“It’s a Power Question”: On Wakanda, Funding Change, and Compassion Across Oceans with Global Leader Ada Williams Prince

In this episode of Not Really Strangers, host Suzanne Ehlers sits down with global leader and major sci-fi fan Ada Williams Prince to discuss how her career spanning multiple continents has shaped the way she thinks about the best way to fund social change. Ada shares how she first came to feel a personal connection to the issue of forced displacement and why it’s not just a humanitarian crisis – it is also a political crisis, a gender crisis, and a climate crisis. Ada also makes a compelling case for what she calls a “liberation practice”: designing investment strategies not in boardrooms but by and with the communities most affected on the frontlines of a crisis. Threaded throughout this episode is a meditation on power, and how people having power over systems is what creates lasting change. 

Topics Discussed:

• Ada’s time working as an emergency program manager in Aceh, Indonesia after the 2004 tsunami and the reminder that compassion crosses oceans, and the visceral connection between forced migration stories.
• Understanding that forced displacement is never just a humanitarian crisis but a political crisis, a gender crisis, a climate crisis, and a failure of systems.
• The centering of women and children in displacement narratives: chronic underfunding, the dangers of defaulting to male-centered imagery, and the specific vulnerabilities that women and girls face inside protracted displacement.
• Reframing philanthropy as a liberation practice where we have to shape the investment strategy itself; not just funding change, but changing who gets to define what change is.
• Meaningful examples of progress within the humanitarian aid system (water placement in South Sudan camps, lights on paths to latrines in Guinea) and the question of what the transformational next move looks like.
• Who gets portrayed as a worthy recipient of aid, whose suffering is made legible, and who gets to construct those stories.
• How strangeness/otherness is being weaponized and entire populations are made to feel like strangers in countries they built

Episode Resources

• Refugees International
• Women’s Refugee Commission
• Women and Girls of Color Design Council
• Resilio Fund

Resources:

• Podcast show notes
• Donate now
• Follow USA for UNHCR on Instagram
• Connect with Suzanne on LinkedIn

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Hi, I'm Suzanne Ahlers, and this is Not Really Strangers, the podcast where we explore just how connected the refugee experience is to our everyday lives and to the social issues that matter most to us. Thanks for joining us for another conversation with a brand new guest here to share the story of how they came to realize that their story and the refugee story were intertwined. By the end of this episode, you'll see that in this global community, the distance between us is often much shorter than we think. Let's dive in. Ada, I am so happy to see you. Our listeners are only hearing you. I'm getting to see your beautiful face. So we're gonna start with a softball, which is where are you calling in from today?

SPEAKER_01 0:50

I'm coming to you from Seattle, Washington, which is the ancestral lands of the Duwamish people, where it's gray and also gorgeous. Um, usually I have a background of Wakanda from Black Panther, because I'm always there too. And somehow I am always where I need to be. So yeah, that's where I am.

SPEAKER_00 1:14

Didn't you didn't didn't you have a Black Panther business card for a while? I still do. I still do. I have that somewhere, literally, I have that somewhere in my wallet that you must have given me now. It's been at least seven or eight years. Um, beautiful place. So this is so the set the second question is not where you're calling from, but it's where do you consider home? And maybe it's the same, maybe it's not, but tell us a little bit about what home is for you.

SPEAKER_01 1:44

Yeah. I mean, it's a question I sit with a lot, honestly. So Seattle is where I have spent a lot of my time. My youngest kid was born here. My oldest kid was born in New York City, and my roots, I think, are uh deepest to wherever I build community. And uh, you know, I've also lived and worked in places that left, you know, really, you know, marks on me. I was in Southeast Asia after the tsunami tsunami, uh, across Sub-Saharan Africa. I lived in London for a while. So there's a part of me that considers um home to be any place where I've been asked to bear witness to something true and deep. So, in a lot of ways, I think home is less geography and more of a quality of presence.

