate this thirst for justice with a simple, terrifying, and liberating admission:
An admission that this land, this soil knows the grammar of extraction…An admission that we have a debt to repay. An admission of our profound, moral, and spiritual debt to the future.
This is the ultimate act of philanthropy. Not the writing of grant checks. But the rewriting of destinies.
It is to use your privilege, power, resources – your access, your voice, your capital – to lovingly, ruthlessly, strategically, and with deep intention collaboratively dismantle the very architecture that granted you this power. You are to become a regenerative bridge to the future, and not the keepers of gates few can fully access.
The call to action is to understand that the most strategic, highest-impact investment you will ever make…is in the hospicing of your industry.
It is in the creation of a world that no longer needs your philanthropic charity because it has finally solved the problem of injustice.
So, I ask you… You, privileged few, lucky enough to hear me today…
When the future, in its gentle and terrible wisdom, writes its ledger of this time… What will it say of you? Of this precise moment? What will the future say of your name?
Will it speak of your capitalist saviour tendencies?
Will it speak of how you drove impact and mitigated risk?
Or will the future find your fingerprint—on the hinge of history? Find it on the moment we turned?
Find it on the moment we chose not to protect the castle…
but to plant a forest… where everyone… everyone… can simply breathe.
I invite you to let that be your legacy. Let your legacy be Not what you protected. But all that you made possible.
And it all begins with an intergenerational breath. It begins with the remembrance of your heartbeat.
Dancing to the drum, drum drumming of the sustainable rhythm of your care…
It begins when you remember your original grant. The heart. The first endowment. It begins with a choice to choose.
It begins with a choice to find the courage of our convictions, together, stronger because we chose to find the courage of our care.
And with that I thank you.