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01| There is a sentence that gets said about children raised in poverty, always kindly, usually by people who mean well: bless their hearts, they come from such terrible circumstances. It is a sentence with a consequence. What follows it, reliably, is a lowered expectation. The teacher grades softer. The programme sets an easier target. The funder calls it a success at a level nobody would accept from a school across town. Pity arrives dressed as compassion and leaves behind

01| Bottom-up progress fails — by definition — the moment decision-making power concentrates in a few hands. That much is obvious and most people we talk to agree with it immediately. What they agree with next is the thing that ruins them: that the alternative is everyone deciding everything together, in a room, until consensus arrives. 02| It does not arrive. What arrives is the Stupid Crowd. A dominant voice pushes, quieter people fold, and the group produces an agreement t

DIVERSITY IS NOT A COLOR PICTURE 01| Diversity, in this book, means diversity of opinion. Not a photograph of a workforce. Not a page of headshots in an annual report. Different ways of reading the same problem, different assumptions about what will work, different instincts about what a barrio actually needs — that is the asset, and it is the only part of the subject we are interested in. 02| Melanin does not build anything. The shape of your genitals does not design a produ

COMPETITIVE COLLABORATION 01| Competition is not a choice. Wherever recognition, money or opportunity are scarce, people compete. Deny it and it does not stop; it goes underground and runs as informal hierarchy, hidden alliance and quiet sabotage. Acknowledging competition is not cynicism. It is accuracy. 02| The standard response in the social sector is to suppress it in favour of the collective, and the result is pathological harmony: a surface of agreement over a floor of

PROUD TO BE WOKE 01| Woke is used as an insult. We take it as an honour, and we would rather say so on page one of this chapter than have it discovered as an embarrassment later. This is not a plea for tolerance. It is a declaration of what the platform is, and anyone deciding whether to work with us is entitled to know it before the first meeting rather than after the first disagreement. 02| Start with what racism actually is to us, because the moral framing is not the usefu