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- [00:11]
Podcast Host (Intro/Outro)
Welcome to Humanitarian Frontiers on the Edge. This is a place to learn about the art of the possible, using technology in some of the most difficult environments in the world, assisting people in their most vulnerable time. Want to learn more? Let's dive in.
- [00:32]
Ben Holt
Foreign.
- [00:42]
Chris Hoffman
Hey, everybody. Welcome back. This is Chris Hoffman, your host at Humanitarian Frontiers on the Edge. We have got an amazing session for you today. I've got some close friends, some former colleagues that are here that don't shy away from giving their opinion. And it's really great about today because we're talking about the future, the future of humanitarian action, the future of what organizations are going to need to be thinking about in the next 10 years. We know that 2025 was an absolute terror of a year for the UN, for humanitarian actors around the world with NGOs, et cetera. And we need to rethink what it's going to look like. And like I said, we've got some great people here today. So I've got Paula, Gil Baizan, who's the principal at Something Meaningful that's here, a longtime friend and colleague, and Ben Holt, who's the principal at New and Useful Paola. Thank you for joining us all the way from Yangon today and Ben from the uk so really happy to have you both here.
- [01:46]
Paola Gil Baizan
The pleasure, very happy to be here, Chris.
- [01:48]
Chris Hoffman
Awesome.
- [01:49]
Ben Holt
Well, great.
- [01:50]
Chris Hoffman
So, you know, just to kick it off, I'm we know that 2025 was bad. There's been all this conversation about the reset, this, that and the other. But is it really a reset or is it a complete redo? Is it, baby, out with the bath water. Paola, what do you think that organizations need to be thinking about and considering as they move into 2026?
- [02:19]
Paola Gil Baizan
It's a difficult question because I think it depends on where you're standing.
- [02:25]
Ben Holt
Right.
- [02:25]
Paola Gil Baizan
So if you are working for an organization and you're in a leadership position, that answer will look very different than if you are a humanitarian entrepreneur that doesn't even think that the label of humanitarian applies to you. I think in general, if we're talking about people who want to help other people, regardless of whether they're in an established institution or they're in an emerging sort of organization, we need to figure out a way of coming up with an operating system that is designed for the current world because everyone seems to be running on this operating system from the 90s, right, where there was like predictable funding cycles, very clear mandates, so stable access, a clear appetite for helping the others and understanding that that is part of, like our shared humanity. And I don't think that those rules no longer apply. So the first thing that I think any group of people wanting to help people need to do is realize that there's no blueprint right now that you can follow. The only thing that you can do is understand how these rules have changed, embrace the fact that new rules are emerging but are not here yet, and just try to sort of like navigate this thing that is way beyond uncertainty. So assume volatility and run with it is what I would say.
- [04:11]
Chris Hoffman
Ben, I know that you've done a lot of futures work in the past and you know, I can't imagine when you were writing some of your work in the past that 2025 was part of the, that document. Right, right. And maybe it was, but, but I mean, you know, when you, when you see it. Because I agree with Paola that it's, it's a just a whole new blue blueprint that we need to be operating from. What, what have, what have you looked at in the past when you've really dove deeply into that future?
- [04:40]
Ben Holt
Yeah, it's a good question. I think that the real drive of good futures and foresight work is to help people deal with uncertainty and rapidly changing volatile worlds like we were just talking about. And so it's not about prediction, but it does help you understand that you can follow trends, extrapolate from them, try and understand how things might play out. And by exploring those multiple different possible futures, you identify new ways for action. The problem is, when you're doing that within that established old school ecosystem, it could be quite hard to convince people who've built their careers in one system and one way of doing things that things will shift around them and change. And that's the constant battle. I was reflecting on this question. And the new operating system and software works on hardware. And the humanitarian system has a huge amount of hard, where they're set up in, you know, Geneva, Paris, and you know, the various kind of hotspots which have largely held the headquarters and the intellectual kind of space that this sector works in. So to shift software and improve the operating system that, that hardware needs to be addressed. But that's really difficult, right? These organizations find a very, very hard to move. So that then creates space for these alternative features to emerge. And what I'm seeing is a bunch of people who have been through the mill in the legacy system, right? They've pushed for change, they've tried to alert people to this. Different types of future that are emerging, they've been frustrated with their ability to Influence, change. And we can talk about that. Like, where does that come from? This, the sense of like, well, I can't change it, I don't have the power to do. Which I've seen right through the sector, right to the top and people are shifting out. And yeah, we do live in a volatile and uncertain time. But I've also, I'm beginning to hear people talk about that as a time of opportunity to build new types of hardware, to set up different types of coalition organization and ways to help people, because you can look at a speculative future, but you know, human nature doesn't change and a lot of humans are deeply altruistic. We want to help each other, we want to build bridges and connections across boundaries, across borders, across communities. And that doesn't change. And that gives me a massive amount of hope for the future.
