So when do we start?

It’s well over a year now since the Global Fund for Community Foundations (GFCF) was launched on the path to becoming a fully-fledged institution. At that time, the Fund’s newly assembled Incubation Committee gathered in a hotel lobby in Madrid to discuss the first strategic steps, and agreed that a series of extensive consultations with stakeholders would be vital to ensuring a successful transition.

We were not starting with a blank slate in terms of mission, function and geographic remit. As a project, GFCF had already been in operation for almost two years. However, our initial grant rounds had revealed enormous regional and contextual diversity in the types of institutions and initiatives that were emerging under the remit of ‘community foundation’ or ‘community foundation-like institution’.

Taking stock

We felt GFCF now needed to take stock. If it was going meet its objective of promoting and advocating for the value of local philanthropy and local philanthropic institutions in development, both among funders and at the local level, it would be crucial that its core message draw on grassroots experiences emerging from local processes and that its programme approaches acknowledge local realities.

Over the course of the last 12 months – and alongside our regular grantmaking programmes – GFCF has been engaged in a wide-ranging consultation process. An open online survey provided an opportunity for people everywhere to respond to, and comment on, a set of questions regarding GFCF’s focus, strategies, governance and structure.

Funders were targeted through the consultation too: a group of European funders participated in the Incubation Committee meeting in Brussels, and in February the International Finance Corporation and GFCF convened a meeting in Washington attended by 50 representatives from a range of US-based donor institutions. In addition, a series of local or regional activities was organized in Brazil, the Philippines, Thailand, Russia (including representatives from Eastern Europe and Central Asia) and Kenya (a two-day meeting for foundation representatives from across Africa).

Differences  revealed

It quickly became clear that, beyond the narrow circles of international philanthropy, the concept of the community foundation remains unfamiliar to many people in many parts of the world. In some contexts, even the concepts of ‘local grantmaker’ and ‘local donor’ requires some explanation. GFCF can, hopefully, play an important role in raising awareness. Partner-led consultations in the Philippines and Brazil, with a cross-section of civil society, corporate, government and donor representatives, provided an opportunity to introduce some basic concepts and from there to discuss their local relevance and what role GFCF might play. At specially convened meetings of foundation practitioners in Russia and Kenya, on the other hand, there was no need to discuss basic concepts. Instead, the discussions focused on some of the main challenges facing the local philanthropic sector and specific ways in which the GFCF might be able to target its support.

In Thailand, a specially commissioned country study by consultants active in the nascent community foundation field provided insights into the Thai context and culture that could help explain the country’s mixed experience of community foundation development in the past.

Stimulating discussion in Brazil

In Brazil, where interest in community philanthropy has been growing in recent years, the value of stimulating discussion around practice and concepts was stressed, as was the importance of having definitions to suit the local context. Over a hundred people participated in an online questionnaire, a seminar and interviews conducted by ICom, the first community foundation in southern Brazil. A picture emerged of a vibrant non-profit sector but a donor base dominated by corporate funders and foundations, whose approaches were often ‘episodic and paternalistic’.

There was a general consensus among those consulted that in Brazil the community foundation concept (flexibly defined to suit Brazil’s context) could offer a new and important mechanism for promoting democratic processes by engaging a broader base of local donors, promoting citizen participation, and demonstrating good governance at the community level.

Building on domestic philanthropy in the Philippines

The Philippines raised some different issues, which included the potential for building on domestic philanthropy and developing skills and awareness around local grantmaking. The country has always had a strong culture of cooperation (bayanihan) and informal community philanthropy takes many forms, financial and non-financial, drawing on systems of kinship and a sense of social solidarity. Diaspora giving from overseas Filipino workers has also been an important force for social and economic development.

Overall, however, organized local philanthropy is still at an early stage in its development and there is a heavy reliance on international donor aid. In the consultation session held in Manila and organized by the Philippines Association of Foundations, among the challenges raised by participants was that of identifying and investing in leaders who can inspire the kind of public trust needed to build a community foundation. The Pondong Batangan Community Foundation in Lipa (the country’s first community foundation), for example, had been able to mobilize many small contributions from the local community for health and education projects because of its close affiliation with the Catholic Church. Local grantmaking is not well-established as a practice in the Philippines, while capacity among non-profit groups is often weak. Organizations such as Pondong Batangan often find themselves implementing projects directly.

Translating ‘community foundation’ into Thai

In Thailand, where GFCF commissioned a country study, translation of the term ‘community foundation’ into the Thai language has often led to its being confused with other grassroots financial sustainability models such as village banks, community funds and informal savings groups, which have been widely promoted by government and civil society in recent years.

However, in the Thai context, the community foundation can offer many advantages which extend beyond the scope and scale of traditional membership-based groups, such as a way of engaging Thailand’s middle class in philanthropy and as a platform for civil society and business sectors to come together around community issues. One of the main conclusions of the report was that, in a middle-income country like Thailand, access to information and resources translated into Thai would be as valuable as grant funding.

Testing an advocacy role in post-Soviet states

The Eastern Europe and Central Asia region, where the community foundation idea is quite well established, has received the highest proportion of GFCF grants so far, most of these to individual community foundations towards their institutional development. One of the objectives of the consultation session, which included community foundation practitioners from as widely separated as Bulgaria and Kazakhstan, was to explore options for testing a more proactive or engaged role for community foundations in the region around specific national, regional or even global issues, as well as targeting grants to support innovation and to reflect on impact.

At the session, a picture emerged of a sector with a sound institutional base, where the basic tools of foundation building have been established and widely shared. Opinion was divided, however, as to the kind of influence and impact community foundations might exert, either individually or as a group, and whether community foundations could mobilize around specific issues without alienating their local donor base.

Overall, the session reflected an environment in many post-Soviet countries where civil society is weak and unable to advocate on specific issues neglected by government. For an international funder like GFCF, an important consideration will be how it can support community foundations in rising to the challenge of taking on a more active role in their communities without compromising their local legitimacy.

Africa: the imperative of social change

In contrast with the Russia consultation, at the convening of African foundation practitioners, the social change imperative of community foundations was established among participants from the start, accompanied by a sense that a critical mass of like-minded, well-governed foundations could exert a positive influence on new philanthropic actors in the field. The discussion reflected a very different context where international development funding has helped to enable and empower civil society, often in the face of weak governments.

At the same time, there was an honest discussion about the malaise of governance and leadership affecting Africa and the real challenges of local resource mobilization on a continent where it has tended to be much simpler to write a proposal to a foreign funder. Individual grants to support the institutional development of Africa’s emerging and often isolated community foundations would continue to be important but participants also stressed the value of philanthropic ‘field building’ activities across the continent, including networks, documentation and sharing of best practice etc.

Different viewpoints, shared issues

The consultations have highlighted a number of shared issues and concerns around governance, local grantmaking and local resource mobilization despite the enormous diversity of contexts in which the Global Fund will be operating. They have also shown the value of local convenings for stimulating local discussion and engaging new voices, and organizing these activities under the auspices of GFCF seems to have helped increase local participation and interest. Similarly, they have provided opportunities for GFCF to partner with other organizations around common interests (the Africa meeting was co-hosted with TrustAfrica and CAF Russia is our partner in Russia).

For GFCF, the richness of the consultations has provided valuable insights as to how we might combine proactive and reactive grant strategies, as well as balancing grants to build the capacities of individual institutions and grants to target networks and forge links between regions. Overall, the feedback has been less about whether there should be a permanent institution dedicated to promoting community foundations and more along the lines of, ‘So when do we start?’!

Jenny Hodgson is Executive Director of GFCF. Email jenny@wings-globalfund.org

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