Archives for March 2014

This article first appeared on Open Democracy. It is also available in Arabic, Spanish and Hebrew.

The global proliferation of community foundations is no accident. Community philanthropy is reclaiming traditions of sharing that have been undermined by individualism and materialism, and is simultaneously an act of resistance against neocolonial interference in the guise of “aid.” There is growing awareness among communities in the global South that dependence on international aid binds them to a system that favors Northern interests; increasingly, they consider “poverty” a construct created by those same interests and perpetuated through the aid system.

In the West Bank and Gaza Strip, international aid constitutes an estimated 36 percent of GDP, and there is literally no aspect of the economy that is independent of Israeli control and international influence. The Palestinian Authority (PA), a pseudo-government residual from the Oslo era, is the biggest beneficiary, with an estimated one-third of the Palestinian population dependent on the public payroll. As a result, the PA answers to international/Israeli orders, and has almost no accountability to local communities. Sadly, international NGOs fail to live up to their civil society mandate. Instead, they compete with local NGOs for funding, staff and beneficiaries. Add the approximately one billion US dollars per year of funding that goes through the United Nations, over which local people have very little influence, and the picture is complete: A massive, misguided, self-perpetuating “humanitarian” system that not only constrains local agency, but also undermines traditional systems for interdependence and self-reliance.

While critiques of international aid are becoming mainstream, there is still little awareness about community foundations as a viable alternative, even in thediscourse about funding for human rights. In responding to local challenges and opportunities, community foundations and other community philanthropic organizations offer communities a dignified and creative way to organize their resources towards collective self-reliance for generations to come.

Palestine’s community foundation, Dalia Association, grew out of two challenges: continued Israeli occupation, dispossession, and colonization; and dependence on politically-restricted international aid. Dalia’s founders perceived that both these forces deny Palestinians the right to control their own development agenda. Today, Dalia’s work is organized around a concept that has evolved through our years of work: self-determination in development. The concept of self-determination in development frames self-reliance in human rights terms and links the right to development with the Palestinian national cause.

In fact, when I assembled the founders back in 2007, I didn’t fully grasp how aid colluded with Israeli occupation, dispossession and colonization. I was focused solely on money. “If only Palestinians had their own money,” I thought, “…the wasteful, irrelevant and unsustainable activities posited as ‘post conflict development’ would stop.” But my group of co-founders quickly disabused me of my naïve and simplistic approach. Self-determination is not about having a big endowment. It’s about responsibly and intentionally utilizing the resources we have, mobilizing other resources by modeling credible, inspiring practice, and working transparently, democratically and accountably to pursue our own priorities over the long haul.

In the last seven years, Dalia’s work has grown and flourished with experimentation in three related pillars. The first pillar of Dalia’s work is an innovative, unrestricted small grants process we call “community-controlled grantmaking.” Dalia mobilizes resources for grassroots community groups in villages and refugee camps, but we don’t make grants like a donor. Instead, we facilitate democratic and transparent community decision-making by the local community. They decide who gets grants and how much each grant consists of. A committee comprised of community members is formed to monitor grantees to ensure they work with integrity and for the good of the community at large, not for any factional, family or personal interest. Grantees mobilize local resources to expand their projects, and Dalia provides constant and on-gong support in the form of coaching on planning, budgeting, procurement, marketing, etc. In this way, small amounts of money can transform a whole community: local civil society is strengthened in its commitment and ability to respond to local priorities, and the community practices the right and responsibility to hold civil society groups accountable and support them with local resources.

The second pillar of Dalia’s work is philanthropy development. We recognize the need to expand the culture of philanthropy beyond religiously-motivated giving and charity to include support for the sustainability of local institutions. We also recognize the need to build systems to make local, diaspora and private sector philanthropy safer, cheaper and more credible. The challenges are enormous: lack of trust in local institutions, underdeveloped legal and regulatory frameworks, and the chilling effect of the war on terrorism. But as a community foundation whose vision is to achieve independence over generations, Dalia is positioned to address these challenges no matter how long it takes. We are currently promoting the idea of “funds” in the name of companies, families, villages or causes. Unlike “donor advised funds” that are common in US foundations, these funds are a true partnership between contributors and the community. Contributors decide what to give (cash, materials, or services, in any combination) and they can engage as much or as little as they want with communities, but the communities are the ones to decide how to use their development resources. The challenge is to keep decision-making local, while encouraging contributors to engage beyond writing a check.

The third pillar—advocacy to reform international aid—has changed over time. Dalia has become more selective in its targets. Rather than attempting to influence major aid actors for whom Palestinian interests are clearly not a priority, like USAID, Dalia encourages Palestinians to refuse that type of funding and instead engage with (and thereby influence) international actors that practice true partnership and are motivated by human rights commitments.

In 2013, Dalia Association was recognized for its unique strategy when it won the Arcus Global Social Justice Prize, in part for this inspiring 10-minute film.

