Collaborative workshops will be facilitated by experts to drive outputs that will be passed to the Global Alliance for Communities, ensuring that the conversations we have result in tangible asks for the Alliance to take forward.
This workshop will be an interrogative conversation facilitated by community leaders on what it will take to unlock the enablers for communities to be at the center of their development with the necessary tools and resources. It will tease out the enablers to support and accompany communities in self-organizing for their own development from experiences of movement building, community organizing and community resourcing.
In light of the global movement for racial justice and tackling systemic oppression, many development actors are reflecting deeply on what it would take to “decolonize aid” and why past attempts have failed. A growing community of stakeholders believe this will require a “people-first” approach to development that prioritizes investing in the agency of people in developing contexts while simultaneously unpacking our biases about where change needs to come from. This workshop will unpack what it would take to evolve our development paradigm from one that works on behalf of people in local communities, towards one that invests in the people themselves to prioritize problems and solutions and continuously improve over time. Download pre-reading materials here.
Can telling your story transform your advocacy and impact? In this session, you will learn from a leading anti- trafficking spokesperson whose personal experiences gave her the determination to pursue an education and career to counter human trafficking. She will explain how she uses her own story to impact policy. You will also have a chance to practice your own storytelling in this interactive session.
This session will share the summary insights from The Bridgespan Group’s July 2020 rapid study Community Engagement to Tackle COVID-19 in the Slums of Mumbai, followed by an engaging discussion with two NGO leaders on their learnings from working with communities during times of crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on the study’s insights, the session will explore how different community engagement models were leveraged and will highlight why community involvement in slums is critical to crisis response. We will synthesize the prevalent models for community engagement and assess the factors for replicating and scaling them across slums in India and beyond, both to tackle the pandemic and to build community resilience for future global stresses.
Despite international commitments to re-target international development assistance to local actors, less than 1% of the $150 billion in ODA in 2018 reached local actors. This lack of progress has been notable, despite a clear evidence base that suggests that investing in local capacity can transform poverty outcomes. The Local Coalition Accelerator (LCA) is a new platform whose aim is to bridge the gap between bi-laterals, multi-laterals, philanthropy and local actors to fundamentally change the way that international assistance is designed and delivered. This session will bring together bilateral donors, private philanthropy, and local actors, to discuss barriers and entry points for working together more effectively to design a more democratic system.
This workshop aims to build a change making movement to set the grounds for peace and healing in societies caught in conflict. It will explore how to effectively communicate that societies and communities ruptured by conflict can heal by building entrepreneurial leadership capabilities amongst a wide cross-section of societal leaders. It will discuss how such role models acquire a transformative force by solving problems and creating jobs and, thereby, receive the support of their communities who see them as their new role models.
The term ‘women’s empowerment’ is being overused and the power, spirit, and politics within empowerment seem to be losing from the concept. This session wants to shine a light on the processes of empowerment that initiate with the realization of ‘power within’, build on ‘power with’ to claim freedom and dignity for women and their collectives. It emphasizes the need to move away from rigid, time-bound, and target-driven projects of empowerment and instead advocates for inclusive, evolving, and iterative processes of empowerment that are often non-linear.
