Working as a young lawyer in Egypt, Emily Arnold-Fernández had witnessed firsthand how disconnected the global response to the refugee community was from the actual realities of the refugee experience. In 2005, back home in San Francisco, she brought together a passionate group of human rights lawyers who shared her frustrations. With decades of combined experience in refugee and international law, they had all seen how forcibly displaced people who flee human rights violations in their home countries almost always experience further violations in the countries that should provide safe haven. In Arnold-Fernández’s small apartment, working on desks improvised from coffee tables and TV trays, they created Asylum Access, becoming one of the first organizations in the world to focus on the human rights needs of refugees beyond just humanitarian aid.

Nearly a decade later in 2014, Malaysian lawyer Deepa Nambiar was an integral part of the organization’s expansion, launching Asylum Access’s Malaysian national office. Now working at the global level as the Director of Partnerships, Nambiar reaffirms the importance of their mission: 

“Most refugees can't return to their home countries, so they end up being in host countries for years, if not decades. But the way the refugee response community responds to them is, let's put them in camps, let's just give food, shelter, water, emergency humanitarian aid instead of how do we fix the fundamental problems in the system. How can we ensure that refugees who are living in host countries have the rights and the laws to protect them, that allow them to work, to go to school, to rebuild their lives while waiting for potential resettlement, instead of just being stuck in camps forever?”

Twenty years since its inception, Asylum Access continues to provide legal advice, help refugees navigate complex legal processes to get documentation, challenge unlawful violations or exploitation, and do advocacy at the global level to make sure that institutions of power prioritize refugee human rights. But their work requires ongoing evolution and adaptation, and over the past few years they’ve emphasized more meaningful refugee participation: How can refugees themselves be part of leadership and be involved in decision making at all levels? They realized that one-off advice and mentorship wasn’t the most impactful way to facilitate change, so they began building local partnerships that supported communities in setting up their own refugee rights NGOs, working closely with them to develop the necessary tools and assist with fundraising. Says Nambiar:

“We believe in shifting power and changing the system and not just putting bandaids on the problem. But we recognized that the way we approached partnership came from quite a colonial mindset like, ‘We know better, let us show you how to set up this organization in a country that we've never been to.’ Of course it came from a place of wanting to help and wanting to support but, in hindsight, we didn't build partnerships that really centered the knowledge and experiences and leadership of our local partners.”

Their partnership strategy has changed significantly as a result, so that now, says Nambiar, 

“We are using our privilege and access to resources, to global spaces, to donors, to conversations, and saying ‘We've got information, we've got tools. What is going to be most useful for you?’ And we build partnerships around that. And ultimately our goal is to just slink away and let our partners lead the work.”

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BYkids Founder and Executive Director Holly Carter loves documentary film. She sees it as an invaluable resource for kids to learn about the world—especially when the documentary films are made by other kids.

“I think that's the way to crack people wide open. I think it's the language that kids speak. They don’t need words, they need moving images. I want to have kids be able to see the world more realistically and be able to participate in it in a way that they have some amount of authority. I want kids to own their voice. I want kids to use their voice. I want them to really get comfortable in their skin so they can use their power.” 

In her earlier career as a journalist working at the New York Times, Carter noticed what she describes as “colonial journalism.” She observed her colleagues flying to countries where they often didn’t speak the language or understand the culture to quickly gather information that was then reported in ways that she believed were often superficial or incorrect. After leaving the New York Times, she traveled to South Korea as a Henry Luce Scholar, with little knowledge of the country, the culture, or the language. Returning two years later, she found herself engaged in a form of  guerrilla diplomacy, educating other Americans about a country that was potentially misunderstood.

"I really got obsessed with this idea that people on the ground should be telling their own stories. We should not be having a person, a filter, a journalist, a cameraman, go somewhere to take a story.”

From there, it was a logical shift to the realm of documentary filmmaking, where she became a producer on a film about the life of Margaret Sanger for PBS. “I realized that when I go to see a documentary film, that just lit up my world. That was where I found magic,” Carter says. Eager to share that magic with a broader community, her next project was a partnership with DoubleTake magazine to launch the Full Frame documentary film festival in Durham, North Carolina. 

