We both have spent the past few years thinking about money. We didn’t really want to. We didn’t join the Centre for Public Impact (CPI) to be fundraisers or part of a finance team. Yet, somewhere along the way, money stopped being a side issue and became one of the main issues - so much that it became like this mental load which follows you everywhere.

Aurelie joined CPI partly because she wanted to see what life looked like outside fundraising. After years at UNICEF working in partnerships, donor relations and resource mobilisation, she was curious about the work itself. The possibility of changing public systems rather than constantly trying to raise money to support them. Aurelie ended up at CPI with the task of building the Global Development Initiative and team with a time bound, limited endowment from BCG.

Thea joined CPI because she was excited about the opportunity it offered to think deeply about the role of government, and how it might be reimagined. She was drawn to CPI’s creative and boundary-pushing work on self-organising teams, measurement and children’s social care. She was also excited about CPI’s vision for government. Thea’s role was to establish a presence for CPI in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand.

We have both now left CPI. We recently took the time to compare notes.

Aurélie was on the Île d’Oléron in France. It was 7:30 in the morning. The sea was nearby and the house was still quiet.

Thea was in Melbourne. She had just come back from a long, sunny winter walk. Her house was slowly filling up with children returning from school.

The conversation was great.

It was also emotional.

We realised how much we still carried from this experience. The emotions and contradictions. The questions we still haven’t fully answered. We decided to try and make sense of it. This question of the role that money played for both of us was central, and this blog captures some of what we discussed.

While we both had similar reflections on the surprising role that money played during our time at CPI, the specifics of our experiences differed because of our roles and contexts. For this reason, we’ve divided up the next section of the article, with each of us authoring different parts - this allows us to tell specific stories around shared experiences and themes.

What We Learned

Money is the language that everyone understands (Thea)

CPI is registered in Australia (as it is in all of our regions) as a not-for-profit. This means, very simply, that CPI ANZ’s objective is to achieve the purpose defined by its Constitution, rather than to pursue profit. This seems simple enough. But something I learned during my time at CPI is that even in the charity world, the language of money and growth is often much easier for people to understand than the language of impact.

Our work at CPI focused on reimagining government - not an easy thing to measure. But we were nevertheless committed to trying to understand the value we were creating. We sought and received feedback from people who participated in our learning programs. We tracked how many times our reports were downloaded and shared on social media. We did regular check-ins with our partners to understand what was working, and what was not. And, generally speaking, the feedback that we received was very positive.

And yet, when we were reporting to the global CPI board, or discussing performance as a global leadership team, I always felt a sense of unease. This was because CPI ANZ was staying small, and our revenue base was holding fairly steady, while other teams were growing their teams and revenue very quickly. Despite the fact that our not-for-profit status meant that we were obliged to focus on our purpose, sharing positive feedback from a learning partnership never felt quite as significant as reporting revenue and team growth. Our comparatively small income stream always felt like a failure.

This is partly my issue. I appear (to my dismay) to have wholeheartedly internalised the norm that more money and more growth equals more success. However it is also true that money is a language that translates most easily - across regions, with funders, and with the Board. I learned at CPI that, even in the context of an impact-driven organisation, the language of money speaks louder than almost anything, and fundraising, budgeting and financial analysis ended up occupying far more time and energy than I had ever anticipated.

Money Burnout (Aurelie)

I was trying to remember how many proposals I had written during my time at CPI.

So I counted them.

There were more than fifty (in less than three years). As I looked at the folders one by one, I noticed that next to many of them, I had written the same word: Lost.

Looking at that list brought back feelings of disappointment and exhaustion. At some point, after enough rejections, another “no” no longer feels surprising. It simply confirms what you have slowly started to fear: perhaps this is not going to work. And yet you keep hoping.

People often say that fundraising is 80% relationships and 20% proposals. My experience at CPI was different. In retrospect, it was 100% relationships and 0% proposals. I submitted 50 proposals in about 3 years. None were successful.

When I arrived at CPI, I was told something along the lines of: “Here is an initiative. Here is a team of four incredible women. Here is roughly 3.5 million dollars that has already been invested in this work, with very few restrictions attached. You have about two years to make it financially sustainable.”

At first, this sounded extraordinary. And in many ways, it was. Most people working in social impact never receive that kind of freedom. Someone had trusted us enough to invest significantly in an idea before there was a clear business model or a guaranteed path to sustainability.

That freedom came with a countdown clock attached to it. I had roughly 2 years to make it work.

I came from the UN. I understood grants and programmes. CPI was different. It largely sustained itself through consulting work: clients, contracts, projects and revenue. None of that was particularly familiar to me. But CPI was also a not-for-profit that received grants.

So I tried everything.

We responded to requests for proposals. We submitted grant applications. We explored partnerships. We chased opportunities wherever we could find them.

Several times we made it to the final round of a major philanthropy. Yes, because there are several rounds. First an expression of interest (a short letter), second, a proposal (a 15-20 pages document) and, third, an interview. The interview always felt strangely similar to preparing for a job interview. Which was ironic. I already had a job.

Once, it was just before Christmas and it was our dream project. It represented exactly the kind of work we believed CPI should be doing. We could see the future unfolding if we won it. We talked about what it would make possible. The pressure and anticipation inside the team were palpable. I refreshed my inbox every day.

Winning would not have solved everything, but it would have bought us time. It would have validated years of effort. It would have given us breathing room.

In my mind, it felt like the beginning of a different story.

We didn’t get it. The rejection arrived just before Christmas.I still remember the feeling in the team afterwards. We were simply deflated.

Looking back, I don’t think the problem was the proposals. The problem was believing that proposals would save us. They wouldn’t. Instead relationships, trust and reputation would. The proposal was often just the paperwork at the end of a much longer process.

Money Versus Relationships (Thea)

Another thing I learned about money while I was at CPI was that it can put enormous strain on relationships.

The CPI regions that generated a lot of revenue felt significant pressure to support the sustainability of other parts of the organisation. This, understandably, led to some sense of frustration on their part - it sometimes felt that their hard work was enabling other regions and initiatives to get a bit of a “free ride”. On the other hand, regions and initiatives which were doing creative and impactful work, but bringing in less money (and sometimes even struggling to break even), felt somewhat aggrieved that the regions which were growing their revenue seemed to have more power in the organisation, despite the fact that the organisation’s purpose was to create impact; not profit.

Both of these perspectives have merit. But in the hustle and busyness and pressure of work, it was sometimes hard to remember this. Money - who earned it and how we shared it across regions - became a significant focus of global leadership team conversations. And the conversations often weren’t easy.

While most of us wanted to spend time in leadership meetings sharing what we were learning through our programs, we often spent hours talking about how we were going to raise enough money by the end of the year. Whereas many of us would have loved to spend our time deepening our vision, we instead seemed to spend a lot of time pouring over spreadsheets and discussing who was going to contribute how much towards our shared services teams.

In short, rather than spending our time as a leadership team talking about ideas and strategy, we often ended up spending a lot of time navigating tension around money. I have no doubt we could probably have managed certain things differently, and better. But there are certain beliefs that we’ve internalised about money that are hard to unlearn: that if we earn money, it is our right to keep it; that more money means greater success. Unlearning these norms - even in an organisation explicitly committed to something other than profit - turns out to be much harder than I thought it would be.

