Proximate

Summer 2020 sparked a reckoning around racial justice after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, not just in the United States but across the globe. The wave of support for the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and broader demands for racial equity pushed foundations and corporations alike to meet the moment by putting dollars behind these efforts. Commitments to racial equity reached $16.5 billion, nearly three times the previous year.

In philanthropy, the arrival of a new wave of wealthy individuals is inevitably heralded as a “new epoch” for the sector. The latest to be so named comes from the claim that we’re experiencing a “third wave of American philanthropy.” A fresh set of rich people is arriving with AI-inflated net worth, and we’re asking the same recycled question: How can we distribute this money effectively? That question is a distraction.

Proximate Press has partnered with Kuja.org to engage our readers on topics related to community-led development, solidarity economies, and philanthropy. As part of this partnership, we'll be posting periodic questions for discussion on KujaLink, Kuja's networking platform for people working in international development.

Welcome back to What’s Taking Root, a series I’m curating for Proximate Press that highlights emerging ideas and resources to deepen grassroots grantmaking. I’m a philanthropy practitioner and ecosystem weaver who has mapped 100+ resources to reimagine philanthropy and global development. As the global funding landscape changes, who gets to shape what comes next?

USAID’s dismantling left a vacuum into which a sprawling ecosystem has emerged to imagine what comes next for U.S. foreign assistance. Over the past few months, our team at the Funders’ Roundtable on the Future of Development has been mapping this ecosystem,  cataloguing more than 100 initiatives exploring the future of development. We designed this mapping as a living resource to help members spot emerging trends, identify potential partners, and avoid duplication.

Everyone, it seems, has a vision for the future of development. Since the dismantling of USAID began in early 2025, something like campaign season has emerged around what should come next. Governments, foundations, think tanks, civil society groups and others have put forward competing visions for what comes next. The Trust, Accountability and Inclusion Collaborative (TAI) is a funder collaborative that brings major philanthropic donors together to learn, strategize and coordinate.

Over the next few years, a wave of tens of billions of dollars from AI may flow into philanthropy, more than the sector has ever had to absorb at once. Nan Ransohoff's essay this summer, The Third Wave of American Philanthropy, asked the question everyone in the field is now arguing about: Who will move that money fast enough to matter? Ransohoff’s essay has sparked frantic debate among philanthropy leaders across the United States and Europe. In the Global South, we should be paying attention too.

A few years ago, I worked closely with the Open Markets Institute, the organization that pushed the debate on monopoly power to the political mainstream. That work helped me understand that monopolies are not just about market share; they’re also about influence. When one or two organizations dominate a field, they begin shaping incentives, assumptions, and the very rules of the game that everyone else is playing.

If you ask Meg and Kevin, my co-founders at Proximate Press, my original idea for the magazine's name, they'll laugh. The name we landed on was pretty solid. Proximate is catchy – it has three syllables, with an X in the middle. It's served us well. But the original name I pitched was very different and, in retrospect, pretty corny: Team Spirit. I've been thinking about that name a lot lately.

Earlier this month, the Arcus Foundation, one of the largest donors for protecting LGBTQI+ rights, announced that it will wind down its operations by 2029. This follows high-profile foundation shifts, such as the closure of Wellspring Philanthropic Fund by 2028 and changing priorities among longstanding supporters of human rights.