Donors Ourselves

by Barry Gaberman, The Ford Foundation

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Institutions are springing up around the world to help channel the universal charitable impulse into meaningful community development endeavors. This collection of essays shows how a particular slice of philanthropy, community-based foundations serving rural areas, value and assemble individual and community assets and put them to use, with guidance from local leaders, to fulfill community needs and aspirations. They represent an emerging movement that is becoming a key feature of civil society world wide. What do these experiences bring to the wider field of philanthropy and what are the challenges going forward?

Personal engagement is a hallmark of these rural development philanthropies as are direct accountability to a web of community relationships and attention to the smallest forms of social organization that are the bedrock of community. Their small, incremental investments — a scholarship fund for orphans, a rotating dairy goats scheme where the offspring are given to community members, weaving and woodworking classes — are building social capital, the social bonds and community relations that comprise the civic culture of a place. As the stories in this collection of essays show, support for these forms of social organization can break down the isolation of the poor, strengthen relationships that provide security and support and encourage the community investment in local organizations and individuals. Local philanthropies that attend to this kind of social capital are no less important than the “strategic” philanthropy of larger foundations. In fact they often excel where strategic philanthropy is most challenged: achieving both greater interaction between giver and recipient and measurable results. Rural development philanthropies have a natural advantage as their actions are built from the outset on local personal relationships and they are directly accountable for the results.