These are worrying times for civil society around the world as governments seek to demonise NGOs and their foreign funders. In the United States, an unpredictable and populist new administration appears poised to abandon the global fight against climate change and disengage from global platforms.

In Russia, a sustained government campaign to demonise NGOs and their foreign funders threatens to put the country’s civil society in a fatal stranglehold. According to a new report by Amnesty International on the effects of the “foreign agents” act in Russia, it is not just human rights and environmental groups that have fallen foul of government: a Russian philanthropic foundation supporting science, and education and consumer rights groups, are also on the list. Similar crackdowns have been taking place in Egypt, Uganda, Ethiopia and China, to name but a few.

But as worrying as some of these developments undoubtedly are, maybe they will also be a chance to refocus the development agenda towards doing more with less. Although the idea of local participation in development has been explored since the 1980s, efforts to build local ownership have been consistently hampered by the demands of external actors (donors and other implementing NGOs) and their top-down systems of accountability and control. This has created a civil society sector that lives from project to project, following the ebbs and flows of donor resources and interests and with often weak local constituencies. This has done little to strengthen local organisations that local people recognise and support and that form part of the local fabric for civic action – and which will ultimately allow those external actors to leave.

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Enter community philanthropy. Over the last twenty years a quiet revolution has been taking place in communities around the world, outside the machinery and beyond the radar of big development. Community foundations have been part of the fabric of philanthropy in the United States and Canada for the past century and were introduced in the United Kingdom in the 1980s. But most of this recent development has been taking place in the global south. This new set of organisations – community foundations, women’s funds, environmental funds and other grassroots grantmakers – has emerged in countries as diverse as Romania and Zimbabwe, Vietnam and Mexico. They have been shaped by local context and culture and by individuals often frustrated by the failures of traditional development aid, anxious about the sense of alienation and disenchantment in their communities, and inspired by the belief that without local resources, local leadership and local buy-in, development projects will continue to land like fireworks – to flash spectacularly and then die. Although many of these organisations were established as one-off experiments in their local environments, there is now clear evidence of a distinct “community philanthropy field” characterised by some unique characteristics and ways of working.

Without local buy-in development projects will continue to land like fireworks – flashing spectacularly and then dying

Firstly, while external resources may form part of their funding structure, they all seek to build a culture of local philanthropy, especially local giving by ordinary people. This emphasis on local assets (money and others) is a critical strategy for growing local ownership and participation, a deliberate rebuke of the traditional “beneficiary” mentally that development aid often imposes. Building a local support base is about building a local constituency for civil society action, getting people to think, engage with and care about a cause. It is much harder to designate an organisation a “foreign agent” when its donors include hundreds of local citizens.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Community philanthropy encourages local giving by ordinary people. Photograph: ranplett/Getty Images

Secondly, these organisations deliberately seek to support local community groups working on all manner of different issues that represent the fabric of local civil society. Such groups are often beyond the reach or imagination of donors who prefer – for a variety of reasons – to channel their funds through big institutions who look and sound like them. Community philanthropy organisations deliberately use grants to local groups as a way to strengthen and invest in the community around them, to feed the pipeline and strengthen the capacities of organic, people-led action, and in that sense, they are often not “specialists” working on a particular issue but rather work holistically responding to a range of different issues that their community might encounter.



At a very profound level community philanthropy organisations are building trust in the communities they serve

And finally, at a very profound level, community philanthropy organisations are building trust within, between and among the communities they serve, through the transparent stewardship and flow of resources, by deliberately fostering multiple relationships at the local level, with those who have resources and can be convinced to give, those who have ideas and aspirations whom a small grant can make all the difference and those who for the first time are made to realise that they too possess assets too. A three-legged stool of assets, capacities, and trust.

In Kenya, lack of access to water was the entry point for the Kenya Community Development Foundation’s (KCDF) engagement with a community in West Makueni County, some 75 miles from Nairobi. Through a series of dialogues and consultations the community came to realise that if everyone contributed a small amount, not only could the community start to address some of its own water problems but it could also demand that government play its role too. This model, which KCDF has replicated across the country seeks to challenge a dependency mindset which still runs deep, by tapping into the intrinsic nature of “horizontal philanthropy” that is deeply embedded systems of giving and reciprocity that form the backbone of local communities.

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In this model, Pamoja4Change, communities are encouraged first to value their own assets, to pool them together and then approach others – local government, wealthy or middle class Kenyans – as “co-investors” in local development processes. KCDF was established twenty years ago as the country’s first public foundation by local civil society leaders – and with support from the Ford Foundation and Aga Khan Foundations – not only offers a platform through which Kenyans and international donors can give, but it has also helped communities across the country to build their own long-term funds which generate interest to reinvested by community members.

In Nepal, over the last twenty years, Tewa, a women’s fund, has built up a network of over 5,000 individual Nepali donors: many of these are ordinary women who themselves have benefitted from Tewa’s grants in the past and want to give back. Until very recently, although international donors supported staff costs and the building of offices, on principle Tewa only used resources it had raised locally for its grant-making as way of demonstrating the power of local assets and local buy-in. After the 2015 earthquake, two decades of working with local women’s groups across the country meant that Tewa was able to respond immediately, leveraging its networks to identify and reach those worst affected with money and emergency supplies (food, temporary shelters, sanitary items etc), that they really needed while serving as a touch point for outpourings of help both from local and international sources.

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The Dalia Association is the first Palestinian community foundation. Like KCDF and Tewa, Dalia Association does not focus on a particular issue – such as health or the environment – but rather on demonstrating how local development processes can be done in more participatory ways.

“We believe in the community’s right to control its resources and its development,” says Dalia’s director Aisha Mansour. The stories go on but the themes are the same: “mindset change,” “putting people in control”, “connecting people with each other around shared issues,” “building trust,” “restoring hope.”

These all serve as examples of the rapidly growing field of community philanthropy, a source of sustainable local funding for local priorities which has been largely overlooked in conversations around local ownership and financing for development.

There is clearly a need to think differently about how international aid programmes are designed and delivered and for tough questions to be asked about whether the current approaches and institutions are still fit for purpose. Community philanthropy offers a way to re-evaluate our work. As the global space for civil society shrinks and it becomes clear that external donor funding can become toxic for local civil society groups, local constituencies become more critical than ever. And local supporters, no matter how small their contributions, become more important than ever. By encouraging “ordinary” people to give and feel as though they have a stake, community philanthropy organisations offer essential spaces to build voice, resources and power – in fact, claiming back philanthropy as something for us all, perhaps.

The remarkable growth of the community philanthropy field is being marked in December with the sector’s first international summit. On December 1st and 2nd, 350 people from 60 countries will gather in Johannesburg for the first Global Summit on Community Philanthropy.

The summit will bring together a range of local community philanthropy organisations, public and private donors and other civil society actors under the rallying cry to #ShiftThePower. 2016’s political events around the world have shown that the social fabric of communities is weakening and trust is sorely lacking. Community philanthropy, with its emphasis on local resources and local accountability offers exactly the kind of bottom-up leadership and hope that we so badly need.

Jenny Hodgson is the executive director of the Global Fund for Community Foundations.

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