I am writing this with my feet actually in the sand. This feels like either the cheapest narrative framing device available to an essayist, or the only honest way to write this reflection.
The tide is doing what a tide should do. A gull is working the wrack line for whatever the last wave left behind. And somewhere behind me, invisible from this chair but audible in every call I have sat through, there’s a program officer in need of information from a grantee.
They want to know the precise systemic return on a grant. They need metrics. They desire to know exactly which grain of sand their specific investment of euros (or dollars) helped to obtain or to apply. And yet elsewhere, another group struggles to obtain a shovel or the means to collect the sand needed elsewhere. And no one pays for shovels these days.
In the funding reality of mid-2026, uncertainty has curdled into teleological gaslighting. The funder demands a horizon-line map before they can consider supporting your request for gas money to reach the end of the driveway. They want a frictionless five-year predictive logic model, so you can prove your understaffed team will dismantle systemic poverty by Thursday. That is, of course, provided you fill out their proprietary portal with the correct sequence of buzzwords.
Call it the myth of the bespoke heap. It’s the toxic delusion that a movement can be unstitched into neat proprietary line items, that a donor can purchase a boutique slice of justice and staple their name to the side of it like a plaque on a park bench. It assumes change runs like an assembly line, wealth in one end, predictable radical output the other, when it actually behaves more like this water at my feet: heavy, wild, interconnected, arriving already entangled with everything else that touched it upstream.
The strategy underneath the strategy is simple. Demand total accountability from the people doing the work. Assume zero accountability for the starvation architecture that funds it. Frame everything as selflessness or sacrifice while running it as economic control.
No new theory of change is going to break that grip. Neither is another dashboard tracking deliverables. What actually saw this coming, thousands of years before anyone invented the word “deliverable,” is older and sharper than anything in a grant portal.
Start with Tzedakah, which the Western imagination keeps mistranslating as charity. Charity is discretionary grace — a choice the wealthy make when a pitch moves them sufficiently. It flatters the donor’s ego by design. Tzedakah shares a tighter relationship with the root word tzedek (“justice”). This suggests that even the resources you’re currently holding are never truly entirely yours. Withholding them from the collective heap isn’t a personal choice for one to even make much less consider.
Maimonides built a ladder out of that idea, and the ladder strips the funder’s ego out of the transaction almost entirely. Near the top, the giving is mutually anonymous — the funder doesn’t know who receives, the receiver doesn’t know who gave, and there’s no naming opportunity, no press release, no multi-stage reporting portal where the grantee performs gratitude for the privilege of being watched.
Cut the source out of the picture and the power dynamic goes flat on its own. At the very top sits something sturdier still: funding that permanently ends the begging, structural enough that the collective never has to write another grant application to survive.
Mishnah Pe’ah pushes the same logic into legal architecture. A landowner is barred, by law, from harvesting the edges of his own field. That strip belongs automatically to the stranger and the poor, and here’s the part that should sting: he doesn’t get to choose who takes it. No vetting. No background check. No logic model explaining what will be done with the fallen grain. He can’t leverage his surplus for status or control. He has to leave the edge open and walk away — the law removes his ego from the transaction whether he consents to lose it or not.
That current runs even hotter through the Talmud. Beruriah insists on structural reform over punitive spectacle, praying for the end of the conditions that manufacture criminals rather than the end of the criminals themselves. Imma Shalom stages something closer to a sting operation, exposing a judiciary whose ledger was rigged for the wealthy all along, proving the rot wasn’t incidental — it was load-bearing.
There’s an ancient paradox that constantly disrupts my work, wearing a Greek label for which Eubulides gets the plaque—though the puzzle likely walked out of Babylon first. If you take away a single grain of sand at a time, you are left wondering exactly at which precise grain a pile ceases to be a pile. Great puzzle to ponder, but it sucks when you can’t even claim it as your own.
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Names have a habit of getting stapled to things by whoever codifies the archive and preserves its continuity, not by whoever actually built the thing. Sometimes there’s a consolation prize for making a good, persuasive, assertive claim to a notion. Sometimes, one can only settle for ancillary recognition for communicating what others already know.
The Daughters of Zelophehad understood that conundrum. Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah recognized that existing inheritance structures completely excluded women. Instead of accepting this marginalized status, they petitioned their community leaders, arguing that their father's name should not vanish simply because he had no sons. They didn’t ask for a handout. They walked straight into the center of power and demanded the property law itself be rewritten, because the existing matrix had made them invisible by design, not by accident.
Here's one thing I’m still grappling with, as sand still sticks to my ankles. I've been writing "you" as if you were the coalition leader getting interrogated, cornered, made to defend a ten-thousand-dollar grant like it's a crime scene. But some of you reading this are the ones running the portal.
Some of you are the ones who wrote the five-year logic model requirement into the RFP, who sat in the boardroom last week helping build the exact compliance apparatus that exhausts everyone downstream of it, beach vacation calling your name through the window while you tell yourself it's due diligence.
The dilemma was never only your funder's to carry alone. It's the shape both of you are standing inside — the grantee performing gratitude for surveillance, the funder mistaking control for stewardship. And if you only recognized yourself in one half of this essay, read it again and find your other half.
For the record: I’m part of that “you”. I’ve been— and sometimes still am— one of you too.
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It is July. The heat is baking the boardwalk. Everyone on your team is thinking about a beach they aren’t standing on, a pause where the only requirement is letting your feet sink into an unmapped shore. Instead you’re under fluorescent light, helping someone build an elaborate, exhausting trap of compliance metrics out of the exact material that should be giving all of you peace.
But the shoreline refuses the ledger, and it refuses on its own terms. Nobody can audit this coastline. Nobody can tag the specific wave that shifted the dune, or issue a line-item receipt proving which dollar purchased which grain.
When the tide comes in, it doesn’t check whose brand guidelines govern the water table. It doesn’t separate the current from an elite endowment out of the current from a common storm. It moves the whole shoreline at once, redistributes the weight across everything living in it — the shells, the tide pools, the grass holding the dune together — and none of that ecosystem checks a funding matrix before it does the work of keeping the whole coast standing.
Demanding that a movement stay legible to a spreadsheet is demanding it stay small enough to fit inside somebody’s ego. Real change means swallowing the delusion of originality, refusing the extractive terms of paternalistic control, and building the anonymous, shifting infrastructure that keeps the whole shore standing — not preserving the name of the man who thinks he owns the beach.
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This is especially true, brilliant, and well said, Ryan. It’s a topic I’ve often written and spoken on, so your excellence is deeply appreciated by a fellow traveler. Thank you.
Hi Ryan, thank you so much for liking my post about living by one's own rules and breaking free from others' expectations. Since you focus on social impact and civil society, I'm thrilled that this topic resonated with you. I truly believe that personal freedom and authentic living are where social change begins—even here in Central Europe. Thanks for the support and welcome to my Substack community! Greetings from Czechia. ✨
Best,
Andrea