We believe that active, engaged, and empowered citizens are the cornerstone of sustainable development and the exercise of human rights. A robust civil society and an independent media are essential to creating and sustaining an active citizenry and responsive government.

We work creatively and realistically with local partners, through both formal and informal structures, to address local, regional, and national challenges – even in countries with closing or restricted civic space.

Guided by the needs of our partners, we provide technical expertise, training, and grants to help citizen groups develop and implement practical solutions to issues of priority concern – such as countering disinformation, improving equal access to public services, combating corruption and ensuring land and natural resource rights. We provide resources and capacity building for aspiring youth, women and Indigenous leaders and community members, while creating an enabling environment for their active participation in political and social spheres.

WHAT WE DO

Defend Civic Space

Closing civic space—including restrictions on the freedom of assembly and association, the freedom of expression, and access to funding—is a growing and critical issue. We help civic actors to increase their support base, coordinate efforts, and maximize impact, through: tailored and demand-driven resiliency skills building; capacity development assistance on fundraising and constituency building; a wide range of learning opportunities for citizen-driven design, implementation, and advocacy and public education initiatives; and strategic and flexible grant support. We also step up to protect our local partners from criminal prosecutions and investigations by supporting partner-led legal defense funds and sharing of best practices to operate these funds efficiently and safely.

Support Community Initiative Groups

We promote organic civic engagement by mobilizing innovative community initiative groups that come together out of a shared concern over a specific local issue, such as environmental degradation, threats to local livelihoods and access to public services. We support these groups and amplify the results of their mobilization when safe and appropriate, so as to motivate other communities to take similar action. Our approach is grounded in a specific theory of change that we believe has particular resonance in the semi-authoritarian or emerging democratic societies in which we work: If people feel empowered to make demands of the state, even simple demands at the community level, they will gradually internalize the notion that the state must be responsive to people’s demands and that it is the people’s priorities that should drive state action and not the other way around.

Support Indigenous Communities

We work to empower Indigenous communities to access natural resources and exercise their rights through initiatives that support storytelling, narrative building, and documentation of their Traditional Ecological Knowledge. We co-create initiatives that support Indigenous Peoples in asserting and protecting their inherent rights to full ownership, control, and governance of their data—and data about them—based on their own value systems consistent with the Indigenous Data Sovereignty framework.

Connect Community Advocates to Donors

We understand the challenge for donors to identify worthy and viable organizations to support, and we ensure that this support is used appropriately and effectively. We serve as a trusted intermediary between advocates and the donors that are essential to their survival. Social change organizations turn to us for this purpose because they recognize our long-term commitment to their development and have faith in our good offices.