SPEAKER_00 2:35

Yeah, that answer, that answer matches uh what a number of guests have said, right? That it's not a it's not a fixed place. It's a place where where community can be built, where work has been done, as you say, and sort of bearing witness in some of those places. Um you, you know, you've named some places like Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Um, and maybe that's part of the story. Tell us a little bit about how the issue of refugees and of forced displacement first became something you were interested in or working on or engaged with in any respect. Just kind of where's the origin story for you?

SPEAKER_01 3:10

Yeah, and I love that you said origin story because I obviously am a huge sci-fi and Marvel DC fan. So I think um I it it comes in a very, you know, as any story circuitous way around. Uh, I was actually a foreign exchange student in Greece when I was 17. So you can imagine as a black girl who grew up in Los Angeles, I certainly thought I knew, you know, poverty and struggle, but I saw a different kind there. I was I also saw, I think for me, there's a uh connection in our, in I think the world's uh sort of a shared forced migration story. So I wanted to learn more, I think, as I think about that. In my undergrad, I lived and worked in a refugee camp in Nepal. So it was another place. It was, I think, well, how I got to that was really like there's a quite fantastic uh hippie granola crunchy college in Vermont that I went to. It was called the School for International Training. And that's kind of what hooked me for life. What I what I fundamentally understood of then and I know now is that I was drawn to the idea of my ancestors being forced to being forced into leaving a home or a place that was not their own into slavery. And it's a connection that I feel deeply rooted in my work to bridge culture and connection. But then later, I was working in international development and I got an opportunity to work in South and Southeast Asia in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami as an emergency program manager with Saved the Children UK. And that proved to me a lot more about our shared connections. I met a driver in Aceh, Indonesia, and uh, you know, we were working together. And he, when I first met him, he looked deep into my eyes and he was like, I am so sorry for your people. I was shocked. I was shocked. And I said, What do you mean? I mean, he had just lost everything, like 16 members of his like immediate and close family. And he he said, uh, you know, for New Orleans, what happened to your people? Well, like, I mean, that just broke me, right? Like, how could he from across the world understand and see a connection in what happened in Hurricane Katrina? Um, and of course, I have family there, and so it was really difficult. Um, but that kind of compassion across oceans was just really heavy and deep. And, you know, working alongside families who had lost um not just their homes and livelihoods, but people, children. Um, I think what struck me was how hard these families were working to reconstitute some sense of normalcy and to insist on their own humanity in conditions that were designed to completely reduce them, right? So that that kind of um that always is the through line for me. First, my connection to my ancestors and that idea around forced migration, and then the compassion and understanding of that connection. So I will say it started when I was 17, um, and then that understanding grew, and then it's gone across my career ever since. Um, from there, I moved into displacement, uh, worked with Refugees International across Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, in conflict zones, and then into policy advocacy at the Women's Refugee Commission, where I had the extraordinary experience of helping facilitate women, peace, and security resolutions at the UN Security Council, uh, where I first came into contact with the USA for UNHCR. So, um, but each of those chapters, I think, uh, deepened my understanding of how forced displacement is never just a humanitarian crisis. It's a political crisis, it's a gender crisis, it's a climate crisis, it's a systems failure. And once you see that, uh, you can't unsee it.

SPEAKER_00 7:22

Yeah, yeah. It's so interesting. I don't know if we've had a chance on any episode of the podcast to shout out some of our kind of peers in the space. And you've worked at two of them. So Refugees International, we'll put it in the show notes, an incredible group that does incredible work, different than You for You, but in a shared sort of space with us and the Women's Refugee Commission as well. Um, one of my best friends from long ago is working there now. So, um, yeah, just to sort of lift up a little bit, you know how I feel about like there is enough to go around, and there are so many groups working in such close concert and collaboration on these issues that I think it behooves us to kind of lift and boost to bring kind of increased attention to the issue that we're all working on from different vantage points. Um, I want to just pull one thread. I think that's really there. Well, maybe two threads. One is, and maybe it's just to sort of say it again so that our listeners really sit with it, this idea of shared forced migration and that that connection you've made to your ancestors, to sort of human, humanities' ancestors. And then I think about this idea of systems that are designed to reduce. And even in times of conflict and trauma and crisis, we still have systems that aren't set up to like lift and alleviate, right? Like it so either one or both of those, do you want to pull on just a little bit? Because I know so much of your work, even since the names that you've mentioned in terms of organizations, has been at that nexus.