Success According to Whom? (Aurelie)

One thing I learned at CPI is that success and failure are often much less objective than we like to believe.

Over time, I realised that the exact same situation could be presented in completely different ways. You could tell the story of an initiative that was struggling financially, unable to secure the funding it needed and facing an uncertain future. Or you could tell the story of an initiative that had built a global community, launched multiple programmes, supported hundreds of practitioners.

In many cases, both stories would be technically true.

I found this particularly challenging because fundraising constantly forces you into the business of storytelling. Every proposal, every conversation with a funder and every board discussion requires you to answer a simple question: what story are we telling about ourselves? It’s often a different story. There are as many stories as there are funders.

Are we an ambitious initiative that has achieved extraordinary things with limited resources and is ready for the next stage of growth? Or are we a team that is struggling to become financially sustainable? The answer often depends less on the facts themselves than on which facts you choose to emphasise.

This became increasingly uncomfortable for me because I was never entirely sure how to answer a more fundamental question: were we succeeding or failing?

The Collective never became financially sustainable in the way we had hoped (for now). By some measures, that is a failure. At the same time, it brought together people across countries and sectors, supported experimentation, built relationships and generated learning that continues today. By other measures, that is clearly a success.

Financial sustainability tends to become the dominant lens through which we judge our work. This makes sense to a point: organisations need money to survive. But I also wonder whether we sometimes confuse financial success with success itself.

Some of the most important work I have been involved in was difficult to fund, difficult to measure and difficult to scale. But, some of the most financially successful projects I have seen were not necessarily the ones that generated the most learning or created the most meaningful change.

When money becomes the primary measure of success, it has a way of reshaping how we understand our own work. And that is a much bigger story than fundraising alone.

What do we propose?

We have described our challenge: we wanted to do great work reimagining government; however, a huge amount of our time and energy at CPI ended up focussing on money. This wore us down. It put pressure on relationships. And it contributed to an underinvestment in practices like shared learning.

This was quite exhausting and often challenging. However, like all challenges, it had a silver lining in that it motivated us to develop some strategies to attempt to resist the powerful gravitational force that money seems to wield.

Create processes that value the right things (Thea)

Many organisational processes are oriented around money - budget and forecasting, timesheets, financial reporting. They say that what you pay attention to grows. So if you set up systems and processes which focus on growth, revenue and billable hours, that is what will be prioritised.

As a way of countering this, CPI ANZ included non-revenue generating categories in our timesheets. Alongside our project codes, we included codes for time spent on “community building” and “thought leadership” and “developing relationships”. This meant that at the end of each month, when we were reflecting on how we were allocating our time as a team, the work invested in relationships, community and learning was visible, and therefore valued.

In addition, our annual Vision Statement focused on the value that we wanted to create, rather than the growth we wanted to pursue. We explicitly identified that “we want to create an environment which enables us to be thoughtful and discerning about what we choose to work on - we don’t want financial imperatives to mean that we feel compelled to accept briefs that don’t feel right.” This broader framing meant that we were able to have rich and meaningful conversations about how we were achieving our purpose, as well as maintaining financial viability.

Know what you want (Thea)

Another thing we learned was the importance of being clear and brave about what it is that we were working towards. As we’ve mentioned, the idea that growth equals success is very (very) hard to disrupt. But CPI ANZ was always very clear with the ANZ Board that the work that we wanted to do was not yet mainstream, which made growth hard. The Board was supportive of CPI ANZ’s vision, which was to deliberately push boundaries, experiment with new ideas, and adopt a stance which was carefully subversive.

Towards the end of Thea’s time at CPI, someone offered a very helpful metaphor - what CPI ANZ was trying to do was run a really unique 10-seater restaurant; not become a Pret a Manger. The world needs both of these things. But the measure of success is different. The 10-seater restaurant wants a long waiting list, and to be offering new and innovative culinary experiences. Pret wants to feed as many people as possible and create a menu that looks and feels the same wherever you are in the world.

Being clear in what you want, having a way to describe this, and believing in its value is an important way to avoid money taking up too much time, energy and attention.

Ask Better Questions (Aurelie)

Looking back, I realise that I spent a lot of time asking questions when I joined CPI, but perhaps not the right ones. I wanted to understand the work, the vision, the team and the opportunities. I was far less curious about the financial model and the assumptions underpinning it.

I wish I had spent more time understanding what I was getting into financially, even though fundraising was not officially my job. Those questions matter because they shape everything else. They influence the decisions you make, the pressures you experience and, ultimately, the story you tell yourself about whether you are succeeding or failing.

Understanding the financial reality from the outset does not solve the problem. But it does help you walk into it with your eyes open.

It’s All About Relations (Aurelie)

One thing people say all the time in fundraising is that it’s all about relationships.

At CPI, my experience largely confirmed this. None of the opportunities that mattered emerged because we had written an exceptional proposal. They emerged because someone knew us, trusted us, introduced us to somebody else or was willing to take a chance on us.

One lesson I carry forward is that relationship-building should not be treated as secondary. If I were starting again, I would spend less time perfecting applications and more time building relationships with funders, peers and partners. Those relationships take time, intention and sustained investment, but most of the opportunities that mattered emerged from conversations, introductions and trust built over time.

Moving forward

As we both move into different roles now, we feel so grateful for our time at CPI. We grappled with tricky things, made mistakes, learned a lot, and developed as people and professionals.

There is a lot we’re still grappling with, in part because the question of how to avoid money becoming the work is so much bigger than us. But we both feel far clearer today about some of the mindsets and practices that will help us in our journeys.

I’ll start with something I spotted on Substack yesterday:

It was written the day after SpaceX went public, in the biggest stock market debut in history. Investors poured in around $85 billion, the whole company was valued at roughly $1.75 trillion at listing, and Musk became the world's first trillionaire overnight.

So: no one wants trillionaires… and we just minted one.

My Money, Honey? co-author has been sitting with this for a while. In her last article she wrote about ending up on a treadmill next to one of the world’s youngest billionaires, wondering what it even means that we’re now talking about trillionaires. And a few days later, poof, here one is. (She also explains what an IPO is, if you’d find that helpful)

Which raises the question: if we can rally this much money this fast around the dream of leaving Earth, what would it take to rally the same energy around keeping Earth worth staying on?

The money is there. The appetite is there. People will pour billions into a story that excites them… so what would make regenerating a watershed feel as investable as a rocket?

That's the question Malik gets at in this recent piece. He looks at what the market is really paying for when it hands SpaceX a trillion and a half dollars. Not rockets, really. Not satellites or broadband. It's buying a story about the future, one where the next chapter of civilization is somewhere off this planet altogether. You're not backing a business so much as a bet on where humanity goes when Earth gets too hot and too crowded.

He sets it next to the last company to break the IPO record: Saudi Aramco, the oil giant. Aramco was the listing of the carbon age, the world we burned through to get here. SpaceX is the bet on escaping it. One company for the planet we used up; the next for the way out.

And here's the thing markets are strangely bad at. They'll happily price land, labour, a company's shares, or even a rocket. But there are whole other categories they can't see at all. Soil healthy enough to grow food. A water cycle that stays stable. The basic trust that lets institutions function. None of that shows up on a balance sheet, and so the market acts like it doesn’t exist.

