Anti-Colonial Funding Principle 1:

Respect the agency and expertise of CLOs by responding directly to their needs and priorities; implementing co-decision-making processes; and providing flexible, context-specific funding.

Supporting community-based care isn't just about utilizing the access that CLOs have to community members and their ability to reach rural areas. It is about recognizing that CLOs bring significant expertise and experience to the table and that community-based care programs are most effective when they reflect that expertise. When funders determine a project’s priorities and implementation strategy, it constrains CLOs by undermining their ability to deliver effective programming and respond to changing circumstances. Grant agreements and funding relationships must be rooted in trust and the belief that CLOs know what their communities need.

“Funders give funds and predetermine what will change as a result. The reality is that it is the people in that community that know what they need – our funding should align with that and we should be flexible to accommodate the needs in communities as opposed to the needs of the funder.”

Funders must also acknowledge the immense investments communities make in their own development. Flexible and context-specific funding that is responsive to a CLO’s evolving needs allows it to pivot activities or adjust budgets when circumstances change, without time-consuming approval processes or burdensome reporting.

“We want to enter into communities with an appreciative model of inquiry, knowing that the challenges communities face can be identified by communities themselves, as well as solutions.”

Voices and perspectives from CLOs must guide funders’ programmatic decision-making and priority setting, beyond individual grants. Participatory grant-making and other forms of co-decision-making ensure that community expertise informs the direction funders take.

Grant agreements and funding relationships should begin with asking: What does your community need and what do you need to support your community?

Anti-Colonial Funding Principle 2:

Provide multi-year grants as part of long-term investment in the people, infrastructure, and growth of community-led organizations and community-based care.

Too often, the funding that CLOs can access is short term and project-specific. By its nature, community-based care is people-centred and ongoing, and therefore requires long-term funding. Funders may cover staff and administrative costs during a project, but there is little long-term funding available for staff salaries, office rent, supplies, security, utilities, and audits. This has led to an unethical reliance on the unpaid work of women care workers, many of whom are living with HIV themselves. Despite the skilled, demanding, and critical nature of their work, few receive any payment at all.

In addition, the lack of funding for ongoing operational costs is detrimental to the long-term growth and sustainability of CLOs and undermines their impact. To pay salaries, repair motorbikes, invest in mobile health units, and keep the office lights on, CLOs often have to string together a number of project-specific grants over the course of each year.

“There needs to be an investment in the organization – the people, the infrastructure, and the equipment that will help the organization to function over the long term.”

This creates an environment in which community-based care is precarious, staff are underpaid and burnt out, and CLOs are forced into a process of retrofitting their needs and budgets to match donor priorities rather than their own.

Long-term, multi-year funding is a critical aspect of meaningful support for CLOs. It offers the consistency and stability that allow CLOs to focus on expanding holistic community-based care and create impact over time. Multi-year funding reduces the amount of time CLOs need to spend applying for grants just to survive. It also allows investment in organizational growth and development and facilitates meaningful relationship building between funders and CLOs.

“You get funding from a donor for HIV and AIDS and they say operation costs should not exceed 10%. How do you survive? We have staff members who need to be paid, they need resources.”

CLOs need funding that matches the length of time it realistically takes for meaningful change to occur. Changing behaviour and systems can take years. There is a substantive difference between funding activities and funding change.

Anti-Colonial Funding Principle 3:

Expand traditional approaches to demonstrating impact in community-based health initiatives and ease the burden of reporting.

When CLOs need to tailor their monitoring and reporting to meet a funder’s needs, it creates burdens on organizations with already limited resources. Impact evaluation and reporting, like all aspects of responses to HIV, must centre communities. Funders need to reconsider their reporting, monitoring, and evaluation requirements in collaboration with CLOs to ensure the requirements do not detract from the actual work.

Allowing CLOs to determine their own scope and metrics strengthens organizations by producing data that is useful to them, not just the donor, and allows CLOs to apply for more funding. Simple, open-ended questions create an avenue for CLOs to define their own successes — such as: What activities or programs are you engaged in? What does community-based care look like in your community? What changes do you see?

