A Conversation on Collaboration, Power, and Belonging
When Kindle Project and Kalliopeia Foundation came together to create Stars and Seeds, there was an immediate sense of alignment, and the partnership quickly blossomed into something alive with trust, community, and the shared vision of supporting women and the earth.
Below, the voices of Sadaf Cameron (Kindle Project Executive Director and co-founder of Stars and Seeds), Hilary Hart (Program Officer at Kalliopea and co-founder of Stars and Seeds), and Arianne Shaffer (Kindle Project Director of Programs) offer a glimpse into the journey of this fund: its origination, its challenges, and its meaning.
What excited you the most about the program?
Sadaf: Partnership with Kalliopea, the formation of beautiful women in the place I live, supporting the earth.
Were you hesitant about the idea of a collaboration?
Sadaf: Not a single hesitation. There was synergy between Kindle Project and Kalliopeia, and between all of us from the very beginning. We had a shared, aligned vision that was supported and nurtured between all people and in the work we weave. It’s been affirming and has blossomed into something both unexpected and delightful. Stars and Seeds has been an organic attractor and pollinator. It has a magnetism that is an affirmation of what has felt sincerely “meant to be.”
Arianne: Not at all! The synergy was so on point from our very first meeting. In a one-day retreat, we delved deep and co-created this program in a way that felt so easy, alive and attuned to what each of us as individuals and each of our organizations holds dear. It was a bit of a “when you know, you know” situation for me. And, it felt so exciting that this theme of women and the earth came into our work. So obvious, why aren’t more funders thinking like this?!
Hilary, you haven't done flow funding before—what has it been like to share power around funding decisions? Have any parts of this power-sharing felt icky?
Hilary: Nothing has felt icky! Believe it or not, it has felt interesting, exciting, different, and adventurous! Working with Kindle, working with the cohort, learning about the grantees... At first there was an inner question – can we all trust each other in this ecosystem? Can we be vulnerable with each other? So that the work together can be really creative and powerful? And very quickly it became clear that we could. Very quickly things truly flowed. We were all on the same page, part of the same story.
From a facilitation perspective, how does it feel to work within the power-sharing model? Were there moments when the cohort’s decision-making felt difficult, and how did you navigate those?
Arianne: I never struggle with the model of power-sharing. The mystery, process, outcomes… all of it is exciting and often evolving over years, and I love to witness that process. What is challenging for me is to see how communities struggle. It can be very difficult to be a steward of money when your own home, organizing, and community are in dire need as well. Everybody moves through it, but it’s sometimes painful to witness. The scarcity is not perceived; it is real. And there’s no flow fund big enough to solve any community issue. So sometimes I feel challenged, or maybe just in pain, holding this truth with the cohorts. Usually, with enough space to air the grief and frustrations about the systems we’re all living under allows for some of that pain to lift. And then the groups are able to move forward holding the both/and of it all and then their decisions are made in beautiful ways.
Sadaf: For me I have never not trusted the communities themselves. However, I have had the privilege of witnessing how power and money can shapeshift from one hand to another. Some of the same baggage and lure of money and power shows up for both wealth holders and for those that become the new stewards. Feelings of responsibility to put out every fire, the weight of the world on your shoulders, the desire to be anonymous, the deep tendrils of core traumas, the great honor of being able to uplift others. Working with communities that have lived in a scarcity reality grapple with a unique perspective and struggle. Scarcity impacts the psyche in the same ways that trauma does and that can sometimes come into play unconsciously in a decision-making process. The confluence of interest is complicated. However, this is why we work in community while moving through the process of money and power—so that it is held together and not in isolation. It is not the money itself that ends up being transformative, it is the process in which money and power is held and transferred. Community does this well, as they have been practiced both ancestrally and in lived experience.
What challenges do you see in this work?
Sadaf: The challenging part is witnessing the struggles that show up in almost every room when power and money is shared. Although every community has a unique constellation, most don’t know what they don’t see on the other side—that these struggles are mirrored in other rooms with communities and donors. As an intermediary, we have the honor of being able to hold these spaces. However, it is also our responsibility to navigate but also attune to what is showing up in the room without flooding the space with personal experience and opinions. Letting a process unfold and taking the time and care to do it well is an art.
What does this fund mean to you personally, given your different connections to New Mexico?
Sadaf: Growing up in New Mexico as a first-generation Afghan American, I have sought a sense of belonging over the years. The yearning for home and the sense of what home embodies is ever-present. Within this unquenched thirst, the land has always held the entirety of my diasporic feet, reminding me that home is with the sky, the dirt, the desert blooms, the falcon. I have straddled the worlds of insider/outsider within my identity in Northern New Mexico since my birth. This experience has come with immense gifts and challenges. Stars and Seeds has been a reverent space for me where I have felt neither inside nor outside. Rather, I have felt alongside. It has built a small home in my spirit, helping to anchor my diasporic body when the yearning for matrilineal history fragments my heart.
Arianne: I always have a little wobble in me when I’m facilitating a place-based group from a place I’m not from. Will I be able to foster trust in the group? Will they trust me? Will I say something wrong? You know, run-of-the-mill pre-work anxieties. And, having been working with Kindle Project for well over a decade, I feel close to New Mexico—it’s a home away from home. But even then, I always know I’m not from there. And there’s so much of it I don’t have an embodied understanding of. How could I? There are no arroyos or scorpions where I’m from in Canada. And then, all these details and worries melted. Because when I’m with this group, something much bigger and more powerful than the intricacies of place emerges. This doesn’t erase the special and unique qualities of NM, but I get this feeling that what we’re working on is something much bigger and more powerful than ourselves. I’ve come to realize that me not being a New Mexican woman is of benefit to this work. I don’t have attachments, expectations or generations of history that inform my participation and leadership. Instead, my curiosity and seemingly endless appetite for understanding New Mexico better allow me to approach my work with an openness that I think has served the group. These are their decisions to make, their visions to shape and their collective dreaming to implement. I am there to hold that container and I love doing it, even if I get a little scared of the occasional scorpion visitor at our retreats.
Why such an emphasis on storytelling in this fund?
Hilary: It's such a compressed time we are living in! Things feel so stuck and so hard and so anxious and intense. Stories can be a wedge into that compression and open us back up to what is possible, not just what is taking up our attention in that moment. Telling stories invites the visionary, the imaginal, into life, transforming life through opening hearts and minds and expanding thinking.
What does the name “Stars and Seeds” mean to you?
Sadaf: As above, so below. As within, so without.
Hilary: It actually sort of came in a morning meditation. I can't remember if it was the exact same phrase, but it had to do with stars and seeds. And I had the sense that there was a way to share the heights of the stars – imagination, visionary experience, innovation, big thinking and big heart, big non-human life – with the really practical work of philanthropy, giving and sharing funding support. And it seemed that the fund we created together should be focused on women because women really have this ability to bring higher and lower, inner and outer together. Its a power that I think many women live through giving birth - inviting and nourishing a soul in ones own physical body. I think we all felt that women would intuitively get the meaning and the aliveness of stars and seeds.
Arianne: Stars and Seeds to me is about the totally uncontainable, yet powerfully on-purpose spirit of women. We are both in this world and not of it and are rooted in multicolored dusts of our ancestors while being connected to something much greater than ourselves.