I ended 2024 flat on my back with a compound fracture in my spine. After a brutal year, I came to Chiang Mai, Thailand, seeking rest, reflection, and rejuvenation. Instead, three days in, while preparing to meet with a prospective funder for Armillaria, I had a seizure, fell, and was rushed to hospital. Now I’m projecting my laptop onto the ceiling. This is where I’ve been for almost four weeks, and this is where I’ll remain for at least another two.
As a metaphor for systems innovators, impact entrepreneurs, non-profit leaders, community organisers, and social and environmental activists – largely labouring in obscurity, and breaking our backs while actually doing the change – it couldn’t be more apt.
2024 was a year of crushing disappointment. Humanity stands on the brink of calamity, yet those with the power to act seem content to let the world burn. Doing the right thing has been supplanted by doing the expedient and/or profitable thing, with decisions that impact the lives of billions being increasingly politicised and commercialised. Ecocide, genocide, and culturicide are rampant — proof, if it was needed, that a vast number of political, corporate, and cultural leaders have lost all claim to moral authority.
What breaks my brain, however, isn’t fundamentalist religion (given how religious moderates treat their sacred texts as holy relics that should not be revised to enhance our capacity for compassion), extremist politics (an unsurprising response to unabated neoliberalism and globalism) or unchecked capitalism (given that most political movements have permitted the market to take supremacy over society).
What beggars belief is the self-congratulatory posturing of the wealthiest and most powerful, who style themselves as our saviours while perpetuating the very beliefs and behaviours that got us here in the first place.
These transactional changemakers seek to remake our world in their image, while erecting roadblocks (intentionally or not) to supporting those who’ve been most actively working towards these outcomes for generations.
In a few short weeks, many of them will gather at the World Economic Forum in Davos to salivate over the next big “opportunity” (likely climate-tech) that living through the era of the metacrisis presents. They’ll talk about public-private partnerships, and the need for more private capital to flow towards addressing the great challenges of our time, while overtly questioning public policy, including anything that might increase their taxation, and permit governments to continue doing the important work of protecting their citizens.
Meanwhile, by way of comparison, 1,800 children will die each day from lack of access to clean water and sanitation – a problem that could and should have been solved decades ago. But somehow, market-based solutions for saving kids lives are in short supply. So we haven’t.
As I remarked in a recent poll here on Linkedin, I was born in Australia in 1971:
The state provided affordable access to education, transportation, power, water, and telecommunications.
Systems change wasn’t the province of philanthropy and private enterprise, but community organising and political activism.
Innovation wasn’t bound to the commercial aspirations of entrepreneurs and investors, but to government and academic institutions.
‘Citizenship’ meant being grounded in place, and engaging in the messy and imperfect process of finding common ground with others — especially those with whom you may find yourself diametrically opposed.
But in the early stages of the 21st century, we’re (being) convinced that contemporary, apolitical, market-based approaches to addressing our most urgent needs are more effective; all while the global social, economic and ecological systems we rely upon for our survival are under catastrophic threat.
I work at the intersection of innovation and impact finance, striving alongside others who are called to this work to be a force multiplier for the hundreds of millions of community activists, entrepreneurs and NGOs battling against the inertia and entrenched interests of those who benefit most from the status quo.
Most days, I feel humbled and inspired by this work. Right now, while I certainly feel that way about my colleagues, clients and partners, I find myself grappling with the rage and grief that have been my daily companions for decades in this work, and have been especially present for me of late.
And judging by many of the posts I’ve read over the past few weeks, I know I’m not alone in feeling a little angry, burnt out and demoralised.
The most challenging element of working to rethink, redesign and rebuild systems to be more effective, efficient, and equitable, is that it demands making the abstract visceral.
It’s easy to quote statistics about the fate of 1,800 children a day. But it’s much harder to confront the awful reality that in the first week of 2025, 12,600 innocent people who barely had the opportunity to begin living, experienced an end to their journey - leaving immeasurable grief with their passing.
Pick any issue, pick any statistic, and as soon as you give meaning to the math, only an automaton or a sociopath could remain unaffected.
