#OpenDialogues 10 June 15 July 5 August: Aid, Trade and Philanthropy in a Senterej Moment. An Open Dialogue series in collaboration with Blueprint.

“We are the generation that’s going to say goodbye to a lot of what we thought would never change and we need to contribute to inspire the folks who will be living into whatever the new blueprints set forward.” — Lucy Bernholz

The global convergence of aid cuts, escalating trade conflicts, and philanthropic sector pressures creates an unprecedented crisis demanding urgent cross-sector dialogue and coordinated action. In collaboration with Lucy Bernholz and Blueprint 2026 this is a three-part special investigation dialogue series examining the unprecedented convergence of aid cuts, trade wars, and philanthropic sector pressures that is reshaping global cooperation.

It will explore the interconnected crises of aid decline and trade fragmentation and reflect on responses to the challenge these bring to philanthropy to confront its role and responsibilities in this fractured landscape. Beginning with the immediate impacts of aid retrenchment, then exploring how trade wars exacerbate development challenges, and culminating in a critical examination of philanthropy’s role, this series offers a framework for understanding how these systems interact and how philanthropy must transform to address them effectively.

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The Convergent Tripartite Crisis

We are witnessing an unprecedented convergence of three seismic disruptions that are fundamentally reshaping the global landscape of development, economic cooperation, and social justice:

• Aid collapse: A 7.1% drop in official development assistance (ODA) marks the first decline since 2017, with only 16.5% reaching Least Developed Countries as wealthy nations slash budgets.
• Trade fragmentation: The $1.4 trillion global welfare loss projected under full trade war scenarios threatens to erase development gains, with UK-EU relations and Global South supply chains at particular risk.
• Philanthropic squeeze: Proposed U.S. tax reforms targeting foundations could drain $39B+ from charitable sectors over a decade, while judicial inquiries pressure donor autonomy globally.

This triad creates a systemic risk multiplier, where trade disputes reduce fiscal space for aid, aid cuts heighten dependence on philanthropy, and philanthropic constraints weaken crisis response capacity.

The Aid Collapse: Reimagining Security

The Trump administration has effectively dismantled USAID, cancelling 83-92% of foreign aid contracts worth approximately $60 billion, representing cuts of 34-38% of programming by dollar value. Public health experts warn this could lead to more than 176,000 additional deaths from HIV alone if aid is not restored by the end of 2025. Critical food supplies worth over $98 million—enough to feed over a million people for three months—sit rotting in warehouses while global hunger levels rise.

And it isn’t only about USAID. Across the globe, closing civic space and aid reductions are happening everywhere—justified in the name of security. But we need to reimagine security as underpinned by human flourishing and global care, not military might and border walls.

This isn’t just about money. In Mali, 270,000 people lost access to water, food and health services; in northern Burkina Faso, 400,000 people lost access to basic services; in Somalia, 50 health centres serving 19,000 people monthly have closed. The infrastructure of hope is being systematically dismantled.

Dialogue 1: Resilience beyond Aid: Dismantling dependency, Reimagining development. June 10^th at 3.30pm UK

Moderator: Gerry Salole with
Million Belay, Coordinator, Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa
Enrique Roig, Global Expert on Violence Prevention and Former USAID Director
Eddie Mandhry, Senior Fellow, Schmidt Futures; Former Director for Africa and Middle East, Yale University

📅 Date: June 10th, 2025
⏰ Time: 3.30 PM GMT / 4.30 PM CET / SAST / 10.30 AM ET / 7.30 AM PST
🔗 Register for the zoom link

The Trade War Escalation

Trump’s tariffs have raised the average effective US tariff rate from 2.5% to an estimated 27%—the highest level in over a century—affecting approximately $2.3 trillion of US goods imports, or 71% of all goods imports. Global markets have responded with panic, with JP Morgan raising recession probability to 60% by year end. A federal court has now ruled many of these tariffs illegal, throwing Trump’s economic agenda into chaos and creating unprecedented uncertainty for global trade relationships. The post-war international economic order is fracturing in real time.

