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About This Episode

“If we build a cleaner society where we understand these systems of criminality, we keep crime at bay…that will lower the chance for disadvantaged people and other people who fall on hard times to actually go towards criminality then to become themselves victims there.” This is the kind of future that the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) is working towards and that its co-founder Paul Radu imagines—one where dirty or illicit money is no longer a cause and a consequence of hard times.

In this episode of Rewilded!, host Malaika Cheney-Coker sits down with investigative journalist Paul Radu, OCCRP’s co-founder and head of innovation to discuss illicit money’s connection to the social impact sector. Drawing connections between speculative fiction—specifically Ignited Word’s flash fiction series, The Reviewer of Pious Money—and OCCRP’s investigations into corruption, money laundering, and illicit finance, Paul unpacks how corrupt actors systematically build ecosystems around themselves, why individual compliance checks often miss the bigger picture, and what it really takes to safeguard civil society from dark money.

With an estimated $3 trillion in illicit funds circulating through the global economy every year, criminal networks inevitably spill far and deep into our society, and philanthropy and the social impact sector are not immune from it. From reputation laundering and improper use of donor-advised funds to high-level "criminal angel investors" insulating their empires through charitable fronting, the boundary between doing good and enabling harm is far more porous than most leaders realize.

Key Takeaways

• The Reality of Reputation Laundering: How bad actors re-invest up to 5% of their fortunes into philanthropy, politics, and media to build "impermeable ecosystems" that protect their core enterprises.
• Beyond Black and White: The ethical gray areas that real-world whistleblowers and compliance officers face when dark money directly funds desperately needed social impact projects.
• Systemic Resistance vs. Small Fish: Why fighting financial crime requires dismantling enabling infrastructures—e.g. lawyers, accountants, and backdated websites—rather than targeting vulnerable people lower down the chain.
• Proactive Protection: Practical advice for non-profit executives, foundation boards, and social entrepreneurs to audit financial pipelines and understand institutional risks before a reputational crisis hits.

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Vaida Odongo imagines a world where a young woman running an education program in Kisumu, Kenya could write a grant in less than an hour. 🌈 She has access to funder networks, and in fact, it is the funder that has reached out to her.

How do we get there? Join Ignited Word’s Malaika Cheney-Coker and network weaver Vaida Odongo on Episode 2 of Rewilded! as they discuss why a lot of funders are fed up with the status quo and eager to explore more collaborative and relationship-based ways of working, why restricted funding keeps social innovators stuck in silos, why most funders gladly pay for shiny new communication tools while completely ignoring the invisible human glue that holds networks together, and what happens when we replace lengthy application forms and reports with radical, real-world trust.“

“The one thing that I know is that at the very base of any network, we are all dealing with people. And so people ARE relationships. And when you look at it that way, networks become less complex and they become this beautiful living thing that actually has and serves a purpose." —Vaida Odongo

We've convened as a team because all is not well at the Gulf Coast CRX in New Orleans in the year 2040. The problem? A mysterious source of money that threatens to upend a coalition that could change the lives of many people.

On our very first episode we take a look at the medium of flash fiction as a means to explore possible futures for philanthropy and social impact work.

For those listening, we invite you to join the conversation and imagination exercise by answering this question: "When we consider the future of community development finance in the U.S. what do we imagine?”