When communities hold the assets: Grassroots grantmaking and the work of shifting power in Southern Africa

Shelly Satuku

Traditional aid has been known to have a saviour approach to development. For decades, it has begun with what communities lack, viewing them as mere recipients. The needs assessment, the gap analysis, the problem statement: the whole machinery of grantmaking was built to find deficits and then fill them with someone else’s money. It seems efficient and familiar, but it is also quietly disempowering, because it teaches communities to see themselves as a list of shortfalls waiting for external rescue. This is probably why the billions of dollars poured into Africa over the decades have never quite tilted the needle. A telling symptom of this disconnection is the vandalism of donated equipment and infrastructure, which flourishes precisely where communities feel no ownership of what was built in their name.[1]

The #ShiftThePower Manifesto for Change asks us to break that habit. Across Southern Africa, organizations are quietly moving from talking about the Manifesto to acting on it. A growing group of young philanthropy practitioners is building systems to break these old habits, most recently through an Afrocentric, Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD)-informed Grassroots Grantmaking Toolkit. Initiated by the South African organization, SGS Consulting, the effort brought together seven professionals from community foundations and intermediary organizations across the region to co-create the toolkit through a Community of Practice. It starts from a different premise entirely: that communities are not empty spaces to be filled, but living systems already rich in assets, knowledge, leadership, and solutions.

The Community of Practice developing the ABCD-informed Grassroots Grantmaking Toolkit in Durban

The toolkit does not stand alone. It sits alongside a complementary experiment gaining ground in the region, the Reverse Call for Proposals (developed as a prototype under the RINGO Project), which turns the conventional funding relationship on its head by inviting communities to define their own priorities first and asking funders to respond. Where the toolkit reshapes how grants are designed and managed, the Reverse Call for Proposals reshapes who sets the agenda in the first place. Read together, they point toward the same horizon. Both are a gradual process of changing how grantmaking has been done in Africa. When communities lead the design, hold the assets, and set the priorities, and funders learn to follow rather than dictate, development stops being something done to people and becomes something built with them. Read against four of the #ShiftThePower Manifesto’s demands, the toolkit shows what shifting power looks like when it becomes a method rather than a mood.

Manifesto Point 3: Change what we mean by success

“Move away from a system preoccupied with quick ‘solutions’, and that is premised on and organized around the transfer of funds. Change how we approach, and seek to measure, the notion of success.”

Most grantmaking is organized around moving money and proving it moved efficiently. The toolkit deliberately widens the frame. Grantmaking, it argues, should move not only money but trust, dignity, partnership, accountability and community power, and success should be measured accordingly, not only in outputs but in the quality of relationships strengthened. That reframing runs right through to the end of the grant. Rather than a compliance-driven final report, the toolkit closes each grant with reflective questions about what tangible and intangible changes it brought about, what the community contributed, what the group learned, what remains unresolved, and what unplanned actions it set in motion. The grantmaking cycle itself becomes a learning cycle, in which what is discovered in one round informs the strategy and partnerships of the next.

Compliance is reframed in the same spirit. The toolkit applies proportional compliance, matching documentation, risk management, and reporting to the size of the grant, the capacity of the group, and the actual level of risk. The governing question is always whether a requirement is fair for this particular grant, rather than whether it satisfies a standardized template. This is how the system resists the quick-solution reflex, slowing down enough to be fair and refusing to let bureaucracy become a wall that keeps grassroots groups out.

Manifesto Point 4: Retire the language of beneficiaries

“Creatively find ways to unlock the inherent power of communities in determining their own development course, however they define it, and let the language of ‘beneficiaries’ and ‘recipients’ be a thing of the past.”

The toolkit’s guiding phrase is a quiet act of defiance, grantmaking with community, not for community. That single preposition carries the Manifesto’s demand. It refuses the beneficiary framing not with a slogan, but by rebuilding the mechanics of the grant around community agency. You see it most clearly in how applications are written. Instead of asking groups to catalogue their problems, the strengths-based application asks what strengths already exist, what change the community itself wants to lead, and who will participate, including how excluded groups will be involved. The grant strategy is designed to follow community vision rather than the reverse.

When communities lead the design, the interventions that emerge often look quite different from what an external actor would have proposed, and they are stronger for it, because they are rooted in lived experience rather than institutional assumption. This is one place the Reverse Call for Proposals experiments emerging in the region offer a useful illustration. When communities set priorities first and invite funders to respond, the resulting projects tend to carry deeper ownership. But the toolkit’s ambition is broader than any single mechanism.

