Reimagining community power and sustainability.
Community-based organisations often operate in fundraising ecosystems that are slow, highly competitive, and structurally exclusionary. Limited access to language, time, networks, and cash flow means that those organisations closest to the communities they serve can be the last to receive resources and may be forced into survival mode rather than being able to focus on long-term impact.
This session explores a shift beyond competitive, project-based fundraising towards collective, community-centered funding models that prioritise sustainability, dignity, and shared power. Drawing from lived experience supporting grassroots organisations and foundations through moments of creation, crisis, and redefinition, the workshop reflects on what happens when fundraising is reimagined as a collaborative system designed to sustain missions instead of as a race for scarce resources.
You will be invited to question dominant fundraising narratives, reflect on the unintended consequences of our current systems, and explore practical ways organisations are experimenting with collective approaches that strengthen financial resilience, organisational capacity, and community power.
Learning outcomes
- Understand how competitive fundraising models reinforce scarcity and exclusion, particularly for community-based organisations, and why these systems need to be reimagined
- Explore collective thinking and strategic alliances as viable fundraising approaches, including collaboration between foundations, community organisations, and private-sector actors to increase sustainability and shared impact
- Apply practical reflection tools to assess your own fundraising practices and identify opportunities to shift toward more ethical, resilient, and community-centered funding models