Last year while at my native(Silchar, Assam, India) I happened to meet a young boy aged around 22yrs at our village. I realised his face even though he's grown up, as he used to collect our cricket balls whenever it went outside the boundary field. I was touched by his well behaved behaviour and so i invited him to my house the next day early morning just to talk to him. 



Next morning Gama came to our house and we started…

Continue

Dalia Association, Palestine’s first and only community foundation, recently launched an advocacy campaign to address the issues facing grassroots civil society as recipients of international aid in Palestine. Nora Lester Murad, Dalia’s founder and former executive director, shares the organization’s progress and the questions they face going forward.

***

We at Dalia Association in Palestine have an…

Continue

Check out my post today on The Broker Online, "What’s missing from the aid effectiveness debate? Overlooking the capacity of local organizations", in which I argue that rather than being the lowest common denominator of international assistance, local indigenous organizations should be regarded as the fundamental unit of… Continue

How-matters.org is featuring two posts today as part of the Girl Effect Blogging Campaign. 

Part 1 discusses how grassroots organizations, as powerful actors that find and reach marginalized girls, are key to unlocking girls’ potential.

Because they are embedded in the communities they…

Continue

In honor of this week's Clinton Global Initiative's Annual Meeting, I'm reposting this from early October last year. The issues remain the same; the fundraising resources for local organizations still needed.

“Is a trickle of that money ever going to reach us?”…

Continue

Marc Maxson is not your usual aid worker.

Yes, he is a returned Peace Corps volunteer, lives in Kenya, works for a Washington D.C.-based non-governmental organization, and is married to someone also employed in aid.

But Marc Maxson also has a PhD in neuroscience.

So what does that enable Marc to do as an aid worker? Marc develops new conceptual approaches to solving "impossible" problems, of which there are many in international development.…

Continue

source: AWDF

The African Women's Development Fund has issued a "Call for Proposals" and is seeking applications from groups planning to organize activities during the 2011 16 Days Campaign and who wish to secure funding. The maximum grant will be $1,000…

Continue

Continue

The storm that has devastated Japan is hardly past. But as charities appeal and the public offers up their support, I cannot help but think of the three friends in southern Africa,…

Continue

Posting this report from Organization X in Zimbabwe and asking my readers, “Would YOU fund this organization?” was about one thing for me:



Assumptions.



We all have them. Yet I find as aid workers and do-gooders, we don’t get nearly enough opportunities to surface them.



The fact that I would have to examine my own assumptions and explain how they’ve transformed over the… Continue

Thanks to probing, concrete questions from Maryline Penedo, moderator of a virtual discussion on…

Continue

Swanson has just published War Is A Lie. This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.

To understand just how bad the 112th Congress, elected on November 2nd and taking office on January 3rd, is likely to be for peace on Earth, one

has to understand how incredibly awful the 110th and 111th Congresses

have been during the past…

Continue

Professional or amateur? Skills and experience or passion and new ideas? These are riveting questions indeed, but I’m concerned that in the development discourse, we continue to miss a key piece.



Well-intentioned do-gooders of any sort must recognize that in the developing world, local people with that same “combustible mix of indignation and vision” that… Continue

Continue

"‘The system’ whereby foreign donors give handouts, and not sustainable initiatives that are drawn from the needs of the communities, is a problem.” ~R.F.M., Zimbabwe

This post is a continuation of the small series I started in August entitled “Changing the System,” which pulls together quotations from about 150 of my former colleagues, friends, and acquaintances around the world who… Continue

I am thrilled to cross-post a briefing from an important series on the work and findings of the Listening Project, which began today at the Harvard Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations’ Humanitarian & Development NGOs Domain blog.



Below is a briefing of the initial… Continue

The peace movement has made significant progress in the United States since its low point of late 2008, and just about everything anyone in it has done has been a contribution. If everyone keeps doing

what they're doing, and more of it, we might just end some wars,

eventually. But I think some techniques are working better than others,

and that pursuing the most strategic approaches would make victory

likelier sooner and longer-lasting when it comes.

I think the…

Continue

Reflections on the increasing impossibility of funding peace research that refuses to be intellectual ‘embedding’ in power.



By Jan Oberg



Summary



This analysis has come about for four reasons:



1) Over the last couple of decades, it has become virtually impossible to do research that is truly free. This applies particularly to smaller organizations which, if they do obtain money, seldom have the capacity to both conduct the… Continue

Grantmakers Without Borders (Gw/oB) is a philanthropic network comprised of over 160 grantmaking entities sharing knowledge to improve the practice of international grantmaking and increase funding for the global South (i.e. the developing world). Gw/oB is unique in that we provide specific, concrete support to foundations, grantmaking public charities, individual donors, and philanthropic advisors, among others, on how to be effective international grantmakers creating positive social change… Continue