Your movement is lonely. So is mine. Let’s talk about why.

Eshban Kwesiga, GFCF Knowledge Weaving and Influencing Manager

In the development sector, we talk about the need to bust silos so often that it has almost become a platitude, in danger of becoming neither interesting nor thoughtful. I often think about this when attending in-person conferences, where we tend to stick with who we already know or – at most – attempt to approach the funders in the room. It’s a very human thing to stick with “our tribe.” However, instead of busting silos, aren’t these (perhaps unintentional) “conference behaviours” reinforcing them?

With that in mind, it’s good to be able to recognize when real “silo-busting” is happening. Back in 2023 when the GFCF hosted our #ShiftThePower Global Summit in Bogotá, Peace Direct came along with more than 50 individuals from across its peacebuilding movement. This was to ensure that they – their views, experiences, challenges – would be well-represented at the Summit, and to introduce them to the wider #ShiftThePower movement. Fast forward two years later, and the GFCF moved with part of our tribe of community philanthropy practitioners and #ShiftThePower Fellows to Peace Direct’s global peacebuilding gathering Peace Connect.

Here is why this mixing and cross-pollinating matters: after spending time with the peacebuilding movement at Peace Connect, like a veil falling off, I started to see new layers of how we, in the community philanthropy space, face similar issues as the peacebuilding movement. This is even though we have been “conditioned” to think that we exist in different parts of the system.

Local peacebuilding to prevent, reduce and heal violent conflict at the grassroots level is led by local people because they intimately understand the moving pieces related to a conflict. It is their lives, families, livelihoods, history, etc. that are most seriously threatened by war and conflict. Who could have more of a stake in this? Yet, despite this, the international funding system too often sees peacebuilding as something best done by large multilateral institutions (such as the United Nations) and governments. Because of that, international institutions and funders that hold power tend to overlook the contributions of grassroots peacebuilding efforts.

This dismissal of grassroots action, especially if it relies on local resources, is also felt in other spaces, such as the grassroots environmental justice movement, grassroots feminist and civil society organizing, and our global network of community philanthropy organizations (amongst others). The dismissive power of international institutions reproduces itself across sectors, and a quick conversation with people in various grassroots movements and spaces reveals that there is a strong sense of feeling lonely, isolated and not seen.

We could also consider the issue of measurement and evaluation. The local peacebuilding movement has had to navigate how to measure impact on long-term and complex issues. Yet donors still want to use log frames, ask for short-term impact and shy away from complexity. Local peacebuilding understands that relationships matter and are fundamental to sustaining change after external programmes end. Yet very few donors are interested in what happens to community organizing after their programmes closes. Instead, they request transactional reporting that tends not to reflect on the quality of relationships.

The risk of imposing such top-down processes on local actors is that these actors can, in turn, begin to behave in ways that create distance between themselves and the communities they work with, causing further isolation. These issues are a function of power, felt and endured across other movements too. Movements that do not always talk to each other. No wonder everyone feels like they are fighting a systemic beast alone.

The week before Peace Connect, the GFCF hosted our Community Philanthropy Symposium in Nairobi, with 42 participants from 23 countries who are all mobilizing local resources to support and sustain their work. One of the discussions at the Symposium was about the need for new kinds of organizing (versus “organizations”). A kind of organizing which is bound together by a shared connective tissue or central nervous system. “Niche marketing” of non-profits to attract funding has caused us to present our organizations as being particularly special and different (the ego). We present our work as something that matters more than the work of others (halos), and this causes us to retreat to those who are most like us (silos). What if we were, instead, birds of “different feathers” that flock together?

Problematic and harmful funding practices cut across all movements, and are hard to reform or influence in isolation. Peacebuilders travelling to Bogotá and community philanthropy actors attending Peace Connect in Nairobi were not courtesy visits. Instead, this deliberate cross-pollination is part of larger and deliberate efforts to build meaning across artificial divisions, to warm up conversations across differences, to identifies synergies in values and practices.

In a world in which movements can often feel isolated and threatened, this deliberate weaving of new forms of solidarity and horizontal relationships across movements is more urgent than ever. Bringing shared struggles into sharper focus, and upping our collective ambitions that “systems change” should and can be within our reach. Indeed, that we all need to see ourselves as systems thinkers.

By: Eshban Kwesiga, GFCF Knowledge Weaving and Influencing Manager