SPEAKER_01 8:57

I think when I think about the points of intersection around systems, I and the fact that I'm now working in philanthropy. Um, I think what comes to mind is the intersection of a couple of different things, right? So, and and I would say power, because systems, people having power over systems is part of how we get at transformation, right? So what comes to mind for me most immediately is that intersection of displacement, gender, and climate, actually. When we talk about refugees, the image is uh that gets centered often is a man, right? Like a young man, the major, but the majority of people, as you know, living in protracted displacement are women and children, right? And specific, the specific vulnerabilities that they face, uh sexual violence, reproductive health and crisis, exclusion from formal decision making about their own future, right? And the chronic underfunding in humanitarian response. So I think centering the intersection of these things is how we can change that system, right? So uh I think I could also link it to like what I'm doing now and what I've done most recently, which is, you know, building um an initiative around women and girls of color, which is grounded in an analysis of intersecting structural vulnerabilities, economic, racial, geographic. That that work actually has something in common globally because it's impossible to ignore some of the major things that are happening that um that have to do with systems that we don't think about, right? Such as the climate, which is a compounding variable, right? The communities that are most disinvested from uh across every dimension of structural inequality are precisely the communities that are most exposed to climate risk. And we're seeing this now: heat, flooding, food insecurity, and displacement. So they all kind of come together. And that's where all I think the worlds collide. And the sector, I think the philanthropic sector has the flexibility that aid doesn't, right? It can take risks, it can fund locally led organizations, it can support feminist movements inside displacement communities, but it hasn't, right? And I think part of our work is making that case loudly and specifically to funders who have that capacity. And I think there's another piece in there, which is around power. And um, I will say that again for the people in the back, fund locally led organizations, support feminist movements inside displaced and refugee camps. So just I want to just put that there. There's another piece here, which is about um narrative, right? So we all run on stories and who gets portrayed as worthy, who uh who is a worthy recipient, whose suffering gets um made legible and who doesn't. I I spent a lot of my time thinking about how those narratives um get constructed and who's gets to who gets to construct them. So refugees and displaced people are so rarely the authors of their own stories. And so I think that is part of a systemic issue. Uh if they're not the authors, if they're not the ones who have the power to make decisions of their own agency, it's a power question and it's one that we can actually do something about. So I think I think I'm trying to make the link between like these systems and who has the power to change these systems and where we could actually make uh a difference in that area.

SPEAKER_00 12:37

Mm-hmm. That was beautiful. And in fact, the next question I have for you is is go a little bit further in this philanthropic direction. There's so much work you've been doing at this sort of this area of finance, of making capital available, of making grants, both for famous and big foundations and small and unknown, maybe family foundations and others. What's most exciting for you right now about philanthropy, in addition to what you just said, which is that it's got the flexibility to respond if it if it knows how to and wants to? What else is what else is happening in philanthropy right now that's that's good stuff?