Around that time, Carter began to notice what she considered to be significant gaps in her own children’s school curriculum, observations that reminded her of the colonial journalism she had witnessed early in her career.

“What got me mad was that these kids are being taught about pluralism and equity. And yet, they really only want to go to Harvard and get rich. What we're actually teaching our kids is not to listen and be empathetic, but just to get ahead for themselves.”

Motivated by the hypocrisy of educational institutions and the fear-mongering around differences following 9/11, Carter began working on how she could shift the education of American youth using films by young people.

And, with that, BYkids was born. 

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Children of the Forest (CoF) is a non-governmental organization based in Sangklaburi, Thailand that provides stateless children and families with the necessary resources to build a self-sufficient and fulfilling life. Without Thai identification, stateless persons lack access to affordable education and healthcare and are at high risk for violence and exploitation. CoF provides opportunities for migrant children and their families to break their cycle of disadvantage through no-cost schools, healthcare coverage, and protection services. Their approach is guided by CoF’s principles of investing in youth, protecting vulnerable persons, reaching out to communities, and adapting to their needs.

British CoF founder Daniel Hopson was living and teaching in Japan 25 years ago when a student told him about a place he’d visited in Thailand called the Children’s Village, a healing space for children of drug-addicted parents. While traveling in Thailand himself, Hopson decided to visit the Village.  

“I was taken around by a social worker and saw their vocational activities, saw their teaching, saw the children enjoying washing their clothes and swimming in the evening in the river, the beautiful natural setting, and you could just sense that they were genuinely healing and that just by being there, by the support from the staff, by the natural environment, that they were moving through their trauma.”

What really stuck with him was the conversation he had with the social worker at the end of that day, when he came to realize that she'd grown up at the Village herself, had attended their schools, gone on to university, and come back to be a social worker there. He recognized not only the incredible change that had been made possible for her, but also the ripple effect it had on so many other lives.

That's when Hopson was inspired to leave the corporate world and follow a new path. He went back to Japan for a year to save up some money and then returned to the Children’s Village, where he volunteered for over two years, primarily as an English teacher. He began visiting the border region with Burma, where he encountered so many children who lacked access to formal education and many who were living in unsafe situations or had been abandoned by their parents. Hopson and his colleagues wanted to help these children join the safety of the Children’s Village, but the children didn't have the proper documentation to leave the border area. 

Seeing such an urgent need for schools and protective services, Hopson thought, why not bring a similar safe haven to them? With some help from his parents to purchase the land, he and a few other volunteers began their new project with a school. They thought maybe a dozen children would show up, but somehow word got out through the villages and plantations, and they had 150 children on the first day.

"So we were a school from day on. It wasn't really planned, but the nee^{d was there.”} 

And the seeds for Children of the Forest were planted.

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In-Sight Collaborative is a global grassroots organization that focuses on education for humanitarians and activists. What is one word that can describe their work? “Co-learning,” says executive director, Madi Williamson. 

Founded in 2016  by a group of friends volunteering in refugee camps in Northern Greece, In-Sight Collaborative began as a response to the often inaccurate narratives in Western culture regarding migration. Williamson and her fellow founding members recognized the incongruence between the media’s representation of refugees and the actual experiences of the people they met.

“We realized one of the most important things we could do to truly help the people we met in displacement was to help change those narratives. In an acute humanitarian crisis spanning acres and acres of farm fields, train tracks, and spreading to gas station parking lots and abandoned hotels, our founding members recognized that the current lens we had grown up viewing the world through was dangerously misleading. We saw a need for more collaboration, for more inclusion of the affected populations calling these camps home; for more platforms where the experiences of the displaced could be magnified rather than told on their behalf.”

The COVID pandemic was a critical turning point in In-Sight’s evolution.

“Like most organizations at a grassroots or global level, we were dependent on international volunteers to help with our programs and partnerships. COVID significantly limited the ability of travel and added the extra concern about incoming volunteers bringing the virus to new communities. The restrictions on mobility helped us recognize the power of localized, community-directed initiatives and ways to cultivate them.”

