Community-Driven Systems Change: The Power of Grassroots-Led Change for Long Term Impact and How Funders Can Nurture It

"In order to reframe development narratives according to values, goals, and agendas that are aligned with community-driven systems change, we need to fundamentally redefine our understanding of concepts of success, impact, sustainability, and effectiveness."

In partnership with community-based organisations (CBOs) across eastern and southern Africa, the Firelight Foundation created a framework for grantmaking strategies that are designed to foster effective, sustainable change - with communities leading the way. This report provides foundations, philanthropists, and other donors with practical actions they can take and questions they can ask themselves to move away from Global-North directed programming towards a model that centres the leadership and expertise of communities and CBOs in social change.

The framework in grounded in the conviction that CBOs are critical actors and leaders in the development ecosystem and especially in grassroots change processes because they:

• Have the capacity to transect, engage with, support, and influence different macro, mezzo, and micro levels of society;
• Hold familiarity, trust, and legitimacy within their communities;
• Can work with those who hold power in their communities while also reaching the most vulnerable;
• Value and tend to be skilled at building relationships and partnerships with strategic stakeholders;
• Work on different dimensions of holistic issues, including long-term systemic change such as through advocacy and gradual shifting of social norms.
• Value participatory processes and dialogue and accountability with their community members - likely resulting in approaches and projects that are community owned and sustainable.

The framework was built over a 3-year period across 9 countries, beginning in 2017. Firelight listened to its CBO grantee-partners to understand how better to support them in creating lasting change at the community level for children, youth, and families. This process of inquiry, learning, co-creation, and validation with CBOs led to the analysis and recommendations for philanthropic reform that are included in this report.

The report provides an outline for how funders can centre CBOs in their philanthropic work by moving through the "what, why, and how" of community-driven systems change, which Firelight defines as "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." In practice, it means:

• Working with community and government stakeholders to surface key issues, share indigenous knowledge, map out systems and stakeholders, understand root causes, prioritise issues, and develop a shared action plan in which the CBO is one of many actors.
• Together implementing, evaluating/reflecting on, and adapting that shared action plan.
• Developing actions or interventions with community stakeholders in response to the issues and root causes identified in the community - drawing on available experiences, indigenous knowledge and practices, and internal and external tools and resources as appropriate.
• Being open and sensitive to both expected and unexpected outcomes, and looking for intermediate indicators of progress.
• Using data and evidence to learn and improve action.
• Thinking about the whole system, the context, different stakeholders, relationships, and dynamics.
• Different stakeholders recognising and acting on different entry points.
• Investing time and resources into convenings and exchanges that build community cohesion, shared analysis and learning, and collaborative action.
• Taking actions that aim to create lasting changes in systems, such as advocacy, normative change, and the strengthening of existing community or government structures.
• Recognising that it takes time and investment to create true shifts in systems that will last - that this change may not be immediately visible, and that beneficiary numbers in a given year are not an indicator of systemic change.

Firelight explains that investment in community-driven systems change is important because:

• Enduring, transformative change requires an approach of justice and solidarity.
• Current global development paradigms and approaches have had limited success.
• Social change is complex and systemic.
• Community institutions, leaders, practitioners, and activists are critical agents of grassroots change.

The report highlights the gap between how the global development sector and CBOs from eastern and southern Africa conceptualise success, effectiveness, and sustainability, while providing tools for donors to bring their work more into alignment with CBOs on the ground in communities. For example, funders can support CBOs to effect community-driven systems change by providing or facilitating:

1. Meaningful funding over a longer period of time that enables the CBO to take sustainable and community-driven approaches to programming, to build and nurture relationships with stakeholders, and to strengthen their own organisational capacity and resilience;
2. Simpler and more supportive grantmaking systems and practices that are more guided by what CBOs need to achieve success than by what the funder wants to know;
3. Trust in CBOs and their communities to be able to identify, prioritise, analyse, and address their pressing issues and root causes, as well as determine their own indicators of success and learning agenda;
4. Flexibility that recognises the complex and non-linear nature of systemic change work and enables learning and adaptation at the community level;
5. Mutual transparency and accountability for openness, understanding, trust, and more equality of power in the funder-CBO relationship;
6. Mutual capacity strengthening that responds to CBOs' own identified capacity needs and recognises the capacities that many funders lack that CBOs can help build; and
7. Investment in and the normalisation of CBO leaders' presence and voice in national, regional, and global development discourses.

In conclusion: "If we keep doing things the way we always have, we continue to instrumentalize CBOs and communities in service of the agendas of the Global North funders and INGOs, and define their success and effectiveness in relation to the goals of those Global North actors. This is an inherently flawed narrative and perspective, as it continues to centre and frame everything from the perspective and priorities of the Global North funders and INGOs [international non-governmental organisations] rather than those of Global South community-based leaders and practitioners. This results in Global North values, priorities, agendas, and approaches continuing to be imposed on Global South communities, and risks important lost opportunity and potentially great harm to these communities and their civil society institutions."

Editor's note: Also available are tools and templates to translate these concepts into practice - click here to download:

• Tools for donors
  • Designing a New Initiative that Supports Community-Driven Systems Change [9 pages, PDF]
  • Grantmaking for Community-Driven Systems Change [8 pages, PDF]
  • Guidelines for Interactions with Community-Based Organization Grantees and Their Communities [5 pages, PDF]
  • Capacity Strengthening for Community-Driven Systems Change [4 pages, PDF]
  • Evaluation and Learning in Community-Driven Systems Change [4 pages, PDF]
  • Top Five Indicators of CBO Effectiveness as Indicated by CBOs Themselves [1 page, PDF]
• Template for donors: Initial Proposal for Implementation Grant [11 pages, PDF]
• Tool for CBOs: Participatory Reflection Tool: CBO Capacity to Facilitate Community-Driven Systems-Change [29 pages, PDF]