This paper considers what resilience looks like in practice. It is based on the work of three organizations – Tewa, Global Greengrants Fund and Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. It is far from a complete account of resilience and that more work is needed. We hope that you will join us in this learning journey and share your stories.
Measuring what matters is a consultation paper designed to advance a conversation about measurement in civil society and the goal is to identify more meaningful approaches to organizational learning and accountability. The paper is based on a series of parallel and intersecting conversations, online and in-person, over a two-year period with 130 people from civil…
If you look at Tewa’s website, it will tell you that the word means support in Nepali. Applied to the organization, it’s both appropriate and understated. Tewa’s story has been ably told. This is not the place to retell it. Instead, I want to draw attention to a few key ideas which inform it and…
Just before Christmas last year I found myself with a very small and unsure group of ‘anti-CAA’ protestors outside a public park in Jaipur. We weren’t certain if we had the permission to gather and protest, who was really in charge or what we were going to do. Someone said we could gather but only…
Coronavirus has changed our world forever. Plans made a few weeks ago seem outdated at best or undoable at worst. The speed of this has been remarkable. In a recent article, former UK prime minister Gordon Brown quotes Lenin: ‘There are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen.’ Those of us…
By Andrew Milner and Halima Mahomed ‘Development can be seen as expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy,’ wrote Amartya Sen. However, it seldom has. Instead, development has been reduced to much more easily identifiable numbers and targets. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Africa. Institutional philanthropy, which could potentially play a significant part…
In the 19th century, Victor LeGrand created an orderly, geometric railway system for France which was designed to bring about the full integration of the country. This was reckoned to be far superior to the Prussian rail system, which was a hodgepodge of lines run by 50 different companies. The French system, known as the…
PSJP’s recently published paper on ‘Dignity and Development’ looks at the concept of dignity in development and philanthropy. At the Zambian Governance Foundation for Civil Society (ZGF) this paper provided us with an opportunity to revisit our own journey from a dignity lens. In this blog post we would like to share the practices at…
By Jenny Hodgson (The title of this blog was inspired by a conversation with a colleague at the Africa Philanthropy Network conference in November 2018.) On 28 November 2018, together with GFCF board chair, Rita Thapa, and several community philanthropy partners from across India, I attended the launch of the Dalit Community Foundation in Patna, the capital of India’s…
PSJP’s recently published paper on ‘Dignity and Development’ looks at the idea of ‘dignity’in development and philanthropy. The first point to be made is the need to recognize that development practitioners do not impart dignity to others. We do not ‘empower’ people – a word that carries a taint of colonialism in its definition of…