Seeing visionary community entrepreneurs live the reward — part 1: the start-up
How community foundations in Romania built a nation-wide movement of catalysts enabling community-led development
This October, we joined the celebration of 15 years since the first community foundations were established in Romania, at the National Conference of Community Foundations.
This is a two-part reflection on what we saw at the conference, and beyond. Notes on the making of a movement.
Our reading comes from the vantage point of being a long term supporter of community foundations in Romania. Our role has shifted over time, but we have remained close to their dynamics.
We chart three major transformations:
- From model to viable organizations
- From disempowered communities to leveraging local assets
- From local organizations to a national movement
Snapshot of a movement at age 15
Today, there are 18 community foundations, serving half the country’s territory. They are connected as a network by their Federation, which offers capacity development, stewards peer learning groups, cultivates donors for network-wide grant-making programs, and upholds community foundations’ self-defined standards of practice.
As we joined the foundations, supporters and partners in celebrating this remarkable growth, we realized we were witnessing an exciting collective evolution.
Every community foundation present in the conference room had started out as an informal civic initiative — groups of citizens of different backgrounds and professions who had in common the audacity to envision a way for their communities to thrive from the inside. Today, these groups have matured into capable independent organizations firmly rooted in their local communities.
And they are now more than single entities.
These organized vehicles for community philanthropy have also become a nation-wide movement that is increasingly aware of the impact it is able to have as a connected network, with capacities exceeding the sum of its parts. They have linked up and out, becoming an ecosystem that nurtures community-led change from many different nodes, simultaneously.
The inception: community philanthropy… how?
How did they get here? To get a better sense of the journey, before reflecting on how these organizational and movement features play out today, some broad strokes on the starting point — the terrain on which community foundations took roots.
In 2005, community philanthropy was an entirely novel idea in Romania. Philanthropy itself, as a field distinct from international aid and development, was just beginning to take shape. The country was still navigating a complex transition to democracy — building accountable institutions, a market economy, and an independent civil society sector — after five decades of a pervasive totalitarian regime that left a complicated legacy of deep distrust and disempowerment.
Against this backdrop, the community foundation was an intriguing organizational and developmental model with a rich history, and exciting tools & thinking embedded into it.
Firstly, it centered assets, and started from the premise that these do exist — in diverse forms of knowledge, skills, connections, and money — in local communities. This premise ran counter to the mainstream narrative and self-image of a country fast exporting citizens as economic migrants.
The community foundation model also assumed that people would want to contribute their time, talents and treasure, if given the opportunity, because they are generous and care about the places they call home. Also not a commonly held belief in Romania at the time.
Besides being a cultural contrast, the community foundation model stood in stark difference to some of the practices of international development, the familiar reference at that time. A common logic was for institutional donations to be directed top-down, through centralized intermediary organizations managing the access to those funds, based on intricate schema of pre-established lines of financing that had little regard to the differences in needs across local communities and no room for flexibility in implementation.
A widespread outcome was organizations following the funding lines instead of the needs they knew about and could serve in their communities, or instead of pursuing opportunities not scripted in the application guidelines. At best, they would twist their mission to try to fit both formal requests and legitimate local needs. Smaller organizations had difficulties navigating these highly bureaucratic processes and would largely be left out, unless contracting the services of the cottage industry of consultants that popped up to fit projects into financing lines. Informal groups stood no chance, neither by eligibility nor by the capacity required to manage such heavy administration.
Over time, this adaptation to the constraining rules of the game created a reflex attitude of bending into the shape of the funding instead of seeking or building alternatives. Scarcity mindset had permeated the emergent civil society, inducing a dependency on international bureaucratic funding.
This is the context around 2005, when the community foundation model began to be explored by ARC, a young organization with a mission to develop strategic philanthropy within the country. They were foreseeing a time when international donors would make their exit and leave the civic sector with a serious gap of funders capable of deploying much needed resources.
ARC’s big question was: could this model work in Romania? Their strategy: “let’s test it.”
By 2008, the first community foundations were registered, with the support of a start-up program led by ARC. It provided coaching and capacity building, legal set-up support, and matching funds for the capital required to register a foundation to the selected initiative groups from different regions of Romania.
Fast forward to 2022.
From model to viable organizations — Capable community-rooted foundations
Part of the attractiveness of the community foundation model has been its straightforwardness. It has three core functions, and each builds on the other: fundraising, grant-making, and community leadership.
