The 14th annual Just Giving Conference tackled the toughest, most essential challenge facing our generation: achieving economic and ecological justice.

Just Giving’s collective purpose is to enhance philanthropy’s capacity to confront and to address successfully these profound systemic challenges.

Four building blocks made up the agenda for the 2014 conference. More time was allocated for informal discussion, caucusing and advancing strategic initiatives led by grantmakers in and outside EDGE Funders. Above all else EDGE created an inclusive space aimed specifically at deepening relationships and strengthening a sense of community and shared, aligned purpose. EDGE Funders Alliance works to increase support for greater equity and sustainability within the system as it is, while encouraging our community to address our deep and systemic social, economic and ecological challenges over the long term, supporting needed innovations and alternatives for tomorrow.

• To undertake the “managerial tasks” of feeding the planet, reversing anthropogenic climate change, securing community natural resource management and transitioning to a new, sustainable economy, while also attending to the tasks of personal, institutional, and social transformation.
• To find space for movements and to honor the value-frames they bring to the task of transformation.
• To develop discussion and strategy development sessions that combine an issue focus with power analyses of, for example:
  • Community food systems; Regions feeding cities, Agriculture out of the WTO!;
  • Energy democracy, including housing – affordable, energy-smart, community-minded;
  • Strengthening local control of resources and of the commons, and community bargaining power in setting new rules for the global economy;
  • Rights, sexual orientation and gender justice, Indigenous strategies of resistance and resilience;
  •  Philanthropy itself, including the ‘permafunding’ concept rooted in permaculture’s core tenets of Care of the earth, Care of the people, Return of surplus, i.e. reinvesting foundation resources in service of people and planet.
  • Among other topics of key interest to the wider philanthropic community.