What they also recognized was that the key resource they could offer was education. “The most impactful thing we could be doing during these periods of lockdown was to reach out and share what we had learned with other sector participants who felt the same way we did about the mainstream narrative of humanitarian aid,” recalls Williamson. With that philosophy, In-Sight launched their first education program in the summer of 2020. 

But when the world reopened a couple of years later, many new challenges arose, including heavily policed borders, crackdowns on migration, and a shift in global sympathy for migratory communities. Once again, the In-Sight team saw the need to re-evaluate their work and steer themselves in a new direction to continue to effectively serve the migrant community.

“In the non-profit and humanitarian sector, you see lots of projects fail rather than adapt. Fortunately, this period of rest and growth was the best thing we could have done for In-Sight and for our team.”

As a result, In-Sight has refined their mentorship program and other educational initiatives to provide something extremely powerful that had been missing from the sector: accessible, decolonized, and wellness-based approaches to humanitarian education and humanitarian assistance. 

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Since the 1990s, Greece had been receiving asylum seekers pretty regularly each year. Many migrants came from Afghanistan during the first Taliban rule. When the Syrian war escalated in 2015, their numbers rose from a few thousand every year to nearly a million passing through Greece within a span of 14 months. More than half a million of them traveled through a single island in the eastern Aegean: the island of Lesvos. 

The numbers of migrants arriving on Lesvos started escalating essentially overnight and on the north shore of the island, an area of tiny fishing villages that is the farthest point from the main port city. Several thousand people were arriving every day for weeks and months on end, overwhelming the local community. Initially the villagers were empathetic and tried to help however they could, but they desperately needed support. That is where Lighthouse Relief began—before the U.N., Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders or other NGOs had arrived—with several volunteers who had no previous connection to one another who quickly self-organized and coordinated an emergency response that was active 24 hours a day.

Chloe Esposito, Lighthouse Relief’s Head of Partnerships and Advocacy, describes these critical early days:

“Some people would stand lookout with night vision goggles, and if they would see a vessel in distress offshore, they would call one of the local fishermen, and the fishermen would go out and help the people and bring them to shore. We had another team that was waiting on the beaches with thermal blankets and first aid equipment. Passengers would pass them their babies while they were getting off. Then they set up a camp right on the beach that was a first rest stop for people when they were just arriving. So it was a place where people could get a warm meal, a hot shower, get some dry clothes if they didn't have any. They could rest, they could get some medical attention, and they could just catch their breath.”

Once the U.N. Refugee Agency, UNHCR, eventually established their own camp just up the hill, Lighthouse Relief became known as Stage 1, and the U.N. camp became known as Stage 2, where individuals would go to begin their asylum application process.

“That's how it was in the beginning. It was very transitory at that time, because pretty much everybody was hoping to make it to Germany and other parts of Northern and Western Europe, so they were passing through Greece very quickly.”

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SafePlace International is a nonprofit organization that provides safe spaces for healing and learning for LGBTQIA+ displaced persons. Throughout its evolution, the organization has sought to address global issues of inequity, beginning with safety. SafePlace Executive Director Rachael LeClear notes that forcibly displaced people and asylum seekers are frequently failed by asylum processes that are meant to assist them.

“We focus on helping those who have experienced some of the most severe marginalization in the world. These are people who end up in limbo for years. The asylum processes are very punishing and really built to not be successful in many places, and people end up in these holding patterns where they have no documentation, they have no access to work, they can basically just be kept—intentionally trapped in these systems that prevent them from establishing and moving forward with their lives.” 

Already in a precarious situation, displaced members of the LGBTQIA+ community often land in places that are microcosms of the ones they left, leaving them at continued risk of discrimination due to their gender identity or sexual orientation.

The first SafePlace shelter was established on the streets of Istanbul in 2017 after founder Justin Hilton witnessed the extreme violence the trans community was experiencing there. More shelters were established in Turkey, Lesvos, and Athens, with up to 22 shelters providing case management services, referrals for legal aid, psychosocial support, food and clothing distribution, and livelihood training. 

