Development aid and community philanthropy: Building a new world at the margins in India

In this Q&A, Snehlata Nath of Keystone Foundation, an NGO based in India, reflects on her 2024 / 2025 #ShiftThePower Fellowship, three decades as a development practitioner working with indigenous communities and the future of community-led development. One of the founders of Keystone, Snehlata has spearheaded many civil society networks and continues to engage with communities to build their institutions for shifting the power.

For more on the work of Keystone Foundation, read Snehlata’s Fellowship paper: Development Aid and Community Philanthropy: Building a New World at the Margins in India.

GFCF: What did the #ShiftThePower Fellowship mean for you?

Snehlata Nath, Keystone Foundation and 2024 / 2025 #ShiftThePower Fellow

Snehlata Nath (SN): Having a #ShiftThePower Fellowship was a chance to reflect on our practice at Keystone Foundation after three decades working as an NGO in India. Development practice with marginal communities often absorbs you completely, so much so that you cannot pull out and see the work in the context of the larger ecosystem driving economic change.

I was part of an interesting Fellowship cohort from across the world and we were ably led by the GFCF’s Ese Emerhi to interact and share our work and ideas. I had interesting conversations with Doel Jaikishan on the current state of philanthropy in India and her work with young people. In the “Manifesto and Emergent Practice” pairings, it was fascinating to be connected to Facundo Ibarlucía from Argentina and Adior Ibrahim from Kenya where we e-talked about the different situations in our countries, and the striking similarities in the functioning of development aid across the world.

In October 2025, all the Fellows met in person at the GFCF Community Philanthropy Symposium in Nairobi, which was a chance to understand the “big picture” around community philanthropy. During the Symposium groupings, it was good to hear about June Omune’s work in Zanzibar and the culture of giving in her community. With Era Shreshta from Nepal, we discussed the role of state, the youth uprising and sudden violent change. We shared insights on how corruption of governments and suppression of the aspirations of ordinary people can lead to anarchic situations. Éva Fekete passionately described the situation in Hungary and, just as I am writing this blog, the government was changed by the people through a democratic process, which hopefully will lead to freedom of expression and true democracy.

The many discussions during workshop sessions framed ideas around community philanthropy more clearly in my head and gave me a sense of hope. The importance of local action, circularity and indigenous knowledge for autonomous resilience is clear and resonates across the world. For Keystone’s journey too this Symposium helped to reconfirm the validity of our efforts to start and support indigenous youth collectives as community foundations which can build on their knowledge and resources. These youth foundations can connect with each other and build solidarity networks across the world and, more significantly, locally. Community philanthropy is the only way to truly empower people, helping them to become independent thinkers and contributors. It uses the strengths of local, indigenous knowledge and values to build a good society. This message resonates well with the work of Keystone.

GFCF: How do some of these ideas relate to the long history of Keystone Foundation and its work?

SN: The Keystone Foundation is an NGO working in the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve, supporting sustainable livelihoods of indigenous people, their land and cultural rights and nature conservation. Over three decades, Keystone has worked on a number of initiatives and multi-stakeholder engagements to address some of the crucial issues facing communities here. Our work with indigenous (Adivasi) people revealed to us a beautiful world of nature, culture and an ethos built on indigenous traditional knowledge. Viewed from this world, mainstream economic development looked like a false paradigm. False because it was based on destroying nature, uprooting people, with money power being the only indicator.

Since my training as a development practitioner, my practice has been informed by aspects of sustainability –  such as E F Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful and the ground-breaking 1972 report The Limits to Growth – as well as awareness of the importance of protecting the rights of different peoples. In India, it is complex to break these concepts down and apply them to real-time practice. We are a 5,000-year-old civilization with many influences, all sorts of people are divided by caste, community, religion and language – and every place has its own characteristics and features. In India, funding is often earmarked for specific communities, and particular jobs are reserved for particular types of people. Development and philanthropy in India reflect these complexities and the result is that often people are against each other. Our journey was a big learning of how to work within these complexities.

GFCF: What were some of the key questions that you set out to answer through your Fellowship?

SN: Keeping these thoughts together and linking overall global development aid practice with grassroots community-building efforts needed some analysis. Some of the questions I set off to ask during the Fellowship related to how aid behaves, and the efforts of some INGOs to make development support more participatory. In relation to my work, I wanted to know what this means for indigenous community foundations being formed by our organization – and where would they get their strength from?

While reflecting on these questions, it was important for me to also see our work in terms of grassroots development, community-based and people-led approaches, local indigenous knowledge and sovereignty – and how mainstream economic development impacted these. Development aid flowed through government schemes, NGO funds and local philanthropies and I took a step back to understand these carefully and analyze their decision-making processes. Who decides what the funded scheme and its components are – and what do the people “benefitting” from the scheme really want? Every time I went to one of our indigenous territories, I saw these government-funded blue buildings for rearing chickens lying defunct. The people in those areas keep chickens “free range” in their homesteads. So who decided to build the blue buildings and why did we waste so much public money on this scheme?

Development aid from governments and bilateral institutions almost always takes away decision-making power from communities. It’s like distant plans are being made elsewhere which dictate local action. Efforts to bring financial resources to local people have been tried and – slowly – some are finding ways to base aid on “trust” and to let communities decide what is best for them. However, there are many hurdles in the process of aid reaching local communities as many don’t have the proper instruments, accountable governance and financial management systems. Due diligence knocks them off the eligibility list!

After analyzing our efforts, community collectives and mutual aid philanthropy seemed to be an answer here, so I thought it would be good to do some participatory exercises with the indigenous youth community foundations we have supported over the years. It was interesting to see their networks, the recognition they had received, the forums that they were invited to participate in and where they had got to on the road to building community philanthropy based on their own strengths. In the long run, localization, social and solidarity economies are more resilient approaches than “development” being decided from afar. These approaches also give identity and purpose to individuals, encouraging them to play a role in their community and society, thereby strengthening them from within.

It’s interesting to note from Gerald Kankya’s blog that in Uganda communities are self-resourcing social justice movements and turning “charity” into an instrument of transformation, while also moving away from external aid. Sustainable and self-reliant options to address development, environmental and social justice issues are happening and we need to get these voices together.

India has much to learn from these empowering and inspirational efforts as the way wealth is divided in India is quite lopsided, with the top (richest) 1% of the population owning 40% of total national wealth, the top 10% owning 65% of national wealth and the bottom 50% just 6.4% of total wealth. So, whereas India is the fifth largest economy in the world, most of the growth benefits only 10% of the population and it is this economic inequity that demands community action: peoples’ voices need to be heard so they can shape their development and create a sustainable future.

The #ShiftThePower movement helps me find solace – I know that I am not alone. Many initiatives and alternatives are brewing across the world, and it is time to reimagine the future by putting these together and building a new vocabulary. The Possible Now movement – which emerged out of the #ShiftThePower Global Summit in Bogotá – has gathered strength and is poised to build a dynamic and creative alternative. As the GFCF’s Jenny Hodgson wrote in her blog: “Against a backdrop of growing global crises, there was a sense of abundance and possibility, glimpses of a future that felt within reach.” I agree that this new wave led by people, youth and women across the world will be able to create a new society which centres equity and bases itself on a humane logic of the interconnected-ness of people, nature and dreams of a world for everyone.

By: Snehlata Nath, Keystone Foundation and 2024 / 2025 #ShiftThePower Fellow. Read Snehlata’s Fellowship paper: Development Aid and Community Philanthropy: Building a New World at the Margins in India.