How does Firelight support its donors to support community-driven systems change?

At Firelight, many of our donors come with a passion, interest or mandate to support a particular aspect of children’s and youths’ lives. It could be rights, care, education, early childhood, wellbeing, sexual and reproductive health and rights or something else entirely. They often have particular strategies, impact goals or evaluation frameworks that they want or need to meet.

But in coming to Firelight, donors want to support children, youth and communities to have the ability to influence in that area – they want to support the community to drive the change in that area.

 As such, Firelight supports donors to meet their goals without compromising our fundamental commitment to supporting children, youth, families and their communities to develop, drive and achieve their own outcomes.

But how do we do this? Listen to our own Dr. Sadaf Shallwani, Firelight’s Director of Programs and Learning talk with the Participatory Grantmaking Community about how we work with our donors to support community-driven systems change. (Hint – Sadaf’s presentation begins at 5:10 minutes in) - https://youtu.be/kBivMhTa6K4

Here’s a preview…

First, we are completely transparent about Firelight’s commitment to community-driven systems change. This means that we do not actually submit to the funder a pre-determined set of activities and outcomes, but rather we present a framework or plan for how we will work with community organizations and support them to surface and respond to community needs and priorities. So, at the outset, the donor knows who we are, how we work and why.

Second, we work with the donor or funder to develop a systems understanding of the issue, which helps them to expand their agenda to be as wide, broad, and flexible as possible. This means that their thematic area of interest becomes an entry point but it is the community’s discussions, mapping, analysis, and actions that will not only surface the core underlying issues but will propose actions and outcomes.

Third, we support the donor to understand what they are funding. They are supporting a completely different and powerful, lasting mechanism for systems change. CBOs and community stakeholder groups start unpacking the issues in front of them, going below the surface to find the root causes and systems. Through this they are supported to identify any and all of the core underlying issues that affect that system. And the community actions that follow work on these core underlying factors, not just surface band-aid things that are more issue-specific.

Fourth, while this might mean that change looks different in different communities, and may not reflect traditional indicators of change that funders are used to, we support a range of measurements – including participatory baselines, midlines and endlines – as well as other forms of data collection and sense-making so that data and learning are available to everyone – the community, systems stakeholders, and the donor. And – as is critical in systems change - the learnings cover short, medium and long term changes and outcomes.

If you are a donor that is interested in learning more about how we do our work at Firelight, please don’t hesitate to reach out to Dr. Shallwani – sadaf@firelightfoundation.org. If you are a potential grantee, please don’t hesitate to register with us www.firelightfoundation.org then click on “Contact Us” and “CBOs”