‘Meating’ the future
OK, so who spent the weekend doomscrolling the on-off U.S. tariffs and the impacts of an immediate and unexpected freeze of USAID? What a ride.
This human-induced crisis reminded me of the COVID-19 pandemic, when I first learned that Canada has only three abattoirs that dominate beef processing. I never thought about where our Canadian meat came from and who was processing it until the workers got sick and individual location closures shut down an entire system.
And so it seems with the USAID freeze. I had no idea the U.S. had such an outsized contribution to overall aid (43% globally, compared to under 8% by the next largest donor and 1.6% from Canada).
We are learning, unlearning, and relearning a lot about our systems and finding some serious overreliance on single points of support.
Last week, Future of Good published our 2025 ‘Trends & Tensions Shaping Leadership in the Social Purpose World’ report. How does this relate to abattoirs and USAID?
The trends report is meant to spark a discussion with boards of directors, leadership teams, and anybody in charge of understanding the landscapes in which the social purpose world operates.
One way I think this is useful is that often, before an organization goes into an annual or strategic planning exercise, it does something called a SWOT, which is a review of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
Strengths and weaknesses are usually internal to the organization, but opportunities and threats are very much external. That is where this report comes in. You can read it and figure out where the relevant opportunities and threats are in your work.
I genuinely hope this report is useful to you. We have additional resources coming out soon that will support the use of this report. Let’s build stronger systems, more resilient organizations and make smarter decisions.
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