Or, as Malik puts it:

“markets are very good at pricing transactions and very bad at pricing continuity.”

And continuity is the thing that actually matters, because everything else runs on it. Every fortune, every company, every rocket is built on top of living systems holding together. A liveable planet isn't a backup plan you fund once the exciting stuff is built. There's no future, on Mars or anywhere else, that escapes that.

So why are we so good at funding the way out, and so bad at funding the world we'd leave behind? Part of it is just that it's easier. It’s easier to put money into a shiny escape pod than into the slow, shared work of keeping living systems alive. And it isn't only money. Our political systems have the same blind spot. They’re much quicker to react to a crisis than head one off. We've built a whole civilization that's good at responding to what's loud and immediate, and close to blind to what's slow and keeps us alive.

That's part of why we're writing this Substack. Money is a language, and right now it can fluently describe a trillion-dollar dream of leaving the planet while barely finding the words for keeping it liveable.

But here’s what we forget. Money is a claim on the future – a bet that a certain future will arrive and pay out. And every bet assumes the bigger picture holds: a stable enough world for any of it to be worth anything. Let those conditions unravel and the claims unravel too. You can’t cash in on a planet that’s stopped working.

Which is why regenerating the conditions we all depend on is the most basic hedge there is against what’s barrelling towards us: fires, floods, failed harvests, cities that can’t cool down. It should be the obvious place to put money, not the worthy afterthought. And sooner or later it’ll be what the smart money learns to back, before everyone else catches up.

Clean water.
Free healthcare.
An Earth that’s safe for future generations.

None of it has an IPO. Our job is to build a world that values it anyway.

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Building on Robyn’s last article, I thought I would tell a different story than the one I had initially planned.

This is the story of me meeting a billionaire.

Or rather, running next to one.

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Money on a Treadmill

Last September, during the UN General Assembly in New York, I found myself running next to a billionaire.

As a fundraiser, this should have felt like a dream. But it really did not.

At the time, I was working at the Centre for Public Impact and leading a programme called The Collective. It remains one of the most beautiful things I have ever worked on. The idea was simple: bring together people working on the same public problem, help them collaborate across organisations and sectors, and provide a small experimentation fund so they could take risks, test solutions and learn from one another.

In practice, it was much harder than that.

Collaboration is hard. Systems change is hard. Funding any of that is even harder.

A lot of my time was spent trying talking to foundations and philanthropists, trying to convince them that collaborative governance, learning and experimentation mattered. The challenge was not only that the programme was difficult to explain. It was also difficult to measure, difficult to package and difficult to fit into neat funding categories.

To be honest, I often felt like I had set myself up for failure.

Who wakes up in the morning thinking: “You know what I’d really love to fund today? A collaborative governance initiative”

The task felt overwhelming. The future of my team depended on it. Real people with real contracts.

And then, somehow, at five in the morning, in a Barry’s Bootcamp class in New York, money was running next to me. I was sweating. I was not looking my best. I was also one of the slowest people in the room.

Halfway through the class, I realised the woman running next to me looked familiar.

A few weeks earlier, I had listened to a podcast interview with Lucy Guo, co-founder of Scale AI and one of the youngest self-made female billionaires in the world.

What had caught my attention was the philanthropy part.

During the interview, she talks about what comes next. One of her priorities is learning about philanthropy. She talks about seeking advice and about using AI to solve child trafficking in China, an issue that affected her deeply growing up.

I remember listening and thinking two things simultaneously.

First, this is genuinely interesting.

Second, I think she is asking all the wrong people.

She mentioned wealth advisors. JPMorgan. Donor-advised funds. Conversations with NGO boards. Philanthropy advisors.

Listening to the interview again, what struck me was not how unusual her approach sounded. In many ways it sounded entirely reasonable. She was talking to wealth advisors, exploring a donor-advised fund, sitting on nonprofit boards and trying to learn from people already in the sector.

The question that stayed with me was who wasn’t in those conversations.

And I found myself wondering something. If I suddenly became a billionaire tomorrow, who would teach me how to give? And why would I trust them?

Probably because they speak the same language as me. The language of money, investment, scale and optimisation.

At some point during the class I asked whether she was indeed Lucy Guo.

She was.

Is this what it takes to meet a billionaire?

A 43-dollar fitness class?

(Yes. Forty-three dollars.)

The class ended and we both went on with our lives.

That should have been the end of the story.

Instead, I keep finding myself thinking about it. Mostly because I follow her on Instagram.

One thing that strikes me is how different the lives of very wealthy people are from the lives of almost everyone else. This sounds obvious, but I don’t think we really sit with what that means.

In the podcast, Lucy explained that she still lived more or less like she had before becoming a billionaire.

Maybe that is true relative to other billionaires. But travelling the world on private jets, attending exclusive events and consuming enough caviar to sustain a small fishing industry does not exactly qualify as a normal life.

Wealth creates distance.

Not only economic distance, although that is obvious enough. It also creates experiential distance. The people around you change. The information you receive changes. The problems you encounter change. The assumptions you make about the world start to change.

Yet these same people end up making extraordinarily important decisions about social problems.

Because we have built an economic system that concentrates resources, and therefore decision-making power, in very few hands.

(and by the way, the richer you are the most free stuff you get…)

Learning to Be (Very) Rich

Recently I listened to an episode of Hard Fork discussing the new generation of AI wealth and the wave of founders becoming unimaginably rich through IPOs, acquisitions and stock ownership.

For those of us who don’t spend our weekends reading the Financial Times, an IPO is simply the moment a private company becomes publicly traded. Imagine you own 20% of a company and suddenly the stock market decides that company is worth 50 billion dollars. Overnight, at least on paper, you become worth 10 billion dollars. You don’t necessarily receive a giant cheque. But the shares you already own are suddenly worth a fortune.

What struck me was not the wealth itself but how quickly an entire ecosystem emerges around it. The moment someone becomes rich enough, a whole industry appears to help them think about money.

Banks want to advise them. Family offices want to manage them. Philanthropy advisors want to help them give. Donor-advised funds offer efficient structures. Universities want them on boards. NGOs want relationships.

And among the people waiting to advise newly wealthy founders are often proponents of effective altruism.

Effective altruism has become hugely influential in parts of the philanthropy and tech world. At its simplest, it asks a seemingly reasonable question: if you want to do good, how can you do the most good possible?

Rather than giving based on emotion, proximity or personal experience, effective altruists encourage people to use evidence, data and reasoning to identify where their money can have the greatest impact.

It sounds sensible enough.

Who wouldn’t want their giving to be effective?

The movement has generated some fascinating ideas and pushed philanthropy to think more seriously about evidence. It has also attracted criticism for treating social problems as optimisation exercises and for sometimes being more interested in measurable impact than questions of power, politics or lived experience.

What fascinates me is that all of these actors are ultimately trying to answer the same question.

How should wealthy people think about doing good?

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The Other Expert

Back to New York.

During UNGA, CPI organised a side event on The Collective and one of the participants was Abdul Semakula from Uganda.

Abdul is one of the smartest people I met during my time at CPI.