While my grief at these ongoing losses, and my rage at the folly that permit their persistence, pales in comparison to those most impacted by them, I’ve found myself feeling increasingly affected. It’s heart-breaking, as it should be, and it’s not something I wish to disassociate myself from - with statistics, with intoxicants, or with spiritual bypassing.
Which is perhaps why, for much of the last month, as I’ve found myself unable to move, proscribed medication that prohibits the use of intoxicants, and unable to stay busy as a bulwark against heartbreak, I’ve found myself drowning in a backlog of unprocessed emotion.
In order to survive, I’ve been forced back to the foundations of self-enquiry. All of the mechanisms of avoidance have been stripped away, and indulging the suffering merely results in the desire for an easy and permanent path to cessation.
I’ve quoted Byron Katie before, and once again these words resonate.
“When you fight reality, you lose. But only always.”
The seemingly most challenging aspect of systems change is that it appears to require we fight reality (it’s easy to quote Buckminster Fuller at moments like this, but it’s virtually impossible to build new systems that aren’t required to intersect with those they seek to make obsolete!). For me, however, there is a more difficult truth. That in the face of an ever-expanding universe, it’s hubris to believe that reality will ever bow before anyone.
To believe otherwise demands a belief in my supremacy over nature, rather than being subject to it. It demands a belief in my significance, that in the face of the universe I utterly lack.
It demands adherence to the myth of the self, and the elevation of my self above all else — permitting selfishness to masquerade as selflessness.
It demands, in other words, the very beliefs and behaviours I’ve become so quick to judge others for.
“Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray.” (Rumi)
It’s easy to have compassion for those with whom I share common values. It’s easy, because it’s easier to love those who appreciate the way it feels good for me to love, and believe what it feels good for me to believe. It’s much harder to love those whose beliefs and behaviours remind me of all that I find most unlovable about myself.
So while it’s easy to say that in my professional life, I love this work that I feel called to, and thoroughly enjoy those I’m fortunate to encounter along the way, I feel more called to spaces in which the openness and curiosity of “I don’t know” has not yet yielded to the evangelism that arises when one has determined they have found ‘the way’.
The only difference between turning my face or my back towards the sun, is that in one direction, it’s easier to become blinded by righteousness, whereas in the other, I get to see all that I would choose to ignore, while still feeling warmed.
It’s much more difficult and dangerous to dance the razors edge that separates opposing perspectives, but if I want to know joy, I need to remember how to dance.
“Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.” (Oscar Wilde)
I’ve spent three decades now finding ways to make a living while being of service. From being a freelance copywriter, to a massage therapist, to starting a cause marketing agency, an organic restaurant and home delivery business, sustainable domestic and commercial cleaning company, allied health clinic, digital agency for health and sustainability businesses, green hosting company, yoga studios, ethical business consultancy, systems design agency, and four separate platforms focused on mobilising knowledge, people and capital towards solving the most pressing issues of our time.
I’ve made plenty of mistakes, battled my way through many a long winter by being either too early or too late to market, and lost loved ones by forgetting that while you can always build another company, you can’t always rebuild a bridge that’s fallen through neglect.
And I also imagine I’ve learned a little along the way - about how to uncover and hold true to my values, build cultures that sustain those I labour alongside, identify and navigate by the north star of purpose, develop strategies to keep my feet on the ground while reaching for the stars, design organisational and governance structures to keep my companies on path, how to lay the operational tracks while the train is still running, communicate with clarity and conviction, and scale up impact without necessarily having to scale up an organisation.
Most significantly, however, I’ve learned that it’s the balance of love, knowledge, and action that ensures those who are motivated to this great work of rebuilding a world that works for all are living their legacy, rather than sacrificing their today for a better tomorrow.
If you’re one of those people, regardless of how little or how much money, influence or power you may have, no matter how difficult the last years may have been, or how bleak the world may look as the year begins, you should know that there are millions more just like you, who labour against the status quo, even if they're a part of it, because they believe that humanity’s story has barely begun.
It is my great honour, privilege, and joy, to continue walking and working beside you.