As we welcome the next cohort of MRF scholars to the Sustainability Institute (SI) to begin their exploration into what it takes to lead in complex, uncertain, and rapidly changing worlds, we reflect on what was experienced in 2025 as a reminder why this partnership matters.
The partnership between The Mandela Rhodes Foundation and the SI unites two communities committed to nurturing ethical, imaginative, and courageous leadership for Africa’s future. As the next cohort of scholars arrived this week they will discover the SI is a place where emerging leaders experience how learning can be grounded, guided by values, and connected to the living world.
In our current global ecological crisis and social fragmentation, this collaboration offers a glimpse of what’s possible when leadership becomes an act of imagination and when courage, care, and creativity meet at the edge of change.
Project areas the students explored in 2025 included food systems, knowledge systems, governance, and climate. Scholars were invited to move out of just theory into a more practical exploration of the inter-connectivity of these human created systems with nature, community and complexity.
Across these project areas the MRF scholars worked within ecotones. An ecotone is the transitional zone where two ecosystems meet and is a space rich in diversity, tension, and possibility. Ecologists call this the edge effect because these spaces don’t just hold what’s already there, they create the conditions for new and unique life to emerge.
The project areas have a shared thread of grappling with systems in flux. The search for just climate futures, centring indigenous knowledge in education, rethinking governance and how policy is communicated and understood, and regenerative food systems; all are working within ecotones, where something old is breaking down and something new is trying to emerge.
What might grow in the ecotone? Edward Keenan reflects on The Mandela Rhodes Foundation 2025 Second Year Programme
On the evening of our Second Year Programme exhibition, I watched people from across the Mandela Rhodes community – guests, alumni, friends of the Foundation and scholars in residence – move slowly through the room. They leaned in toward posters and screens, tasted and talked over dishes prepared by the scholars, listened to poetry, and traced the shape of an app made tangible. Not scanning for outcomes, but following the story of how something became possible. You could feel it in the pace of the evening, slower and more curious than spaces like this often allow. Scholars stood beside their year’s journey made visible, not selling it, but holding it with a kind of honest care. It felt like we were gathered at an edge.
That framing mattered because it made room for the truth of this year, the beauty of what was built alongside the uncertainty, friction, repair, and the quiet discipline it takes to stay present when you cannot yet see the full path ahead.
In many ways, this is the work of leadership right now. Leadership as a practice of orientation, staying grounded amid complexity, resisting the rush to certainty, and allowing yourself to be shaped by the very change you are trying to make.
The world as an ecotone moment
It has become trite to say we live in uncertain times. But the word “uncertainty” can sometimes make what we are facing feel lighter than it is. We are living through overlapping crises that are reshaping the ground beneath us: climate change, technological acceleration that outpaces our social contracts, migration and conflict that keep remaking questions of safety and belonging, and, and , and. Many of the systems we inherited are cracking under pressure, and what comes next is still incomplete, contested, and forming.
In moments like this, we are often told that the goal is to restore what was, to return to the world as it used to be, to rebuild yesterday’s sense of order. It is an understandable longing because predictability can feel like safety. But that promise of return can also become a kind of distraction, because it assumes that what came before was fair, or sustainable, when in truth it was often held together by exclusions, silences, and quiet violences we learned to normalise.
So maybe what we are experiencing is not simply a loss of sanity, or a sudden deviation from a more coherent past. Perhaps this is what systems do when conditions change. They reach their limits and enter thresholds where new forms become possible, even if the process is messy and uneven.
I therefore argue that this global moment is an ecotone: unsettled, yes, but also fertile. I’ve learnt this year that in nature, it is often at the edges, where ecosystems overlap, that life becomes most inventive. New combinations take hold, diversity gathers, and the boundary itself turns generative. And if that is true ecologically, it may also be true socially and politically.
The question, then, is what kind of leadership helps life emerge at the edge. What kind of leadership can resist the reflex to force premature certainty, and instead stay with transition long enough for something more honest, more inclusive, and more resilient to take shape.
A programme designed for the grey
The Mandela Rhodes Foundation Second Year Programme, in partnership with the Sustainability Institute, has become a practice ground for that kind of leadership.
This is not a programme where scholars are asked to arrive with the answer. It is not a space for heroic problem-solving from a distance. It is a space for putting leadership into action through co-design, in relationship with living systems and communities.
Over five months, scholars worked in transdisciplinary teams across food, climate, knowledge, and governance systems. Again and again, they met the same invitation from the holding team: move toward the edge. Toward the in-between spaces where things are not settled and where the “right” approach is not obvious. Between expert knowledge and lived experience. Between urgency and reflection.
And importantly, the programme does not pretend these tensions can be eliminated. Instead, it asks scholars to practise the mindsets required to navigate them with integrity:
- Sitting in the grey
- Practicing curiosity
- Valuing many perspectives
- Elevating the contributions and leadership of lived and living experience especially voices historically overlooked
- Extending generous hospitality
- Learning through doing
These are not abstract ideals but muscles to be built. The programme, then, becomes a kind of gym for the inner and relational capacities that complexity demands.
Or, to borrow a phrase from the great Bayo Akomolafe that has stayed with me all year, in urgent times we must slow down. Not because urgency is not real, but because speed can become a way of avoiding the deeper work. The work of listening well, building trust and noticing what the system is actually asking of us, rather than what we wish it would ask.
That slowing down is uncomfortable. It runs against how many of us have been trained. We are rewarded for certainty, polish, and outcomes we can count. The process can feel indulgent when the world is burning. And yet, in complex systems, the process is often the intervention.
The SI’s director Vanessa Von Der Heyde said this programme represents the invitation to “reactivate our tools for creation” and resonates with the greater work of the Sustainability Institute. Imagination is a collective capacity and, like a muscle, strengthens when people come together to envision, experiment, and create in service of life.
One scholar said “The Sustainability Institute tour felt more authentic and embodied and grounded our learning in real stories of people, place, and purpose.” This reflection echoes what we hold dear at the SI: that learning happens through doing, sensing, and connecting. When we engage the head, heart, and hands together, imagination becomes not just an idea, it becomes a practice.
