Community philanthropy: a brave new model for development funding?
Jessica wrote a particularly thoughtful RSN note on philanthropy recently which was very popular – so I hope this will further engage people’s interests:
While this article’s strapline is ‘involving local people in philanthropic projects makes communities stronger. Is it time for international NGOs to stand aside?’ and much of the content is from an international NGO perspective, it offers interesting insights into different philanthropic entities and activities and what they might mean in a rural context for the UK.
The article tells us that athough 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.
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.
More information about the work of Community Foundations and philanthropy will be available at the next RSN seminar in Peterborough on 14 December. The seminar is free to attend and almost full – so please email events@sparse.gov.uk if you would like to come along.