Tonight marks the first night of Passover – a celebration of the Biblical exodus of the Jewish people out of slavery and into the Promised Land. Passover happens to be my favorite Jewish holiday, as I have always found strong connections between the exodus of the ancient Israelites and the forced flight of so many…
I woke up today to hundreds of messages about the genocide case brought by South Africa against Israel. Some were calling it a victory, an unequivocal legal demand for Israel to prevent genocide in Gaza. Some were expressing disappointment that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) did not call for a ceasefire. A part of…
The story of Hanukkah is one of the Jewish people fighting against a tyrannical ruler for the freedom to practice their religion. The Jews then rededicated their holy temple and witnessed a small amount of oil – meant to light the temple’s menorah for just one night – miraculously last eight nights. On this holiday,…
I was really impressed by this article by the Agroecology Fund and the Global Greengrants Fund about their partnership and approach to fostering agroecology through direct support to grassroots movements and Indigenous Peoples. This is the kind of support I would love to see predominant in philanthropy because it embeds all the principles I believe…
The recent launch of the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) report confirms the alarming reality of increased hunger in some regions of the world, namely the Caribbean, Western Asia, and all regions of Africa, with women and people living in rural areas being the groups most affected. This is not…
As luck would have it, I was in New York City today with many of my colleagues, and our allies from TIAA Divest!, Ekō and others. We were protesting TIAA’s continued harmful investments in fossil fuels and farmland outside the Bloomberg Invest conference where multiple TIAA executives were speechifying. We were lucky; it was relatively…
Last week, Reuters released a major investigative piece on climate finance The authors examined 10% of climate finance flows reported by developed countries to the UN, finding that: “at least $3 billion spent not on solar panels or wind farms but on coal-fired power, airports, crime-fighting or other programs that do little or nothing to…
One of the bigger stories of this past weekend came with the bland heading “California New Business Update” – State Farm, the biggest homeowner insurance company in California, is no longer accepting new homeowner or property insurance applications from anyone in California. The reasons? Rising construction costs, “rapidly growing catastrophe exposure, and a challenging reinsurance…
At a wedding I attended recently, I fell into an interesting conversation with another guest. She asked me what I ‘do’ (somehow the words ‘for work’ are always implicit in this phrase, yet rarely spoken out loud), and I shared that I fundraise for an international human rights organization. I quickly assured her that I…
The leaders of development agencies and big donors, such as the EU and the United States, gathered today to comment on the Global Report on Food Crises 2023, which is dramatically alarming. In the words of the World Bank Director during the launch: “food crises, once exceptional, are becoming the new normal.” In 2022, 258…
