How Do We Keep Social Change Human? A Writing Retrospective

Over time, my writing has been an attempt to follow one thread: how do we keep social change human?

In 2023, I asked how nonprofits could scale without becoming brittle (The power of building a community) and argued that scale happens at the speed of trust. Later that year, I turned to leadership (What new possibilities could your leadership unlock?), framing it less as directing and more as gardening. By 2025, the question of connection versus control had come into sharper focus. Connection, not abstraction argued that philanthropy’s role is to nurture the scaffolding of relationships, not just replicate frameworks. And in A question for all of us who care about change, I asked how we might resist the pull of control and stay with the messiness of connection.

My new piece for India Development Review (IDR) picks up that thread in the age of AI and argues for a vigilant embrace. Large language models can amplify relationships, illuminate ecosystems, and automate routine tasks. But when they slide into wide abstraction, flattening context and corroding trust, they risk creating systems that look efficient but feel hollow.

The principle remains the same across all my writing: abstraction must serve connection.

Social change scales like a forest: root by root, mycelium by mycelium, canopy by canopy.

Originally written for LinkedIn on 25 September 2025. View original →