Have you imagined what the world would look and feel like if we invested in life?

Pause with that question for a moment.

Notice what arises in your mind—and in your body.

Perhaps you see thriving communities: children walking safely to school, elders receiving the care they deserve as they age, and everyone accessing nourishing food that supports their health. You may envision healthcare services that prioritize wellness and are accessible to all, public spaces where people—across all identities—gather, rest, and live with dignity and joy. For many of us, this vision is clear.

Across the world, communities have long been building pieces toward a vision of a flourishing future for all, investing in life. Their efforts span mutual aid, grassroots organizing, and cooperative economies; community seed banks and food sovereignty initiatives that protect land, knowledge, and provide access to meals and socio-emotional support; along with feminist community centers and grassroots care networks that provide shelter, safety, and collective support. Rooted in care, interdependence, and collective power, these are grassroots and movement infrastructures of survival that honor life and promote wellbeing. Built from the ground up, these infrastructures do more than meet immediate needs—they lay the groundwork for creating new community systems of support that are centered on improving quality of life.

Envisioning a world where everyone is valued—and actively working toward creating that vision—is essential. It is how communities exercise agency and restore dignity to withstand systems that were never built to sustain life.

Over generations, this work unfolds in the face of some of the most brutally invasive systems of our time, further demonstrating the urgency of investing in life. Under the current political and economic order, we are navigating systems that were built to concentrate more and more profit at all costs. These systems are exporting authoritarianism and violence, all while producing some of the highest levels of wealth inequality in modern history.

Investing in Life: A Profound Contradiction

As communities work to sustain life and protect one another, oppressive systems that impede this work continue to accumulate vast concentrations of wealth. Meanwhile, institutions that claim to serve public good—such as governments and universities—are directing billions in investments toward enabling these systems of harm.

To date, these systems are creating occupations, ethnic-cleansing, genocides, inequality, war, and mass displacement as profitable outcomes. Crisis—war, instability, forced migration, and ecological breakdown—fuels expansion of these systems, intensified by AI and technological infrastructures that scale surveillance and control. Populations are being tracked and managed through data-driven systems; borders are continuously militarized; private security markets are expanding by privatizing land, resources, and enforcement; and extractive economies deepen—fueling further displacement and dispossession, underscoring the need to invest in life.

Read the full article about divesting from systems of violence at Nonprofit Quarterly.