South-East Asian Community Foundations gather in Bangkok – and a new regional network is born

Until recently, the emergence of community foundations in South-East Asia has been something of a gradual, stop-start process. Some truly homegrown, one-off, institutions have certainly emerged: the founders of the Pondong Batangan Community Foundation in the Philippines, for example, unaware of any global community foundation field, called their new institution a “community foundation” simply because those two words best seemed to describe what they thought it should be about. Other efforts by international funders to seed the community foundation idea have yielded somewhat mixed results. 

If a recent meeting in Bangkok is anything to go by, however, there is a new energy emanating from and among community foundations in the region. In the first regional meeting of its kind, community foundations from Thailand, the Philippines and Vietnam met in Bangkok, Thailand on 1–3 December. The workshop, which was supported by the Global Fund for Community Foundations, included 34 participants from new and emerging community foundations in Korat, Satun, Songkhla, Phuket and Bangkok (Thailand), from the Pondong Batangan Community Foundation and the Coalition of Social Development Organizations in South Cotabato (Philippines), the LIN Center (Vietnam) and the World Bank (Bangkok office).

The first day was dedicated to discussions among the group of five Thai community foundations, with a particular focus on the Thai context and the potential value-added of community foundations in that context. Although the five have all emerged from different processes and with the support of a variety of institutions –including the Thai Centre for Philanthropy, the World Bank, Synergos and the Van Leer Foundation – in recent months, they have increasingly found a value in collaboration, the seeds of which were planted by a joint study visit to Slovakia in 2009.

The group was joined on the second day by community foundation representatives from Vietnam and the Philippines and the day was spent sharing different country experiences of giving, effective fund-raising approaches, grantmaking for social change, social mapping and social media, with a view to teasing out some of the common characteristics and challenges of emerging foundations in South-East Asia.

It was on the final day, that the decision was made by the group to create an Asian Community Foundation Forum (ACFF), as a learning and sharing network that would link community foundations in the region. Songkhla Community Foundation was assigned the task of formulating different types of e-forum for the group, such as blog and Web S-splog.

Thanks to Pamornrat Tansanguanwong for contributing to this article.