A necessary caution runs alongside this. Unlocking community power is not the same as romanticizing community. Power exists within communities just as it exists between communities and funders, and without care, existing hierarchies around gender, age, disability, language and kinship quietly reproduce exclusion. This is why the toolkit pairs its asset-mapping tool with a deliberate power, stakeholder and inclusion mapping exercise, treating inclusion not as inviting marginalized groups in after decisions are made, but as letting excluded voices shape priorities, design and accountability from the start.

Manifesto Point 6: Start with what communities already have

“Ensure that external funding recognizes, respects and builds on local resources and assets, rather than overlooks, undermines or displaces.”

The whole approach is built on ABCD, a methodology that shifts the starting point of grantmaking away from deficits and towards the strengths, skills, social networks and resources a community already holds. ABCD rests on four elements the toolkit names simply:

1. Assets, because every community holds gifts, whether skills, stories, spaces or relationships.
2. Based, because grantmaking is grounded in what communities already have and do.
3. Community, because people are the experts of their own lives and they lead.
4. Development, because change grows from existing strengths, from the inside out.

Underneath sits one deceptively radical claim: money alone does not drive community initiatives. Appreciation of assets does.

Importantly, the toolkit does not import ABCD wholesale. It reads the approach through an African philanthropic philosophy of Ubuntu and communal solidarity, so that no grantee is imagined to succeed alone and accountability is owed to the whole community, not only to the funder. Evidence gathered across fourteen ABCD-sensitized communities in the region points the same way.[2] When people become aware of their own strengths, they also become aware of their ability to utilize them.

This reframes what a community brings to a grant. The toolkit is firm that co-investment should never be reduced to cash. Communities contribute labour, land, local materials, meeting spaces, volunteer time, knowledge, care, networks and mobilization, all assets that conventional budgeting renders invisible. Recognizing them as real is precisely the recognition the Manifesto demands: external funding that builds on local resources rather than displacing them.

Manifesto Point 7: Value what money cannot buy

“Expand our horizons beyond money as the central driver of change, and place greater value on other kinds of infinite non-financial assets and resources (knowledge, trust, networks, etc.).”

If ABCD teaches that appreciation of assets, not money alone, drives change, the toolkit’s reporting practices are where that belief becomes real. Flexible reporting explicitly accepts voice notes, oral reports given with a facilitator, WhatsApp updates, videos, community testimonies and group reflection sessions, and thumbprints wherever signatures are required. These are not administrative concessions. They are a deliberate decision to honour forms of knowledge that written, English-language, proposal-driven systems routinely discard.

The Manifesto’s own call to challenge the dominance of English lives quietly inside these choices, as does its call to value knowledge, trust and networks as infinite resources. By meeting communities in their own languages and formats, the toolkit treats local knowledge as legitimate evidence rather than anecdotes to be translated into donor formats before it counts. There is a strategic dimension here too. As aid budgets tighten across the region, the ability to mobilize non-financial assets, such as trust, relationships and local giving, is what allows community philanthropy to take root and outlast any single funding stream. The toolkit’s insistence on community co-investment and asset-based practice is, in this sense, not only principled but practical. It lays the groundwork for development that does not collapse the moment external money recedes.

The unfinished work

None of this is offered as a finished revolution. Shifting power is gradual, behavioural work, and the toolkit is honest that it is a living resource, meant to be adapted and argued with, not treated as a compliance checklist. Dependency runs deep, funders remain uneven in their willingness to loosen control, and hierarchies inside communities do not dissolve on their own. But the direction is unmistakable. The #ShiftThePower Manifesto never promised a single model or a silver bullet. It called for a future that is negotiated, participatory and widely owned. A grassroots grantmaking practice that begins with community assets, retires the language of beneficiaries, redefines success around trust and learning, and values what money cannot buy is not that finished future, but it is a credible, grounded movement toward it.

Ultimately, the development agenda is a shared journey, not a stage for showcasing power or a battlefield on which funders and communities test their strength against each other. Both partners are working toward the same end, the overall well-being and improved quality of life of the people that development is meant to serve. That, in the end, is what philanthropy is all about. When a Manifesto stops being read and starts being built into the way we make grants, that shared purpose stops being an aspiration and becomes a practice.

By: Shelly Satuku, an Independent Researcher, 2023 #ShiftThePower Fellow and a 2025 CUNY International Fellow on Community Philanthropy. This piece draws on the yet-to-be-published Grassroots Grantmaking Toolkit, which the contributor facilitated and co-developed through the Community of Practice group across Southern Africa, with illustrative reference to emerging Reverse Call for Proposals practice in the region.

[1] https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781003424383/strengths-based-practice-adult-social-work-social-care-robin-miller-sharanya-mahesh?refId=74428ccb-55c2-4e46-add7-d840026c60c9&context=ubx

[2] https://guardian.ng/news/poor-community-ownership-fuels-destruction-of-development-projects-in-ndelta-says-nddc/