His organisation is working to protect wetlands around Kampala. That description barely scratches the surface. He brings together landowners, communities, government actors and other stakeholders who would not normally sit around the same table. He experiments with new governance models. He is rethinking carbon markets through Ubuntu Credits. He thinks about data sovereignty. Ultimately, he is trying to protect ecosystems while ensuring that the people who live there have a stake in their future.

If you want to know more about his work, click here and here.

In other words, he is doing the messy work of changing systems in a real place with real people.

What I admire most about Abdul is that he doesn’t have the luxury of abstraction.

If the wetlands disappear, they disappear. If a governance model doesn’t work, people feel it. If an idea sounds good in a conference room but doesn’t survive contact with reality, reality wins.

It was Abdul’s first time in New York. And I remember feeling slightly uncomfortable watching him discover this world. The receptions. The towers. The panels about changing the future. The wine. The endless conversations about impact. The visible social class element. Who feels comfortable in these rooms and who doesn’t. Who already knows the rules and who is learning them on the fly.

I genuinely believe many people in these rooms are trying to do good, including myself. But there is a clear power and access problem.

The people closest to the problems are often the furthest away from the rooms where decisions are made.

Meanwhile, I somehow found myself running next to one of the youngest billionaires in the world.

Not because I had solved a public problem. Not because I was particularly important. But because I happened to have access to the same spaces? Barry’s?

And that is where my discomfort comes from. The truth is that it goes deeper than access.

I don’t think billionaires should exist.

I think a philanthropy system built on extreme concentrations of wealth is inherently contradictory.

We celebrate generosity while not questioning the conditions that made such fortunes possible in the first place. And yet our system often assumes that expertise flows from wealth rather than proximity to a problem.

Because if I wanted to understand climate change in Uganda, I would trust Abdul before JP Morgan. If I wanted to understand child trafficking in China, I would probably start with people working on the issue before I started with a wealth advisor or an American not-for-profit.

Yet the architecture around wealth often works the other way around.

The closer you get to wealth, the more likely you are to hear from people who understand money.

The further away you get from people who understand the problem itself.

What Are We Doing?

At Philea a few weeks ago, someone reminded us that philanthropy literally means “love of humanity.”

I loved that. Somewhere between investment portfolios, donor-advised funds, giving vehicles, optimisation frameworks and theories of change, it is surprisingly easy to forget the humans.

The philanthropy sector spends a lot of time discussing where money should go and surprisingly little time discussing how wealth is created and sustained in the first place.

Should we really live in a world with billionaires? And now, apparently, trillionaires. I don’t even know what that means anymore.

We live in an economic system where money generates more money and where very large fortunes tend to grow faster than most people can imagine. When your wealth generates more wealth than many people will earn in a lifetime, philanthropy is no longer only a question of generosity.

Looking back, the funniest part of the whole story is that there was absolutely no chance Lucy Guo was ever going to fund The Collective.

Even if I had somehow managed to deliver the perfect fundraising pitch between two sprints on a treadmill at five in the morning, a collaborative governance initiative helping organisations learn together through experimentation is probably not the obvious choice for a young AI billionaire trying to figure out philanthropy.

At the end of my trip to New York, I found myself stuck on Third Avenue.

The city was blocked.

First Avenue was closed because Benjamin Netanyahu was attending the UN General Assembly.

Fifth Avenue was closed because Kim Kardashian was launching a new flagship store.

Somewhere between geopolitics and shapewear, Manhattan had come to a standstill.

I remember thinking: this is absurd.

And yet perhaps that is exactly the world we live in.

A world where billionaires learn philanthropy from bankers, where people like Abdul struggle to access the rooms where decisions are made, where money, celebrity, politics and social change constantly collide.

A world that often feels absurd.

And one that feels harder and harder to understand. At least to me.

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I first read it alone in a café. Over the next few days it followed me onto LinkedIn, and friends started forwarding me the responses it had set off. (Since I started this Substack, people send me interesting things about money unprompted now, which I’m loving.)

The essay was Nan Ransohoff’s “Third Wave of American Philanthropy,” and in the world of money-that-tries-to-do-good it was suddenly everywhere.

It left me feeling unexpectedly excited, which isn't my usual response to a philanthropy essay. Ransohoff runs climate at Stripe and built Frontier, a billion-dollar fund that paid for carbon removal before a real market existed. So when she does “napkin math” about the future of giving, it carries weight. And the case is compelling. As AI wealth turns liquid, somewhere between $37 and $100 billion a year could pour into philanthropy, against the roughly $600 billion a year US charities already take in from every source combined. You don’t have to believe the exact figures to think the question is worth getting ahead of.

Her real move is to flip the problem. The hard part, she argues, won’t be the money. It’ll be having anywhere good to put it.

Her fix: build the machine

Ransohoff argues there simply aren’t enough strong organisations, or enough people to run them, to absorb that much that fast. We’re orders of magnitude short of the institutions the moment requires.

So what does she propose we build? The most successful machine we know for turning money and talent into outcomes at speed: Silicon Valley.

That means a few things borrowed wholesale. A kind of Y Combinator for public goods. Philanthropic versions of the big venture firms, which hand out not just money but credibility and prestige. And the core instinct of venture investing, the so-called “power law”: the expectation that most bets will fail, and that’s fine, because the rare giant winner pays for all the losers many times over. Apply that same risk appetite to giving, she suggests. And pay the best people the way tech does: partly in Anthropic or OpenAI equity, so they get rich if they deliver.

It’s a serious answer, and a tempting one. But it also comes with a whole way of thinking attached, which I want to unpack.

The model you copy is the logic you inherit

Here’s the thing. When you borrow a machine, you don’t just borrow how it moves money. You borrow its idea of who holds power and what counts as worth doing.

The Silicon Valley model has a clear answer to both. Power sits with the allocator. The allocator decides what counts. Everyone else competes to be seen. That works well enough when the goal is returns, because the market eventually settles the argument. It’s a stranger fit when the goal is civic life, the slow repair of living systems, the things Ransohoff herself says the spreadsheet can’t reach.

You can feel the mismatch in one of its core instincts. The power law hunts for the rare giant, the bet that scales fast and visibly. It’s brilliant at that. But it tends to pass over the patient, bounded work that will never 1000x and might quietly hold a whole system steady.1 Justin Steele, who spent years funding exactly this kind of embedded work at Google, calls a version of this the legibility trap: the ideas easiest to read from across a table are rarely the ones closest to the problem. Build the whole machine around fast, confident, winner-takes-most bets and that trap doesn’t go away. It gets bigger and faster, with more money behind it.

Ransohoff does worry about concentration. She wants more independent allocators so deployment isn’t “single-threaded” on one or two organisations. But that’s a redundancy fix more than a power one. More allocators making the same kind of call in the same kind of way isn’t quite pluralism; it’s the same logic, replicated. The question I keep coming back to sits just underneath all of this: who gets to decide what futures are worth funding?

A moment worth getting right

It matters because the new wave isn’t landing in an empty field. It’s landing next to a flood zone. The dismantling of USAID has been brutal, and it isn’t only a US story: France cut its development aid by close to 40% last year, and the EU’s latest budget proposals lean the same way, toward competitiveness and away from on-the-ground work. And a lot of the talent Ransohoff says we’re missing already exists, in exactly the organisations going under. It just doesn’t read as “talent” from where the hiring is imagined, because it’s the wrong shape — a decade in community organising rather than a track record scaling a startup. The shortage is real but it’s partly one of recognition.

