From privilege to possibility: leadership in an age of inequality

What will it take to move beyond an economic system that entrenches inequality? Our session at Philanthropy Australia’s Leadership Summit set out to find some answers with the help of our expert panel. Reichstein Foundation CEO Rachel Ball shares some key take-aways from the conversation.

In her opening plenary, social researcher extraordinaire, Rebecca Huntley, explained that one of the messages she hears consistently in her focus groups is that our economic model is broken. Wealth is being concentrated at the top, and it’s fuelling discrimination, disadvantage and disengagement.

We dove deeper in our session on leadership in an age of inequality, asking what it would take to move beyond an economic system that entrenches inequality and its multitudinous offshoots, including poverty, polarisation and environmental degradation.

Panellists offered a range of ideas and approaches:

• We have opportunities to make change within our own organisations, including ceding control of decision-making and resources (even if this feels uncomfortable).
• Our tax and transfer system is society’s greatest act of care, and one of the strongest levers to address inequality. Yet as it stands, we’re falling short when it comes to backing advocacy for fairer tax and social security.
• We need to look upstream and reimagine our economic system. Funders have a critical role to play, but it will require trust, patience and an appetite for genuine change.

We know this last point is possible, because philanthropy’s done it before. In Larry Kramer’s 2018 letter to the Hewlett Foundation, he described the funding of the neoliberal agenda in the 1950s-1970s as perhaps “the single most successful example of effective philanthropy in history”.

Our sector helped get us into this mess; let’s see if we can help get us out.

The Reichstein Foundation focuses on four spheres of justice essential to creating an equal and just society on healthy country — including economic justice. Find out more about our approach.