Mara Shaw

“The emphasis of interpretation was rooted in their understanding that their endeavour would take a long time and that outside intervention too often comes wrapped in agendas and time frames that offer help but which demand outcomes related to foreign understandings of purpose and results.”
― John Paul Lederach, When Blood and Bones Cry Out: Journeys through the Soundscape of Healing and Reconciliation

“The truth is we don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t even know the questions we need to ask in order to find out, but when we learn one tiny little thing, a dim light comes on in a dark hallway, and suddenly a new question appears. We spend decades, centuries, millennia, trying to answer that one question so that another dim light will come on. That’s science, but that’s also everything else, isn’t it? Try. Experiment. Ask a ton of questions.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

“We believe the one who has power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history, you must ask yourself, Whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth? Once you have figured that out, you must find that story too. From there you get a clearer, yet still imperfect, picture.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“MOBIUS: Neon, you’ve been living in the Nonprofit Matrix, a world controlled by wealthy individuals and corporations, who created a sector to delude people from seeing how they’re hoarding money, avoiding taxes, and furthering inequity while convincing people they are the solutions to the problems they cause.

NEON: What are you talking about? I’m a good person. My nonprofit helps a lot of people.

EQUITY: That’s true, it does. But remember that improv workshop you took once, where you learned about “Yes and”?

NEO: Yes. And?

EQUITY: You are helping people AND you are helping capitalism uphold itself by charity-washing its most egregious offenses. You see, by setting up foundations and donating to nonprofits, the extremely wealthy get to feel good about themselves while the masses are tricked into believing excessively wealthy people are good. This is how wealth disparity maintains itself.”
― Vu Le