The pilot phase in the establishment of the Leverage Fund Institute has seen the first round of grants being made in South Africa. Mpho Raboeane shares her personal reflection on contracting these grants with CBOs, advice offices, and on stewarding shared resources through law, trust and liberatory decolonial praxis
There are moments in the work that appear, from the outside, to be ordinary. A contract signed. A banking detail verified. A compliance document received. A grant agreement sent back with initials in all the right places. But beneath these administrative gestures, something like a tender justice is happening: resources are beginning to move towards people and places long asked to survive on too little.
Successfully contracting the first round of grants with community-based organisations and advice offices feels, to me, like bringing nebulous ideals and politics into concrete, albeit transitional, infrastructure. It is delicate, practical, urgent and sacred all at once. And a stark reminder that money has memory, that paperwork has power, and that the way we move resources can either repeat old violences or rehearse new freedoms.
There is a structural friction here that I cannot romanticise away. To anchor decolonial stewardship, authentic community agency and radical trust inside the architecture of the legal system is to feel two worlds rub against each other: one reaching for interconnectedness, repair and life; the other trained in containment, exclusion and control. And still, we enter that friction consciously, asking whether contracts, compliance and grant administration can be made to serve relationship, redistribution and repair rather than suspicion, extraction and punishment.
To steward shared resources is to begin with humility. These funds do not belong to us privately; we are temporary custodians asked to listen for where resources are being called, move them with integrity, and account for them without turning accountability into suspicion. A liberatory decolonial praxis asks more of us than efficiency: it asks us to notice the colonial afterlives still living inside funding systems, while also being careful with shared resources because people’s lives and material conditions are at stake.
The contract as transition infrastructure
Alnoor Ladha and Lynn Murphy’s Post-Capitalist Philanthropy: Healing Wealth in the Time of Collapse helps me name this paradox. Their work asks philanthropy to confront the history of wealth accumulation, the logic of late capitalism, and the need for deeper shifts in how we relate, redistribute and repair. The Transition Resource Circle describes this as work to alchemise and liberate capital in service of Life, honouring historical entanglements, lineage, reconciliation and healing. That language helps me understand the contract as transition infrastructure: an imperfect container built inside the old world to protect the tender experiments of the next one.
In this frame, the legal shell becomes a shield rather than a shrine. The grant agreement, compliance checklist and audit trail are not holy in themselves; they are tools. They become dangerous when we mistake them for the work, but useful when they protect resources from capture, misuse or withdrawal from the commons. Compliance, at its best, becomes an act of care: not obedience to a master, but the careful tending of a structure so that quiet, radical redistribution can happen inside it.
Linda Alvarez’s work on Discovering Agreement and Conscious Contracts also offers language for what this process was reaching towards: legally enforceable agreements that support alignment, creativity and a return to relationship when change or disagreement arises. This matters because traditional contracts often anticipate betrayal before they imagine care, allocating blame before asking what the relationship is for.
To de-escalate the contract is not to make it weak. It is to make it more honest about what sustains the work. The preamble, shared purpose, values and mutual recognition should not sit ornamentally at the front of an agreement; they should be the pulse that calls parties back to relationship when conflict, delay or uncertainty appears.
A practice of moving differently
I keep thinking about what it means to move money differently: not only faster, though speed matters when organisations are stretched; not only more cleanly, though governance matters when resources are shared. I mean differently in a deeper sense: with memory, consent, reverence for local knowledge, and an awareness that every system we build teaches people what we believe about them.
This is the ethics of the bilingual practitioner. We have to remain fluent in the radical, life-affirming language of decoloniality, relationality and community agency, while also being fluent enough in the dry language of indemnities, governance protocols, reporting duties and liability to prevent that language from doing harm. The work is not to let the sterile alphabet of law swallow the living grammar of liberation, but to bend the tool towards protection.
That is why this first round has felt like a crucible. Not a perfect practice, not a purified politics, but an honest attempt to build something strong enough to withstand scrutiny and soft enough to remember why it exists. A practice where reporting can become learning, compliance can protect rather than punish, and community organisations are not treated as risks to be managed but as co-stewards of a shared future.
I want to acknowledge this first round softly: not as a finish line, and not as proof that the work is now simple, but as a beginning that required many hands, many reminders, many acts of coordination, and a shared belief that advice offices and CBOs deserve to be resourced with seriousness and care.
Perhaps this is the lesson I am carrying most closely: resourcing justice is not only about transferring funds. It is about the spirit in which we transfer them, the structures we build around them, and the courage to keep those structures answerable to life. It is about refusing to let bureaucracy harden the heart of the work, and instead bending cold tools of enclosure into protective sanctuaries where dignity can travel with the money.