- [07:11]
Chris Hoffman
Yeah, yeah, I hear you. I mean, my wife Wakani always talks about that piece, that the deep human connection is where the starting point is and we need to reflect on that and kind of go back into that before we go forward and start operating and try to create like minded people. Paola, you and I both and Ben have all worked for different NGOs in the past, right? We do know how the infrastructure works. We know what's there. And Ben, to your point, the ability to pivot and those that have raised their voice around pivots have sometimes lost their jobs. You know, not mentioning any names but you know, have, have pushed too hard on, on, on this. And so what, what is it that the individual can do? I mean, Ben, you, you, you, you know, kind of started to talk about it a little bit about going back to your roots, why you're doing this, this altruistic piece, but what practically like in today's environment, is it, you know, is it that the, the rise of social impact businesses should come up and, and start to influence this? Should it be less nonprofit, more social impact, kind of focused that are more efficient potentially and, and, and more cost effect organizations? Is it more localization? So grassroots organizations, national level organizations taking root? I mean, I don't know, but trying to think about what is that mix that we need to get to that can potentially work. And it's an open question, it's a hard question, but it's something that I think everybody's asking themselves. I don't know, Paula, what do you think?
- [08:53]
Paola Gil Baizan
I think this is like in these moments of like systemic unmooring where we have like lost all of the rules of the system that we were relying on and that there Are no other rules that are emerging. I think the best thing that we can do to be a good ancestor is to ground ourselves in our values. At least this is what I have been trying to do, not only sort of like individually and personally, but also professionally. So when all of these sort of like agencies and organizations have called me in the last year going, like, help us, we don't know what we're doing. My recommendation is always the same as in, like, ground your actions as you navigate this volatility in your values. So I think one of the mistakes that we have done in the past that has brought us where we are now is that we think that we are constantly in need of an upgrade, which is potentially true. But the upgrade we always assume is about making us faster, right, and more efficient, when actually the upgrade should have always been about making us more honest, right? About trying to identify more and more transparently how are we working with and around power. Like, what are the trade offs? As in to truly understand what we're really optimizing for. So if you're asking me what can individuals do? Well, wherever you are sort of like working from, make sure that you are working for accountability. Make sure that you're always sort of pushing for dignity instead of like this obsession we have with scale. So great things can happen when we do programs. Excellent, excellent. Programs at a small level for a neighborhood change the life of people in a neighborhood instead of just like randomly throwing out food parcels to hundreds of people. There's value in both approaches, but, you know, the one about dignity is not necessarily something that we tend to stand up for. Focus on building networks of trust with whoever you're working. That doesn't necessarily mean that, oh, only, only local people can do great stuff. Not necessarily, I would say people that are able to gain the trust of the people that you're trying to support in what is potentially the worst moment of their lives. Those are the ones that should have like, you know, a call, a seat at the table, the role of the administrator, not the user, all sorts of things. So that would be my advice. Will that get you fired? For sure. Will it allow you, would it allow you to like, you know, think back in 20 years time and think like, did I make the right choices?
