SECTOR: Philanthropy
PARTICIPANTS: 145
When Lumos Transforms founder, Nkem Ndefo, first arrived in Accra in February 2024, she stepped into a forest. Not a natural one, but a carefully crafted immersive environment of woodland sounds with trees and leaves projected onto walls. This wasn’t a typical setting to discuss and learn about transforming philanthropy—and that was precisely the point.
Nkem had been invited to bring her embodied trauma-informed expertise to launch the ambitious What’s Possible Learning Institute, an experiential pooled fund and donor learning community created in partnership between Children’s Rights Innovation Fund (CRIF) and We Trust You(th). This ongoing, multifaceted initiative includes donor education and support for the youth-led participatory grant-making collaboratives, “Decolonize” and “What’s Possible.” Designed to transform how philanthropic organizations and youth changemakers collaborate, the Accra convening brought youth-focused donors together with youth leaders to demonstrate “what’s possible” when donors follow young people’s lead. Donors were supported in setting intentions beyond the adultism and siloing that often characterize philanthropy while youth collaborators decided the strategy and distribution of more than $1 million. Lumos’ role spanned all these components as Nkem brought Lumos’ signature embodied trauma-informed resilience oriented (eTIRO) lens to the design of the entire enterprise.
The What’s Possible Learning Institute emerged from a recognition that traditional philanthropic relationships often fall into problematic patterns, especially when collaborating with youth. Philanthropic organizations tend to either micromanage and overcontrol or completely collapse, fearful of making mistakes, especially when navigating power dynamics in mixed-aged collaborations that include youth with lived experience. Despite the best of intentions, neither of those are effective ways to collaborate.
True collaboration requires navigating the gray area where funders can bring expertise and listen deeply without exerting power over grantees and limiting their visions. It means unlearning familiar dynamics and creating something new together—which is inherently uncomfortable and uncertain. Lumos shared the knowledge and skills needed for participants to self-regulate and co-regulate when navigating uncertainty, thereby deepening their capacity for true collaboration.
The Tiny Cave Experience
Nkem co-designed the embodied, trauma-informed agenda for the 5-day convening in Accra with CRIF to intentionally create a compassionate, supportive, and relational container for this gathering. At the center of the Accra convening was “The Tiny Cave,” an immersive art installation that participants physically entered. 
This space represented the tensions between the magical expansiveness of the forest outside the cave, where potential projects are dreamt up, and the “tiny cave”–the limits imposed by traditional philanthropy as projects get funded and implemented. Puppeteers enacted scenarios related to philanthropic power dynamics while donors navigated the deliberately disorienting and disruptive space. For example, they would suddenly hear demands for “Reports!” or be called into different environments, like the “risk management safeguarding evidence-based best practice enclosure,” seen here in the illustrated book that accompanied this experience.
The interruptions provoked visceral reactions, as participants felt the embodied pressure of bureaucratic demands, revealing internalized patterns of appeasement and false urgency.
This disorienting yet controlled environment allowed participants to practice regulation skills while experiencing the emotional realities of philanthropic relationships. Rather than teaching concepts abstractly, the design invited embodied learning about power, appeasement, and collaboration. In The Tiny Cave, participants practiced using trauma-informed embodiment skills to navigate uncertainty rather than clinging to familiar frameworks and/or collapsing from stress.
Addressing Appeasement in Philanthropic Systems
A central focus of Nkem’s contribution was exploring appeasement—the ways people unconsciously accommodate power at their own expense. By conducting specialized sessions on appeasement, Nkem helped both donor and youth participants understand how this trauma response shows up in their bodies, their behaviors, and their relationships. For donors, these sessions helped them recognize appeasement patterns within themselves, their relationships with grantees, and their own organizational cultures. In the Virtual Learning Series after the Accra convening, Nkem continued working with donors to practice recognizing when appeasement and other trauma responses, such as urgency, control, and/or an overreliance on metrics, show up in the field of philanthropy. For youth participants preparing to engage with funders, this learning provided tools to recognize and navigate power dynamics authentically without losing their project vision. In addition, Nkem facilitated separate sessions for both the “Decolonize” and “What’s Possible” grant-making youth collaboratives to help them process the emotional complexity of wielding decision-making power, while rooting in the power and knowledge of their lived experience expertise when allocating resources.
