A Community‑Led Assessment Tool to help determine the degree to which organizations are community‑led. The Tool considers nine essential characteristics…
Community-Driven Systems Change: the power of grassroots-led change for long-term impact and how funders can nurture it
Publications
Community Driven
Grantmaking Principles
May 23, 2023
Firelight Foundation
Between 2017 and 2020, Firelight embarked upon a learning journey to listen deeply to our CBO grantee-partners to understand how better to support them in creating lasting change at the community level for children, youth, and families, and to share CBO leaders’ insights with the wider sector as a rich and valuable source of guidance to funders, international non-governmental organizations (INGOs), practitioners, and scholars. Both objectives were driven by a realization that there was limited, if any, documented and published evidence on how to strengthen the capacity and success of CBOs, especially from the perspectives of CBOs themselves. The result is our report Community-Driven Systems Change: the power of grassroots-led change for long-term impact and how funders can nurture it.
Community-driven systems change is an approach to development and social transformation that emphasizes the insight, leadership, and ownership of the people who are living and experiencing issues at the community level, and their work to create lasting change in the systems and root causes that underlie the critical issues they seek to address.
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