Until March 2020, I moved easily and seamlessly between my two roles and contexts that couldn’t be more different: a doctoral student at UMass, Amherst in Amherst, Massachusetts; Executive Director of Jitegemee Children’s Program (Jitegemee), a community development program in Machakos, Kenya. And then the COVID-19 pandemic struck. Flights stopped; work that could, shifted online; we were limited to our homes; travel was out of the question. During the time we were isolated and forced to stay indoors, there was the opportunity for reflection and considering new ways of being. Following the police murder of George Floyd and the summer of 2020 BLM protests, the international development sector had its own overdue moment of reckoning, which led to online conversations, Zoom workshops, media reports and so on and a flurry of anti-racist statements from academic and NGO organizations alike. In this dissertation I use performance autoethnography to offer my embodied critique of an ongoing process of (de)centering Whiteness in my academic scholarship as well as in my work as a development practitioner. That summer, I too was involved in my own personal moment of reckoning as a White development scholar-practitioner, born in apartheid South Africa, working between Kenya and the USA. How could I effectively lead an organization halfway across the world, situated in a completely different context, much less during a global pandemic that rendered visits also impossible? We started considering how we could realize a transition at Jitegemee to ‘local leadership,’ by then a tired sector buzzword that was rarely implemented, in ways that would minimize disruption and harm to the organization and children we supported. This dissertation traces that back-and-forth journey, in community, in conversation, engaged in a process of care and collaboration. I share this dissertation as an offering of love and solidarity; an offering about a process that is incomplete and ongoing. These reflections, our experiences, and challenges with this work, are a snapshot of what I/we did, where I/we were, and how I/we individually and collectively wrestled with the complexities of the on-the-ground, lived realities of what it meant to us to (de)center Whiteness. You are invited to join this journey.