Grantee Profiles
- The West Coast Community Foundation
- The Lambi Fund
- Icom
- The Kenya Community Development Foundation
- Community Foundation Kaliningrad
- The Dalia Association
Project success at the West Coast Community Foundation:
Atlantis Athletico
Part of the Atlantis Youth Development Forum local government initiative, Atlantis Athletico runs a rehabilitation programme for 300 children and young people from 5 – 25 years of age, whose challenging behaviour has become a concern. Actively involving both children and parents, the programme uses the principles of discipline and integrity associated with sport to help tackle behavioural problems.
West Coast Community Foundation has been working with Atlantis Athletico since 2005, supporting the club with a total of 20,000 South African Rand (c. $2,500 US) in grants. Offering funds to meet the basic needs of the team, such as soccer kits and other equipment as well as offering vital networking opportunities to link the club with other funders, West Coat Community Foundation has seen the programme go from strength to strength both in terms of sporting success and its organisational development. Local league winners and holders of 5th place in the Coke Tournament 2008, seven of the club’s under 17 players have recently been selected for the Western Cape Provincial team for the 2010 Soccer World Cup. Johanna Hendricks of West Coast Community Foundation commented that “It’s a privilege to work with people who are so passionate about the future of our children”.
The Lambi Fund
The Lambi Fund was founded in 1994 by Haitians, Haitian Americans and North Americans. Their mission is to assist the popular democratic movement in Haiti by providing financial resources, training and technical assistance to peasant-led community organizations promoting the social and economic empowerment of the Haitian people. The Lambi Fund makes grants and offers technical assistance to its rural grantee organizations. The Fund also conducts leadership training for rural grassroots leaders.
Demonstrating transparency and accountability in its management and decision-making systems is of extreme importance to the Lambi Fund as way of building trust both among its grantees and its donors. In turn, it seeks to demonstrate that Haitian peasant organizations can help to stabilize rural communities by improving economic conditions such as increasing availability of food and potable water, reducing soil erosion and establishing an overall improved environment. Two other focus areas for the Fund are improving gender equality and supporting the democratic process in rural communities.
Key challenges include “raising awareness and spreading the good news about Haiti when most messages are focused on bad news from Haiti.” Past governmental corruption and unethical conduct on the part of some organizations have created a distrust of Haitian institutions.
The Fund collaborates with other local and international organizations working with peasant communities. They are developing a peer-to-peer exchange between peasant and women’s organizations working on reforestation in Haiti and those involved in the Green Belt movement in Kenya. In an attempt to further diversify its funding base, and with the long term objective of establishing its own endowment fund, the Lambi Fund plans actively to reach out to potential donors in the Haitian diaspora with support from the Fund. This effort will focus on creating networks of donors in Miami, New York, Montreal, and Washington, D.C.
Icom
ICom, founded in 2005, is the first community foundation in southern Brazil. It was founded by a group of individuals who wanted to support groups and organizations working in the community, but who had little access to technical assistance and financial resources. Community foundations are not well established in Brazil and ICom sees itself as serving as a model that can be replicated elsewhere in Brazil: in developing its messages to donors and the community ICom has adapted terminologies and a model that resonate in the Brazilian context
ICom serves Grande Florianopolis, a metropolitan area comprised of 9 municipalities with 764,000 inhabitants. The city, located on an island with over 100 white-sand beaches, has grown rapidly over the past decade. This rapid growth has resulted in an increase in shanty towns from 29 in 1987 to 59 in 2004. Inadequate infrastructure exists to accommodate these newcomers and a sense of community has decreased. Other people moving to the city have high incomes; many are retired.
Over the last five years the NGO sector in Florianapolis has grown dramatically. Many of these new organizations were founded by newcomers and do not always engage the local community, while organizations working in the impoverished areas tend to compete instead of collaborate.
In 2006, ICom received three interrelated grants from the Global Fund. The organizational development grant focuses on: 1) board development; 2) increasing ICom’s four directors’ knowledge about community foundation management and programming; and 3) building a community-based network “Rede Solo” of 30 nonprofits to advise ICom on local needs and priorities. They hope to increase their board’s involvement in fund development activities, thereby also increasing ICom’s visibility as a community asset.
Developing a toolbox with information about asset building and social investment funds for community foundations in Brazil is the focus of the second grant. They plan to work with one of Brazil’s major commercial banks, which has expressed interest in developing philanthropic products for their clients. Information, including examples of how social investment funds work in other countries, will be adapted to the Brazilian context and will be shared with potential local donors as well as other community foundations in Brazil. This type of giving is new to donors.