So what feels most important to me is what we actually do with the most concentrated surge of transformation-minded money in a generation. The real waste wouldn’t be moving too slowly, or getting some bets wrong. It’d be pouring all that momentum into the same concentrated, top-down logic that helped build the problems in the first place. Funding the upkeep of systems we already know don’t hold, and calling it change.

So the question I’d put to the people about to deploy this money isn’t how to build the ecosystem fast. It’s what kind of logic we want running underneath it.

The freedom in a greenfield

And here’s the part that makes me hopeful rather than just wary. Ransohoff is describing a genuine greenfield, and naming it as one. We’re briefly in the rare position of getting to choose the model rather than inherit it.

The good news is that the alternative isn’t hypothetical. It’s a lot of what we’re trying to figure out in my own corner of this work: not more allocators of the familiar kind, but new constellations of actors and governance that can hold the problems existing institutions can’t. Rooted in particular places. Accountable to the people living the problem. Designed to solve several things at once rather than optimise one. Built to strengthen what already exists rather than bulldoze it.

Maybe the move isn’t picking winners from a height at all. It’s getting close enough to find the people already in the places where the risk is real and the conditions are right to act, the ones asking the sharp questions, and backing them with what they can’t easily get on their own. Not just money. The scaling support, the introductions, the lines drawn to people solving the same problem somewhere else.

It’s harder than writing a big cheque, and slower, and we’re early. But it’s already happening. One example is the work on Bioregional Finance Facilities by some of my colleagues at Dark Matter Labs and allied organisations, building exactly this kind of place-rooted, multi-solving infrastructure. Several others are working on similar ideas.

What I’m taking from it

We need a lot of what Nan’s describing. The ambition, the urgency, the seriousness about actually building. I’m just not sure the machine built to spot the bet that’s already legible is the one to reach for, when so much of what we need to fund doesn’t yet have a recognisable shape.

And I’ll own the contradiction in what I’m asking for: this is both urgent and slow. We need money, people and energy moving into this now, with real urgency, and we can’t shortcut the patient work of building things that hold power well. Speed and care usually trade off against each other. This might be the moment we have to refuse that trade.

So, to anyone about to help decide where this money goes: the more interesting bet isn’t a faster version of the old system. It’s joining the people working out a different one, with different power running underneath it.

I don't have the whole picture yet, and I don't think anyone does. But more and more of us are holding a piece of it, and figuring out how to fit them together — how to back this work, scale it, and join forces across the places already doing it. That's the part I'm most excited about.

The pieces behind this:

Nan Ransohoff — The Third Wave of American Philanthropy
Justin Steele — The Legibility Trap

On the funding picture: The Conversation and Foreign Policy (2025–26); the European Commission’s 2028–2034 MFF and FP10 proposals (July 2025).

At some point last year, I even started a podcast about it. It’s called Where Are You From? (D’ou viens-tu? in French). One episode, one story. The first episode is my own story. Or at least an attempt to tell it. Since then, we've recorded stories in French, English, Spanish and German, and every time I am reminded that people are far more complicated than the boxes we put them in.

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Looking back now, I realise that the same question applies to careers.

Not just where you work, but where your motivations come from and what shaped you. Why certain opportunities attract you, why some environments feel familiar and why some experiences stay with you longer than others.

A few days ago, I wrote that I wanted to start a series of chronicles about my time at the Centre for Public Impact (CPI). Stories about consultancy culture, philanthropy, partnerships, power, ambition, exhaustion and trying to change systems from within the system itself.

But before I get there, it feels important to start a little earlier.

Because none of those stories really start at CPI.

They start much further back.

One thing I’ve re-learned over the past years is that we all come with a context. And that context matters when we speak about pretty much anything, especially power and money. I think that’s what we call positionality?

Where are you from?

If you met me today and didn’t know me, you would probably perceive me as a white woman. A few years ago, reading the name “Aurélie Rapenne,” you might have assumed I was fully French. You might also assume a certain level of privilege given where I work, the spaces I move through and the life I have today.

And you would be right.

Although maybe my long black curly hair would make you hesitate for a second. There is a whole thing about hair.

I was born in France to an Algerian mother and a French father. My mother’s family fled Algeria to France at the start of the war of independence. My father’s father was a police man under the Vichy regime and his older brother fought with the French army during the war with Algeria. My Algerian identity was mostly hidden while I was growing up, which is not uncommon in France and its long history of assimilation. But over the years, and especially since becoming a mother myself, I’ve realised how deeply that part of me matters - and of course, how deeply it shaped me.

What matters here is this: I am French-Algerian. My full name is Aurélie Lairedj Rapenne. And I grew up in a low-income family where money was always present, mostly because there was never enough of it.

I studied international law and human rights partly because I was searching for justice. Maybe for my mother, whose story is one of war, colonialism, racism and sexism. Maybe for her generation. Maybe for mine.

Learning How Money Works

I joined the UN because I wanted to be as close to implementation (of rights) as possible. I had spent years studying rights and policies, and I wanted to understand what happened when those ideas met reality. There was also something else: at some point I realised that working for the UN was actually possible. It didn’t have to remain a dream for a girl studying Human Rights in France.

First at UNRWA, working on issues affecting Palestinian refugees across the West Bank and Gaza. Then at UNDP Jordan during the Syrian refugee crisis.

I still remember one conversation with my manager in Jordan. He told me I needed to learn how to draft proposals because it would be one of the most important skills I could develop for the future. He put me to work.

I didn’t think much of it at the time. I was slightly disappointed if I’m honest. I hadn’t gone all the way to Jordan to write donor proposals. I had a very different image of humanitarian and development work. Human rights, refugees, justice. Not budgets and fundraising.

Looking back, it is funny because what he was really telling me was: learn how money works.

Following the Money

My career then took a few unexpected turns that I won’t develop here. Somehow I ended up at the French Embassy in Ethiopia and discovered a completely different world. Diplomacy. Protocol. Literature. Champagne. No anglicisms. Punctuation mattered. The way you dressed mattered. The way you addressed people mattered.

I was also, without fully realising it, getting closer to money again.

Part of my portfolio was international adoption. Another part was managing a child protection and gender fund. Which means that, quite suddenly, I found myself helping decide where funding should go. Looking back, it is slightly terrifying because nobody had really taught me how to do that.

Then came UNICEF.

Turkey first, at the height of the Syrian refugee crisis. Money flowing from the European Union, among others. Officially I was working in monitoring and evaluation. In practice, a lot of my work involved reporting to donors, translating programmes into numbers, indicators and results.

Then New York.

I became Executive Manager to the Deputy Executive Director for Partnerships. Suddenly I found myself in rooms I had never imagined entering. Davos. The World Bank Spring Meetings. UNGA. COP. And more. Meetings with Ministers, CEOs and… David Beckham (he’s a UNICEF Ambassador). Conversations about philanthropy, corporate partnerships and branding. I worked for one of the most inspiring women I have ever met and realised that I wanted to stay in partnerships.

Money was everywhere by then. Politics too.

Then Kenya.

