Global Grassroots Grantmaking

Most U.S.-based foundations have never made a grant beyond the borders of the United States. IRS regulations, selecting good partners, and monitoring and evaluation may all seem challenging. But it’s actually quite feasible, and leads to impressive results. Four experienced foundations are coming together for a “Common Spaces” session on April 11 at the Council on Foundations conference in Philadelphia focused on global grassroots grantmaking.

Grassroots grantmaking reaches deep into communities in far corners of the world, investing in local solutions in places that are often rural, isolated, excluded, and ignored. Working this way, even with small grants, has big impact on social change, community leadership, and civil society. What’s more, it is proven, cost effective and you can track results.

Firelight Foundation, Global Fund for Children, Global Greengrants Fund, and Global Fund for Women will discuss the rationale for grassroots grantmaking, how a foundation can get started, how to monitor and assess this work, and how to situate it in the range of other funding flows.

Each of these grantmakers has a pivotal story that reminds them how grassroots grantmaking makes a big impact, whether it’s the immediacy of local actors to respond in disasters like the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the resiliency of community-based organizations to continue to operate in the highest rate of inflation the world has ever seen in Zimbabwe, or the resource building that allows children forced into military action to return to school and take steps out of poverty in Burundi. These grantmakers have seen the impact of grassroots grants. They know what’s possible and what works.

With a collective six decades of global grassroots grantmaking experience, these organizations will share their answers to three questions that drive them.

• What is it really about, and what theories of change underlie global grassroots grantmaking?
• What is good practice in making cross-border grants and what makes it work for the grassroots organizations on the receiving side?
• We know small grants make a big difference to small organizations, but how can small grants be leveraged for large-scale change?

Please come to our session and learn how you can get involved.

Peter Laugharn is executive director of the Firelight Foundation