Sufina Ahmad

Editorial Welcome to this new – and new look – issue of Alliance magazine This issue includes a special feature on leadership in philanthropy. Too often, our focus in popular depictions is on the lifestyles of elite philanthropists or the views of big personalities in our field. But what about the committed individuals working in or leading philanthropic foundations?

We have now spent almost 18 months living with high levels of Vuca. Excuse the management speak, but before the pandemic, I am sure that many of us will have discussed dealing with volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (Vuca) in our work. We’d often talk about responding to changing circumstances – circumstances that were hard to predict. There was rarely enough time for reflection. And we were adept at making decisions that weighed up multiple factors, often competing, at once.