By that point I was pregnant, then a new mother, and my relationship to work was changing. I had a staff position in UNICEF’s regional office and, then, parental leave. I was grateful for that. But when I came back, something wasn’t quite clicking anymore.

Partly because the work felt strangely distant from what had originally brought me there. I often felt like I was sitting between headquarters and country offices, chasing inputs for reports and proposals, forwarding emails and coordinating processes.

Partly because Kenya confronted me with another reality.

For the first time, I experienced the full expatriate package: a large house, a gardener, a cook, a babysitter, a cleaner, a big car. For a young mother exhausted by work and childcare, it felt like paradise.

The feeling lasted about a week.

The more I looked at it, the less comfortable I became. The whole arrangement seemed to depend on inequalities that I couldn’t ignore. Seating on so many privileges. Combined with a job that no longer felt meaningful, I found myself asking difficult questions about what I was doing and why. The truth was, for me to make money, I had to rely on the help of vulnerable local women to take care of my home and child. I didn’t want to be this person. It felt very unjust. After 4 months we decided to leave Kenya.

That is when CPI entered the picture.

The Red Thread

Looking back now, I can see that there was a red thread running through all of it.

When I was growing up, money was a source of anxiety. When I studied human rights, I thought I was searching for justice. When I joined the UN, I thought I was learning how change happens.

Instead, I spent the next fifteen years slowly learning how money moves.

Who has it. Who doesn’t. Who decides where it goes. Who gets access to it. Who gets left out.

I just didn’t realise it at the time.

Next: Chronicle 1: From the UN bureaucracy to the consulting culture

So much so that I followed that passion into a university degree. And one of the clearest lessons it taught me is that language isn't just a tool for describing reality. It shapes it. The words available to you shape what you can think, ask and even notice. Step into a new language and you don’t just access new conversations. You access new ways of seeing.

Every field, every world, and every institution has its own operating system: its grammar, its references, its unspoken rules about what counts as serious and what gets dismissed. I’ve spent most of my career crossing between those worlds and picking up enough of each dialect to find what becomes possible at the intersections.

Which, looking back, is what makes it strange that I spent so long avoiding one of the most consequential languages of all.

Someone else’s language

For years I assumed money was someone else's language. But I've slowly learnt that many of the questions I care about most eventually become questions about capital.

Capital, and everything that determines where it flows and why, has its own grammar.

Not just the technical vocabulary. The deeper layers: the assumptions baked into how we talk about value, return, risk, time, growth. Before anyone makes a conscious decision, that logic determines which futures get funded into existence and which don’t.

Money is the part most of us see. But capital runs deeper in the institutions, incentives, and power relationships that shape where money goes, on what terms and for whose benefit. The forests, soils and watersheds that underpin everything represent value on a scale financial accounting barely registers. Most of what actually matters doesn’t show up on the balance sheet.

Most people who care deeply about where the world is heading aren't fluent in this language. And that’s not an accident. Finance developed its own dialect partly to do genuinely complex work, and partly (as all specialist languages do) to regulate who gets to participate. The people asking the most important questions are rarely in the rooms where the resourcing decisions get made.

The operating system currently running capital with short time horizons, measurable returns, and extraction over stewardship is doing enormous damage.

If you want to change what gets funded into existence, you have to understand the logic that currently decides.

Which brings me to now

I recently joined a new strand of work at Dark Matter Labs, an organisation that has spent a decade recoding what they call the dark matter of society — the governance structures, legal frameworks, institutional logics, cultural narratives, and relational infrastructure that quietly determines what’s possible.

Part of that work is bringing the same systems lens to capital itself: the financial vehicles, instruments, relationships, and institutions needed for transitions at every scale, from neighbourhoods to bioregions to the planetary.

Six months in, I am somewhere between exhilarated and completely out of my depth (which turns out to be exactly where the most interesting questions live!).

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Three layers of a new language

What I didn’t anticipate was how many languages I’d be learning simultaneously. I think this field has at least three, stacked on top of each other.

The first is conventional finance: the foundational grammar that governs how capital currently moves. A rabbit warren of GP/LP structures, blended finance, term sheets, and sovereign wealth funds. And beneath those the assumptions baked into terms like fiduciary duty, risk-adjusted returns, and alpha (not the personality type). You have to understand the grammar before you can rewrite it.

The second is the socialised vocabulary: terms that emerged as finance tried to account for values beyond pure return. Terms like impact investing, ESG, regenerative finance, systemic investing. These words carry ambition but also contested meaning. Regenerative can mean almost anything. ESG has been stretched so far it barely holds. Impact has been claimed by so many it’s lost its edge. Mapping that landscape is one of the things I want to do in this Substack.

The third layer is, for me, the most interesting: new vocabulary being deliberately coined to reshape what’s possible. Some of it names things that exist but have no home in conventional finance.

Take civilizational optionality (the key term at the heart of my strand of work) which we use to mean the capacity societies need to actively keep futures open under stress, rather than letting them close off irreversibly. Or take Bioregional Finance Facilities1, which my colleague Leon helped to coin: purpose-built institutions for directing resources toward the regeneration of ecosystems, cultures and communities at the scale of living systems rather than markets.

This is of course also happening far beyond our corner of the field. Kate Raworth’s doughnut economics2 gave a generation a new image of what a healthy economy looks like, and with it new demands. Adam Tooze’s polycrisis3 named the compounding, simultaneous nature of current shocks in a way that “multiple crises” never quite did.

Once you have these words, you have a new compass. The naming is a crucial part of the intervention.

Which means the question of who does the naming, and who does the mobilising, matters enormously. The current moment badly needs concept-makers and mobilisers: people as comfortable in the grammar of desire as the grammar of governance and the grammar of finance. People who understand not just how systems work but what actually moves people. People who can translate between what’s technically possible and what becomes thinkable, fundable and thereby real. And people who can build the coalitions, construct the demand, and create the conditions for new ideas to actually land.

That’s the work I’m trying to be part of.

On writing in the middle of learning

I'll be honest, there have been moments in the last six months where I've sat in a room, followed maybe sixty percent of what was being said, and wondered what I was doing there.

And then I remembered that this is exactly what it feels like to be learning a language. That phase of being simultaneously inside and outside is uncomfortable, when you understand enough to know what you’re missing, but not enough to fill the gaps. However, I've come to realise it's also one of the most useful places to be. The questions that feel too basic to ask out loud are often the ones that most need asking. The outsider who hasn’t yet been socialised into the field’s assumptions is sometimes the only one who can see them clearly.

So that’s what I’m trying to do here. Not perform expertise I don’t yet have, but learn out loud, in public, with others, at a moment when the stakes are high and the grammar is still being written. Asking the questions. Mapping the terrain. And (I hope!) helping others to learn this language too.

Two weeks ago in Copenhagen, during the Philea Forum, I found myself talking with Maria Alejandra Escalante from Collective Abundance and Samia Hathroubi from FundAction about work, transitions, and somehow, how we had all ended up at Philea.

At some point, I started telling stories about my time at the Centre for Public Impact (CPI), where I currently work. Small stories mostly. Funny ones. Intense ones. I think there is often curiosity around CPI because of its affiliation with Boston Consulting Group, a major American consultancy firm, and because it sits in such a strange in-between space compared to the traditional social impact and social justice sector.

