The Editor’s Post: Could Trump's institutional dismantling lead to a fresh start?

Anna Patton 4th April 2025

Many discussions at the 2025 Skoll World Forum centred on the impact of the latest edicts from the White House. While anxieties prevailed, some emphasised the positives. This week’s view from the Pioneers Post newsroom.

The annual Skoll World Forum, one of the biggest global social entrepreneurship events, is always big on heartfelt emotion and we-can-save-the-world optimism. Though it takes place amid the very English, historic city of Oxford, it’s hosted by the California-based Skoll Foundation, and a huge number of (perhaps most of?) its attendees are American or supported by American funders.

For that reason, the mood this year was a bit less upbeat. “Things are breaking,” as Skoll Foundation CEO Don Gips put it. And the founder, Jeff Skoll – who, as Devex reported, has recently published a series of social media posts praising Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency, including its USAID cuts – was unequivocal this week in calling the recent policies “callous and inhumane”.

But what’s broken can be fixed, Gips argued, or even replaced with something better. It was a common refrain this week. A blank slate, a white sheet of paper, a repaired kintsugi vase: all manner of metaphors are being grasped to suggest that the current dismantling of US institutions can lead to a fresh start.

Some social entrepreneurs say they are relatively unscathed. An area such as employee ownership still has bipartisan support, according to the co-founders of Apis and Heritage Capital Partners, one of this year’s Skoll award winners, which finances employee-led buyouts to benefit people of low and moderate incomes.

Explore more about ownership structures in our Impact 101: What is steward ownership?

But others worry that resource scarcity is already creating an environment of fear and competition. More collaboration is seen as part of the solution. It’s hardly a new idea (and it’s certainly a refrain we hear at every conference we attend). But current pressures may finally push things forward: mergers have typically been rare among nonprofits, but one large foundation said it would now be providing grantees with guidance on this topic.

And when it comes to the deeper issue of polarisation within society, we need to work with others in ways that cut across political, racial, or any other divides, according to Shamil Idriss of peacebuilding nonprofit Search for Common Ground. “I wish every funding source would have some dedicated component, if not everything that they fund, supporting collaborative action across whatever the dividing lines are in whatever society they’re working,” he said.

Meanwhile, some are still fighting, day after day, in the bleakest of circumstances. Malala Yousafzai – the world’s youngest Nobel prizewinner – is among those making sure that the world does not forget the plight of women and girls in Afghanistan, by backing the “amazing, talented activists” who are making education accessible through various routes.

“Let's make it impossible for the Taliban to stop a girl from learning,” she said, speaking among an inspiring trio of women on Wednesday. “This is a form of resistance… when a girl just picks up a book and she’s learning, she feels that she’s fighting against this oppressive regime that is trying to do everything to stop her from learning, to stop her from following her dreams.”

Header photo: Skoll Foundation CEO Don Gips speaking at the opening plenary of the Skoll World Forum 2025 in Oxford. Photo supplied by Skoll Foundation