- [12:00]
Ben Holt
Probably, yes, I 100% agree with that. I've been running various future focused workshops with, you know, what would broadly be called civil society organizations, values based organizations. And I always start by getting them to tell us what they're fighting for. Why did they get into the space in the first place, what are their personal values? Why do they think this is important? The amount of times people say, wow, I haven't been asked that in years. I haven't really shared and unpacked that. And it's so empowering for people who are caught up in these big, slow, complex, frustrating bureaucracies to just reroute themselves and why they got into this space in the first place. It really starts to unlock new ideas. I also think that a lot of the kind of legacy organizations, they're in grief, right? They were built to deal with a certain set of rules. You mentioned these rules falling and fraying apart. I've heard it described the current era, unruly. The rules are being abandoned, discarded, just completely ignored. And so if you've built your organization around a set of assumptions and they no longer reply, people feel grief. They feel lost for the future that they were expecting to come about because of the impact they were aiming for, the social progress that they were feeling building behind their movement. And I think that that, again, is a really deeply human thing and needs to be acknowledged. There's a really great organization called the Method Collective that are exploring that sense of community grief on a personal, individual level. We've all felt it, but we also feel currently a grief and a loss for things that we fought or hoped for. You can tap into that and you can start to use that to kind of really drive change and to reimagine what's possible. And rooting in communities. Shift in power is deeply important, but I think we talk a lot around localization without actually really thinking through what that means and the changes that it demands or the collective global power we have. Right. And you see the same issues come up at all sorts of scales. It was making me reflect on working on the Ukraine crisis and the big global INGA humanitarian system swings into action. The Ukrainian Red Cross bombarded with offers of support and help and money and goods, but they weren't always aligned with what the Ukrainian Red Cross society wanted to focus on or intended to become in the future. And that was really interesting to see. And using futures in that context, actually, like, how do we target the work that we do now to improve and strengthen this capacity of this kind of local organization in the future. I think that's really powerful. Anyway, all this stuff is wrapped up. Yeah, Paola.
- [15:11]
Paola Gil Baizan
I find the idea of grief quite interesting because it makes me so angry. So whenever I'm in these conversations with the people that are and were senior leaders in this time, where everything was going so well and we had so much money, and now these people are grieving. It makes me profoundly angry because it's not that we're. We're grieving for a path where. Where everything was going fantastically well for everyone else. Like, I think if you're grieving for that past, you should check your privilege, because it means that you are perhaps working as a humanitarian in an organization now, now as super funded, while there were other local organizations that were not funded because you were funded. Um, and. And. And I cannot sort of, like, marry the fact that, oh, my God, it's so sad that we cannot continue being the way that we were before. And what I want to say is, like, good riddance. We were not being their best. We were not helping people in the best possible way. And. And there's this other sort of, like, phrase around. Around grief that. That I was thinking when you were talking about Ben, of, like, grief. Grief is love that has nowhere to go. And so to all of these people that are. That are grieving the past, I would say, well, then channel that love to the places where it needs to go. So instead of trying to, like, use this moment as an opportunity to sort of map out your own survival or the survival of, like, the. The way that you were before your organization was before, take that love and channel it to other corners of the world that, like, really needed it. So, like, I don't know, do you need to see opportunity in, like, turning your NGO into a super powerhouse again? Maybe not, like, take that love out of, like, the grief and perhaps figure out how you can support young people who are pretty angry with what's happening with the world and, like, focus on their activism and not your job. Right, I agree.
- [17:36]
Ben Holt
No, I agree. And the grief I'm talking about wasn't a grief of the past and a perfect setup because these were people fighting to change the organizations anyway. It's grief for a future that's been taken away. Right. I was working last week with people in the sexual reproductive rights space, and it's really interesting comparing where they are to where the humanitarian sector is. Humanitarian sector got sideswiped by the aid cuts, and it was already deep in a conversation about its fundamental principles, its privileges, its step, and the distribution of power. But what I've started to see there is really amazing people emerging from the other side. They've been through this process. They definitely felt anger at the way things were. They felt lost. They felt upset about the derailment of a progress, albeit imperfect, towards a fairer world. That sense that they were still fighting or able to fight for people to get more safety, more security, more rights, more agency and autonomy. It feels like in that SRHR space, those guys are slightly behind in that journey and they were still really in shock about how quickly things had shifted around them and, and how their existing ways of providing support and driving change just no longer relevant in this world. They're not yet in the space from what I saw last week, of really progressing to channel that anger that you talked about into new ways of doing stuff. But that's exactly what we were doing. And it was really interesting seeing them shift from. But we know what works and we know how to deal with shifting policy, lobbying governments, pulling the levers of power to actually, we need to be a lot more targeted, a lot more aggressive and go, you know, stand for something rather than just against something. We can't just expect people to believe that, you know, sexual reproductive rights, gender equality, LGBTQ rights are a good given thing that are obviously better for people on planet. They feeling this, this anger is turning into action in some ways I'm seeing those signs coming out and that's a good thing. And if that means abandon and disbanding some of the old things, if it means merging in new ways and destroying some of the silos we've built up over the years, good. Yeah, 100% with you on that.
