https://fixthenews.com/p/the-end-of-aid
"Black Range Rovers outnumbered yellow cabs on the streets of Manhattan during
the last week of September. The UN General Assembly had descended on New York,
squeezing the world’s dictators, diplomats and beleaguered aid agencies into a
few blocks of Midtown. It was unseasonably hot, and inside hotel ballrooms the
recycled air was thick with the density of too many important names in too
little space.
On the surface, business as usual. Beneath it everything was breaking, and
everyone knew it. There was a slump in people’s shoulders, and empty seats
because of the no-fly lists. Fewer high heels, more sneakers. The cynical
scheming and brute force of international affairs felt physically present,
wedged in throats and suspended in the silences between panels.
“This does feel like a crisis meeting,” Tjada D’Oyen McKenna, CEO of Mercy
Corps, told us on Monday morning. Her organisation works on the frontlines of
disaster relief, serving around 37 million people in over 40 countries; we
connected with them earlier this year when we helped fund a sanitation program
in Nigeria in danger of shutting down due to USAID cuts. “When everything feels
like it’s on fire it’s still good to come together – to remind you that there’s
still so much we need to do.”
The Greek root of crisis, κρίσις, means to sift. And that’s what was happening
across those five days in New York. Everything was changing — the old models,
the old certainties, the old ways of moving money and measuring impact. It felt
like witnessing a page turning in real time, suspended between the end of one
global chapter and the beginning of the next."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
