Roxane Jessi writes about how communities organise, fund and sustain their own work, and the place of creative and cultural expression in it. As institutional funding retreats, community-led models are being asked to carry more, and her reporting follows what people build in that gap.

She reports from where the work happens. In 2026 she covered the International AIDS Conference in Rio de Janeiro, where artists, filmmakers and community organisers were making the case for a response that funding cuts had put in question. Her writing has appeared in Global Development (Guardian) and Devex, and she writes for the Burning Man Journal on the global regional network and on Burners Without Borders, a volunteer-driven network supporting community resilience and civic action in dozens of countries. She has also written on art grant programmes and on how creative practice is used for community building and collective healing.

Her book Once Upon a Time in the Dust: Burning Man Around the World was published by Burning Man Publishing in 2023. It follows a year spent at seven regional events on six continents, exploring how community forms around similar principles in widely different cultures.

She has worked extensively on international development projects, evaluating how programmes are designed and sustained and making recommendations for how they could be better anchored in the communities they serve. She also runs workshops on art, community and collective healing.

She has travelled to more than 80 countries and documents what she experiences through writing and photography.