- [20:03]
Chris Hoffman
Yeah. So, so in that vein, I want to, I want to pose a question to you guys around the commons. So there, there's, there's a lot of talk about commons and commons can mean many different things. Commons could mean collective, commons can mean accessibility for many other people and things like that, but turning it into kind of technology and what technology can do, because I think it's important, obviously from my perspective, but also I think there are movements happening around the world around using technology to create accessibility within common frameworks. And those common frameworks can be accessibility to banking, Commons can be accessibility to art. So working with an organization in Argentina that's looking at traditional artists and how can traditional artists band together across Central, Central and South America and be able to share their goods and things and have platforms for, for, for these people that aren't necessarily engaging in technology all the time, but how can they use technology to leverage it to, to be able to expand themselves? And I think, and this is my opinion on this one, and I'd love to hear your guys thoughts.
- [21:18]
Ben Holt
Excuse me.
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Chris Hoffman
My thought is that I think the commons, it's time, it's time for the commons to take root. And that's Return to community. That's a return to community not only from a geographical perspective, but returns to community from an expertise perspective, but also an accessibility perspective. And I'd love to hear what you guys think about. About that. Paola, what do you think?
- [21:43]
Paola Gil Baizan
It's. It's. Yeah. I don't know. I think common Commons aren't platforms. Right. Commons are relationships. And in my experience, like, technology doesn't create a common. Like, it reveals how power already worked in that relationship. As in, like, the technology cannot sort of, like, they cannot replace the shared priorities, the alignment, the transparency, the idea of fairness. Like, technology doesn't do that. What technology can do is elevate where that relationship already existed. And so is it the time? Yes, but I think it's also the time for us to reframe what a commons actually is in humanitarian work, as in Commons is an open access. Right. It's more like shared stewardship under conditions of deep trust, accountability and constraint. And the humanitarian sector as a whole is not built on those relationships of trust. It's built on a relationship of, I took something from you historically that has put you in a hole, and I will now go back and give you that thing in the way that I decide you need to have it.
- [23:05]
Chris Hoffman
Yeah.
- [23:05]
Paola Gil Baizan
So it's really complicated to build a common under that predicament. Now, there are other ways in which people are organizing themselves to almost, like, capture those relationships of trust in moments where, you know, bad things happen, either because, you know, there's an earthquake or something different and there I can see how technology could amplify those relationships of trust. But I don't know if, like, I don't know. I'm just terrified of saying, yes, Commons, that's the future. And then, like, everyone's doing the same thing they did with blockchain, and then everything crumbles down.
- [23:53]
Chris Hoffman
Yeah, yeah.
- [23:54]
Paola Gil Baizan
So, like, have a relationship first. Build a relationship first, and then figure out which technology helps you amplify that.
- [24:03]
Chris Hoffman
Yeah.