SPEAKER_01 13:16

Because a lot of philanthropy is organized around charity, around reducing suffering at the margins while leaving the structures and systems that produce suffering intact. I'm interested in something different. I want to um work with, you know, people, funders, and institutions who are asking, what would it look like to fundamentally, excuse me, shift power to put resources behind the people that are closest to the problem who already have the solution analysis and the relationships that just need the capital, all kinds of capital. So in my in my previous role, uh, I was able to direct, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars in grant making, including an initiative that I mentioned about around women and girls of color. And one of the things that I'm most proud of is that we didn't design a strategy in a room. We built a mechanism called the Women and Girls of Color Design Council, where women of color with lived experience and technical expertise built the strategy itself. So that is what I would say a liberation practice looks like. Not just funding change, but changing who gets to define what change is, particularly for those like those who are in the worst situations in conflict and natural disasters that have the least agency, get to uh design an investment strategy that is for and by them. I think that's the innovation, is if we can allow those with the least power to have agency, and that can mean that could be in the form of these kinds of design councils. Community foundations have been doing this. Uh, you know, governments have something called participatory budget making. Uh, so it's it's it's not uncommon that you could do this in impact investing, you could do this in private philanthropy, you could do this in humanitarian aid spaces. So I think there's a real um there's a real opportunity here uh for us to think differently, to operate differently, and the result is transformational, right? Um and that that requires uh a shift in thinking, right? And a and a release of control, right? My friend Glenn Gaelick just wrote a book called Control, um, how big giving can shift uh their uh their ways of giving. So uh I think there's a lot uh out there to look towards in order to do this, but it just it takes it's gonna take some some doing.

SPEAKER_00 15:54

So many examples are coming into my mind of things I've witnessed that match what you've just laid out. Like, and I would love to keep pulling that thread and bring it back maybe to this issue of refugees and forced displacement. And you already did that a little bit, but let's think about some of the ways in which you've described the potential for philanthropy to be liberatory and the the way that we can dismantle systems that are designed to reduce and oppress? How would you draw some connections between that, what you're doing, and what you know about the humanitarian space? Is it is it what you said, is it really just putting money and decision-making power into communities who are on the front lines of disaster? Like what are some other ways that this refugee space that you've inhabited for a long time, how can we leverage some of the learning and innovation you're doing now in the philanthropic space?

SPEAKER_01 16:47

Well, you know, uh, when I was working in this space, there were some, you know, uh interesting gains made at that time. Um, you know, I'm gonna date myself here a little bit, but things like in uh in South Sudan in camps, there were, there was just the idea that listening to women and their issues of gathering firewood and being raped on the way to gather firewood, putting the water closer, having, you know, ways of making sure that their safety was paramount, right? So that was actually making sure that refugee women or displaced women had a seat at the table when designing where the camps were gonna go, right? Same with um understanding in refugee camps in Guinea with Liberian and Sierra Leonean refugees, that there needed to be, you know, lights on the way to uh go to the bathroom. And so integrating the voices of women and children and not designing camps just for men, right? So those types of things are small, small things that we could do, which now I think I hope are regularly done, but it is gonna take these large institutions and agencies of humanitarian aid to integrate this idea of local expertise and local knowledge. But not just that, like it is about what I mentioned before, fund locally led organizations to support them in their own communities. Part of the problem is that humanitarian aid is a still a colonial, top-down power structure that does not take into take into account what is happening locally. And so I think it is always gonna be about agency. It is always gonna be about integrating the local knowledge, the local expertise, and shifting power at that level. And there's actually a great uh organization, there's a great fund right now called the Resilio Fund, um, run by Fatima Um Torre, who is currently, you know, experimenting with that idea. So philanthropy can do this uh and is trying, but I think it's that whole system and institution that hold sometimes hold us back because institutions are just things, you know, they're behemoths, but there are people behind that. And so I think in changing institutions means changing people within them.

SPEAKER_00 19:28

Yeah, I think that I think there are probably many places in the world where you would see the progress that you would hope for in some places, right? The the provision of solar lights to make sure that areas stay well lit and safe, the placement of water dispersement within camps. I mean, I was in Bangladesh at the end of last year and bore witness to a woman living in a shelter with a door that had a hinge for the first time in her entire displacement crisis. Like, I mean, a hinge on a door that she could close and have privacy and some semblance of safety was like life-changing for her. And and I I agree with you. We're I'm I'm working, of course, for the UN Refugee Agency, but we're clear that nothing gets done at the camp level without the support and input of local partners and local expertise. They make the trains run. Um, so I appreciate, and of course, I know Fonta over at Resilio Fund and am so interested in sort of what they're pioneering in this space as well. So thank you for raising, you know, some of the more innovative work I think that's bubbling in a moment that frankly feels kind of scary as aid funding is decreasing, but you know, crises are increasing. Where's it all gonna come from? And you've pointed us in the direction of some possible sort of solutions and bright spots.

