To date, the concept of community philanthropy has not been part of the mainstream development discourse. For the next five years, the Global Alliance for Community Philanthropy will be seeking to rectify this by demonstrating why it matters and how donors can support its development most effectively.

The Alliance, a new multi-donor, multi-stakeholder collaborative, will be engaged in a series of joint research and learning activities aimed at advancing the practice of community philanthropy. In particular, it will aim to influence international development actors to better understand, support and promote its role in achieving more lasting development outcomes.

At present the Alliance comprises four funders: the Aga Khan Foundation, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund and USAID. Each of these will be providing financial resources and a commitment to active participation in the Alliance’s learning, while the Global Fund for Community Foundations leads the work as secretariat.

However, this is by no means a closed group: indeed, the Alliance is actively seeking additional partners who have an interest in community philanthropy and civil society sustainability and who appreciate that working with others will yield greater impact than working on their own.

In the first year, the Alliance will focus on establishing a baseline that tests its core hypothesis: that community philanthropy can create assets, capacities and trust which in turn will lead to a more sustainable and strongly rooted civil society and improved development outcomes. In undertaking these first efforts, one of the roles of the secretariat will be to create a process for broad participation of stakeholders and to ensure that the work of the Alliance is continually informed by practitioners of community philanthropy around the world.

For more information
Contact Jenny Hodgson at the Global Fund for Community Foundations at jenny@globalfundcf.org