This post first appaered on the Global Fund for Community Foundations blog on November 13, 2015 A lot can change in a decade. In December 2004, a gathering in chilly Berlin marked an important moment for the global community foundation movement. 162 people – practitioners, funders, researchers – from over 30 countries came together for…
This post first appeared on the website of the Global Fund for Community Foundations. At a meeting of community foundation representatives from across Europe, Jasna Jasarevic, from the Tuzla Community Foundation in Bosnia and Herzegovina, reminded us that although her country was not a transit area for refugees, Bosnians were experienced in responding to emergencies. “We can…
In September 2013, the Working Group on Philanthropy for Social Justice and Peace and the Global Fund for Community Foundations convened a small group of grassroots indigenous foundations in Shillong in the North East of India. The convening was hosted by the Foundation for Social Transformation – Enabling North East India and included foundations from India, Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh,…
‘A Life Lived on the Edge: An Account of the First Ten Years of the Foundation of Social Transformation’ is a new resource produced the Global Fund for Community Foundations. It tells the story of a community foundation in the North-east of India, of the conditions that necessitated its birth, its vision, its struggles, how…
Over twenty years of working in this field of social justice philanthropy in Nepal, I continue to be struck by the resilience of the local communities, their home-grown leaderships, and the way they innovate and improvise to sustain and nurture each other as far as it is possible! During a recent visit to several districts…
On Oct 20, 2014 in Cleveland (USA), at the Fall Conference for Community Foundations, an international research collaboration unveiled the “Community Foundation Atlas,” the most comprehensive directory of the world’s community foundation movement that has ever been published. The online platform, available at http://communityfoundationatlas.org/, maps the identi- ties, locations, assets, roles and achievements of place-based…
I’m a critic of “poverty porn,” the selling of poverty to increase donations. It dehumanizes “beneficiaries” (a word that itself is dehumanizing), but even worse, it’s a slippery slope. Engaging donors on the basis of crisis means you always need a new crisis to keep them engaged; successful philanthropy becomes dependent on having a steady…
What makes the global spread of community philanthropy organizations so exciting is the variety of forms they take, adaptations to different local contexts, challenges, resources, and leaders. The core similarities matter— all in some way help geographic communities mobilize financial and other kinds of capital for improvement of the lives of residents. But so do…
The Global Fund for Community Foundations has been appointed Secretariat of the Global Alliance for Community Philanthropy, a new multi-donor, multi-stakeholder initiative supported by founding partners, the Aga Khan Foundation USA, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and USAID, which aims to make the case that growing local ownership and accountability leads…
Bernie Dolley, Director of Ikhala Trust, Cape Town, South Africa talks about the role that philanthropy must play, the questions we as the philanthropic field need to be asking of ourselves, the value of small grants, and overcoming barriers posed my emphasis on quantifiable outcomes in philanthropy. Click on the attachment below to read the…