This is the recording of our live webinar held on March 18, where we explored new approaches to financing non-profit and mixed-profit initiatives in a rapidly changing global landscape.

In recent years, global development funding has faced significant disruption. US overseas development aid has been dramatically reduced, with a large majority of programs cancelled, and worldwide aid is projected to continue declining. These shifts are already having profound impacts—affecting economic stability, health outcomes, and the viability of critical programs across low-income countries.

As traditional funding sources shrink and alternative support remains limited, organizations must rethink how they finance their work.

In this session, we discuss:

• The evolving global funding landscape
• A spectrum of financing structures for non-profit and hybrid models
• Emerging financing blueprints from around the world
• Practical insights for building resilient, self-sustaining programs

Hosted by Diane Osgood and Tom Cummings, this conversation also features Dr. Data Santorino, a Uganda-based clinician, researcher, and global health innovator, who shares frontline perspectives on designing sustainable solutions in resource-constrained settings.

It is not news that democracy is in trouble almost everywhere. Poll after poll shows that people in most countries—especially in the West and throughout the Americas—are disappointed with democracy as it exists today. This is particularly true among young people, many of whom seem to prefer a strong leader to the apparent impotence of their democratic leaders.

Of course, there are exceptions, and we should celebrate them. Top of that list is Bangladesh, with a history of autocratic leaders, some of whom used elections to hang on to power for years. However, during the summer of 2024, a student-led revolution succeeded in expelling the government of Sheikh Hasina, who had ruled for 15 years.

Fast-forward to February 2026, and Bangladesh has just conducted an election that, by all accounts, was mostly free, fair, and peaceful. The result was that the interim government, led by Nobel Prize-winning Muhammad Yunus, has now been replaced by a democratically elected government. From start to finish, the entire transformation took less than 20 months.

Score one for democracy!

Our guests on New Thinking for a New World were in the front ranks of that revolution. Aysha Siddiqua Tithi and Umama Fatema were both leaders of Students Against Discrimination, the organization that drove the revolution. Listen as they discuss their experiences and hopes for their country’s future.

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ABOUT OUR GUESTS

Aysha Siddiqua Tithi is a Computer Science student at Brac University and an internationally recognized Bangladeshi youth activist. She emerged as a leader of the 2024 anti-discrimination student movement and represented youth voices at the 79th UN General Assembly alongside Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus.

She co-founded She Leads to empower women and works with the Zero Missing Children Foundation to protect children’s rights. Aysha has held leadership roles at Brac University and contributes to civic training initiatives. Blending technology and activism, she focuses on innovation, human rights, and climate justice, aiming to advance equity and sustainability through tech-driven solutions.

Umama Fatema is a Bangladeshi student activist and youth leader committed to social justice and education reform. A graduate of the University of Dhaka, she rose to national prominence during the 2024 July Uprising, advocating for quota reform and greater transparency in public institutions. As a coordinator and spokesperson for Students Against Discrimination, she mobilized thousands of students and championed the rights of marginalized groups. Known for her clear, inclusive leadership, she previously served as General Secretary of the Dhaka University branch of the Bangladesh Chhatra Federation and remains active in youth empowerment and women’s rights advocacy.

The number of active conflicts today is the highest since the end of World War II. The world has clearly entered a new, more violent, and fragmented era.

We can and should debate “why?” But we also need to focus on “so what?” What are the consequences, not only for warriors but also for the innocents caught up in spreading conflict? Is it possible that the impacts of traumatic violence could be transmitted across generations?

A group of scientists believes their work proves that war trauma can alter gene expression, thereby impacting the children and grandchildren of victims of war. Among the authors of a profoundly important scientific paper published last year was Rana Dajani, a Jordanian molecular biologist and long-time participant in the Tällberg network. Listen as she explains the science and its implications.

What do you think?

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You can also find the New Thinking for a New World on your preferred platform, including Apple, Spotify, and YouTube. 

ABOUT OUR GUEST

Rana Dajani is a professor of molecular biology at the Hashemite University in Jordan, specializing in epigenetics and biomarkers of trauma among refugees. A leading voice in scientific policy, she helped introduce national and regional stem cell laws and has served on numerous scientific boards and UN councils, most recently as President of the Society for the Advancement of Science and Technology in the Arab World. She has held visiting professorships at Harvard, Yale, MIT, the Jepson School of Leadership, and Cambridge, and is an ISC and TWAS fellow. A committed advocate for building indigenous research capacity and mentoring women scholars in STEM, her mentoring model has been recognized by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

Rana is also a social entrepreneur and global thought leader. She founded We Love Reading, a grassroots movement that cultivates changemakers by fostering a love of reading in underserved communities; the program has received the UNESCO International Literacy Prize and grown to more than 8,000 locally run libraries in over 70 countries. Her work has been recognized through Fulbright, Eisenhower, Robert Bosch, Ashoka, Yale Morse, and Yidan Global Fellowships, as well as the Jacobs Social Entrepreneur Award, the Nansen UNHCR Refugee Award, and the Schwab Social Entrepreneur Award. Her 2018 book Five Scarves: Doing the Impossible — If We Can Reverse Cell Fate, Why Can’t We Redefine Success?challenges global leaders to rethink inequities in education and employment and to redefine how we measure success in a rapidly changing world.