During livelihood training, the SafePlace team noticed internal barriers that were keeping individuals from capitalizing on opportunities, even if they were offered to them for free. And that's where The Dream Academy was born.

“We recognized the challenge that comes from having this trauma—trauma of being ostracized and kicked out of your home and your family and your culture for being queer. It is then also the trauma of having to deal with the reality that is forced upon those who have to leave their homes and become asylum seekers or refugees or forcibly displaced. The Dream Academy seeks to unlock those internal barriers and help people reframe what they have experienced as a strength instead of a burden.” 

The first cohort of Dream Academy graduates began the 10-week community-led program in the spring of 2020. Since then, the Dream Academy has supported and celebrated the endeavors of nearly a thousand graduates across 15 countries through leadership development, job skills training, socio-emotional learning, and the support of SafePlace’s network of partners and funders. The program—and SafePlace as a whole—is now comprised of Dream Academy graduates, who have a deep understanding of the program and the experience of displacement.

When COVID hit in 2020, the Dream Academy quickly moved online, with its first cohort of 35 students starting in the spring of 2021. That turned out to be an unexpected blessing as it completely dissolved any geographic barriers and allowed them to connect with people in places they’d never been able to reach before. And now it has become one of their flagship programs.

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In 2018, a new chapter began for EMA Foundation as Bill Meyer, a lifelong educator and Connie Adler’s son, stepped into the role of Executive Director. 

Bill's teaching career began in 1992 at the Webster Magnet School in St. Paul, Minnesota, but it was in his second job as a History/American Studies Teacher at Lincoln School in Providence, Rhode Island, that his philosophy took shape. His friendship with his colleague Thierry Gustave birthed a shared dream: an "un-school" where learners, unburdened by hierarchy and institutional constraints, could explore freely in community. This vision echoed EMA's trust-based approach to philanthropy and would ultimately become the basis for rhizōma, EMA’s learning platform.

In 2003, Bill moved to Marin Academy in San Rafael, California, where he taught History and English and also co-created innovative programs like MA’s Conference on Democracy and the Transdisciplinary Leadership Program (TLP). His experiences teaching U.S. History for nearly thirty years unveiled the stark realities of structural injustices, compelling him to champion stakeholder-based partnerships that shifted power and resources to historically marginalized groups. The TLP course he taught focused on Migration and the Refugee Crisis, which  influenced EMA’s future work in supporting migration-based organizations such as Lighthouse Relief, Children of the Forest, SafePlace International, and In-Sight Collaborative. 

In 2020, as the world grappled with COVID, social isolation, and racial inequity, Bill wondered how he could leverage his network to create momentum for a different approach to the problems existing systems couldn’t solve.

"As I thought about the systems that had produced the murder of George Floyd and the chaos of the COVID response and put it all in the context of what I had learned—and really unlearned—teaching U.S. History, it seemed clear: A ‘return to normal’ was the wrong goal. There were signs everywhere that existing systems—some by design, some by decay—were not serving the interests of much of the world. The gift of a career in teaching is that I met so many incredible thinkers, most of whom are former students, and so I wondered: How could I activate my network with intent to see if we could collaborate to build infrastructure for more equitable systems?”

An opportunity to pilot new approaches came later that summer when EMA partner CAFILM Education (formerly CFI Education) reached out for assistance with exploring options for moving programming online during the pandemic. Bill assembled a dedicated team of seven college students and his former colleague Thierry Gustave to craft "CFI Education Reimagined." Through interviews with 38 stakeholders from 21 global organizations, EMA provided recommendations that helped CAFILM Education conceptualize their next steps, and the initiative culminated in a successful $100K match campaign. It also provided proof of concept of EMA’s belief that young people are not only ready to handle significant responsibility, but also that they could produce professional-quality results.

We understand philanthropy, in a broad sense, to be a tool for driving positive social change. But does philanthropy itself need to change? 

