Consciousness-based education​
​The Saville Foundation team have spent over two decades in the field seeking appropriate and enabling solutions.
Shifting from the ''educate at scale' investment strategy we advocate for one tailored to the individual needs and unique worldviews of people in the system. This ensures their voices are front and centre in decision-making processes.​
Philanthropy has a direct and powerful role to play in ​education that values the whole child. Through its broad ecosystems and networks, it can support, invest and highlight the work of those that embody this type of approach.​
Consciousness-based education has a vital role to play in the future of human evolution.
Emotional intelligence and indigenous wisdom​
Over the past century emotional and spiritual intelligence have been sidelined in favour of pursuing materially driven notions of success. While society emphasises the importance of ‘intellectual’ intelligence, there is deep value in ‘emotional’ intelligence.
​
Shifting paradigms of advanced capitalism will require us to decolonise our perception of ‘intelligence’ and reevaluate the risks of materially driven success on whole systems evolution. The African indigenous worldview of Ubuntu calls our awareness to what it means to be inextricably, deeply bonded through our common humanity. In this context, the materialistic ‘developed’ world has significant lessons to learn from ‘less developed’ nations about emotional intelligence.
Empathy allows us to acknowledge the implications of what it is like to operate in trauma systems due to intergenerational human rights abuses. This presents us with an unprecedented opportunity to interrogate how we treat our natural systems - and each other as human beings.
Emotional intelligence impacts our ability to manage ourselves and our relationships effectively.
Being aware of the depth of human connection is the radical paradigm shift that will enable us to transcend our most insurmountable challenges.
Honouring emergence​
Having supported the human journey at various milestones along the way, we witnessed the principle of ‘synchronous emergence’.
Engaging in a different way allows important insights and responses to appear naturally. Ecosystems where all role-players can openly share knowledge as equals, brings a deeper clarity to the kind of support needed to impact the system. This means ensuring that beneficiaries or individuals poised to activate necessary social change on the ground are central to the engagements - their input clearly heard and assimilated.
The growing partnerships we have nurtured over the past two decades possess the ability to meaningfully contribute to transforming the role of global philanthropy. Together we can ignite networks that drive the much-needed paradigm shift through honouring emergence.
​
Symbiotic philanthropy
​​
'Philanthropy’ is sometimes referred to as a love for humanity.
​
Ubuntu describes the recognition of one another's humanity.
​
A society that embraces its humanity begins to question the value of destroying natural resources for material gain. Having unconsciously sacrificed this emotional intelligence for instant gratification - we are experiencing a different kind of poverty - the poverty of the psyche.
​
This overlap between ‘westernised’ and indigenous perspectives reveals an unexplored ‘philanthropic symbiosis’. The approach asks several questions. What can we learn if we see each other as equals? How can we shift cultural values of consumption? How can ‘civilisation’ heal its poverty of the psyche?
In this context - who is giving and who is receiving (who is the philanthropist)?