To celebrate 25 years of advancing womens’ rights and building local philanthropy in Nepal, Tewa - The Nepal Women's Fund released this report, as well as this short video. Both resources feature anecdotes from members of the Tewa family - staff, board, grantee partners and volunteers alike - that collectively begin to tell the story of Tewa. The report offers a snapshot of Tewa's milestones over the years, considering its grantmaking, local resource mobilization efforts, volunteer programmes, grantee partner support programmes as well as the establishment of the Tewa Centre. Published: January 2021 Published by: Tewa Download: 'Marking the silver jubilee'

This paper explores community development as an effective participatory approach to overcome development fatigue. The first section focuses on the dynamics of donor fatigue while the second section explores the fatigue experienced by implementing civil society organizations from the global south and the effect on the communities they serve. Since power imbalances are the common trait to all stakeholders’ fatigues (donors, civil society organizations and beneficiaries), this paper will then explore how to streamline and shift power between stakeholders, and move from a top bottom to a bottom up approach where beneficiaries’ communities own and decide their development agenda. This paper further presents selected case studies of organizations in the global...

Noting preliminary lessons from how coronavirus has affected the philanthropic response to big societal issues, this report calls for three major steps to incorporate these learnings into the long-term approach of philanthropy to the grand challenges facing the Global South and beyond: Fund networks to build infrastructure, capacity and knowledge. Increase partnerships between Global South governments and Global South philanthropists. Build resilience by funding core costs. Published: February 2021 Published by: Centre for Strategic Philanthropy, University of Cambridge Judge Business School Download: 'Philanthropy and COVID-19: Is the North-South power balance finally shifting?' or the Executive Summary

During 2020, the world faced an acceleration in the rate of dramatic shocks: the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting economic turmoil, the ever-gathering climate catastrophe, and the global reverberations of calls against structural racism. These developments occurred against the constant drum beat of rising inequality that erodes the capacity of states to manage the combined effects of these crises. Such developments make the concept of resilience even more salient. People are asking "how can we cope and survive?" and "how can we make sure that we build back better from this crisis?" This paper considers what resilience looks like in practice, and is based on the work of three organizations – Tewa, Global...

The GFCF Annual Report, covering the period 1 April 2019 - 31 March 2020, offers a snapshot of the organization’s activities for the financial year. The report lays out key outcomes for the period in three areas: supporting individual community philanthropy organizations; connecting the field and growing the evidence base for people-led development; and, building a global movement to #ShiftThePower. A particular highlight for the period covered by the report was the Pathways to Power Symposium, held November 2019 in London. Published by: GFCF Published: January 2021 Download: ‘GFCF Annual Report, 1 April 2019 - 31 March 2020'

A separate chapter of the global battle against COVID-19 is being played out in Latin America, which is testing national and regional capacities to meet a challenge that goes far beyond a health crisis. The different responses of public administrations call into question regional coordination capacities, and also expose the fragility of institutions, infrastructure, the social model of development and the capacities of different actors to collaborate across sectors for the public good. Against this backdrop, over spring 2020, ELLAS spoke with a number of women community leaders from across Latin America, to learn more about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on their communities and on their own personal lives....

Recognizing the increasingly urgent need to defend human rights in the Arab region, as well as the challenges of funding such work there, a working group of advocates initiated a multiphase research process to explore possibilities for local human rights funds in the Arab region. This first phase of research aims to identify resource mobilization and participatory grantmaking mechanisms in other regions where communities have successfully organized to support human rights in difficult environments. Furthermore, it aims to provide sufficient context and detail so that researchers in the next phase can engage in thoughtful, informed and open-ended discussions with leaders on the ground. Authors: Mary Fifield and Abigail Sarmac Published: November 2020 Published...

GlobalGiving, as part of its mission to make it easier for funders to identify, support, and strengthen community‑led approaches, engaged the GFCF to understand how to define “community‑led” and to develop internal tools that would help their team identify community‑led grantee organizations. Over 2020, the GFCF, along with field partners in six countries, engaged in participatory research with knowledgeable local community leaders to: Explore what community‑led approaches look like in practice; Gather evidence of such approaches and their long‑term impact; and, Discover how funders’ policies and practices promote or inhibit community‑led approaches. One output of the research is the Community‑Led Assessment Tool, that will help GlobalGiving determine the degree to which...

The goal of this report is to identify and lift up a variety of enabling practices that can be replicated, increased in scale and scope, and adapted. The report: Presents the current landscape of funding for gender equality; Acknowledges common constraints, or stumbling blocks, that often emerge as challenges for bilateral and multilateral funders wishing to directly resource feminist movements; and, Identifies concrete building blocks, or dimensions of funding modalities, that address those constraints. The hope is that this work can provide practical steps for funders to drive more accessible, efficient, and impactful funding to feminist movements and strengthen the capacity of movements and funders to deliver on the shared mission...

This consultation paper is designed to advance a conversation about measurement in civil society. The goal is to identify more meaningful approaches to organizational learning and accountability. Over a two‑year period, 130 people from civil society from all over the world came together in a series of parallel and intersecting conversations, online and in‑person, to co‑create this document. It is now being published to widen those discussions and to advance the co‑creation process still further. To date, these conversations have resulted in increased understanding about the challenges involved in measurement, identification of some promising areas for exploration, guiding principles for any system of measurement, and two recommended action steps (local...

This study aims to increase knowledge and understanding of the characteristics and impact of small grants funds and recent developments in thinking about this kind of funds. In particular, it explores their role in strengthening environmental protection in an effective, participatory and socially just fashion. The purpose of the study is to provide further insight into how small grants funds function and what they can achieve. It seeks to create a starting point for discussion and forward-looking strategizing about the role and value of small grants funds in contributing to environmental protection, women's rights and social justice. This study aims to provide insight and answers in the following three areas: The...