Capita Co-Founder + CEO Joe Waters shared the following holiday note with our closest supporters and collaborators on December 23, 2019. We republish it here this New Year’s Eve with the hope that the insights and inspirations drawn from our work in 2019 will help you build a world in which all young children and their families flourish in 2020 and beyond. Happy New Year.

Dear friends,

With the holiday season and the end of another decade upon us, I wanted to write to thank you for your encouragement and support during 2019, and share some of our thinking as we look to the year and decade ahead.

What’s happened

With your support, during 2019 Capita has:

Published our first white paper, Tomorrow is Now: New Directions for Children’s Philanthropy, to share learnings and perspective from our first year of work while shaping current thinking about philanthropic investment in the flourishing of young children and families.
Through our collaboration with KnowledgeWorks, we launched Foundations for Flourishing Futures. This look ahead is intended to help stakeholders examine what emerging issues and future possibilities will impact collective action to shape dignified futures for all young children and their families.
Considered the ‘right’ to child care, how to confront the epidemic of stress, and the contributions of neuroscience to answering the most urgent human questions.
Brought long-term thinking and intersectional perspectives to audiences in Macau, South Africa, and across the United States, to forums on the transformation of pediatric primary care and early childhood innovation, and in conversations with architects thinking about the redesign of pediatric primary care clinics, illustrators making culturally diverse work for young children, and serious game designers imagining how to use gaming to build empathy for child care workers.

Of course, there is even more good work to come in 2020. We will kick off our year in a big way during an evening with master storyteller Ray Christian on January 20th in Greenville, SC. We hope you will make plans to join us.

Insights

Our work this year has led to some key insights that are worth sharing.

As a guest of the DO MORE Foundation, I visited the Leave No Young Child Behind Initiative in Nkomazi District, Mpumalanga, South Africa where DO MORE is supporting the implementation of South Africa’s Integrated National ECD Policy.

The culture of the Technocene encourages us to put our trust in tools, especially digital ones, but more valuable than tools are cultures that value the integrity, stability, and beauty that are at the heart of our relationships with our families, neighbors, communities, land, and planet. We must develop new approaches to (re)building these “cultures of respect” (Eric Freyfogle) that foster relational health and well-being.
Framing matters and “cradle to career” isn’t a good frame. Our destination in life isn’t a career. It is flourishing. We are made for love, beauty, self-government, and relationship. Education, health care, workforce programs, and the like are to help us attain a life of dignity and purpose. While “cradle to career” framing might be a pragmatic frame to entice business leaders to support our cause, we risk allowing that narrative to construct a reality which is counterproductive to the end goal of flourishing.
The loss of play continues to be concerning and is further evidence of our disenchantment with the world. Modeled by parents and other caregivers stressed out by the pressures of making ends meet, “total work” has become the child’s first teacher and “productivity” a language learned at home and at school. Play, therefore, is considered a luxury good for those who can afford it and children are taught from their earliest years to avoid such unproductive activity until they’ve “earned it.” Child care centers and schools that deeply value unproductive play thus become sites of resistance against the dominant total work culture.
We should spend more time working towards and thinking about how “to maximize the conditions in society that produce the best people, the sorts of humans that we would like to have as friends, spouses, neighbors, relatives, and fellow citizens” rather than maximizing the conditions that create the most overall wealth. This insight is drawn from David Graeber’s masterful Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, but it strikes me as particularly applicable to any work in education, health, advocacy, etc. that happens on behalf of children. We will be spending more time in 2020 thinking about how the future can be one in which it is easier to produce the best people. What policies and systems would we change “to make that kind of society where it is easier to be good” (Peter Maurin) and not just survive (for most) or thrive (for some) economically?

Reading and listening

Despite the vigorous competition for likes, clicks, and attention, I have found some time for book learning. George Scialabba’s Slouching Toward Utopia, Ivan Illich’s Tools of Conviviality, Priya Parker’s The Art of Gathering, Adrian Pabst’s The Demons of Liberal Democracy, Nicholas Diat’s A Time to Die, Jean Danielou’s The Lord of History, and Michel Houellebecq’s Submission have left lasting impressions, changed the way I thought about something, or confirmed an intuition. Podcasts including Dolly Parton’s America, The World in Time, Confessions with Giles Fraser, and Sarah Smarsh’s The Homecomers have become not-to-be-missed listening.

A more just and fraternal world

In March of this year through the generosity of the Felician Sisters, a community of Roman Catholic religious women for whom I volunteer, I had the opportunity to travel to Assisi, Italy where in the year 1206 Francis of Assisi renounced his father’s wealth and abandoned all worldly goods to live in such a way that others might have more.

This image has, in many respects, defined my year. It has encouraged me to better understand the ways in which how we live taxes those who are less powerful, the role of turbo-capitalism in fostering a “throwaway culture” that discards the vulnerable, the weak, and unprofitable, and the alternative models of economic life and culture which we must develop to build a world in which all children and families flourish. Assisi is a “prophecy of a more just and fraternal world” (Pope Francis) and my time there was an important source of insight for Capita’s work.

Notwithstanding the headlines, it is my encounter with Assisi during the early part of this year that has sustained me in hope. It is a sign of possibility that despite the harshness of our politics, tenderness can have the final say; despite inequality, we can commit to fraternity and cooperation as economic values not just pious platitudes; despite living on an increasingly uninhabitable planet, we can acknowledge and act on our obligations of justice and solidarity to future generations; despite an epidemic of loneliness, we can recommit ourselves to love as the foundation and goal of any future worth having.

Peace, and please keep in touch,

Joe Waters

Co-Founder + CEO

Capita

December 23, 2019

Blowing Rock, North Carolina

An End-of-Decade Note