Keeping the show on the road: a reflective dialogue between a community worker and a funder

This chapter presents a dialogue between Japhet Makongo, a community development worker based in Tanzania, and Lin Bender, CEO of the philanthropic organisation, the Helen Macpherson Smith Trust in Victoria, Australia. Lin and Japhet have each worked on both ‘sides’ of the funding relationship and through their discussion they offer insights into the day-to-day realities of managing funding relationships. They analyse the risks and challenges involved, but also the possibilities for effective funding for community empowerment. Their discussion of funding speaks to perennially important themes within community development such as power, agency, community ownership, process versus outcome, and the meaning of ‘success’.

Communities of hope? Gendered re-signification of microcredit in rural India

This chapter presents a picture of what gendered resilience looks like at the ground level in eastern India's Darjeeling district in the state of West Bengal. It focuses on how women interpret and react to popular market-based development alternatives like microcredit and the consequences this has had for community development. The chapter is divided into three sections. The first section charts the history and dynamics of microcredit's unfolding in Darjeeling and highlights the practices and discourses through which women demonstrate resilience. The second section lays out how and why women re-signify risk in the context of microcredit to make visible non-financial forms of risk that affect their families and, in turn, their communities. The third section explores how, after encountering the social and economic difficulties that came with the microcredit loans, many of the women set up their own groups for lending.

“Walking the tightrope”: the funding of South African NGOs and the governance of community development

This chapter examines the role of intermediary NGOs in community development in post-apartheid South Africa, specifically exploring how these organisations have been shaped by changing funding modalities. It first summarises the socio-historical developments that have enabled NGOs to become significant actors in community development. It then examines partnerships as a specific neoliberal mode of funding that has shaped the role of NGOs in community development. It is argued that partnerships provide a context within which shared values, practices, and techniques appropriate to particular, often neoliberal, forms of community development can be developed in NGOs. Partnerships link intermediary NGOs with corporations, the state, and communities, and enable claims of legitimacy, build consensus through homogenisation, and necessitate particular auditing techniques and capabilities.

‘It is time to reterritorialise utopian thinking’: community, the commons and the funding of autonomous movements in Latin America – an interview with Marcelo Lopes de Souza

This chapter presents an interview with Marcelo Lopes de Souza, a scholar who cooperates with social movements, and professor in the Department of Geography at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Drawing on the experiences of Latin American social movements, Marcelo discusses the implications of a commitment to radical autonomy for the funding of community-based movements and for emancipatory community development more broadly. Among the topics covered are the importance of ‘the commons’ in the life of communities; the role of ‘autonomous’ movements in community empowerment; the so-called ‘NGOisation’ of Latin American civil society and the extent to which this phenomenon has been a feature of the movements that Marcelo is familiar as well as its effects.

Corporate funding and local community development: a case from the mining industry in Australia

This chapter elucidates the social and political complexities of corporate community development as practised in the mining industry, with attention to implications for meanings of ‘community’ and ‘development’. This is achieved through examination of corporate funding of community initiatives in the rural Shire of Ravensthorpe in Western Australia, the greenfield site of the Ravensthorpe Nickel Operation owned by BHP Billiton (BHPB) until 2010. The chapter begins with an overview of corporate social responsibility and the contested concept of development before examining the community development practices undertaken by the mining sector in Australia. It critically analyses BHPB's claimed commitment to community development and then explores more specifically its role in ‘developing’ Ravensthorpe.

The reinvention of ‘civil society’: transnational conceptions of development in East-Central Europe

This chapter explores how the notion of ‘civil society’ in East-Central Europe, and the discursive and organisational practices attached to the term, have been deployed in politics, and how this has affected how local development and empowerment are conceived and funded. In this respect, struggles over the meaning and practice of ‘civil society’ activism in the region speak to longstanding debates within the community development field relating to the role of state and market; the status, function, and relevance of professionalised organisations within communities; the relationship between political and economic freedoms; and the possibilities for meaningful transnational solidarity.

Funding, power and community development: an introduction

This chapter sets out some of the most important themes across the book and illustrates why funding offers a powerful lens through which to ‘rethink’ community development in the current historical conjuncture. The first section unpacks the term ‘community development’ with reference to the varied conceptualisations deployed across the book. In particular, it draws attention to the importance of the widely shared democratic ‘ethic’, and to the inherent complexity of community development as a set of processes that call for a historical and social-spatial analysis of power. The second section expands on the analytical, political, and practice significance of funding. Finally, it highlights the three major cross-cutting themes of the collection: new configurations of power and governance; the role of the state in relation to democracy; and the complex connections between community development and egalitarian social change.

Funding community organising: diversifying sources, democratising civil society

This chapter recognises the variety, complexity, and contested politics of community organising — a practice that ranges from consensus-based community building to more conflict-oriented grassroots organising confronting oppression. It focuses on the need for movement-like organising for economic and social justice at the local level and beyond. The chapter makes the case that an over-reliance on progressive philanthropic sources has resulted in the underfunding of community organising. It has also contributed to the depoliticisation of ‘civil society’ and has obscured the potential role the state can play in achieving egalitarian social change. The chapter argues that it is time to diversify funding sources for community organising and to re-evaluate debates in the field about the limits and difficulties associated with state funding.

Building alternative communities within the state: the Kurdish Movement, local municipalities and democratic autonomy

This chapter discusses the different forms of community development that the Kurdish Movement creatively makes use of and how funding is sourced in support of these practices. Since the mid-2000s, the Kurdish Movement has put increased focus on the development of alternative communities in the Kurdistan region in Turkey as part of an effort to establish ‘democratic autonomy’. The chapter is structured in three parts. The first section explains the historical and theoretical background of the paradigmatic shift within the Kurdish Movement from armed struggle for independence towards a movement for democratic autonomy. This is followed by a discussion of the central role of the municipalities in this model and an analysis of three exemplary forms of funding.

Local philanthropy and women’s empowerment: the case of Tewa, the Nepal Women’s Fund

This chapter presents the author's reflections on how her commitment to community development principles has been applied to funding. She shares her experiences at Tewa, the Nepal Women's Fund, a feminist organisation she founded right after the UN World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, with the explicit aim of fostering local philanthropy as a means to empowering women. Over the past 21 years, Tewa has successfully raised 3.6 corer, equivalent to US$355,600, from approximately 5,000 Nepali donors and made 573 grants to over 454 community groups of women in 69 of the 75 districts of Nepal. Tewa has trained and mobilised over 680 fundraising volunteers. It has been a forerunner among the women's funds in the Global South, and a model for women's groups and others in Nepal.