President Trump has launched an unprecedented trade war, a radical overhaul of regulation, and a significant reshaping of U.S. fiscal policy. His purpose? To rewire global trade patterns and supply chains, recreate American manufacturing capacity, and change the essential structure of the U.S. and world economies. Can he succeed? How would success be measured? What are the risks it will fail — and what would failure look like? How might all of this affect your job, your savings, your kids’ future prospects?

Those are almost impossible questions to answer, but  Marco Annunziata is willing to try. He is former Chief Economist at General Electric, where he was also Head of Business Innovation Strategy. Listen as he and host Alan Stoga explore the upside as well as the downside of Trumponomics.

What do you think? Do you expect to be better off a year from now — at least in economic terms — because of what President Trump is doing?

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ABOUT OUR GUEST

Marco Annunziata is a TED speaker and an expert on the interplay between technological innovation, corporate strategy and global economic trends. Marco is the former Chief Economist and Head of Business Innovations Strategy at GE, and co-founder of Annunziata + Desai Advisors. He has served on the Board of Advisors on Information Technology at Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.

Author of the book “The Economics of the Financial Crisis: Lessons and New Threats,” Marco is a two-times winner of the Rybczynski Prize for best paper in business economics, awarded by the Society of Business Economists in London, has published in the Harvard Business Review and other economics and finance publications and has given lectures at Harvard Business School and Stanford University. He authors the Just Think blog on technology and economics on Substack. Marco has extensive experience in the private financial sector and policy making. He holds a PhD in Economics from Princeton, and lives in Miami with his wife Sonal.

Normally, that’s a simple question with a simple answer: of course, the Congress matters; after all, its powers are enthroned in the American Constitution. However, as the Trump presidency unfolds, nothing is simple anymore. President Trump obviously has an expansive view of presidential power and is clearly intent on exercising it at the expense of the Congress and of the courts.

So does Congress matter, is becoming a huge question, potentially the stuff of constitutional crisis.

Tom O’Donnell is an insider’s insider when it comes to understanding how the Congress works. He was a longtime colleague of Congressman Dick Gephardt, former Democrat leader, and a key player in Democratic Party politics for years. If anyone understands how the Congress—even one with narrow Republican majorities in both houses—might react to White House overreach, Tom does.

Listen as O’Donnell and host Alan Stoga explore the growing confrontation between the President and the Congress. Then tell us: who do you think will win?

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ABOUT OUR GUEST

Tom O’Donnell co-founded Gephardt Government Affairs in 2007 and served as Managing Partner, guiding Fortune 500 companies, non-profits, and coalitions on legislative and regulatory strategies across a wide range of issues, including energy, healthcare, financial services, trade, tax, defense, and technology. Known for his deep policy expertise and bipartisan relationships, he played a central role in major negotiations with the White House, Congress, and key stakeholders. In 2015, he led a coalition of over 110 companies to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank—hailed as one of the top lobbying victories of the year.

Prior to that, O’Donnell was a partner at Doak, Carrier, and O’Donnell (DCO), a leading political media consulting firm, where he developed messaging campaigns for numerous winning candidates, including Senator Chris Van Hollen and Senator Sherrod Brown. From 1989 to 1997, he served as chief of staff to House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt, helping craft major budget legislation and building strong Capitol Hill relationships.

O’Donnell also held senior roles at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and taught political science at American and Georgetown universities. Regularly named a top lobbyist by Politico and The Hill, he was once described by The Washington Post as a “star consultant.”

With its unlimited natural resources and huge agricultural potential capacity, the Democratic Republic of Congo should be a paradise—but unfortunately, it’s not. Instead, it’s been wracked by war, bad government, corruption, tribal and ethnic enmities, neighbors who are serially tempted to intervene, and Great Powers who seem to think that it’s time for a second age of colonialism.

Recently, well-armed militias, accompanied by the Rwandan military, have seized key provinces in the country’s mineral-rich east. They’re threatening to continue their offensive with an ever-changing mix of tribal, political, and economic justifications that may be pointing towards violent regime change in Kinshasa.

Why should we care? Obviously, because the human tragedies that define such wars should not be happening in the 21st century. But, beyond that, the Congo conflict is a dangerous microcosm of our time: international borders no longer sacrosanct; 19th-century-style natural resource grabs for 21st-century rare earth minerals; Great Power rivalries; the potential for a larger regional conflict if full-blown civil war breaks out across Africa’s second largest country.