- [24:03]
Podcast Host (Intro/Outro)
Ben,
- [24:08]
Ben Holt
I think that, again, it's a problem that you can unpick of many layers. Right. I think that there is certainly space and need for commonality and interoperability, and I think that a lot of humanitarian, social impact, civil society organizations would benefit from being better able to create interoperable, common shared digital infrastructure. I did a lot of work with humanitarian cash teams looking at how that might evolve over time. And the UK Open banking standards are a really good example of where set in a common group of clear standards, really radically altered the way that the banking sector worked in the UK. Those are standards on security, usability and APIs. Right. And if you met those, you could enter the banking system and it opened it up to a bunch of new players and innovation. Now what might that look like for humanitarian cash assistance? There's a different set of standards needed. If they were able to actually articulate those, would that radically alter what's possible with cash assistance? Right. Could you then ensure that the un, the ifrc, commercial entities, startups, individuals, were all contributing to a common set of interoperable tools that you can plug together as microservices? Yes. Would that mean you could really radically localize the response? Because in one instance, you know, cash distribution was supplemented with short term disaster insurance because it was a particular type of crisis, whereas in another it was short term bridging loans because there was a disruption in the supply chain of wholesalers, for example. Right. You could plug and play these things and collectively that crisis response might look a lot stronger and would put a lot more control into the hands of that local population. You could build in it for this particular needs. Right. I think that also goes on into the space. And I've spoke to commercial agencies who almost feel guilty about charities and other organizations coming to them with over specced projects and they've built the same thing for 10 different NGOs. They don't use most of the functionality and it's a complete waste of communal resources. Would I like to see stuff being built, reshared, blueprints created? Yes. And the catalyst is a really good project that looks at how you might build that stuff out. And then the final thing is that kind of organic community layer just problem up hacking of tech. There's a bunch of stuff going on where people are creating their own micro apps, modify like gig job apps for example, like in Indonesia, Gojek is being modified by local locally generated things that solve a problem that's being imposed on them by that technology. One guy pushed to get Sarani Kurdish added to Google Translate with an army of volunteers because it wasn't there, they weren't represented. Talking to colleagues and friends, looking at how traditional community practices around protecting mangroves forests is being spliced with satellite data and imagery to create tech based ways to kind of use that long historical knowledge to support local fight back against climate. All of those things give me a lot of hope. Is that the commons? Is it like how can NGOs be better at spotting than amplifier those things rather than turning up and imposing a tech based solution? That's the commons to me.
- [27:42]
Chris Hoffman
Yeah.
- [27:44]
Paola Gil Baizan
I Think the mention of cash made me realize that there's, I think, something important to mention around Commons that I didn't say. And I think, like, the real promise of Commons is that sort of tech can protect, you know, the commons from capture. As in, like the danger, right. Of, like, that someone owns the system. And it's the issue we have with cash programming, since I was doing cash programming the way before I had all of this white hair. And it's that someone owns the system and the powers that own the system don't want the people that we're trying to give money to have money. And so that, at the end of the day, is the ultimate rule that we cannot change. And, you know, yes, it could be that this was solved through Commons, but Commons, as in, like, understood as the tech, can help in making the capture harder, but not impossible, just harder.
- [28:55]
Ben Holt
Right.
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Paola Gil Baizan
And I think with all of these sort of applications to humanitarian work, we end up in a situation that someone still owns it. They just own it quietly. So who owns it now? Well, maybe it's not the bank. No. Now it's the tech company that built the thing that you need to do cash transfers. Right. And so I don't know if that's like, do we just change masters so that we can serve people? I don't know.
- [29:30]
Ben Holt
That's fair. Is that where, Chris, your work with stablecoins and blockchain, that's always the kind of idealistic promise of the blockchain. I mean, I have my own issues with it and my own experiences of trying to work with it, but fundamentally, wasn't that one of the promises that you can escape the kind of dominant banking system and move money and resources much more freely?
- [29:56]
Chris Hoffman
Yeah, I mean, that's. Yeah, obviously I was asking this question because of the work that we do, you know, around the stablecoin piece and the blockchain and all of that, and the promise of it and the promise of open sourcing it, the promise of making it a digital public good so anybody can use it and to make the chains transparent so everybody can see every transaction, you know, and looking at different ways of doing that. But I mean, I think. I mean, I agree. Paola, your point is completely correct.
- [30:25]
Paola Gil Baizan
Right.
- [30:26]
Chris Hoffman
It is a bit of a shifting of the same thing in some ways. But then I guess the other question is, and this isn't a pushback, but it is an honest question of, well, what alternatives do we have? Do we throw, like I said, I said it before, throw the baby out with the bathwater kind of thing. Where is the happy medium where people will grow and, and, and, and people will be able to engage with everything. Okay, tell me, tell me, tell me.
- [30:54]
Paola Gil Baizan
You cannot see us in the podcast because you can't see the video. But Chris told us to put our hand up and like, both Ben and I were like, pick me, pick me. I think the alternative is not to eliminate institutions. Actually commerce, I think, demand better institutions, right? So I think there's this fantasy that commons just like let us bypass institutions when in reality they demand institutions that can hold ambiguity without collapsing into behaviors of control. So for me that would be the ideal future. Like can we come up with governance systems around how we work with money? Right. That are not bureaucracy, but that focus on care. Right. That can be applied at scale, as in, we know this especially when we're working in settings like humanitarian settings, where it's like a complete sort of like change of normalcy. The absence of rules usually benefits the most powerful actor. It never benefits the, the weak actor. So we do need institutions that are able to have that mandate and to be able to hold the protection of weak human beings dear and close to their mandate. We just need those institutions to be better. That's what I would think should be a future then. What do you think?