Trust-based philanthropy is a relatively new practice offering an alternative to traditional philanthropy. The core objective is to build more equitable relationships between funders and nonprofits. 

Decision Making

In traditional philanthropy structures, foundation leaders and board members are the primary decision makers. Financial decisions are driven by the board’s interest in building or maintaining wealth. The individuals in leadership and board positions are considered the “experts” who assess funding opportunities to avoid risk and keep payouts low. 

Trust-based philanthropy instead promotes inclusive decision making, involving both foundation and nonprofit staff. This model views the nonprofit staff and the communities it serves as the “experts,” since those are the people closest to the issues on the ground. Trust-based funders emphasize building close relationships to their grantees in order to best understand their needs; those needs then guide decision making. 

Funding

Traditional grants are usually restricted to specific projects or programs, with strict timelines and objectives. This means that the funder decides how and when the money will be spent, decisions that often come from the top down without feedback from the grantee. Because of these restrictions, most grants are oriented toward short-term goals. Grant renewals or long-term funding are much more difficult for nonprofits to obtain.

Trust-based philanthropy prioritizes unrestricted and multi-year funding. This gives nonprofits the agency to allocate the funding according to their own needs and priorities. These funds are also not restricted only to projects or programs, but can be used for overhead costs such as rent, salaries, and other essential expenses. This funding approach encourages long-term relationships between funders and nonprofit organizations, which promotes stability and security for nonprofits to tackle larger issues.

Impact Metrics

Historically, acceptable metrics to demonstrate the impact of funding have been extremely limited. Impact metrics are traditionally quantitative, focusing on measurable outcomes and numeric indicators. While these numbers can be helpful, and are especially important to donors and advisory boards, they often fail to convey the human impact of the investment. 

Expanding the scope of impact metrics, trust-based foundations and the nonprofits they support often report in both quantitative and qualitative metrics relevant to their mission. Qualitative metrics can be more personal, shining light on the human impact of funding. They also allow for a more nuanced conversation about social impact and how it looks in different contexts.

Culture

The predominant focus of traditional philanthropy culture is on compliance and reporting. Relationships are considered to be transactional; extensive applications are required to facilitate a partnership, and these agreements are maintained by equally rigid reporting processes. Avoiding risk and proving impact are the goal outcomes, and all dynamics exist to ensure them. 

The culture in trust-based philanthropy is more concerned with learning opportunities. Relationships are personal and meaningful. Partnerships are viewed as opportunities for collaboration and shared learning, and they are upheld through systems of mutual accountability. 

While the missions of two different philanthropic organizations may be similar, their funding approach marks a vital difference in the grantee experience, and often the funding outcomes. As more organizations move to a trust-based model, work becomes more values-driven, nonprofit partners feel better seen and heard, and the potential for positive social change only grows. 

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In 2001, Connie Adler inherited an extraordinary opportunity that she never anticipated. Her father, Eugene M. Adler, had established a family foundation in his name in 1959, but ironically never revealed its existence to his family. In a pivotal conversation with her estate attorney after her mother’s passing, Connie recognized that she could create a new kind of foundation to drive meaningful change. She decided to put half of her inheritance into the fund and changed its name to EMA Foundation to de-center family identity and mark a new direction. 

Connie's decision to redistribute her inheritance through EMA Foundation was rooted in her values but also in her formative experiences in the nonprofit sector. Her years of service with organizations like the Southwest Research and Information Center, where she published the monthly magazine, and the Inter-Hemispheric Education Resource Center, documenting the impact of US imperialism in Central America, shaped her understanding of the nonprofit landscape, and she knew firsthand that philanthropic funding processes could be burdensome for small organizations. Though the term “trust-based philanthropy” did not yet exist, Connie forged an approach built around the idea of developing relationships with partners and then shifting power and resources so the partners could focus on their mission rather than tending to funders.

“The values that drove my thinking at the time were driven by the fact that money didn’t mean a whole lot to me,” Connie says. “And if I could use it to do good in my community, that would give me much more pleasure than buying a larger house or a new car. I knew I wanted to use it to fund small groups similar to the ones I had been working with so that they would have a chance to grow—like a seed.”

