Make Shift Happen: Coming October 2025

Sep 30

By Tara Health Foundation

At the Tara Health Foundation, we believe that in order to realize a world where all people have full control over their bodies, lives, and futures, philanthropy has to shift the flow of power and resources.

We're not the first or the only people to believe this: our work to do philanthropy differently exists within a long lineage and thriving ecosystem of changemakers already modeling different ways forward.

This October, we're excited to share conversations with many of them in our new Make Shift Happen Conversation Series. These aren't interviews about best practices. They're honest, vulnerable conversations about power, failure, identity— about what it means to co-create new structures built for everyone.

Creating New Conditions Together

"We are experiencing circumstances that none of us ever thought we would face," Maria Nakae (Justice Funders) observes in conversation with Tenesha Duncan (Orchid Capital Collective) "And I think this kind of moment requires philanthropy to expand its imagination beyond what folks in this field thought was possible."

This expansion isn't theoretical. Throughout these conversations, we witness how leaders are building innovative models that recognize our inherent interconnectedness—creating pathways for resources to flow through relationships rather than hierarchies, designing systems that serve all of us rather than some of us.

The framework of belonging offers us a different way forward. As Nwamaka Agbo (Kataly Foundation) shares: "Reframing of what safety looks like in that it's not about your wealth, your capital, your big house. It's actually about the strength of the relationships and trust that you build with people."

This understanding, that our security lies not in accumulation but in connection, runs through every conversation. "Transformation and change, it's not something that happens out there that someone else is gonna lead," Elise Belusa (Tara Health Foundation) reminds us, "but it lives here with us, in us, and in our relationships."

Perhaps most powerfully, these conversations reveal how we can move from critique to creation. Erika Seth Davies (Rhia Ventures) captures this possibility: "I think about the conditions under which everyone is living today, and someone else's imagination created those conditions. So I constantly remind myself that we can create something new, right? Like, my imagination can create something new. Our imagination can create something new, so it's worth the effort to get up every day and figure that out."

This is the work: recognizing that the structures we inhabit were imagined into being, and that we have the power to imagine, and build, differently.