A very Cape Town Christmas

For ten days, I took a vow of noble silence and forsook the outside world and its distractions.

Chantal PasquarelloDecember 22, 2021

Great-full

With my favorite (thankful) holiday around the corner and the end of this year in sight, I can feel a shift happening.

Chantal PasquarelloNovember 21, 2021

Decolonize it all

I’ve talked about coloniality as a pervasive legacy underpinning and weighing down what I loosely refer to as “development” work, but it felt like I should try to cogently present my case. Ultimately, I decided it was wiser to let some of the experts speak.

Chantal PasquarelloOctober 17, 2021

A cog in the wheel

It doesn’t look as dramatic as Kabul airport, but over time the death toll from poorly thought out, rushed, or just plain bad policy in so many other countries (some of which I have personally worked in) is greater.

Chantal PasquarelloSeptember 21, 2021

Dark days

It all just feels impossibly bleak. And then I think, it’s going to get darker.

Chantal PasquarelloAugust 20, 2021

On the road again

One of the many strange things about spending over half my life outside the U.S. as a quasi-nomadic immigrant is that I’ve always had the option to leave.

Chantal PasquarelloJune 23, 2021

Aspiration not expectation

If we hold on too tightly to a certain expected result, we not only get frustrated when it doesn’t happen, we might miss other, unexpected things that did.

Chantal PasquarelloJune 16, 2021

Autopilot

Fair and equitable development is becoming like all the box gardens and sourdough starter and Zoom happy hours - relics of that terrifying time we were all on the brink together.

Chantal PasquarelloMay 11, 2021

A year of the blog.

A year ago, I started this blog because I felt that more genuine connection was quite literally at the heart of better, more effective social justice work.

Chantal PasquarelloApril 8, 2021

The incentives are all wrong

We need to re-vamp capitalism and stale stakeholder primacy in favor of shared value.

Chantal PasquarelloApril 1, 2021

I'll stop the world (and melt with you)

Now that travel has moved from impossible to unsafe to justifiably avoidable, I’m amazed to find I miss it much less than I expected.

Chantal PasquarelloFebruary 26, 2021

Same difference

Why are we surprised by the events of January 6, 2021? One word: exceptionalism.

Chantal PasquarelloJanuary 8, 2021

Buh-byeeee 2020

What if we knew about 2020 in advance?

Chantal PasquarelloDecember 30, 2020

And now. We work.

Ready to get back to it after the election.

Chantal PasquarelloNovember 8, 2020

Make the money, don’t let the money make you...

Did I just build an entire personal life to development work metaphor around Macklemore’s the Heist?

Chantal PasquarelloSeptember 25, 2020

Comfortably numb

Is it possible for activism to not be all-consuming?

Chantal PasquarelloSeptember 4, 2020Black Lives Matter, Rage Against the MachineComment

Assimilation, adaptation, authenticity?

You do you...across cultures.

Chantal PasquarelloAugust 7, 2020Comment

Too much power

Use and abuse of power by the police, dictators…and the international development system..

Chantal PasquarelloJuly 10, 2020Police violence, Authoritarian, NeocolonialComment

More anger

Until a few weeks ago, I had never heard the term Performative Activist or Optical Ally, but I’ve long been intimately familiar with the concepts.

Chantal PasquarelloJune 26, 2020Black Lives Matter, Performative Activist, Optical allyComment

What can I say?

I think many of us in the humanitarian field are somehow exempting ourselves, skirting around honest conversations about race precisely because of the kind of work we do.

Chantal PasquarelloJune 14, 2020Black Lives MatterComment