Open Development 2025: A Year of Collective Growth, Resource Building, and Justice-Centered Innovation
2025 has been an extraordinary year for our Open Development community—a year where resourcing ourselves, each other, and our movements became not just a practice, but a shared art form. What began as a weekly Zoom co-working space has grown into a vibrant ecosystem of fundraisers, culture workers, strategists, and dreamers who show up for each other with generosity, rigor, and joy. We have watched each other rise, and the rising has been contagious over our 38 sessions this year.
Open Development is simple at its core: people bring their fundraising, social capital–building, and resource-growing projects to co-work in community. Some arrive with years of experience, deep knowledge of the philanthropic landscape, and intricate mutual aid strategies. Others show up with a question, a blank document, or the desire to begin. And somehow, every week, we build a learning environment where everyone’s wisdom counts and everyone’s curiosity leads us somewhere new.
It is an ideation space as much as a working room—a place where we crowdsource solutions, sharpen our language, break down intimidating processes, and demystify the funding ecology together. We share links, tools, spreadsheets, examples, templates, and hard-earned lessons. We practice strategic planning in real time. We learn how to do micro-fundraising and mutual aid in ways that are sustainable and non-extractive. The room has become a living library through participation of folks like you.
2025 was a flourishing year.
Many of our participants successfully applied for grants, fellowships, and residencies. Folks found fiscal sponsors that aligned with their values. Several participants developed entirely new fundraising models after workshopping ideas in the room. Others built tracking systems, strengthened their budgets, or prepared for audits with confidence because they weren’t doing it alone. Some people even replicated our model inside their own networks, bringing this justice-centered approach into new communities and organizations across the country. That is the power of shared learning: it multiplies.
This was also a year of deep intellectual exchange. We read essays, shared articles, and even engaged entire books like Decolonizing Wealth, discussing how funding structures uphold or disrupt systems of power. We talked about economics, justice, community-controlled resources, the politics of philanthropy, and how our identities shape the way we ask for and distribute money. We learned from each other in every direction.
At the heart of it all is our weekly Zoom room, hosted by Claudia, where we gather to focus on growing resources and audiences through collective intelligence. We fill out grants together, review each other’s drafts, circulate opportunities, and workshop communications and promotion strategies. We talk about who our audiences are, how we speak to them, and what it means to grow sustainably without replicating oppressive structures.
Crucially, this is not a space where we exchange funds. We don’t pass the hat or distribute money in the room. And yet, every single person has experienced a rise in income, opportunity, clarity, or power because of what circulates there: knowledge, relationships, solidarity, and a refusal to gatekeep. We practice abundance by teaching each other how to access it.
Funders, too, have found this space transformative. In 2025, more grantmakers, board members, and organizational leaders joined us to better understand the lived experiences of grantees and grassroots practitioners. They came to hear directly from the communities they seek to support. They learned about funding gaps and inequities. They witnessed the brilliance and ingenuity that flourishes when people have space to ask questions without shame. They built relationships rooted in transparency and respect—not extractive observation.
Open Development has become a micro-ecosystem of care and capacity-building, where people gather every Wednesday to make the impossible feel possible. It is a room full of cheerleaders, editors, mentors, and co-strategists. It is a place where someone will always say, “Yes, let’s figure that out together.”
Looking back on 2025, we feel proud of the victories, grateful for the community, and inspired by the way our collective practices have grown. We have proven, again and again, that when people share knowledge freely, everyone gets more powerful. When we demystify fundraising, we democratize opportunity. When we show up consistently, we build movements that last.
As we move into the next year, we carry this momentum with us. We carry the stories of the grants won, the projects launched, the strategies refined, the relationships deepened, and the networks expanded. We carry the joy of watching each other thrive.
2025 has been great because we built it together.
Here’s to more resourcing, more justice, more brilliance, and more collective power in the year ahead.