Beyond the Event: Creating Sustainable Impact
By focusing on embodied capacity-building rather than prescriptive solutions, the initiative has laid groundwork for sustainable transformation in how philanthropic relationships function. To this end, the Virtual Learning Series reinforced and deepened the skills developed for recognizing when and how appeasement and other trauma responses common to the philanthropic field, like urgency, show up at individual and organizational levels. The sessions also provided a supportive space for participants to explore different responses as a way to return to spaciousness. Nkem also supported both the “What’s Possible” and “Decolonize” participatory grant-making youth collaboratives by debriefing with them to reinforce and practice the skills learned during the Accra convening. By recalling the shared Tiny Cave Experience, participants practiced holding the magical aspects of the forest alongside the practical aspects of the tiny cave in harmony, rather than letting the tiny cave dim the imagination, creativity, and possibility of the forest.
Sustainability was also built into this project through the illustrated workbook developed by Juhi Jha, CRIF’s program officer in learning, data, and storytelling, to accompany the Tiny Cave experience, on which Nkem provided consultation and feedback.
The workbook was designed to evoke the physical experience and prompt reflections to inform interactions and decisionmaking moving forward. It offers a strategy to keep the learnings alive beyond the physical convening or the confines of virtual learning sessions. It also offers a powerful tool for building empathy between youth and donors, thereby enriching and facilitating their collaboration. The workbook represents a key element of the initiative’s sustainability strategy—ensuring that the embodied learning approaches can be shared beyond the original participants and replicated in different philanthropic settings.
Measuring Transformation Through Embodied Awareness
Though a formal evaluation was conducted after the Ghana convening, insights also emerged through reflection and dialogue in the sessions. After a workshop on appeasement, participants shared realizations on post-it notes: “I am triggered at work.” “Urgentocracy is a symptom.” “How much appeasement do I accept?” 
Other participants placed multi-colored dot stickers on statements they agreed with to show solidarity and build a supportive community. These moments of embodied self-awareness represent crucial first steps in transforming philanthropic practice. By recognizing how power dynamics manifest in their bodies and behaviors, participants gained the capacity to make different choices. By the end of the convening, participants expressed an increased ability to identify their stress, trauma, and relaxation responses and determine their usefulness to the current situation, as well as confidence in using a relaxation practice to settle overresponses.
The “What’s Possible Learning Institute” demonstrates a fundamentally different approach to philanthropic transformation—one that addresses the embodied dimensions of power and collaboration rather than just changing policies or practices. As one participant post-it note reflected on their hopes for the future: “My hope is that young people can be who they are in all their true selves, to cede power and drive resources to the global south.” Through trauma-informed approaches to collaboration and philanthropy, this vision moves closer to reality.
Several participants expressed enthusiasm for the methodology and suggested replicating it in different funder spaces: “This was a great way to get funders who are interested in participatory grantmaking, but are hesitant about where/how to start.” Nkem’s in-person contribution supported donors in developing embodied capacities for ceding power and growing authentic collaboration. Her work with youth leaders helped them develop skills for grounding in the power of their lived experience expertise and navigating power dynamics with funders. Following the convening, Nkem continued to reinforce that supportive relational container virtually over the course of 2024 and into 2025 by co-designing the Virtual Learning Series for donors, and facilitating activities and discussions grounded in Lumos’ eTIRO approach.
As Dr. Ramatu Bangura, Founding Director of the Children’s Rights Innovation Fund, shared:
“Our partnership with (Lumos and) Nkem Ndefo allowed us to sustain humanity, compassion and care for all engaged in the What’s Possible Learning Institute. It gave us tools and practices to make that humanity actionable in the philanthropic sector where it can feel impractical and inefficient to do so. It is the thing I am the most proud of.”
