It is a chilly but rare clear day in Scotland as I sit down to write this reflection at one of my favourite cafés in Paisley. I’m entering my fourth year in the UK after emigrating from South Africa. I continue to make steady but slow progress in overcoming various challenges.

There is value in writing and sharing after-action reviews. Writing these reflections (and journaling most days) helps me to orient myself and reflect on how I must do things differently in the future. They might even help others to anticipate and avoid my mistakes.

While I had no big breakthroughs this year, I laid a good foundation for 2025.

My clients and colleagues have been complaining about how difficult fundraising has recently become in the UK for charities, social enterprises and community groups. They observe that there seems to be less funding available and much more competition for it. The overall mood of the UK third sector seems subdued.

Unfortunately, this situation is very familiar to me. It’s almost déjà vu. It reminds me of the situation facing the South African non-profit sector since the early 2000s. I know the endgame – how this can turn out since I’ve spent over two decades helping these organisations overcome these challenges.

Here are 10 trends I observed about how the third sector in South Africa adapted to the decline in funding. This may contain insights for UK charities.

This article describes the various challenges I overcame during my first, second and third years of living in Scotland after emigrating from South Africa in 2021.

After three years of making a concerted effort to integrate into Scottish culture and contribute to the country, I’m starting to feel increasingly at home.

This article will help people who have recently moved countries to gain perspective on how long it takes to integrate and the likely challenges they will encounter. People tend to feel reassured when they realise they’re on a journey and how others have also struggled. 

There is some debate about the job market in the third sector in the UK. It concerns whether organisations like charities and social enterprises struggle to find qualified staff because of a shortage of skilled job seekers. My article explores the different perspectives in this debate and offers advice for organisations struggling to recruit staff. This advice is based on my experience of looking for work in the UK.

This article describes my system for managing tasks and information. This system evolved over the past two and a half decades as I’ve consumed books, podcasts and blog posts on productivity, task management and personal knowledge management.

This system has enabled me to stay relatively sane as I’ve managed up to 20 simultaneous consulting projects across multiple continents.

It is a snowy day in Scotland as I write the first paragraphs of this reflection in December 2023. I’m entering my third year in the UK after emigrating from South Africa. I have continued to make steady progress on several fronts amidst a host of challenges.

I believe in the value of writing and sharing after-action reviews. You can read my previous end-of-year reflections from previous years which show how my career has evolved. Writing my reflections (and journaling daily) helps me to orient myself and reflect on how I must do things differently in the future. My reflections might even help others to learn from my experiences and avoid my mistakes.

Community wealth building (CWB) is a philosophy and approach to local economic development that is packaged into a coherent and marketable model. CWB is gaining traction in the UK.

CWB aims to promote economic activity and investment in local areas and enable equitable economic growth. It opposes the idea of extractive economics where wealth is taken out of communities by national and multinational corporations. It rather promotes generative economics and embraces concepts like localism and new municipalism. This involves prioritising local matters and increasing the autonomy of local municipalities or councils.

The Scottish Government has embraced this concept and is busy embedding it in policy.

This article introduces CWB and reflects on its value and limitations. It will be interesting to anyone involved in sustaining and growing a local economy. I wrote it to contribute to the discussion about CWB.

This debate has recently arisen several times in conversations with friends following my most recent article on artificial intelligence (AI).

I do not believe that AIs can produce art. This assertion applies to all fields of art such as music, fiction, poetry, drawings and sculpture. I struggle to imagine over 180,000 people attending a 10-week exhibition of the art-like outputs of an AI, whereas they happily did that for a recent Banksy exhibition in Glasgow.

An AI’s algorithmic outputs might produce things that look or sound very good, perhaps even be awe-inspiring or life-changing, but this is not art.

My home is now in Scotland. I emigrated from South Africa about two years ago.

The move has been predictably difficult. Nevertheless, we are 100% satisfied with our decision to move here. We have been proactively integrating into our new home country – forming relationships, embracing the culture, and enjoying the safe and abundant wilderness. We have hope for the future.

Someone recently asked me for advice on moving countries. This article highlights the three challenges we discussed.

Although I anticipated these challenges, I was unaware of how much work they would require to overcome. It would have helped if someone had clearly explained this to me. It would have given me more perspective. I’ve therefore written this article to help anyone thinking of moving to a new country in their middle age.

There is a lot of hype and anxiety about artificial intelligence (AI) nowadays. Everyone seems to be discussing it. I’ve been playing around with Chat GPT and exploring how management consultants and charities are using AI. I’ve also realised how many AI tools are already in our lives.

This article contains my thoughts on AIs. It follows several discussions, internet research and lots of reflection. The topic of AI is controversial and polarising. Some people are anxious and fatalistic; others are optimistic. People’s viewpoints seem entrenched.

The article explains that we will all end up using AI. This technology is not going to solve all our problems but neither will it replace all humans. It will be more useful than a cataclysmic threat, although millions of people will lose their current livelihoods because of it. AIs will amplify both the good and bad in human nature.