“The ancient human-Earth relationship must be recovered in a new context, in its mystical as well as its physical functioning. There is need for awareness that the mountains and rivers and all living things, and the sky and its sun and moon and clouds, all constitute a healing, sustaining sacred presence for humans, which they need as much for their psychic integrity as for their physical nourishment. This presence … is the atmosphere in which humans breathe deepest….”
~Thomas Berry

It’s been a while since I have written a blog or updated this site. That’s because for the last 18 months I have been writing a book based on interviews with 25 of America’s top grantwriters. It’s finished now and I’m delighted with the result and thinking about how I want to distribute it. It has been fun, arduous and rewarding. It has been a chance for me distill what I have learned about grant development from my years in the business. I have a lot of material that did not make it into the final draft and will start sharing that soon but first I want to share a very personal post with you. It felt like time to write a book because I’m ready to move on to the next stage of my life. I’ve been doing a lot of navel gazing over the last few years and distinguishing what really matters to me in this short life that I’ve been blessed with. Here’s what I came up with:

Our world

Our planet is at a crucial turning point – we simply cannot sustain our current level of growth and viciousness towards each other. I believe that our global structures are disintegrating. As a European I’m deeply aware how seemingly formidable fortresses such as the Berlin Wall and the Eastern Bloc can dissolve overnight. And, intractable centuries old disputes such as Northern Ireland can be brought to peace. I have no idea if our economic structures will shatter overnight as seemed imminent in 2008 or will slowly crumble but I do believe that they are heading out the door.

I am a radical social activist at heart. I have spent my entire adult life either fighting the system, working to change it, or collapsing in despair. It is quite clear that there are more than enough resources on the planet for every single person to eat, be clothed, and housed. And yet, that is far from the case and starvation of the most vulnerable is accepted as a part of life.
Yet, deep down we know that everyone matters, life matters, love matters. Our hearts know that a more beautiful world is possible and we are satiated when we express that knowledge in our daily actions.

My commitment in the world

I’ve been gifted many times over in this life – starting with the two most loving parents possible and moving on to an ivy-league education and living in two of the safest and richest countries on the planet. I’m grateful to have a talent for writing award-winning grant proposals and the gift of intuition. Although I do not usually share this, I am what would commonly be called a medium – between the visible world and the unseen one – the place where time and space are non-existent. In my grant work, I use my intuition as a guide when developing grants with teams, in helping to see the right direction, and understanding the best way to communicate a pure intention from our hearts to the funders’ hearts. As I’ve been sharing this gift more openly, I’ve come to realize that it is one that many, many women hold in some form and yet we’ve been trained over the eons to hide it. But our world is tremoring with birthing a new way of life and hiding our inner knowing and connectedness with the ethereal is expedient no longer.

I’ve been dealt a fine hand. Now, I’m choosing to use those gifts in service to the deepest yearning of my heart to help birth a world in which the feminine is powerfully and freely expressed, all life is honored as sacred, and people know themselves to be peacemakers in their homes, communities and world.

What do I mean by the feminine? I do not mean simply women and girls although there is lots of evidence that empowering women has deep and lasting impacts. There is no such thing as a feminine trait or masculine trait – they are just traits that we label that both men and women possess. But, I, and many other women, are feeling an urge to channel ‘feminine’ energy that is collaborative, cooperative, nurturing, slow, beautiful, gentle, spacious, and receptive. And it is also fierce love, the one that roars with outrage at the rape of our earth and our children. And many men are equally constrained feeling that they must play a dominating role instead of freely expressing their emotive compassionate natures. Our world is grossly out of balance and there is a lot of space for the feminine to be reintegrated into society. I am calling for the reclaiming, honoring, and reintegration of the feminine in both its gentle and fierce forms so we know ourselves as whole both individually and collectively. Collective healing and individual healing are two sides of the same coin. When I can open my heart to my own pain and anger it is easier to face that in the world and do what I can to be a voice for love and compassion even in the face of insurmountable odds.

So, what’s this got to do with grants?

I am no longer interested in putting band aids on systemic issues. Four years ago I had an ‘aha’ moment in which I realized that if we all freely shared our talents my job as a grant developer who moves money from one place to another would be moot. It forced me to fundamentally question my role in sustaining and training people to compete in a system that keeps inequity in place. Since then, I have been wondering if the current foundation/grantmaking model is not effective, what would work? I don’t have any answers yet but they are beginning to emerge and I’ll use this blog as a place to explore them with you. This is what where the exploration stands at the moment:

1. The IRS regulations keep an artificial divide in place between organizations for the social good and those that are focused on profit. I love that social enterprise/entrepreneurship is blossoming because this provides an avenue for sustainable socially beneficial organizations. But, nascent social enterprises are facing the same constriction of funding as non-profits.

2. Our relationship to money is at the core of so many destructive actions and thoughts. We invented money – it does not exist in reality. It is a collective agreement that we made on a global scale that pieces of paper or bits on a computer signify value in the real world. But then we seem to have forgotten that we invented it and it has a life of its own that dominates our choices and how we treat one another. This is an opportunity to change our relationship to money and the structures it has created. I have been reading a fascinating book by Charles Eisenstein called Sacred Economics that I highly recommend in which he coined the phrase ‘the world that our hearts knows is possible’. There is also a short film that explains the book’s major concepts. He argues that our financial system is dependent on perpetual growth and yet our ability to convert what was once free (childcare, entertainment, music, water) into a procured service is reaching capacity. And, Lynn Twist’s Soul of Money gives a persuasive argument for money as a spiritual vehicle, She reminds us,“If you let go of trying to get more of what you don’t really need, which is what we’re trained to want more of, it frees up oceans of energy to pay attention to what you already have. When you nurture and nourish what you do have and begin to make a difference with it, it expands before your very eyes. In other words, what you appreciate appreciates. This is true prosperity.” We have forgotten that our birthright is a beautiful earth with plentiful natural resources (including human ingenuity) that are sufficient for all of us to live freely and share our natural talents. It is time to remember.

3. What does philanthropy look like when the feminine is reintegrated, when we are one? At the moment, it is a system that is hinged on the idea that we are all independent beings separate from one another, where those who have give to those who don’t at their discretion. But would a system grounded in the knowledge that we are all expressions of an interdependent whole look like? What does it look like when it embodies cooperation, collaboration and partnership? For sure, it doesn’t look like hundreds of people spending thousands of hours writing grant applications in the hope that someone will give it the nod. Some options are already emerging –

• crowd funding through organizations such as Kiva or Kickstarter.
• Socially beneficial businesses are blossoming and new structures are emerging such as L3C that will dissolve the old non-profit/for profit divide.
• There a few true funder-community collaborations that I hope to write about in future posts.

4. As the true costs of globalized industrial production emerge our economy will become more localized. We have already seen this happening with the slow food movement and slow money is emerging too. I’m fortunate to live in one of the most progressive communities in the U.S. which is home to a local currency, Ithaca Hours. In a radically localized economy, we would reconvert things that were once free – entertainment, childcare, eldercare etc. back to the collective commons by mutual support networks and giving circles. I’ll also expand on these ideas in later posts.
Going forward, what you can expect from me and this blog is:

a) Ideas, musings and thought-provoking ideas about birthing the world that our hearts knows is possible;

b) Trainings on how to succeed in the current grants system specifically geared to visionaries and activists dedicated to creating a more heart-centered world;

c) Channelling/energy healing for visionary leaders dedicated to shining a light on what is happening in the world and/or creating the world that our hearts know is possible.

d) Grant writing services for those immersed in systemic transformation and/or dedicated to finding new and better ways of operating that expresses our spiritual nature.