A short film: The rise of local philanthropy
Shortly after the pandemic, film maker Josie Fomé travelled to Uganda to shoot a documentary on the organisation, No-White-Saviours. While there, a different, more complex …
Donors
Did the pandemic prompt a rethinking of funder-grantee dynamics?
The pandemic also saw funders who had previously shied away from social justice work become more amenable to funding these critical areas.
How collective care and holding each other’s hands could change the global aid sector
Musimbi Epillose The concept of #ShiftThePower is rapidly taking over the old development approaches. For a long time, grassroots organizations were placed behind the scenes …
What a Balinese massage taught me about measuring what matters
In July 2024, the Global Fund for Community Foundations (GFCF) extended their global reach to include Australia in the #ShiftThePower movement. I was fortunate enough …
Leading, learning and letting go: PSJP’s journey
At Philanthropy for Social Justice and Peace (PSJP) our goal has been to centre the normative values of justice, solidarity and agency in the field …
Measuring community wellbeing; beyond numbers and donor agendas
If we want the people to be resilient, how can we build a vision of evaluating that based on well-being? How can we measure resilience? How can we measure happiness? How can we measure some of these really extraordinary indicators?
A call for proposals, but only if you are from the “right part” of the world
Studying the ways in which aid remains restricted has been the progressive discovery of how little we still understand the racist schemes of the international aid system.
Tied Aid: A development challenge that refuses to go away.
At this time, when governments of developing nations are increasingly skeptical of foreign funding, barriers imposed by the donor countries put grassroots CSOs at enormous risk. As powerful elites in the Global South continue to discredit CSOs in the name of ‘foreign agents’, tied aid contributes to this narrative, muddying the waters for activists.
To my feminist siblings, there is a funding crisis in feminist activism.
When the sector talks about donor fatigue or donors saying they don’t see where the money is going. Well, only less than 10% of your money comes directly to us. They should ask Northern CSOs about the other 90% – they shouldn’t ask us.
Evolving together: What caterpillars can teach us about transforming philanthropy
Have you heard of imaginal cells? This is what Amaha Selassie asked us as we sat in the jungle-themed hotel lobby. It was the night after the #ShiftThePower Summit in Bogotá, and 5 of us had come together seemingly by accident, talking for hours about the worlds of possibility and complexity that the Summit had unlocked. None of us knew about these cells, so Amaha explained