The Quiet Rise of Systems Change Philanthropy

Lately, I’ve had the slightly unsettling feeling that we’re all standing in a real life version of something similar to the 1990 monster comedy horror movie Tremors with Kevin Bacon — a film which probably reveals my age a little, but honestly remains essential viewing. For anyone unfamiliar, the entire premise revolves around giant underground creatures called “graboids” causing chaos by violently shaking and shifting the earth beneath people’s feet. Admittedly, the special effects have not aged particularly gracefully. But strangely, the metaphor has.

Across many sectors and areas of inquiry, there is growing recognition that ecological, social, economic, and institutional crises are often deeply interconnected rather than separate challenges unfolding in isolation.

Ecosystem breakdown. Climate instability. Biodiversity loss. Institutional distrust. Rising inequality. Technological acceleration. Burnout. Anxiety. Social fragmentation. Loss of meaning.

None of these exist in isolation.

They are interconnected expressions of systems that have become detached from the living systems they ultimately depend upon.

And yet many of our dominant institutions remain poorly equipped to respond at the depth required. Governments are constrained by political cycles. Markets reward extraction and short term returns. Organisations struggle to balance urgency with reflection. We react endlessly to symptoms while the deeper conditions continue shifting underneath.

Which may be why philanthropy feels particularly important right now.

Not because it holds all the answers, but because it occupies a unique position within transition itself.

Philanthropy can move differently. It can hold longer horizons. It can support experimentation before consensus exists. It can convene across silos. It can fund inquiry, imagination, coalition building, systems literacy, and forms of stewardship that more transactional systems often struggle to sustain.

At the same time, philanthropy itself is also coming under deeper reflection.

Questions around power, extraction, wealth accumulation, institutional legitimacy, and the origins of philanthropic capital are becoming harder to ignore. This is partly why Urvi Kelkar’s reflections on “composting philanthropy” feel so timely.

The idea has stayed with me through conversations with colleagues such as Jess Jorgensen and her work through Sporesight exploring fungi, decomposition, and regeneration as living systems processes. Jess recently framed an upcoming gathering around a powerful provocation:

What needs to rot?

Honestly, it feels like one of the most important questions not only in philanthropy, but in systems transition more broadly.

We spend enormous energy focusing on what needs to be built, scaled, innovated, or transformed. Far less attention is given to what may need to decompose: exhausted institutional models, extractive economic logics, inherited power structures, and ways of organising that no longer create life.

In nature, decomposition is not failure. It is part of how living systems renew themselves. Structures break down, nutrients return to the soil, and conditions emerge for new forms of life to grow.

And I wonder whether societal transition may require something similar from many of our institutions now too.

Not simply toward better philanthropy within existing systems, but toward philanthropy consciously participating in the transition beyond systems built on extraction, fragmentation, endless growth, and ecological overshoot in the first place.

Because this no longer feels like a period of normal reform.

It feels like a civilisational transition.

One requiring shifts not only in technologies and policies, but in worldviews, economies, governance systems, measures of progress, and human consciousness itself.

From extraction toward regeneration.
From linear economies toward circular systems.
From GDP growth toward wellbeing and resilience.
From short term optimisation toward longer horizon stewardship.

And perhaps most importantly, from separation toward interdependence.

The more I work across systems transition, futures inquiry, and sustainability, the more I feel that many of our crises are also crises of perception and relationship. How we see the world shapes how we organise it. How we relate to uncertainty shapes how we govern. How we understand progress shapes the futures we make possible.

Which means the transition ahead is not only external.

It is also cultural, psychological, relational, and deeply human.

Perhaps this is where philanthropy may have one of its most important roles to play.

Not simply funding change.

But helping cultivate the conditions from which wiser futures might emerge