Here we are, the end of December 2025. One day until a new year arrives. And with it, the inevitable personal resolutions about who we want to become and what we hope to change.
At this time of year, we usually look back. We take stock of what we’ve achieved, what we’ve learned, and what we’re proud of.
But over the past months, Team One World Together has been in deep conversation. And we realised something significant.
Even though our new campaign and North Star — The New 1% — is designed to be unapologetically future-focused, we haven’t yet shared our own long-term dream as boldly as we should.
Part of that is simply capacity. We are a small team — entirely part-time or volunteer-led — with more powerful stories and insights than we’ve had time to share.
And part of it is because we’ve spent these past months digging deeply into our “why” through our newly curated Why? Brief series, bringing to life the three decades of research that shaped us. It shows you how and why traditional charity and aid systems are failing communities, and how One World Together is building something fundamentally different — a giving model designed from scratch to be long-term, flexible, and community-led.
A model that connects your generosity to the slow, relational work that real change requires.
A model that lets you move beyond charity to build a better world, fit for people and planet.
But there’s another reason too, one we want to be open about: we are learning this as we go. As a two-year-old organisation attempting systems change in real time, there are rarely easy answers. In fact, we’ve learned that the “easy answers” and “quick wins” are often the dangerous ones — the ones that sound neat and satisfying but quietly lead us back to the old model, the old assumptions, the old habits.
And we didn’t come here to recreate a broken system.
What we have learned this year — our third year of operations — is that this unknown is not just something to fear. It’s where the magic lives. It’s where the space for emergence, creativity, and genuine community-led change opens up. And making space for that emergence matters.
That’s why this next phase is so exciting for us. Because it’s the phase where we invite you in more fully — not just as donors, but as co-learners, co-builders, and co-dreamers – to help us think through and answer some big questions around our future.
And that brings us to the vision we haven’t talked about enough…
So as 2025 draws to an end, let’s look radically forwards, to imagine what the world could look like in 30 years if this tiny organisation and growing community of ours truly succeeds.
It’s 2055. The world of giving looks nothing like it did when we started. The traditional idea of charity – top-down, short-term, project-bound, tightly controlled and dependent on crises – has been replaced with something more humane, more relational, more circular.
The New 1% has spread globally. Local chapters around the world are getting stronger and stronger. Tens of thousands, then millions, of people now give a small amount regularly into our Solidarity Funds, which have become a collectively owned and managed global public good.
This giving is not a transaction, but a commitment to a better world. It’s not aid or charity. It’s a quiet, consistent and joyful act of solidarity. A vote for the world we want to live in.
These individual actions have created one large, beautiful and global ‘unanimous heart’ beating for a better future.
And hand-by-hand, as this giving movement has grown and strengthened, that world you want to live in has emerged.
One World Together’s ever-expanding circle of trust means that our partners now number in the thousands, reaching every part of the world. That’s thousands of community organisations receiving long-term and no strings attached funding to support their work. This stability has helped them move from crisis mode into deep strategy. It’s solidified and strengthened their community foundations.
These communities are no longer just sticking temporary plasters on their hurting communities in the way the project-based funding kept them stuck to. They are leading, they are thriving, they are transforming their ‘now’ and their futures.
And this quiet and consistent act of solidarity has ripple effects. The dominant narrative of charity has transformed. The idea of philanthropy and aid being a top down and controlling process is unthinkable. The narrative of ‘impact’ has been reclaimed. It is no longer something that is measured and quantified by those giving, but as something that communities own and share. As a community we have shared one billion stories of what real impact looks like, celebrating their power, their diversity and the change they have ushered in.
A new generation has grown up with a different understanding of what it means to help. They no longer imagine themselves as saviours or spectators. They instead see themselves as neighbours in a global community, connected by responsibility as much as by compassion. “Do they know it’s Christmas?” has been taken off the air waves for good.
We have moved from a philanthropy of control to a philanthropy of liberation. Philanthropy is no longer the purview of the elite. We are all philanthropists. We recognise the extraordinary power of ordinary people. We haven’t left the world and its future down to the market, the politicians, the governments, or the global institutions.
We have changed it together by trusting in the people. In ourselves. In us. In humanity.
This trust-based, direct-to-community approach delivers so much more for the world. But it also costs so much less than the aid and charity systems that preceded it. Financially, yes.
But also emotionally. Global solidarity for communities has helped them shift from from fatigue, fear and burnout to joy, hope and possibility. Across the world, governments have more money to invest in other priorities. And recognising our power we’ve helped move the narrative away from measuring national outcomes based on growth and productivity to count and invest in what counts. Happiness, wellbeing, equality.
And this is contagious. We look back and we can’t believe those days, back in the mid-2020s, when it felt like the world was burning, on the precipice of war, at the thrall of AI and governed and influenced by a tiny but incommensurably powerful global elite.
Those days when we felt powerless, almost hopeless and when a call to ‘imagine a world where we put kindness first’ was seen as laughable by many and only a distant dream for some. We are proud. We realise that we did this. Together.
This is the world we’re working towards. This is the world we believe is possible. And we are already building it.
So if you are reaching the end of 2025 feeling tired, fearful or disillusioned, we invite you into this slow and hopeful work with us. In 2026, we’re building a new circle of people – supporters, believers and dreamers – who want to help us ask the right questions and shape the next phase of One World Together’s journey.
A space where we ask together: How do we expand this new, but growing movement in ways that maintain our core values? How do we root this community deeply, tend to its growth, and ensure that trust, solidarity, and equity remain the compass guiding every step we take?
So if you want to being 2026 not with another personal resolution, but with a resolution for the world, we’d love you to join us early in the new year. Come and learn more, bring your curiosity and see where you might want to step in.
And please know this: you are welcome here. This space is for all of us. For anyone who carries kindness, hope and a belief that a better world is possible. No expertise is required, just heart.
Because it’s heart that’s going to change this world.
Written by Nicola Banks
It starts with you
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