SPEAKER_01 20:49

Yeah, and I think it's uh, yeah, so thank you for that because I I do believe that obviously there's been a lot of advancement. And I think it's uh it's also then that next step, right? That next step. So we can do a lot of these um great solutions at the local level. And then that next step is what is the transformational move, right, that gets us out of these small steps, right? They're small steps and they're great. What is the transformational next move, right? Then it becomes like, are we being intersectional, right? Are we connecting these things together? Climate, gender, are we funding and moving to the to the level that we need to be to actually enact that transformation? Because what we actually ultimately want to do, right, is not have to do this anymore, right? Uh we don't want to be in this position. So are we in are we being intersectional? Are we also doing the political analysis? Like there's I appreciate that there's been advancement, right, in the way that we are providing services and funding. But the power issue is always gonna be there. The power dynamic is always gonna be there. What are we doing to advance that at a really transformational level?

SPEAKER_00 22:11

Yeah, yeah. I um, yeah, I mean, there's so much food for thought here. It's like a it's like a core, you're you're giving us like a mini masterclass, if you will, in um in transformative philanthropy. And I hope what listeners are taking away, though, is that there is, even in a time that feels so chaotic, and even in a time when so many funding streams have been decreased or sort of dissolved altogether, I want the listener to appreciate that there is still so much experimentation and invention and innovation happening in philanthropy. And in the relationship that good philanthropy is forging with local groups, with local expertise, with groups that are looking to bust up sort of systems of power that are designed to not put, you know, those most impacted in the driver's seat. I think it's important for us to remember that this work is happening and that we can be a part of it uh as we learn more about it. So shifting, shifting just a little bit, um, back to the name of the podcast, Not Really Strangers. And I want to know what the idea of stranger means to you.

SPEAKER_01 23:19

Uh, wow. Okay. Well, right now, stranger feels like one of the most politically loaded words in the English language. I think we're living through a moment where strangeness, otherness, foreignness is being weaponized. And so I think where entire populations are being made to feel like strangers in countries that they built, right? Communities that they've called home for generations. And yet I've also experienced, you know, radical hospitality that exists on the other side of that. I've walked into communities in the middle of a crisis, in the middle of like conflict, as a complete outsider, and I've been fed, I've been sheltered, I've been trusted with stories. Um, and there's a human impulse, I think, towards connection that is older and more stubborn than the fear that's being cultivated right now. And I hold on to that. Um, the stranger in so many traditions is also the sacred guest, and I think we need to reclaim that. And there are so many instances that I can tell you of being in the Middle East and or being in the middle of Afghanistan and having people um just completely um bring me in, gather me in. And as somebody who, you know, has also felt like a stranger in my own country, um, I hold on to that.

SPEAKER_00 24:41

I love that notion of radical hospitality. And I also appreciate, I mean, even the story you told at the beginning of the individual in the face of the tsunami asking you about New Orleans. I mean, here's a stranger who, like, with one question becomes like a compassionate ally in your life and bearing witness to what your people have gone through when he's in the midst of tragedy. Like that, I'm just so interested in how how easy it is to bridge the difference and to bridge the gap that frankly is made out to be much bigger and more treacherous than it really is. Um, I think you've broken that down so beautifully for us. And I love the, I love the title of the podcast because we're not really, right? There's so much that runs common through us. Um, and it's just uh, yeah, it's it's our job to break through it and to bridge and to really try to find areas of commonality um in a moment of such fracture.

