The 2019 Conference

April 9-12, 2019

Next year’s Annual Conference is taking place near Rio de Janeiro on April 9-12, 2019.

[Please note: We are in close contact with our Conference Planning Committee members in Brazil, and will continue monitoring developments there. Our thoughts are with them, and with their grantee partners. Their counsel, along with the advice of other CPC members as well as social movement allies there and in the region, will help guide our decisions and planning over the coming period]

Next year’s events will offer us all an important opportunity to situate our work within the social, economic and political context of Brazil, Latin America and the wider world, to broaden perspectives, wherever we work and whatever strategies we pursue, on the systemic and global nature of today’s challenges.Within the context of our efforts to build foundation support for just transition and systemic change, holding the conference outside of Europe and the US offers EDGE and our members an important opportunity to situate this work within the social, economic and political context of Brazil, Latin America and in the wider global South. The aim is to broaden perspectives and raise awareness of the systemic and global nature of today’s challenges among all members, even those who don’t fund outside their own countries. Holding the conference in Brazil will allow us to:

• Lift up the importance of the “global” context: EDGE emphasizes the significance of global and international structures, policies and potential solutions, even for members working within a specifically local or national context. Holding the conference in a country of immense size, influence and historical importance and dynamism as Brazil will help members understand new contexts and realities, in ways likely to bring more international consciousness and commitment to their own grantmaking – and to our collective work as engaged donors for global equity.
• Lift up the importance of transnational organizing: EDGE strategies stress the important lessons to be learned from translocal and international movements organizing resistance and developing systemic solutions within different contexts and cultures. The activities and approaches to be contemplated will provide EDGE members with a deeper appreciation of different realities and terrains of struggle, supporting in direct and subtle ways a fuller understanding of how movements are contributing to global social transformation in the region and around the world.

Formal activities will begin with a funder assembly and introductions on the afternoon of Tuesday, 9th and close the evening of Thursday April 11, and we would like to encourage participants to join colleagues with the Rede de Filantropia para a Justiça Social/Philanthropy Network for Social Justice in Rio, to gain deeper insights into how grantmakers with ties to various communities in struggle are responding to local contexts, and current realities (see Philanthropy in Brazil: Obstacles, challenges and opportunities).

Our 2019 gathering seeks to achieve two overarching goals:

1) Supporting civil society and social movement organizations and networks in their efforts to advance and consolidate their own work of resistance and development of systemic alternatives;

2) Identifying and developing strategies aimed at moving more resources towards those struggles and alternatives by advancing a “systemic change philanthropy” that is informed by our engagement with social movement allies.

These events and the work leading up to them are intended to build on EDGE’s Barcelona Commitment and other discussions and insights from previous annual gatherings, momentum coming out of our Global Engagement Lab cohorts and the Gender Justice Initiative, as well as on the work and experiences of allied funder networks across the philanthropic landscape.

Together with movement partners joining us in Brazil, inspired by their approach to systemic alternatives captured dramatically in our short film Come to the Edge, we hope to bring together philanthropic allies to help collectively set terms of the debate, defining values and attributes, establishing benchmarks, and creating tangible and strategic guideposts for foundations and our field to move from transactional to transformational grantmaking, in support of deep and long term social change.

Our amazing Conference Planning Committee is still working on the last details, which will be constantly updated on this page. Stay in touch!