Episode 8: #ShiftThePower - The Movement

Disrupt Development

The call to change the balance of power in development cooperation is getting louder and louder. It is time for more local ownership of the global agenda, everyone seems to agree. There is even a real movement under the hashtag #ShiftThePower. The development community has been talking about this for decades now, but what has changed? In this new Podcast series of Disrupt Development I am going unpack the #ShiftThePower debate with great minds.

In this #2 episode I am going to talk with Jenny Hodgson the driving force behind the global #ShiftThePower movement and Executive Director of the Global Fund for Community Foundations, about disrupting development aid through community philantropy.

Community philanthropy, a source of sustainable local funding for local priorities which has been largely overlooked in conversations around local ownership and financing for development. Over the last twenty years a quiet revolution has been taking place in communities around the world, outside the machinery and beyond the radar of big development. This new set of organisations from the Global South – community foundations, women’s funds, environmental funds and other grassroots grantmakers – has emerged in countries as diverse as Romania and Zimbabwe, Vietnam and Mexico. They have been shaped by local context, culture and by individuals often frustrated by the failures of traditional development aid, anxious about the sense of alienation and disenchantment in their communities, and inspired by the belief that without local resources, local leadership and local buy-in, development projects will continue to land like fireworks – to flash spectacularly and then die.