So I found myself telling stories about consultancy culture, American working culture, ambition, exhaustion, power dynamics, impossible expectations and the strange emotional worlds that exist inside organisations trying to “change systems” from within the system itself.

And as I was talking, I suddenly realised something slightly uncomfortable: there were still so many emotions sitting there.

Some small traumas even. The kind that accumulates slowly over years inside intense workplaces. The kind you only notice once you’ve stepped slightly outside of it. Especially when parts of the story still feel, somehow, like personal failures.

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I’m currently in the middle of a major transition. In a few weeks, I’ll leave CPI and join Transparency International. And the two worlds already feel very different.

For the past months, I think I’ve been trying to move through this transition in the way many professionals do: quickly, efficiently, without looking back too much. Finish the handovers. Close the loops. Start the next chapter. Keep moving.

But sitting there in Copenhagen, listening to myself tell these stories out loud, I realised I don’t actually want to leave this chapter behind so cleanly.

CPI shaped me deeply. Professionally, politically, emotionally. It changed how I think in many ways. It was one of the most important chapters of my professional life. It was hard, intense, beautiful, and I grew enormously through it. It also challenged me in ways I still don’t fully understand.

And maybe transitions deserve more reflection than we usually allow ourselves.

So I started thinking about this Substack differently.

What if, instead of rushing forward, I used this moment to look back properly? Not to produce a corporate retrospective. Not to settle scores. Just to pay attention to what this chapter actually was.

A way to document moments, tensions, contradictions, lessons, absurdities, relationships and emotional landscapes from inside a very particular organisation and ecosystem.

Partly to make sense of it for myself.

Partly because I suspect many people working in “impact” spaces may relate.

So next week: Chronicle 1 - Where are you from?

*And yes, this is still a Substack about money. Because one of the things CPI probably taught me the most clearly is that eventually, almost every conversation about systems, power and social change ends up becoming a conversation about money.

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I spent the better part of last week in Copenhagen at the Philea Forum, my first deep immersion into the world of European philanthropy.

I know American philanthropy better. The mega-foundations, the tech money, the culture of scale and disruption, the obsession with metrics and storytelling. Through the years I have met some of the best of American philanthropy: the incredibly creative, disruptive and genuinely inspiring funders. And some of the worst. European philanthropy feels different. Slower maybe. More discreet. More institutional. More cautious? Less polished in some ways. Less performative perhaps.

It was a strange moment for me personally to attend this kind of gathering because I’m currently in between jobs. I’m about to leave the Centre for Public Impact and join Transparency International. That changes how you move through a conference like this. Very few people know CPI. Most people know TI. Your institutional affiliation shapes how people see you before you’ve even opened your mouth. In fact, everyone looks at your badge first. It determines how legible you are in the room.

And that’s complicated. Because this is a “no fundraising conference.” At first, I interpreted that as funders wanting to protect their safe space, or perhaps just being exhausted at constantly being pitched to. Part of me instinctively resisted that idea. But in the end, maybe it’s better this way, because it takes out the pressure of constantly having to fundraise. You end up focusing on creating relations.

Eventually, I realised that there were a lot of fundraisers. Many foundations are themselves fundraising. Some organisations are foundations but not really foundations. There are also many intermediaries: organisations moving between funders and grassroots actors, co-creating, convening, de-risking and building trust. So, despite the concentration of wealth and power in the room, there was also a surprising amount of solidarity.

The conference itself was incredibly well run. Honestly, almost suspiciously smooth. Everything worked. The sessions started on time, ended on time. The logistics were seamless.

What I’ve realised after years of conferences, summits and retreats is that my favourite moments are rarely panels though. The best spaces are the ones where people actually build something together. Workshops where you get your hands dirty, where conversations become collaborative rather than performative. That wasn’t entirely the vibe here. But this forum gave me something else: a map of the European climate and philanthropy ecosystem.

And what an ecosystem.

I listened to and met people from Climate KIC, the European Climate Foundation, Thousand Currents, Segal Family Foundation, TechSoup, Giving Tuesday, the European AI & Society Fund, the Adessium Foundation, Bikuben Foundation, Collective Abundance, Youth Climate Fund, CIFF, the Botnar Foundation, the Fondation Chanel and, many others. I also randomly ran into beautiful friends from FundAction and EPIM, which is always the secret joy of these gatherings.

There were also, inevitably, some less interesting encounters. Certain conversations gave me what I can only describe as “old French humanitarian guy energy.” People who have occupied the same institutional spaces for thirty years and somehow still speak entirely in jargon while saying very little.

But there were also many signs of change.

One thing I noticed was the feminisation of philanthropy. Ten years ago, this event would probably have looked very different. Several people mentioned that their boards, once dominated by older white men, are now increasingly made up of women. Still, the space remains deeply elite, overwhelmingly white and incredibly concentrated in terms of power.

And that power is immense.

At one point, someone casually mentioned their foundation’s endowment: 350 million euros. A “small foundation,” they said. They spend the yearly interest, around 14 million euros, while preserving the capital forever.

Forever?

I kept thinking about what that actually means. How are those returns generated? Through what investments? Which industries? Which extractive systems? Foundations often demand extraordinary levels of transparency from the organisations they fund, especially NGOs and grassroots groups. But philanthropy itself can remain surprisingly opaque.

Who sits on these boards? Who decides where money flows? What ideologies shape those decisions? Why are foundations rarely scrutinised with the same intensity as the organisations depending on them?

One person during the forum reminded us that philanthropy literally means “love of humanity.” Not reports. Not logframes. Not endless project management systems. People.

It was such a simple comment, but it stayed with me because somewhere along the way, many parts of institutional philanthropy seem to have drifted very far from that original idea.

One of the most powerful sessions I attended was called Too Political, or Too Lukewarm: What’s the Cost of Neutrality?

It focused on the increasing attacks against civil society organisations across Europe, particularly climate CSOs. Delegitimisation campaigns. Funding cuts. Accusations of being “too political.” Questions around legitimacy, advocacy and public trust.

The discussion raised a deeper question running through the entire forum: can philanthropy really remain neutral?

Because everything is political.

The origins of wealth are political. Investment strategies are political. Decisions about what gets funded, and what doesn’t, are political. Even choosing not to take a stance is a political stance.

I was especially struck by the organisations trying to hold complexity inside all of this. Intermediaries especially. The groups operating between institutions and grassroots actors, translating, convening, redistributing risk and building trust. Quiet infrastructure organisations doing deeply important work that often remains invisible.

Someone during the conference complained that there are “too many CSOs” and that civil society organisations “don’t collaborate enough.” But honestly, after listening to many conversations, I kept thinking the opposite: what’s remarkable is how much solidarity still exists despite shrinking funding and increasing pressure.

Also: there are so many foundations in Europe.

There was also a growing recognition that philanthropy alone cannot “fill the gap.” One speaker mentioned that global philanthropy amounts to around 2.4 trillion dollars while inequality continues to grow alongside the number of billionaires. The point was not that philanthropy is useless, but that generosity without structural change will never (ever) be enough.

That tension stayed with me throughout the forum.

I left Copenhagen both energised and unsettled. Inspired by many of the people I met, especially a younger generation trying to reshape philanthropy from within. But also increasingly aware of how strange this entire world can be: rooms full of people discussing social justice while sitting on enormous concentrations of private wealth.