Community foundations design methods to fundraise locally in ways that show that donating can be a fun, accessible and accountable experience. These are in-person community events that generate enthusiasm and participation across generations, also leveraging online platforms that make it easy for every citizen to be a donor, fundraiser or civic initiator. Sports events are the most popular fundraising mechanism in the community foundation movement in Romania, but by no means the only one.
Fund development is where community foundations shine, and a critical milestone in their becoming. Cultivating local donors to develop funds that respond to their philanthropic intentions and aligning them to the needs and opportunities in the community was unknown territory to the founders. This mix of philanthropic advising and deep knowledge of the community that fund development processes involve is something that community foundation leaders learn by doing, as core practices for their role of funders of local NGOs and civic initiatives.
Founding members are entrepreneurial & tenacious long term thinkers and builders. This is often the most intriguing aspect of the Romanian community foundation movement for the people who discover it by meeting the professionals active in it. How does it attract this kind of talent?
Our guess: there is a mutual attraction between the model of the community foundation, its tools and adaptability to the context and potential of a specific community, and the people who are invested in their places for the long run and have a strong desire to build solutions to the challenges they are seeing. They notice missed opportunities around them and, at a right time in their lives, come to discover an exciting way to do something about it. (Yes, there’s always some serendipity involved.)
The community foundation model captures people’s imagination about what else is possible. Once connected to the vision and sense of purpose of being a driver of change, these people are drawn by the practicality of convening conversations and designing tools to inspire more people to get engaged and contribute, connecting assets to generate community value.
We call them community entrepreneurs. And there is evidence that every community has them.
The governing board and executive team embed grit & vision into the culture of the new organization. Learning is a vital feature of a community foundation, as the newness it brings into its community puts it in a position to continuously design, test, learn and iterate. It takes a degree of comfort with making mistakes and considering them information. Founders and board members are not only visionary, they are also risk-takers.
Over time, this learning accumulates into ability and effectiveness, as well as into an extended capacity to reach more donors and doers, develop more funds and multi-annual programs, create richer chains of value by connecting actors around more ambitious shared goals, and generate effects that are visible in the community (more on this in part 2).
Besides the “school” of trial and error, organizational development and professional skills building to upgrade the practices of community foundation work is an intentional and continuous process.
The conference was a statement to this, as most sessions modelled community of practice spaces led almost exclusively by practitioners themselves, with sessions on board engagement, fund development, capacity building, communication, and innovation in programming.
Are you incubating community foundations?
We’re interrupting the storyline with a little ‘tips & tricks’ section. If you are in a position to support or to start a community foundation, here is what we are seeing as consistently effective approaches for this first transition from a model to a viable organization:
- Get creative when designing fundraising formats. Connect people who are doing great work in the community with people who want to discover and support that work, as this helps them feel appreciated, purposeful and proud to live there. Build bonds as you build assets.
- Jump into developing funds early, even if it’s an intimidating new thing. It was entirely new to every person in this movement. Cultivating donors to see philanthropy as a way of achieving their vision of change, and helping doers to access resources designed with their potential in mind is a transformative process that gains traction over time.
- Scan for talent in each opportunity you create, as you are building a constituency of people who want to thrive together. Everyone is a potential grantee, board member, donor, ambassador, mentor, volunteer of expertise, time or ability. People respond to the work of the community foundation because it speaks to their values, it plays to their strengths and because they have a part in it.
- Learn by doing and sharing with your peers. Practitioners are generous with their experience and insights because they are investing back into the learning spaces they have — and still are — benefitting from. Building or joining a community of practice is an investment that rewards you throughout your journey, from start-up to consolidation and impact. As organizations mature, CoP can become seeding spaces for coalitions and movements across geographies. Having peers is powerful.
Next part: the reward
This first part sketched out the starting point for community foundations in Romania, as a concept, and explored its becoming an organizational form and function.
The second part of this reflection will explore two other transformations, at community and national level. We will look at:
- How community foundations played the role of incentivizing people, groups, organizations and businesses in their communities to become active contributors through mechanisms that surfaced and leveraged local assets, generating means and evidence for change.
- How, as more community foundations got established and served more territories, they became connected, started sharing, and a network began to emerge. We will also explore the role of support organizations and their shifting position within the movement as it grows in complexity and capacity, becoming a resourceful ecosystem.
See you in part 2!
About us:
Inspire is a community of practice for community foundation professionals across the globe. We surface effective practices and build knowledge on changing systems by designing catalyst community-rooted organizations and support ecosystems.
