From grassroots to global movement! 

All over the world - from Brazil to Russia, from China to the Congo and from Palestine to South Africa - community philanthropy has emerged as an essential tool for strengthening communities' voice and power.

Join us in Johannesburg to celebrate the dynamism and potential of this flourishing movement at the Global Summit on Community Philanthropy, 1st - 2nd December 2016!

Call for ideas

What are the burning issues or essential tools that you would like to discuss at the Summit? Ideas for inspiring speakers? Creative ways to present your work? Send us your ideas!

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Earlier this year the Global Fund for Community Foundations and the Global Alliance for Community Philanthropy announced a landmark event in the field of Philanthropy - the Global Summit on Community Philanthropy, to be held on 1 - 2 December 2016 in Johannesburg, South Africa.

This post first appaered on the Global Fund for Community Foundations blog on November 13, 2015

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, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines and Indonesia.

The convening aimed to provide a platform to these foundations to learn from one another to strengthen their organisational capacities, and to work as a group to develop community philanthropy for progressive social change in Asia.

The attached report summarizes the key characteristics of these foundations as emerging from group work during the convening. Its purpose is to set out the emerging themes form the conversation in Shillong and explore ways in which the practice of philanthropy for social justice and peace in the region can be deepened and broadened.

‘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 it came to almost close doors and its slow recovery and renewed direction.

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 of the far-west Nepal, visiting with Tewa grantees and women activists, I was blown away when this was reaffirmed for me yet one more time! 

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 stream of victims.

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 differences. Some have endowments, some don’t. Some are large, more are small. Some call themselves community foundations, others do not. This diversity is one sign of community philanthropy’s flexibility, potential, and rising popularity.

But it also presents a challenge to those who want to better understand and support community philanthropy, especially on a global level. A practice so varied, so organic and tied to local conditions, complicates classification, resists general conclusions, and calls for lots of learning through example.

A movement relatively young and quickly evolving, with a limited body of applied research, requires ongoing documentation and study.