ICom’s third grant provides them with an opportunity to raise local money for their first round of grantmaking. They plan to make five to ten small grants to local organizations and will include a capacity-building component. Grantees will be required to develop partnerships with other local NGOs. They are already mapping the location, activities and needs of 400 nonprofit organizations working locally. This information will inform the development of ICom's grantmaking programme and will be shared with the area’s nonprofits.
The Kenya Community Development Foundation
KCDF is Kenya’s only community foundation and represents a Kenyan-led effort to reduce donor dependence among community development initiatives. Initially a project of the Aga Khan Foundation, the foundation became independent in 2001. It now has an endowment of $1.7 million and a broad-based mission to support sustainable development efforts throughout the country. In addition to general grantmaking to community-driven development organizations, KCDF has developed topic-specific funds, such as the Girl Child Fund that addresses the specific needs of Kenyan girls especially as they relate to health and education, and the Food Security Fund that looks at long-term structural solutions to the food security crisis facing so many Kenyans.
Taking an expansive view of the role of a community foundation, KCDF has worked with international non-governmental organizations and other groups to support institutional strengthening as well as on-the-ground programmes.
A key challenge for KCDF is a lack of familiarity with the concept of an endowment. Systematic approaches to philanthropy are also new to most Kenyans. A 2006 study conducted by the foundation examined 50 companies in the country and their level of commitment to social responsibility. The study found many companies are willing to support non-profits but are often unable to determine which ones they should fund. KCDF is trying to make this link between community-based efforts and corporate or private giving.
One strategy they hope to use to address these challenges is to learn from the experience of other community foundations. In 2007, the Global Fund for Community Foundations supported a peer visit to community foundations in the UK with track records of working on issues of poverty, mobilizing funds from the corporate sector, developing strong donor services and endowment growth, and addressing conflict resolution and community building. These are all high priorities the Kenya Community Development Foundation.
Community Foundation Kaliningrad
While the Community Foundation Kaliningrad (CFK) was established relatively recently, it has already incorporated the lessons and experience of key philanthropic partners in Russia and Eastern Europe. It was founded in 2003 by a group of corporations and NGOs after research on the charitable environment showed that, although the philanthropic sector was not well developed, there was great potential for growth, especially for corporate philanthropy. Kaliningrad is a relatively remote region of Russia, positioned between Poland and Lithuania, and witnessed substantial social and economic challenges in the post-Soviet era. In response, donors and charitable groups have tended to focus on basic needs and social services rather than developing long-term, sustainable solutions to social problems. When coupled with low levels of public trust in charitable groups and a reliance on the government as the “main donor,” these issues have posed acute challenges to a developing philanthropic sector. However, the situation has changed recently with a surge of economic growth. The fact that Kaliningrad sits close to the German border – and used to be a part of Germany – also means that there are ties to diasporic communities with significant economic resources and continuing interest in the region.
The CFK is trying to capitalize on these strong cultural ties with an initiative to not only attract donors from the diaspora but to engage German institutions as partners of the foundation. The Global Fund grant to CFK will support consultant assistance in the design and implementation of the Heritage Fund, a program designed to develop German philanthropy in Kaliningrad. In addition to attracting German donors, the CFK will institute a “charity tourism program” to allow Germans to get actively involved in the region’s development. This innovative effort also engages partner organizations from across the border in the development and execution of the project: Initiative Burgerstiftungen, a support organization for German community foundations, will provide ongoing support to the CFK.
The Dalia Association
Often, the areas that need community-driven philanthropy the most are the most challenging areas in which to implement programmes. The Dalia Association was started in 2007 in the Palestinian Occupied Territories as a way to address the diverse needs of Palestinians outside of the traditional framework of foreign aid. Local civic leaders held a series of discussions in 2005 about how to reduce donor dependence and build broader participation in community-driven development efforts.
The foundation faces myriad challenges as a result of the economic and political context. Israeli regulations governing movement around the territories and ongoing violence mean that even bringing together the board for a meeting is difficult. Severe economic crisis also raises the question of how well local fundraising can develop. The Dalia Association is paying special attention to institutional capacity building as one way to address these challenges. It is registered as a Belgian foundation to create a stable legal basis for the institution and plans to tap the Palestinian diaspora as a key source of funds. With a de facto absence of a functioning government, community-based organizations, NGOs and other multilateral institutions play a key role in assuring the well-being of the Palestinian people. The Dalia Association plans to work with all of these actors while forging an innovative strategy to promote Palestinian funding and ownership of community-driven development.
The Global Fund for Community Foundations is supporting efforts to build the Association’s infrastructure. The grant will help Dalia develop a website, build a database of donors and partners, and design a grantmaking programme. It will also place critical emphasis on board development and an assessment of capacity-building needs. As it works to create these basic systems, the Association is investigating creative ways to jumpstart local philanthropic activism, combining traditional efforts at donor cultivation with grassroots needs assessments and project development.
