The 2023 Conference

Funding Boldly: Systemic Change and Alternatives | Oct 18-20, 2023, Berlin

Today’s global challenges, including climate change, systemic racism, the rising attacks on democracy and violence, require radical systemic solutions. These solutions already exist, and they have been designed and adopted by the communities who are mostly affected by these systemic crises, centering care, justice, and equity.

However, philanthropy often falls short in providing steady support to those systemic alternatives. The EDGE conference  will be the space where voices and experiences at the edge are finally centered and uplifted in a funders-movements space. Bridging these divides means finding ways to recenter care, systemic justice and bold experimentation, in a way that does not shy away from embracing challenging political conversations that are necessary to shift power and resources towards those at the forefront.

The EDGE conference was a brave space for building community and changing philanthropy for systemic alternatives, with a wide array of opportunities to participate, share, learn, and grow in solidarity.

Conference Themes & Focus Areas

  • Money and interrogating its sources

    The EDGE Conference will explore the connection between the extractive capitalistic system and philanthropy, by analyzing the historical close relationship between these two systems and try to understand how money generated from extractive capitalism can truly support systemic change. What is the role of philanthropy in solving the paradox of origin of the wealth and need for movements to receive financial support? And how can these issues be addressed systematically in our investments and endowments?

  • Philanthropy and shifting power while acknowledging past harm

    Acknowledging that philanthropy is a core part of the capitalist system and benefiting from its extractive system is an important first step in exploring how to heal harmful behavior and build true allyship with movement partners we wish to support. At the EDGE Annual Conference, the conversation will focus on understanding how progressive philanthropy can concretely bring sovereignty, black liberation, degrowth, deglobalization, participatory principles, care and repair and other imaginations of a different world with radically different power dynamics to the core of its work and programming.

  • Focusing on alternative models, practices and visions of the world and their multitudes

    Oppressive systems do not leave room for multitudes and exclude ideas outside of their narrow definitions. Systemic alternatives on the other hand are intersectional “visions over visions” that build on one another and center autonomy, sovereignty and the rights of self determination, which is why different communities can develop different solutions to the same problems. Consequently, philanthropy needs to organize resources to be able to support diverse systemic alternatives. At the EDGE conference, funders will be able to listen to those building alternative visions of our world and be challenged to reflect on whether their current grantmaking practices can respond to those diverse intersectional systemic alternatives.

Conference Planning Committee

This conference was created and designed as collaborative effort between EDGE members and movement leaders, who collectively composed the Conference Planning Committee. This committee focused on session design, conference framing and movement participation at the EDGE Conference.

Movement Participation

EDGE Funders aims to build relationship with social movements from around the world, also by challenges power dynamics ingrained in the relationship between funders and movement organizers. To do so, at the conference in Brazil, EDGE tested a new approach to involve social movements and activists through the self-selection of movement participants according to their own criteria.
This year, we maintained (and improved where needed) this experiment. One fifth of conference participants came from an activist/social movement background through a self-selection process.

Thanks to your support in funding their participation!

The conference was held at Oyoun in Berlin, Germany. Oyoun is a non-profit cultural center that conceives, develops and implements artistic-cultural projects through decolonial, queer feminist and migrant perspectives. Oyoun sees itself as an inter- and anti-disciplinary platform for newly emerging approaches between and from the fields of fine arts, performance art, theatre, literature, dance, music, new media, socio-culture, education and much more. Oyoun is now under threat of shutting down under increased free speech censorship from the German government. Learn more and support.