When Big Philanthropy Takes a Backseat

Last autumn, I had the fantastic opportunity to work on a project, Refugees Lead, where several foundations, big NGOs (BINGOs), advocacy organizations, and our team at NeedsList came together as a coalition to support the work of some eleven Refugee Led Organizations (RLOs) in an unprecedented way. Foundations supporting BINGOs and BINGOs supporting local, smaller organizations is not new in the humanitarian world. It happens all the time, usually in a top-down style where grassroots organizations feed on-the-ground information to BINGOs’ system, which then becomes part of BINGOs’ work. In turn, the grassroots organizations are compensated with some forms of financial support but receive little to no recognition for their work. Their names often get buried in the footnote section of the major reports and publications.

As a result, small organizations often face trust issues from donors, who may not know of them directly. Furthermore, the legal constraints many refugees face also follow them to the organizations they lead, effectively hindering their potential. For example, the residential document that many refugees lack prevents RLOs from having access to simple banking facilities, subsequently stripping them of potential donations. In other cases, in countries with hundreds of thousands of refugees, sanctions prevent RLOs from receiving assistance from Western countries.

RefugeesLead was unprecedented because it turned a decades-old practices on their heads. RLOs were the leading players and the face of the campaign, with coalition BINGOs and funders playing behind-the-scenes supporting roles. For refugee led organizations, contrary to being treated as passive beneficiaries, the campaign was the first time they were invited to the table; they felt their work were genuinely being promoted on their behalf. At the end of the project survey, I was amazed to find out that for some RLOs, it was not even all about the financial donations; as one leader told me,

“we participated for recognition, exposure, and inclusion — not just the monetary aspect of the campaign.”

For others, the change of power dynamic was ‘a refreshing feeling of being part of a collective effort’ and empowering eachother.

Though the project was largely successful, raising over $ 70,000 USD to advance the work of these organizations further and reaching over eighty-five thousand lives stretched across four continents, the campaign wasn’t problem-free. For example, some of the coalition members were not able to explicitly support the Refugee Led Organizations for various reasons. Many large organizations are still constrained by traditional rules and other factors preventing them from taking up new approaches. Yet, the project served as a crucial experiment to test the viability and effectiveness of cross-sectoral solutions, proving that there is an appetite for new models of collaboration and investment in refugee leadership.