Michela Wrong is a journalist and an author who knows Rwanda, Congo, and the Great Lakes region as well as anyone. Her recent article in Foreign Affairs, “How Far Will Rwanda Go in Congo?” provides some of the backstory to this New Thinking for a New World conversation about the huge dangers of yet another conflict in Congo.

Will Congo ever find peace? Please tell us what you think and comment below.

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ABOUT OUR GUEST
Michela Wrong has spent nearly three decades writing about Africa, first as a Reuters correspondent based in Cote d’Ivoire and former Zaire, and then as the Financial Times Africa correspondent, based in Kenya. From journalism, she moved into book-writing. Previous books include “In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz”, the story of Mobutu Sese Seko, “I Didn’t do it for You”, focusing on Eritrea, “It’s Our Turn to Eat”, an examination of Kenyan corruption, and “Borderlines”, a novel set in the Horn of Africa. Her latest book, “Do Not Disturb”, is a scathing assessment of the Rwandan Patriotic Front and President Paul Kagame.

The brutal Hamas attacks on October 7th, 2023 kickstarted a new cycle of widespread death and destruction that continues today. Countless lives lost, shattered, or irrevocably altered. Of course, mostly Palestinian, but also Israeli. Even Donald Trump is right about some things, as when he says, “It’s impossible to imagine how life can go on under such circumstances.”

Indeed, it’s easier to imagine how roads or houses or markets can be rebuilt than how people, Palestinians as well as Israelis, will deal with the scar tissue. Can the hate, despair, fear, and insecurity that caused the past 18 months, and has been exponentially compounded during that time, ever dissipate? Are kids who survived this war condemned to new cycles of rinse-and-repeat violence?

Even though those questions may be unanswerable, they are far more vital than all the talk about governance or reconstruction or peacekeeping that preoccupies diplomats. So this episode of New Thinking for a New World attempts to focus on people, Palestinians as well as Israelis, who are condemned to co-exist rather than on the Arab Plan or the Egyptian Plan or the Trump Plan. Francesca Borri is an Italian journalist who lives in Jenin, which helps give her reporting a totally different insight into what people are actually thinking. Gershon Baskin is an Israeli political activist and commentator with deep empathy for Palestinians and an even deeper commitment to looking for ways for people to live together.

What do you think: is Palestinian-Israeli peace possible? Let us know i the comment section below.

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ABOUT OUR GUESTS

Francesca Borri was born in Italy in 1980. She holds a Master’s in International Relations, a Master’s in Human Rights, and a Bachelor’s in Philosophy of Law. After a first experience in the Balkans, she worked in the Middle East as a human rights officer. She turned to journalism in February 2012 to cover the war in Syria as captured in her book Syrian Dust. She is also the author of books on Kosovo (2008), Israel and Palestine (2010), and Aleppo (2014). In 2017, she was shortlisted for the European Press Prize for her reporting from the Maldives, the non-Arab country with the highest per capita number of foreign fighters. Destination Paradise, the book based on that reportage, was published in 2018. She now writes for La Repubblica, Italy’s leading newspaper.

Gershon Baskin is an accomplished peace activist and entrepreneur with 46+ years of expertise in Israeli-Palestinian conflict resolution. Renowned for orchestrating high-impact back-channel negotiations, including the release of abducted Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. Founder of groundbreaking bilateral initiatives (IPCRI, Israeli-Palestinian Alliance for Two States) and trusted advisor to governments. Published author, international speaker, and recipient of multiple peace awards. Leverages deep regional insight and cross-sector collaboration to advance sustainable peace and development.

Donald Trump has been president for five weeks now. In light of the blizzard of executive orders, funding and hiring cuts, endless nominations and appointments, and above all the nonstop controversial policy declarations on every imaginable topic (and some of which literally are unimaginable), it seems like months or even years.

It’s already clear that President Trump intends to change, not only how Washington and the United States work, but how the whole world works.

No president has ever started with this much activity, for better and for worse. The American custom is to wait to the hundred-day mark to assess the launch of a new presidency. But all this frenetic and even radical activity justifies an earlier stocktaking. 

To do that, the Tällberg Foundation recently convened a webinar. Alan Stoga, Tällberg’s chairman, engaged in an extended conversation with Aziz Huq, professor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago, and Scott Miller, a leading strategist for businesses, politicians, and governments in the U.S. and globally.

Do you think Donald Trump is good for the United States, your country, or the world? Please tell us what you think here

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ABOUT OUR GUESTS

Aziz Z. Huq
Frank and Bernice J. Greenberg Professor of Law

Aziz Z. Huq is a scholar of US and comparative constitutional law, focusing on democratic backsliding and AI regulation. His award-winning work appears in top law, social science, and political science journals, as well as major media outlets. He has an active pro bono practice and serves on the boards of the American Constitution Society, the Seminary Coop, the New Press, and the ACLU of Illinois.