SPEAKER_01 25:36

And you know, one more thing about that is that last week I was in South Africa and um right outside of Johannesburg, I got to go to the caves where they found the first peoples. And just it's called the cradle of humanity. And just the name of it, right? Like where we were all born, where we all come from in the whole world, you know, it just really, really brought it home for me. Um so I really appreciate the name of this podcast and the fact that you asked me about that that idea of what is being a strange or what does it mean to me at this moment in the world? Being able to see that, being able to like be in the caves where these first people were born, our, our actually, our actual humanity was birthed from this place, um, was just it's very meaningful.

SPEAKER_00 26:24

Yeah, and it links back to where you started us thinking about our collective shared migration and the story of ancestors. Like if anybody was listening and didn't think that was about them, they were wrong, right? Like it is all this shared, unifying story. Um, so so let's take all of those people. Let's take this question of humanity and let's put everybody around a dinner table. I love to like end on this question. And you can take it in any direction that you want. You can tell me what you'd like to serve. You can tell me about the people at that table. Like, what is that in this moment of breaking breaking bread is like a way to, you know, bring people together? How would you, what do you want to do with that dinner party? What what story could we tell?

SPEAKER_01 27:05

Oh my goodness. Well, uh, this is a great question. Um, well, first of all, the table has to be really, really long. Um, like a like a big uh we have a place in Washington State called the Grobe of the Patriarchs, and it's these massive trees that are a thousand years old. So it has to be one of those. Um, and we have to eat something like Ethiopian or Nepali or Indian food, you know, the kind that you eat on a shared platter because, you know, the act of eating from a shared platter with your hands, it's already doing the work of the evening, right? Because you all have to like dig in. Um and uh there has to be jolif rice because there will obviously be a huge debate, loving debate, about who's who's the best, what country has the best jolif rice, right? So everybody there's gonna be a huge hot heated debate about that. And then like um, I think when we get to the dessert part, there's probably gonna be a big debate about like what's the best dessert, but my best dessert is mango sticky rice because in homage to the years, the years that I spent in Southeast Asia. Um, and then if I think about um who's at the table, uh Wangaria Mathai, because I want to understand how she held her joy while she was doing impossible work. I would love to talk to her about that. James Baldwin, because every dinner party needs somebody who will say the thing that makes everybody go quiet for a moment. Uh, and I think Tory Tony Morrison for that same reason, because she knows she just knows how to say the thing and everybody's like, whoop. And then I think um my mom, because she makes any gathering a full-blown party. I think also a group of women that I met in a displacement camp in Angola, who I think about a lot. Uh, because they were just coming out of 25 years of civil war, and uh I met them right when they were coming out of the bush. Um oh my gosh. And Prince would be the musical guest, of course, because we're gonna have to dance.

SPEAKER_00 29:22

I love it. I love it, of course.

SPEAKER_01 29:24

Yeah, yeah, that would be it. And then of course I would want my kids there because I would want them to I would want them to hear every word, right? Like just so that they could soak up it all, soak it all up.

SPEAKER_00 29:37

I love where you've taken us today. I love the conversation about new modes of of cap of capital and phil you know, philanthropic investment. I love that you have a history in this space of refugees and forced displacement, but that your career has taken you to so many other places so that you're able to kind of reflect back to those of us, like all the different ways that we can walk through this door and make change. Um, and it's been an honor to speak with you, and I'm just grateful for your time.

SPEAKER_01 30:02

Oh, Suzanne, thank you so much. This has been wonderful, and it's just been so great to connect with you. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 30:13

Thanks so much for listening. Your time is valuable, and it means a lot that you've chosen to spend it here. You can find today's show notes, including how to connect with today's guest, at unrefugees.org slash not really strangers. That's UNREFUGES.org slash not really strangers. While you're there, I hope you'll consider making a donation to the organization I lead, USA for UNHCR, to help us provide more support for refugees here in the U.S. and around the world. If this episode was impactful, please take a moment to review the show and share the episode with a friend or family member. This small action will help us have a much bigger impact. Thanks so much. Don't be a stranger.