Next year’s theme will be democracy.

I’ll be back.

Actually, two birthday invitations.

Before we had even properly gotten to know each other, we somehow ended up inviting each other to our birthdays. Somewhere in between, an instant friendship formed.

A few months earlier, multiple people had told us we needed to meet after a UNDP gathering in Georgia at the end of 2023, where our organisations crossed paths.

They were right.

We met in Berlin and talked for hours. Then we kept meeting (especially at a delicious little Italian restaurant called La Bolognina!).

It became one of those deep work friendships built through shared ideas, shared frustrations and, maybe most importantly, shared dreaming. Both of us simply love imagining things together. And we slowly came to the conclusion that there is probably nothing better than working with someone you are genuinely friends with.

Aurélie has spent her career on the inside, navigating big bureaucracies and translating between the people with money and the people who really need it. Robyn has mostly been on the outside, poking at institutional logic and asking what could exist instead. Yin and yang, more or less.

Something happens in our conversations that doesn’t happen when either of us is working alone. A kind of collective weaving that becomes more than the sum of its parts. The kind of friction (and laughter!) that actually gets you somewhere. Something that leaves you with lots of energy.

Over time, we kept converging on the same topic: money. Not in the finance or productivity sense, but money as power, access, scarcity, influence and contradiction. Fundraising, philanthropy, partnerships, institutional politics: who gets funded, who stays visible, who disappears. The more we talked, the more we realised money had become the hidden thread running through both our work and our questions.

We also kept returning to personal branding. Both of us feel conflicted about it - the pressure to constantly package yourself into something coherent, polished and marketable. Maybe we’ve both read too much Naomi Klein for that.

But we’ve come to believe that showing up honestly, even imperfectly, matters. That ideas need people willing to put them into the world. That the right writing finds the right readers, and sometimes that’s how things change.

So this is a space to think and learn out loud together. To write honestly about money, power, institutions, creativity, philanthropy and all the contradictions of trying to do meaningful work inside imperfect systems.

And although this is starting with the two of us, we don’t imagine it staying that way. We want this to become a collective space, bringing in people from different worlds, experiences and perspectives who are also thinking deeply about money, power, systems and the futures we are trying to build.

What you’ll find here is a mix of our own experiences, conversations with people doing interesting things, guest contributions, and whatever creative formats we stumble into along the way.

Mostly, this feels like an excuse to keep dreaming together, and hopefully bring others into the conversation too!

Welcome to Money, Honey?

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Growing up, money was absent as a topic in our house. Not surrounded by obvious stress, but not spoken about either. It was a humble enabling force — a quiet background hum that gave stability and unlocked opportunity. It became tangible to me through my parents’ wallpaper business, which grew from a stash in the bathroom to the garage and eventually into a warehouse. As it grew, so did our lives. The house got extended. We went for more meals out. I had a concrete sense of where money came from and how it flowed.

At the same time, without quite realising it, I developed a worldview: the most interesting people seemed least focused on money. They pursued artistic endeavours, gave generously, appeared fuelled by goodwill rather than cold coins. So I followed that logic into arts, languages, philosophy, sociology, history, human rights. Money, I had quietly decided, was for other people.

Living alone for the first time, I discovered I couldn’t simply ignore the topic. I was good at maths but not good with money… a distinction no one had thought to mention. The gap registered as shame. I didn't know how to talk about it, so I didn't — scraping by and retreating into the topics and causes that felt safer than facing my bank balance.

After studying, I moved through different worlds. Places trying to do good but hitting ceilings of grant constraints or profit thinking. Places moving fast and creatively where money flowed but without clear purpose. Glimpses of luxury and high-net-worth environments where entirely different logics seemed to operate. And then the public innovation sphere, where I started to see how quietly money shapes everything: brilliant work throttled by project cycles, relationships contorted by grantor-grantee dynamics, large budgets misdirected not through bad intent but through structural constraints.

Over the last couple of years I've been trying to shift my own relationship with money. I realised that simply opting out doesn't help change it. Engaging with money properly, on your own terms, expands what becomes possible. So I started engaging — learning to invest, talking about money more openly with friends, learning to price my own work properly. And the more I engaged, the more curious I became about how money moves at a much bigger scale.

That curiosity recently led me to Dark Matter Labs, where I’m now helping build an initiative exploring how capital might flow toward civilization-scale risks, and what new financing and governance architectures that would actually require. The learning curve is steep and the landscape vast, and I'm loving discovering just how many brilliant people are already working on pieces of this puzzle.

I'm also finding myself in ever richer conversations — with friends unpacking the stories we carry around money, and how they shape what we feel able to imagine, ask for, or step into; and with colleagues and peers navigating fundraising and philanthropy landscapes, building bioregional finance facilities, multi-capital stacks, deal construction funds, and new ways for collectives of organisations to pool resources and make decisions together.

I’ve learned such a lot from people willing to share their thinking before it’s finished over the years. So this Substack is an attempt to do the same — to learn out loud alongside others wrestling with the psychology of money, the power relations around it, and how to move it toward what matters.

Welcome to Money, Honey?

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I never thought I would end up writing about money.

I studied international law and human rights because I wanted to work on justice, the kind of things people put in UN resolutions. Eventually, I joined the UN system and worked mostly with UNICEF across humanitarian and development contexts in many countries.

At first, my job was about rights. Then slowly, almost without noticing, it became about money.

I specialised in partnerships and fundraising, which is essentially convincing governments, foundations, companies and wealthy people to finance work that absolutely should exist regardless of whether someone glamorous wants to sponsor it. The work that makes a real difference in the world. Surprisingly, I loved it. The work was part strategy, part diplomacy, part storytelling. Mostly, it involved dreaming out loud with people and trying to turn those dreams into budgets.

What I didn’t realise at the time was that money had always been the background music of my life.

Share Money, Honey?

I grew up in a low-income family where money wasn’t abstract. It was: can we buy enough food this week? What do we do about the broken washing machine? Can this wait another month?

Then, through fundraising, I suddenly found myself in rooms with people who had more money than I could comprehend. Davos. UNGA week. Fancy hotels with alarming carpet choices (why would you even choose to carpet a room?). Conversations about “mobilising capital

” over tiny pastries and champagne.

I got to see how wealth moves. How governments decide priorities. How philanthropy works. How corporations position themselves as saviours. How some rich people genuinely try to give back. How others mostly enjoy panels about giving back.

Over time, my work shifted toward the private sector. After leaving the UN (partly exhausted by bureaucracy and processes pretending to be action) I joined the Centre for Public Impact, an organisation founded by BCG.

There, I spent 3 years working with foundations, philanthropists and corporate partners, trying to understand who funds what, and why. Some of it was inspiring. Some of it felt deeply inefficient. Occasionally, completely absurd.

More recently, I’ve also been on the other side: helping manage large funding processes with a major tech partner distributing money through open calls. Which turns out to be another fascinating window into influence and spreadsheets.

Soon, I’ll join Transparency International to lead partnerships work there. So now the thread continues into corruption, accountability and the question of what money does to institutions and people.

At this point, writing about money feels less like a choice and more like the only topic that has quietly followed me everywhere.

So this Substack is an attempt to make sense of it all. Welcome to Money, Honey?

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