“We ask them to look at what success looks like in their own micro-space.”

When it comes to financial reporting, requiring overly detailed budgets, timesheets for every staff member, receipts for small transactions, and frequent reporting creates an atmosphere of mistrust and surveillance. It also wrongly places the emphasis on accountability to external donors instead of community stakeholders.

In this environment, even large and well-established CLOs may be deemed “high risk” and excluded from funding opportunities. Funders can play a tremendously meaningful role in supporting CLOs to develop sound financial management and governance practices that fit their context and strengthen accountability to partners, funders, and the communities they serve.

“The results to us are the changes we see happening in the community – not numbers at all. Where funders are only interested in numbers, it can push the organization to expand the program without having the same changes.”

Anti-Colonial Funding Principle 4:

Streamline application processes or support intermediary funders who have existing close relationships with CLOs and work in anti-colonial ways.

Researching and applying for funding takes significant time and human resources, especially when calls for proposals require extensive, detailed submissions. CLOs do not always have the capacity to develop proposals that appeal to specific funders when they must demonstrate narrowly defined impact or alignment with a funder’s own time-bound strategic priorities. Rigorous due diligence processes can also be too onerous for small CLOs to undertake successfully.

To work meaningfully with CLOs, funders must streamline their applications and revise their due diligence. Until that is accomplished, intermediary funders with a proven record of supporting CLOs with multi-year partnerships can play a crucial role and shoulder some of the administrative burden. By developing simplified grant-making systems, intermediaries can also help CLOs access the funding they need. They are strategically positioned to meet the intensive due diligence requirements of large funders.

“Due diligence is often so strict that small organizations can’t pass it. For organizations that aren’t registered yet, it can be helpful to go through an intermediary funder. It can be a way to get more funding to key populations-led and youth-led organizations.”

However, funding through intermediaries is not a stand-in for grappling with the principles outlined in this report. Ultimately, simplified processes and a more fit-for-purpose funding approach in philanthropy should directly support CLO partners as they work toward their own long-term goals. Intermediary funders also have a responsibility to advocate upstream to their own funders about the need to address burdensome processes, and to prevent passing bureaucratic requirements along to CLOs whenever possible.

“We keep hearing about huge funding for HIV and AIDS. Most of it is supposed to work through community-based organizations (CBOs) but it never actually reaches a CBO. Sometimes it’s given to NGOs but you do not see it trickling down to communities.”

Anti-Colonial Funding Principle 5:

Build partnerships with CLOs that extend beyond funding to include peer learning and advocacy.

In philanthropy and international development, community-led organizations are too often expected to create "sustainable" change that allows a funder to wrap up support for one project and move on to another. However, building sustainable access to community-based care requires funders moving beyond relationships where they treat CLOs as local implementers of, or contributors to, the funder’s mission. Instead, funders and CLOs should be collaborators, working in solidarity to fundamentally dismantle inequitable systems that prevent people from realizing the right to health.

While there is value in funding seed grants that allow new grassroots organizations to grow, building sustained change in communities and health systems requires long-term and patient partnerships. These partnerships should extend beyond funding individual organizations to active solidarity on the part of funders, including support for CLOs to build collective movements, alongside advocacy within the philanthropic community and with governments. In addition, funders can support long-term growth and sustainability by both facilitating and funding peer learning and capacity sharing among community-led organizations.

“We need to advocate for community [health worker] cadres, recognizing the tremendous role that they play in improving outcomes and remunerating them fairly.”

CLO concerns should be at the centre of advocacy efforts, shaping relevant policy changes. For example, CLOs have made it clear that community health workers (CHWs) should be compensated for their work. The ultimate responsibility to provide this pay, consistently and across the board, lies with national governments. Funders and CLOs need to work together to advocate for the recognition of CHWs as health professionals and the prioritization of their pay within fully resourced national health systems.

“A funder’s responsibility does not end with a financial contribution. We have the opportunity and obligation to work in solidarity with CLOs, other funders, and like-minded stakeholders for transformative change.”