Dialogue Two: Fragmentation & Failed Promises: Trade Systems in Crisis. July 15th at 3.30pm UK. Moderated by Tom Kruse, Rockefeller Brothers Fund. With Lori Wallach, Lebohang Pheko and Hans Peter Lankes. Read more.

📅 Date: July 15th, 2025
⏰ Time: 3.30 PM GMT / 4.30 PM CET / SAST / 10.30 AM ET / 7.30 AM PST
🔗 Register for the zoom link

Philanthropy Under Siege: Complicity and Transformation

“The 2025 legislative session is filled with peril for the nonprofit world — including threats to foundations, big endowments, donor-advised funds, and charities.” — Chronicle of Philanthropy

The 2025 legislative session brings new proposed taxes that could increase foundation taxes from 1.39% to 10% for foundations with assets over $5 billion. Philanthropic organizations face harassment, data requests, and “chilling effects” as part of a broader cultural war targeting foundations perceived as too progressive.

But whilst some foundations are increasing their spend above the 5% level, many are keeping their heads below the parapet, thinking this will blow over. It won’t. Foundations have to reckon with their complicitness in this triangle and reflect on how to do differently and how to do better.

Dialogue Three: Confronting Contradictions: Philanthropy’s Struggle for Redemption in Radical Solidarity. Moderated by Lucy Bernholz with Bheki Moyo and Naila Farouky.

August 5th at 3.30pm UK. Register.

Why This Moment Demands Action

The Senterej Moment: Learning to Play by New Rules

“The world after the storm feels like a game whose rules no one quite remembers. We’re living in the interregnum, that Gramscian twilight where the old order is fading, the new refuses to be born, and everyone seems to be playing by different rules.” — Gerry Salole

This awareness captures exactly why this dialogue series matters now. We are living through what Gerry Salole calls “the Senterej moment” – where Western chess players (slow, deliberate, strategic) find themselves facing Senterej players (Ethiopian chess, with simultaneous moves, real-time improvisation, chaos met with chaos).

These three crises are not separate phenomena—they are interconnected parts of a systematic assault on the architecture of global cooperation built over seven decades. The convergence creates what development economists call “double jeopardy”—regions experiencing aid withdrawal are simultaneously hit by trade disruption, while the philanthropic sector that might cushion the blow faces its own existential threats.

The aid cuts, trade wars, and philanthropy attacks aren’t random chaos—they’re the collision of two completely different games. While traditional development institutions play Western chess (five-year strategies, measured responses, institutional processes), the world is increasingly operating like Senterej—”everyone acts at once, improvising, adapting, responding to chaos with chaos.”

What This Dialogue Series Seeks to Provoke

“An actual blueprint… represents the expertise of many, many different kinds of people.” — Lucy Bernholz

1. Connect the Dots

Most analysis treats aid, trade, and philanthropy as separate domains. This series will reveal their systemic interconnections and demonstrate how solutions in one area affect the others. The dialogues will seek to consider nexus impacts in this triad and identify the ways in which philanthropy and civil society can surface approaches that address root causes rather than symptoms.

2. Centre Voices and Experience from the Global South

Unlike typical “development” conversations that position Africa as recipient rather than architect, this series will platform the continent’s wealth of experience in navigating crisis and building alternatives. Why the end of Aid could be good for Africa will provide an alternative, and hopeful perspective that challenges decades of dependency thinking.

3. Challenge Philanthropy to Transform

Rather than asking philanthropy to simply fill gaps, the series will push for fundamental questions about power, complicity, and genuine solidarity. Foundations must move beyond performative gestures to genuine reckoning with their role in perpetuating the very systems now under threat.

4. Create New Models

By bringing together diverse practitioners and movements, the series will surface innovative approaches that transcend traditional aid-trade-charity silos, focusing on solutions emerging from communities most affected by these converging crises.

The Urgency of Now

Philanthropy faces a “perfect storm” of declining trust, shrinking donor bases, and reduced tax incentives. Trade wars threaten “a global downturn and sharp price hikes for swathes of goods”.