- [32:31]
Ben Holt
I think we're totally aligned on this one. On that point around. Crises strip people of hope and agency over their own futures quite often because things have been so disrupted, right? The plans they were making, the aspirations that they might have had, the sense that things could ever get better, they're taken from you. And the humanitarian responses they step in. But have they forgotten that actually key to what they're doing is to help individuals re established control over their own lives and feel a sense that actually I can do something here, my life may improve, things can get better. We work in very short term cycles. And I think sometimes humanitarian responses have lost that intent of like giving people back solidity, solid ground, hope and agency and choice. And I was reflecting on this and it's a bigger conversation. Those institutions that we've built are founded on a set of fundamental principles. Do we need to go right back to those and reinterrogate them in the world that we're in, and particularly in that space? It's neutrality. Neutrality is a hugely political act in and of itself now. And has it translated into passivity or even, I don't know, that lack of passionate sort of human connection? I think impartiality is still very, very relevant, supporting people regardless of where they sit in the world or what they represent. But we shouldn't be neutral to suffering. We shouldn't be neutral to people who have lost their agency. We shouldn't be neutral to the damage that the dominant system is doing to the world. We should be fighting back against that. Can we replace or enhance neutrality with agency? Right. We want organizations that are action focused, that are delivering change, that are really trying to shift the world to make it better, more just fairer, to give individuals that space that they need to make choices about their own lives. And, you know, we should fight as a sector for our agency and our space to operate. We've been, you know, shaped, controlled and hamstrung a lot of the time by sources of funding, by the politicization of aid. That's all shifting around us now. I was in a conversation the other day where someone was saying we have to prepare for a future without overseas development aid. What does that look like? That demands a different kind of response. Rooting agency in it, giving people space to take action, make choices, feels to me like a very powerful kind of call to arms. And then I guess the final point, we were talking earlier around the commons. I've also heard people say that the futures are commons. Right. Because the future doesn't yet exist. It's being shaped by the dominant powers now. And there's clearly a long term vision from a lot of people who could be classified as anti Rights Project 2025 style visions for a very different future. But the future doesn't yet exist. It's a space of possibility. It's a space where we can all collectively come together and imagine things differently. We need to translate that into action and agency. Anyway, there we go. That's awesome. Paola.
- [35:57]
Paola Gil Baizan
Yeah, No, I was gonna say this conversation about the humanitarian principles is always interesting because it requires a lot of courage to put them into practice of like all of the operational contexts where I worked in there. There is a lot of courage when you're trying to work in a neutral way, when you're trying to be in pressure like that doesn't come easy. But the easiest way to strip any humanitarian from its courage is to starve it.
- [36:39]
Chris Hoffman
So that's exactly right.
- [36:40]
Paola Gil Baizan
When, when we're now being completely starved, who is going to remain courageous? No one. And then what's going to happen? Well, the system is going to say, you see, the humanitarian principles, they don't work anymore. We either need to get rid of them or adapt. And for me, I'm standing back and I'm like, actually, I don't really think that one Thing led to another. I think it has more to do with how we choose to design what we do around those principles. That is more important. But again, talking about grief, one of the things that I almost cry about inside of my heart every day is that we have lost this idea of humanity. Yeah, like you no longer as a human being have the obligation to be kind to others. If you are again like reading the signals of this emerging future, you don't have that obligation anymore. It's like old fashioned and it's something that you can choose. And you know, I think that's quite concerning. And if we continue to starve the people that say no, humanity is important, helping everyone that you can is important, then I don't really know like how much of that sort of agency to shape the future we're going to have if those people get like wiped out of the table.
