what we do
Firelight finds, funds, and strengthens catalytic community-based organizations (CBOs) that are working with their communities to address important systems for children in eastern and southern Africa. In order to support these organizations and their communities, we raise and strategically invest capital from major foundations, family foundations, and individual philanthropists.
Our approach is founded on the belief, backed by experience and evidence, that by giving communities, families, children and youth the agency and voice to strengthen their own local and national systems and structures and by developing the next generation of changemakers, communities can best determine and sustain the change they want to see. We call this “community-driven systems change.”
Our model has several core components that we employ in an adaptive process through constant learning and refining.
Identify
1. Support communities to map the challenges or opportunities for their own children and youth or the systems in which they live.
At Firelight, we begin by supporting communities to identify the geographic and thematic areas where they believe the needs or opportunities are the greatest in relation to their own children and youth and where they together can have the greatest impact.
2. Identify catalytic community-based organizations (CBOs).
We seek out local, community-based (“born and raised”) organizations that are actively and innovatively mobilizing their communities to change the lives of children and youth. We identify these CBOs through the expertise of our Africa-based Program Officers, as well as our local networks and referrals from a variety of local stakeholders – such as community-based leaders, former grantee-partners, policy makers, civil society leaders and - most importantly - community members themselves.
What is a community-based organization?
Community-based organizations are nonprofit or civil society groups that originate from a group of community residents and work at a local level to improve life for the community. Unlike other organizations (such as local NGOs or international NGOs), community-based organizations arise from the local community and in direct response to their needs. Through a process of leveraging existing community resources and outside investments, they focus on improving the lives of community members over the short and long term.
Click here to read more about what is and is not a community-based organization.
3. Identify root causes and ideal states.
With our mentoring and financial support, grantee-partners are funded to engage in deep community listening and community engagement to collectively identify root causes that push children into vulnerability and prevent them from thriving. This takes place for at least six months before an “action” proposal is give to Firelight. Challenges can range from cultural norms and family practices, to a lack of supportive child-centered services, to more systemic barriers at local or national levels. Tools such as participatory research, user-centered design, community mapping, community dialogues, and community-driven assessments enable stakeholders to have a voice in identifying where the root causes of challenges lie, and to have agency in addressing them. Actively engaging community members also yields greater transparency across the life of the initiative.
4. Identify solutions.
Firelight and our CBO grantee-partners work together with their communities to identify the strategies that best fit the challenge at hand. They decide what they wish to work on, how they wish to do it, what success might look like in the short, medium and long term and how they will measure it. They then give this proposal jointly to Firelight. The activities they choose might include:
providing effective programs and services
improving existing quality of programs and services
shifting community attitudes or practices towards children
stimulating structural shifts in local systems; and/or
engaging governments to provide services or change policies.
Centering community ownership, engagement and participation in design, implementation, and measurement and evaluation is critical to community-driven systems change and to long-term sustainability.
Enhance
5. Bring CBOs together.
We cluster our CBO grantee-partners geographically and thematically in groups of 4-12 organizations. These clusters were requested by our grantee-partners and create a type of local group or network through which our grantee-partners share knowledge and work towards a common goal together. Our cluster approach also facilitates greater collective data and action towards changing the systems – local and/or national – that impact children's lives.
6. Invest in CBOs using patient, flexible, but targeted capital.
Our funding covers a range of support that our grantee-partners and their communities need to be successful. We proudly fund what some call “overhead” because we know that core operating expenses are an essential part of running an organization. Our flexible grants – ranging from ~$5,000 to $50,000+ – support organizational increases in basic operational costs, constant community agency, action and engagement, technical and programmatic capacity as well as the ability to effectively engage all stakeholders that are needed for systems change. We also know that producing tangible and measurable results in the social sector takes time so we strive to raise enough long-term funding to support our grantee-partners for up to five years. We are clear with our grantee partners and their communities from the beginning about how much money we have available, how long we can promise to fund for and we listen to what they want and need from us. This allows them to prioritize what they want to do or seed with Firelight’s capital.