But crisis also creates opportunity.  The current disruption creates space for new blueprints—locally authored, globally connected, and responsive to this unprecedented moment.

This dialogue series will explore where, in a world where old certainties are crumbling, new forms of solidarity and cooperation are possible and are happening. It will show that while the global North retreats from its commitments, the global South is building alternatives that could prefigure a more just international order.

The conversations will feed into Blueprint 2026—not as another report from the philanthropic establishment, but as documentation of how communities, movements, and institutions are navigating the collapse of the old world while building the new.

The Promise: Learning to Play Senterej

This dialogue series will not solve the polycrisis. But it hopes to do something more important: help us understand how to play with simultaneous change when the world is changing the rules. It will explore where, in a world where old certainties are crumbling, new forms of solidarity and cooperation are possible and are happening. It will show that while the global North retreats from its commitments, the global South is building alternatives that could prefigure a more just international order.

The conversations will feed into Blueprint 2026—not as another report from the philanthropic establishment, but as a special investigation and documentation of how communities, movements, and institutions are navigating the collapse of the old world while building the new.

Dialogue 1: Resilience beyond Aid: Dismantling dependency, Reimagining development. June 10^th at 3.30pm UK

As global powers retreat from international aid commitments and USAID operations face dramatic cuts, communities worldwide are experiencing immediate and profound disruptions. This first dialogue examines the real-time impacts of this aid decline while exploring the emerging alternatives that challenge traditional donor-recipient relationships. By starting with aid systems, we establish fundamental questions about power, dependency, and North/South relationships that will resonate throughout the series.

Moderator: Gerry Salole with
Million Belay, Coordinator, Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa
Enrique Roig, Global Expert on Violence Prevention and Former USAID Director
Eddie Mandhry, Senior Fellow, Schmidt Futures; Former Director for Africa and Middle East, Yale University

📅 Date: June 10th, 2025
⏰ Time: 3.30 PM GMT / 4.30 PM CET / SAST / 10.30 AM ET / 7.30 AM PST
🔗 Register for the zoom link

Million Belay coordinates the Alliance for Food Sovereignty for Africa, a network of networks of major networks in Africa. He is a member of the International Panel of Experts on the Sustainable of Food Systems (IPES-Food). Million is a founder of MELCA – Ethiopia, an indigenous NGO working on issues of agro-ecology, intergenerational learning, advocacy and livelihood improvement of local and indigenous peoples. Million has been working for over two decades on the issues of intergenerational learning of bio-cultural diversity, sustainable agriculture, the right of local communities for seed and food sovereignty and forest issues. His main interest is now advocacy of food sovereignty, learning among generations, knowledge dialogues and the use of participatory mapping for social learning, identity building and mobilization of memory for resilience. He has PhD in environmental learning an MSc in tourism and conservation and a BSc in Biology.

Eddie Mandhry is a Senior Fellow at Schmidt Futures. He was most recently Director for Africa and the Middle East at Yale where he led the University President’s Africa Initiative, and advanced Yale’s bi-directional partnerships across Africa and the Middle East.  Prior to joining Yale, he was the Associate Director of NYU Africa House, and the NYU Abu Dhabi Center for Technology & Economic Development. He is a Carnegie New Leader and has served on the Board of Trustees of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs.

Gerry Salole is an independent consultant specialising in international development and philanthropy, currently operating through his consultancy, “drawing conclusions”. He previously served as Chief Executive of the European Foundation Centre and has experience  of having worked with organizations such as the Ford Foundation, Save the Children and Oxfam. In addition to his consultancy work, Salole holds several board memberships, he’s the chair of the  European Cultural Foundation, and sits on the Board of the Unicredit Foundation, The Evens Foundation, The Africa Capacity Building Foundation and the Impact Trust. He also teaches as an adjunct lecturer at the Centre for African Philanthropy and Social Investment at the Business School of the University of the Witswatersrand.