Previously, Huq was director of the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Project, litigating cases in the US Courts of Appeals and Supreme Court. He also worked on constitutional design in South Asia and clerked for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. He graduated first in his class from Columbia Law School and summa cum laude from UNC-Chapel Hill.

Scott Miller, a strategic communications expert, co-founded the Sawyer/Miller Group, advising global leaders, corporations, and over 40 U.S. political campaigns. Clients included Corazon Aquino, Vaclav Havel, Boris Yeltsin, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, and Apple.

He later co-founded RealLeader.com and worked on messaging strategies for political initiatives, including the 2016 Trump campaign. He co-authored several books on leadership and branding and was featured in Alpha Dogs. Miller is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a Fellow of the Tällberg Foundation.

Photojournalist Fabio Bucciarelli shares what compels him to keep documenting the world’s most dangerous conflicts.

We live in a violent and complicated world. Wars, big and small, on every continent; mass migrations, often targeted for abuse by criminals as well as by governments who don’t want the migrants; spreading cartel violence; increasingly disastrous consequences of climate change; pandemics and epidemics.

So much for the Age of Aquarius and the End of History!

If there is any good news in this litany of man’s inhumanity to man, it’s that most of us have not yet been inured to the brutality to which we are constantly exposed. We can still be appalled, angered, outraged—and we should be.

In large part, that’s a tribute to the journalists who report the stories. The good ones don’t aim to shock, but to compel their audiences to reflect on the complexities, of the world as it actually exists.

Fabio Bucciarelli is that kind of journalist. He is an amazing freelance photographer and an even better storyteller, whose beat is some of the most dangerous places on Earth. Listen as he discusses what drives a world-class photojournalist to keep returning to the front lines in a conflicted world.

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ABOUT OUR GUEST

Fabio Bucciarelli is a photographer and journalist internationally renowned for his documentation of conflicts and humanitarian crises through a visual narrative that captures human dignity even in the most harrowing situations. His work goes beyond mere documentation, deeply engaging the viewer and encouraging reflection on the complexities of the realities it portrays. Considered one of the most influential photojournalists of our time, Bucciarelli has received some of the world’s most prestigious awards, including the Robert Capa Gold Medal, multiple World Press Photo Awards, the Visa d’Or News, the Lucie Impact Award, and the Prix Bayeux-Calvados for War Correspondents. He has also won ten Picture of the Year International awards, including the title of Photographer of the Year. He collaborates with leading international media platforms and, in recent years, has expanded his role as a curator and artistic director, with his works exhibited in prestigious museums, galleries, and international fairs. In 2023, he was named a Canon Ambassador.

The start of 2025 is burdened with no shortage of things to worry about. The war in Ukraine; conflicts throughout the Middle East; tensions around Taiwan; the Los Angeles inferno; the possibility of Chinese and Russian financial or economic collapse. And, of course, the biggest known unknown that preoccupies the whole world: what will Donald Trump actually do when he’s president after all of the noise he’s made on his way to the White House?

The list is almost endless—and quite scary.

Somewhat surprisingly, the global threat of ideological extremism and terrorism doesn’t appear on most such lists. After all, we all know Al-Qaeda has been degraded; Islamic State defeated; the Taliban struggling to govern. Most importantly, Iran, the sponsor of so many terrorist groups operating in so many countries, at the least has been wrong-footed by the Israelis.

But, what if that benign assessment is wrong? In fact, that’s the well-informed view of today’s guest on New Thinking for a New World. Dr. Rohan Gunaratna, a Singapore academic, is a widely recognized expert on global terrorism who believes that the threat of terrorism is rising—and is urging the great powers to develop a coherent anti-terrorism strategy as they did after 9/11, before it is too late.

What do you think? Should we fear a new wave of fundamentalist terror assaults?

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ABOUT OUR GUEST

Rohan Gunaratna is Professor of Security Studies at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technology University, and the founder of the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research in Singapore. He was the architect of ASEAN OUR EYES, the regional counter terrorism network.

He received his Masters from the University of Notre Dame in the US where he was Hesburgh Scholar and his doctorate from the University of St Andrews in the UK where he was British Chevening Scholar. A former Senior Fellow at the Combating Terrorism Centre at the United States Military Academy at West Point and at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Gunaratna was invited to testify on the structure of al Qaeda before the 9/11 Commission.

The author of 20 books including Inside al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror (University of Columbia Press), Gunaratna edited the Insurgency and Terrorism Series of the Imperial College Press, London. He is a trainer for national security agencies, law enforcement authorities and military counter terrorism units, interviewed terrorists and insurgents in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Saudi Arabia and other conflict zones. For advancing international security and intelligence cooperation, Gunaratna received the Major General Ralph H. Van Deman Award