7. Enhance individual CBO capacity.
Each community-based organization will have its own definition of success and thus have different needs in order to achieve it. For most, this means being effective organizations whose work positively impacts their communities and the systems around them. Applying our unique “multiform mentorship” model, we draw on the expertise of our own Program Officers, local mentors, African technical partners, African research institutions and the CBO grantee-partners themselves to support the programmatic and technical capacity that CBOs request in order to engage communities to collectively address the complex challenges faced by children and youth. At the same time, we support the organizational capacity that CBOs self-identify they need to run an effective organization such as financial management, systems thinking, governance, strategic planning, government advocacy, stakeholder mapping and information systems. Our funding also strengthens our grantees’ participatory monitoring, learning, evaluation and adaptive action methodologies so they can engage communities in defining the change they seek, defining their own success and monitoring their work towards it.
8. Support communities of practice.
CBO-to-CBO networks – Firelight actively funds its grantee-partners and their communities to come together within districts, within countries, and across countries on a regular basis so they can learn from each other and collaborate on shared goals. Our local mentors in turn provides lived experience and guidance to our CBO grantee-partner clusters to extend knowledge sharing further.
CBO-to-technical expert networks – Our Program, and Learning and Evaluation, Officers are based in Africa, which means they have intimate knowledge not only of our grantee-partners and their communities but also of other local and regional experts whose input might be valuable. This network of African technical experts and consultants forge strong relationships with grantee-partners and provide ongoing follow-up support and coaching to our CBO grantee-partner clusters.
CBO-to-policymaker networks – We fund CBO grantee-partners to join other local, national, or international learning, policy, and funding networks who can also support, learn from, and amplify their work. We celebrate when our grantee-partners become sought after leaders and partners or are cited for their expertise by the local and international communities.
9. Measure progress and document best practices.
Firelight believes that measurement and learning is critical for adaptation, achievement and progress. Learning and evaluation means that we regularly support our CBOs to measure programmatic and organizational effectiveness as well as to document what we and they are learning. We employ participatory learning and evaluation practices so that communities can determine their own indicators of change while also introducing empirical data frameworks that might be important to policymakers and other stakeholders. We are transparent and open with our data across all of our grantee-partner clusters and support them to be transparent with their communities as well.
Our strategy is two-fold:
We support our grantee-partners to use community-based participatory methods to identify, assess, document, and disseminate key learnings and best practices on how community-driven solutions can be most effective for children and youth. This informs our own methodologies and those of our CBO grantee-partners so that we and they can adapt accordingly based on what is working and what is not. As importantly, they are able to use those learnings with their own community, with policy makers and with a range of other stakeholders. We also support them to sharing this body of evidence and knowledge base so that it can be used, adapted, or replicated by others.
We support a robust participatory learning and evaluation mindset in our grantee-partners so they can sustain an ongoing, iterative, learning process in their work and communities long after we are gone.
Firelight believes that measurement and learning is critical for adaptation, achievement, and progress. In close collaboration with community-based organizations, communities themselves, and technical advisors, Firelight supports community-based participatory baselines, midlines and endlines based on the community-developed indicators of progress which might include:
Improvements in organizational outcomes for CBOs as they define them
Increased community, youth, child or parent agency in the systems that surround children and youth
Increased community action around child and adolescent protection, rights, education and nurturing
Achievement of better practices, policies, budgets, environments and systems for children and youth through community-led action
Measurable changes in outcomes for children and youth
Increase in the number of CBOs that have access to and are able to participate in vibrant communities of practice for children and youth
Number of community mentor and community grantmaker organizations seeded by Firelight
Scale or shift systems
A core part of Firelight’s commitment to each CBO grantee-partner and grantee-partner cluster is to support them and their community to look at shifting systems or scaling their ideas at the community, district, and/or national levels. This might mean that a CBO grantee-partner’s programs or solutions are adapted or replicated by other CBOs or adopted by governments as part of practice or policy. It might mean that healthier, child-centered norms or practices have been adopted by a community. It might mean that a community is mobilized to hold their government accountable for services it should be providing. We look at impacting not just individual lives but also the systems and structures within which children and youth live.
Sustain
A core Firelight value is that we want to leave our grantees and their communities stronger than when we met them. They in turn have told us that they do not want to be dependent on us, or outside donor funding, in the long term. We work to honor that by supporting community-driven (not Firelight-driven or even CBO-driven) systems change so that the community drives its own desired systems change after the funding cycle ends.