- [38:24]
Ben Holt
Very fair. And it's. Do you think that the starving of what like resources and space to operate creates compromise and we will sacrifice stuff enable in order to be able to do, to do anything. But I think that that starving that scarcity is also what is attacking that sense of common humanity. Right. People are scared for their own individual survival, for their like ability to feed their families, for the work that they do to translate into any kind of security. And it's that perhaps is pushing people into likes whether it's selfishness or hostility towards people. But there's also like concerted attacks, attempts to exploit that. There's very well coordinated attacks on the sense that humanity, individual rights, social justice are valuable and it's being done on purpose and so that you know. Yeah, the fight back has to be intentional as well. Yeah, it does raise questions. Sorry,
- [39:30]
Paola Gil Baizan
I just was going to say that maybe that's where the commons can be really useful. Right. Like if we start to think of the comments as the soil of like this idea that we can trust each other, we can share, there will be enough to go around for everyone. If we operate in this way, then maybe that's a more effective way of fighting back what is actually something that is emerging. I'm working now with an organization and helping them sort of use creativity and foresight to be able to reinvent themselves like dramatically. And one of the things that they want to explore is the question of trust. And I invite you both and everyone listening to this podcast to go into social media with the intention of understanding what are the signals of the future of trust. It is really depressing and so to come up with a system. Right. Like the commons that is built on strengthening and privileging trust could be one of those ways of like reinventing the operating system and fighting back.
- [40:49]
Ben Holt
Yeah, absolutely. Connecting on a kind of deeper human level and thinking beyond the algorithm. Definitely.
- [41:01]
Chris Hoffman
Yeah. I mean, I love this, guys, and thank you for the two of you taking over the podcast. I haven't had to say anything pretty much the whole time, so I really appreciate that, which is great. And I love the framing of this. I love how you phrased it. And I really think for the listeners having to rethink those. I mean, Paolo, you said it earlier, check your privilege. I think that's been. That's a big. It's a big component of this change. And it is the privilege is what is driving. I think on the opposite side is what is driving the selfishness.
- [41:37]
Paola Gil Baizan
Right.
- [41:38]
Chris Hoffman
And so it really does sit, I think, in a space of being able to do that, being able to check who we are as human beings, having not a humanitarian reset, but potentially a human reset. Right. And that we need to reset our values or rethink what our values are right now and rethink what they started as of Ed. So you said it before, Ben. I mean, so as we come to the end, and I know you can't believe it, we're already getting towards the end of the podcast. I could go on for another two hours with you guys, but I usually end with asking a question and getting your hot take on what's the starting point? Where do we start? Where should an organization start? Where should an individual start on this new journey to prepare the future for what we want it to be? And what I mean is what we as humans kind of look towards it being. And I would love to just get your guys thoughts and kind of to close this out because I think it's a really meaningful conversation that we've had and I think a conversation that'll probably be the next 10 episodes. We'll just talk about the commons and what that means in humanity and that piece. And so there's a lot there. But Ben, I'll let you start. What's the starting point?
- [43:03]
Ben Holt
That's quite a big question. Where do I start with this? Let me roll in it right back to that human nature thing.
- [43:13]
Paola Gil Baizan
Right.
- [43:13]
Ben Holt
You know, we're imaginative, inquisitive animals that constantly imagine in the future anyways. Right. We use it all the time. It's how we make plans to meet each other. It's how we mobilize communities, kind of contribute to stuff. It's how we get people to back Political movements, you know, come with us, and something will be different in the future. So that power is innate within us, and it flows through our organizations. We write strategies, documents, budget projections, plans. So maybe revisiting how we think about future, unpicking some of the assumptions that we're carrying with us, and realizing the decisions we make now, they can also stop stuff that we've inherited. Right. There's a bunch of stuff and systems and processes and ways of thinking that have accumulated around us as individuals and the organizations we've built. But some of them perpetuate inequality, injustice, inefficiency. We couldn't identify them and stop them. I also think in the past, there's a bunch of stuff we can learn and reuse and retool, take forward with this, not lose sight of. We've touched on it this time around. The power of the commons, the original intent of the Internet, to democratize access to information, each other, and to cross borders. All of those things are really powerful, and we shouldn't lose those. That's the baby in the bathwater thing.
- [44:36]
Paola Gil Baizan
Yeah.