I still find that I have to explain Dalia’s work to people who are skeptical. Many of them can barely imagine a vibrant, independent and accountable civil society in Palestine, and the concept of an organization dedicated to helping other NGOs achieve sustainability and community accountability is even stranger. To those people, I like to explain Dalia’s work with a much simpler metaphor, the potluck. At a potluck, everyone brings what they can, however modest, but everyone feasts. Everyone is a giver; everyone is a receiver.

Just imagine if every one of the over 10 million Palestinians in the world, and other supporters of Palestinian rights, contributed whatever resources they can – money, ideas, contacts, materials, faith, culture, services – for the good of locally-controlled development in Palestine! A man in Chicago could donate computers to a school in Jerusalem. A woman in Gaza could translate a press release for an equal rights demonstration in Haifa. A company in Jenin could donate grant money for a women’s committee in a village near Hebron. A solidarity group in Spain could send occupational therapists to teach Gazans. A youth group in Jaffa could perform the poem of a refugee in Lebanon.

Dalia Association is a matchmaker, a motivator, a convener, and a hands-on supporter to ensure that resources are used effectively, with integrity and reported transparently in order to inspire further giving. Our vision for Palestinian development is one that re-weaves relationships among the disparate parts of the Palestinian community and offers every single person and group the opportunity to give.

This post originally appeared on WhyDev.org.

Perhaps I am skeptical because I live in Palestine among a people whose rights to self-determination have been denied for 65 years and who experience daily violence, theft of natural resources, impoverishment, inaccessibility of services – all while being among the largest per capita beneficiaries of international humanitarian and development aid. But from where I sit, I don’t see too much hope for post-2015 development, which is driven by a deceptively benign-sounding ideology that manages only to alleviate symptoms of disease that it simultaneously perpetuates.

I call the ideology “starting from scratch,” and it is especially disappointing to hear this ideology expressed by highly-regarded aid reformers like Paul Farmer. His recent article re-thinking foreign aid says that aid is needed to alleviate human suffering, and he calls for more aid to be delivered through local public systems. It’s a worthy-sounding argument, but it starts from scratch, ignoring the causes of continued vulnerability of children, of illiteracy, of inaccessibility of basic infrastructure and services.

Can we know how aid affects problems without also understanding what is causing the problems? Without analysis, not only of the historical roots of current problems, but also of the ways that need is recreated and perpetuated in the very fabric of today’s global society, we end up with an unexamined assumption that poverty just “is.” This implies that poverty is somehow innate or genetic to those who experience it. With that worldview, any effort to address poverty is going from nothing to something, from stasis to action, because we are “starting from scratch.”

But there is an alternative ideology. More and more aid critics and development justice activists espouse the view that development is an ordinary, instinctual, human process that, if allowed, will proceed naturally with the momentum of gravity and humanity. We are not “starting from scratch” but rather joining ongoing processes driven by inherent strengths and utilizing historically-nurtured assets and capacities. Working from this ideology, the task of the international development community should be first and foremost to get out of the way. The second task should be to stop others from getting in the way. Only then should the international development community embark upon the third task—to humbly inquire if there is any way they can help. I call this ideology “supporting responsibly,” and if taken to heart, this would require a fundamentally different approach to international “development” work.

Development actors would need to find the existing developmental energy–which means recognizing its value–analyze and confront the obstacles that impede those natural forces, and remove the obstacles (which will likely require them to give up privileges). This is political work, systemic work, and self-work. It is not comprised of conducting assessments, running workshops and producing reports. Working from the “supporting responsibly” ideology would require development actors to be self-reflective, power-aware, and sensitive listeners, never competing with, ignoring or looking down on “locals” and certainly not trying to transform them.

Sadly, Paul Farmer, like so many other well-intentioned development actors, seems to be caught in a trap of oblivious self-righteousness that I consider part of the problem. He says the phrase “Local solutions for local problems” is “a commonly encountered liberal piety of development work.” He explains: “Many problems originate outside of people’s own communities: most trade regimes, all epidemics, and just about anything to do with climate change.”  This is true! But he goes on to argue that vaccines, pedagogic materials and shoes should not be manufactured locally. To me, this is a non sequitur. If Farmer admits the problems originate outside, then they should be solved outside (in other words, fix the trade regimes!) rather than alleviating the symptoms with externally imposed, short-term fixes, that enable the perpetrators to keep on causing damage.

Moreover, Farmer’s wrong-headed “starting from scratch” ideology leads him to say, “If we are able to strengthen in-country capacity so recipients can manage their own affairs, one day we will eliminate the need for anything other than partnerships.” But if he spoke from the “supporting responsibly” ideology, he would say, “If we stop actively and intentionally destroying in-country capacity, then surely recipients, like all human beings, can manage their own affairs, and until then, anything we do except in full partnership with locals will be contradictory to that goal.”

Without understanding aid-givers’ role in creating the problems they seek to address, then it’s impossible to assess if and how aid may be “helping.” To use a harsh analogy: Should home invaders pat themselves on the back and take credit for letting hostages eat from their own refrigerator?

The expiration of the Millennium Development Goals provides an opportunity for those who claim to care about development to think about what’s next. I suggest we think first about how we got to the state of inequality, unnecessary suffering, and climate devastation that we find ourselves in now.