What happens when a philanthropist shows up differently? In this episode, Maya Ghosh Bichara joins host Lars Peter Nissen to reflect on what it means to fund, partner, and build trust with integrity.

Maya isn’t running a billion-dollar foundation - she gives small but catalytic grants, drawing on her experience from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to reimagine what money can do.

They explore trust-based philanthropy, the need for humility, and how to move beyond extractive funding models. What would it take to let go of control, trust leaders on the ground, and how could we try to decolonize funding flows?

Mayas biggest advice for change is to start implementing it yourself. This episode is a must for anyone curious about what a new generation of philanthropy might look like.

In this special crossover episode, Lars Peter Nissen (Trumanitarian) and Carla Vitantonio (Living Decoloniality) sit down in Doha to explore the deep fault lines in humanitarian work — and why they’ve both turned to podcasting as a space for honest conversation.

Carla unpacks the concept of decoloniality — the lingering structures, mindsets, and behaviors that survive long after formal colonialism ends. Together, they explore how power, bureaucracy, and hero narratives shape the humanitarian sector — and why we’re so often stuck tweaking language while avoiding the hard work of dismantling systems.

They discuss the limits of reform, the danger of dressing failure as progress, and the need for new actors, voices, and institutional diversity. And they ask the question: If the big institutions can’t change, who can?

These discussions extends too to podcasting and humanitarian events; how different formats, structure and diversity of people could create different reflections and outcomes.

This is an episode about inquiry over certainty, and humility and small acts over heroism.

Notes and Links:

•⁠ ⁠The theory referred to in Carlas podcast: the theory of the colonial matrix of power by Aníbal Quijano

•⁠ ⁠Living Decoloniality (Carlas podcast). The highlighted episodes: Episode with Michelle Lokot; Episode with Karishma Shafi; Episode with Themrise Khan

•⁠ ⁠Trumanitarian episodes highlighted in the convo: Episode with Dr. Rola Hallam; Ukraine episode with Care SG); Episode with Themrise Khan

In this episode of Trumanitarian, recorded on the sidelines of the Center for Humanitarian Leadership Conference in Doha, host Lars Peter Nissen sits down with two sector heavyweights: Sofía Sprechmann, former Secretary General of CARE International, and Amitabh Behar, Executive Director of Oxfam International. Together, they confront some of the humanitarian sector’s most uncomfortable truths.

The aid sector is full of elephants—entrenched power dynamics, outdated models of partnership, performative reform, and organizations that may simply be too big to change. This conversation takes those challenges head by examining the Pledge for Change, a joint commitment by major INGOs to decolonize aid through equitable partnerships, ethical storytelling, and systemic transformation.

But the discussion also goes deeper—into the contradictions of leading large organizations while trying to dismantle the very systems that sustain them.