- [44:37]
Ben Holt
So there's certainly something in there about tapping into kind of how we think about the future, using that creativity, realizing that the battle's not lost, the future's not fixed. There are things that we can do collectively and actually maybe sometimes recognizing that certain, like, you know, we're not going back to where we were. There's no fixing stuff. And actually that's often a good thing. San Lukva New ways of doing stuff come together and find, like, new coalitions of people mobilize around stuff. There's so many great thinkers out there now who are, you know, they're angry, they're active. They want to do things differently. They've learned from that legacy system. And I'm seeing them starting to spin up new organizations to demand new types of funding, to kind of coalesce around challenges and come up with new solutions. Like, that's really, really powerful. And that's the kind of space I want to see more people shifted into.
- [45:34]
Chris Hoffman
Paula, the last word,
- [45:38]
Paola Gil Baizan
what Ben said. I think it's just difficult to answer this question because it is not sexy. The starting point isn't a tool. It's not a framework. It's not a strategy. I think it's a shift in what the system is willing to name. That's it. I feel like the starting point should be sort of changing what we tell the truth about. Right. Every system changes the moment it becomes honest about what it's optimizing and what it's willing to sacrifice. So, yeah, I mean, we should not sort of call it like the humanitarian reset. We should be calling it the humanitarian reckoning. Be honest. Name the damn thing. As in, like, name the world as it is. Right. Not as. Not as the system needs it to be. I think that would be so brilliant. So refreshing. Right. Map who is actually making choices and continues to make choices and, you know, shift the unit of change that we have in this system. Right. Create a network of safety for people who constantly put their hand up and say, this is not working, this is not working. What would it look like if the system attracted highly creative people instead of alienating them? I think at the end of the day, at the end of the world, at the end of the day, creativity is the most human source of survival. And I think we tend to think that professionalization of helping other people involves everything but being creative. I think if we're able to go back and realize that when we're being honest about what we're trying to do, we realize that we work with empathy and we work with like, pain and all those things that are super messy. And the best way to begin is by tapping into your ability to do divergent thinking and to tap into that space between your head, sort of, and your heart. Then I think we will be better humanitarians. Like, but, but is this something that can be put in a tool, in a slide deck, in a presentation? No, it's not. But I am hoping there will be leaders out there who want to be better ancestors and are able to really start sort of naming the thing. Right. Changing from honesty and not like, stop, stop pretending. I think that would be.
- [48:40]
Ben Holt
Well, I'll steal.
- [48:41]
Chris Hoffman
Ben's quote from his latest LinkedIn post was, Quit polishing the poo. Right. You know, that's what, you know, that's it.
- [48:49]
Ben Holt
I said polishing the problem, but, you
- [48:50]
Chris Hoffman
know, yeah, yeah, but in my mind I read poo, but that's.
- [48:55]
Ben Holt
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [48:58]
Chris Hoffman
But I mean, that's. That's really the thing. Yeah. Name it and move on. And, and let's start going, guys, I want to thank you. Oh, go ahead, Ben.
- [49:06]
Ben Holt
At that point, I'm being a good ancestor. That timescale thing is really important. You get caught in a cycle of responsive, kind of reactionary short termism. It's really hard to see past the current problems. Spending your time scale, looking ahead, realizing that the arc of history does shift and change. Dark moments come, but they do get challenged and resolved and new stuff emerges. So, yeah, it's a time of loss, but there's also a time of potentially long term opportunity and actually that's a really important thing. Taking that intergenerational lens can be really helpful sometimes. I love it.
- [49:49]
Chris Hoffman
Paola Ben two great people. I really can't thank you enough for spending this time with me today on this podcast. This has been an amazing episode. You're both very special. Love to your families and if you are in Yangon anytime soon, Paula also does jam, so you can always find her at the farmer's market there with jam and so always stop by and look for her at the local market in Yemen.
- [50:18]
Paola Gil Baizan
Thank you for the free plug, Chris. Appreciate it.
- [50:22]
Chris Hoffman
Absolutely. Well, love to you both and have a great day. Thanks guys.
- [50:27]
Paola Gil Baizan
Thanks Chris.
- [50:33]
Podcast Host (Intro/Outro)
Thanks for joining us on Humanitarian Frontiers on the Edge. If today's conversations sparked new ideas, new questions, or new ways of thinking about what's possible, then we've done our job. This podcast is brought to you by HumanityLink, working at the intersection of technology and humanity to help deliver aid faster, smarter, and with greater accountability. Until next time, stay curious, stay grounded, and keep pushing the frontier.
- [51:17]
Paola Gil Baizan
Sam.