How can money build community and connection instead of division? This piece originally appeared on openDemocracy. “Gone to the Dogs,” Paul Higgins’ canine-friendly café in Carlisle, may seem an unlikely place to look for inspiration in transforming the ways we think about funding for social change. But through ‘pay-it-forward’ fundraising and ‘creative up-cycling’ to re-use resources, Higgins has made the café a center for community in which money builds connection instead of division - a radical reversal of the inequalities that lie at the heart of big philanthropy, foreign aid and government contracting. Here’s how it works: the café’s customers write their donations...

“The best way to predict the future is to create it” The Symposium will be a small event (maximum 80 participants) aimed at bringing people together for two days of creative and constructive conversations. It will have three goals: To shine a light on, and join up, different strands of emerging practice and organizing from around the world that advance people-led development and shift power. To explore new and more effective ways of working at the intersections where bottom-up approaches fueled by “social power” meet top-down, formal institutional processes shaped by rules and resources. To develop a common theoretical framework - based...