Because Connie was new to philanthropy, she relied on friends in the community to identify potential partners. One of the first organizations she connected with was Southwest Creations Collaborative (SCC). Founded in 1994, SCC provides dignified, living wage employment to women from low-income communities through sewing and handwork projects. EMA's support to SCC went beyond one grant; it became a commitment spanning over a decade, including many conversations to determine what else EMA could do in addition to funding to help SCC reach its goals. In explaining her grantmaking philosophy, Connie noted that EMA was not a big foundation capable of disbursing millions, but it could offer opportunities for growth, especially through longstanding relationships that shifted power to its partners. 

Over the next 15 years, EMA continued to provide grants to organizations championing equity. Partnerships with organizations like the New Mexico Environmental Law Center and High Country News exemplified EMA's innovative approach. Unrestricted grants coupled with trust-based reporting methods became EMA's hallmark. This philosophy created collaborations where organizations had the freedom to innovate, explore, and create lasting impact on their terms. Connie’s intent was clear: 

"I did not want people to serve the foundation; I wanted the foundation to serve them." 

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Have you ever stood in a thicket of bamboo?

It seems impenetrable, like a green curtain that you could disappear behind so long as you were prepared to navigate a dense tangle of stalks and spears bound together by a unique root structure – a rhizome – that makes bamboo one of the fastest-growing plants on the planet.  While the stalks soar upwards, the rhizome grows horizontally beneath the soil in a rapid and unpredictable fashion, serving as a communication network that connects towering thickets to each other and to the rest of the surrounding forests in ways humans are only beginning to understand.

It is no wonder that social theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari took the concept of the rhizome to describe a revolutionary theory of social organization. Like a bamboo thicket, a rhizomic community spreads horizontally, without hierarchy, and its roots give rise to nodes and connections to like-minded communities. Unlike traditional structures, rhizomes possess unparalleled flexibility. They foster a harmonious, horizontally-structured network, enabling fluid growth and adaptability.

So what, then, is rhizōma?
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rhizome (n.)

1832, in botany, "a stem of root-like appearance," from Modern Latin rhizoma, from Greek rhizōma "mass of tree roots," from rhizoun "cause to strike root, root into the ground, plant," from rhiza "root" (which is probably from PIE root *wrād- "branch, root"). Also in English in Modern Latin form rhizoma. Related: Rhizomic.
(Source: https://www.etymonline.com/word/rhizome)

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Rhizōma is the living narrative of the growth and development of EMA Foundation’s impact network of partners. It aims to fill a critical gap by building a broadcast network for small nonprofit organizations to build awareness and bring more people into their work. It is a vibrant tapestry of stories of courage, resilience, and healing from places like Safeplace International’s Dream Academy and  Haa Tóoch Lichéesh. It is a curated collection of stories of hope and promise from places like Children of the Forest. 

Rhizōma is a space to learn about the underlying “why” that drives EMA and our partners, to develop empathy with the human beings behind the logos and statistics, and to consider how you might get more directly involved.

The stories that live on rhizōma are an invitation to join our community and become part of a global network. We envision rhizōma as a nexus for learning, where educators, learners, funders, and individuals from all walks of life connect with each other through diverse narratives, live events, and transformative courses designed to move people beyond donations to deeper empathy and action in support of equity.  

You will hear conversations about the movement to decolonize philanthropy. You can take interactive courses from our growing Learning Center to dive deeper into the underlying issues driving the work of our partners. You will discover new and critical perspectives from young people as part of our commitment to youth agency, which we consider essential to any progress towards solutions to the issues that dominate current headlines.

For our partners and other value-aligned organizations, rhizōma provides a crucial space for networking and collaboration. Through convenings, calls for stories, and co-designed initiatives with partners and their networks, our aim is to help the rhizome grow organically. As the rhizōme grows, the thickets will converge into a thriving forest – a powerful network dedicated to equity and the growth of more just systems.

We invite you to dive into the thicket and join us for new stories every week that will move you towards empathy and action.

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