Harmony House is the only second-stage shelter in Ottawa. What are some of the barriers to second-stage, domestic-violence shelters?

Eskritt: The province wasnā€™t funding them anymore. We were lucky, because we had private donors who kept us afloat. Government policies actually matter: the police budget is about $332 million, and meanwhile, 160 agencies that operate in the city have to compete for $25 million. Thatā€™s quite a disparity. Weā€™re trying to get people into housing, but thereā€™s a housing crisis; Ottawa Community Housing has a seven- to 10-year waitlist. Thereā€™s just nowhere for people to go.

But now weā€™re in the time of COVID, where domestic violence got pushed to the forefront. It tripled during the pandemic. We had a woman murdered in this country every two and a half days during the pandemic. But weā€™re not counting on it staying this way forever. There’s going to be mental health services that need support, children that need support, elderly people that need support, newcomers — everybody’s going to be competing for these dollars

With agencies competing for money, do you find success with foundation grants for your organization?

Eskritt: We find huge success with grants. We find that foundations are good for funding projects. During the school closures, we transformed our boardroom into a school classroom. We offered free laptops and a teacher to be in our classroom every day to help kids whose parents couldn’t help them at school for whatever reason. They were traumatized and they couldn’t get up — and they spoke maybe five languages, but English just wasnā€™t their best one — or they had bigger problems to worry about besides making sure their kids were sitting in front of a computer. So, the foundations really stepped up to support education.

The same with our food bank. We moved from giving people unsaleable food that you often get at food banks, and we started giving direct gift cards to buy the food they need. We thought: ā€œGo make it work for your family, not just what we think you might need.ā€ Foundations are good for pilot projects and going above and beyond what weā€™d normally do. But you can’t count on them for core funding, because they’re being pushed and pulled in many directions.

What other projects had to shift gears with COVID? What are you working on for the future?

Eskritt: The thing you need when youā€™re healing from trauma is community. Thatā€™s the thing that will make your pieces come together again. Thatā€™s what COVID robbed us of. We werenā€™t allowed to have communal meals, we had limited programs, and services went virtual. A lot of the people we deal with have trauma around screens, whether they were being filmed against their wills, having trackers put on their equipment, or not trusting tech anymore because their partner used it against them. It was really hard on everybody because we wanted to see them, they wanted to see us, and it just wasn’t going to happen the way we wanted it to.

We ended up hiring a peer support worker for the first time. Sheā€™s a woman who had been at Harmony Hope for years in the past, but came back to volunteer. We offered her a full-time position to help the women get through COVID, so there was always somebody to call, always someone available on video call. Now that weā€™re transitioning back, weā€™re bringing back in-person programming. Weā€™ve been lucky that Rogers donated a bunch of phones and plans, so we could give women clean technology if they were exiting an abusive situation, or thinking about it but their partners were monitoring their messages.

Now that we can have people inside again, Iā€™m instituting a new program where, in order to live in Harmony House, people have to teach a course of their own choosing. Itā€™s because theyā€™re all brilliant. You have to be to survive, and there has to be something you can teach someone else, whether itā€™s a craft, how to knit, or an Algonquin language. They have to do it for an hour once a month just to reinforce that they are capable of running something.

Our boysā€™ program has also been successful because we hired a young man who grew up here. Now the little gents who have never had a positive man in their life can have someone show them how to be strong, but also how to hug, and cry, and cook, and run.

Can you speak more about the process of incorporating those with lived experience as your employees?

Eskritt: Everybody who works here has been touched by trauma; we have lived experience. This peer support worker we just hired is the only one on staff who has lived here, and this job was specifically for somebody who has lived at Harmony House. We also have a position on the board that’s held specifically for somebody who has graduated from our housing, and that’s really important to us. Most people on the board have either experienced, or are close to someone who experienced domestic violence. We tend to hire people who understand it internally, more so than hiring people going through school.

How did the MPNL program contribute to the work you do in your organization?

Eskritt: Iā€™m a radical. When youā€™re a radical, you need that paper behind you. They may never respect what you have to say, but they know youā€™re not stupid. I was looking for respect from my colleagues because I had lived experience and two degrees, but I was struggling to make ends meet. I knew I was an expert, so I decided to upgrade my education. Now, Iā€™m included on national panels and Iā€™m an international speaker. I was able to take the microphone because I had initials after my name. Not that itā€™s fair. Not that itā€™s correct. Not that the smartest people get it. I was lucky to have the support of my family and have great success with school.

It was also really great to experience solidarity with other nonprofit professionals who donā€™t agree with the industryā€™s rules, and now we get to go change it, because weā€™re in charge now. It was exciting.

Ray Eskritt is on . Sherlyn Assam is on and . Photos are courtesy of Eskritt and Harmony House annual report.

Itā€™s a familiar pattern. First comes the unanticipated humanitarian crisis. Then the international aid industry weighs in, focusing on the short-term and on funding well-known versions of itself in the form of international non-governmental organizations (INGOs).

And then, after global attention has moved to the next disaster, someone looks closer at what happened (whether in Haiti, Nepal or Guinea) and notices that local institutions, which were the first to respond, had the best contacts and long-term plans and had local trust, but had received a fraction of the funds. In Haiti, for example, of the $6.43 billion disbursed by multilateral and bilateral donors, only 0.6% went to local organizations. Next time, the experts conclude, we should look harder at working with those groups. Next time, we should put local organizations on the international radar, and ensure theyā€™re heard and supported.

In 2016 this idea of focusing on local organizations was enshrined by donors and aid providers in a ā€œ,ā€ which would see 25 percent of funding going directly to local organizations. The deadline to meet that goal was 2020.

So, what happened in 2020 when COVID-19 swept the world?

Not much, according to the latest evidence: in June,Ā . And, yes, the decimal point is in the right place.

So much for progress.

Get more money and power into the hands of local people

The sheer scale of this pandemic offers fresh opportunities to push for change and .Ā The pandemic has actually shifted focus towards local solutions; after all, in a crisis itā€™s natural for people to look to their own communities. And now every community in the world is preoccupied with many of the same challenges. after reveals a mosaic of local-level actions: information services, food distribution and psychosocial support. But in spite of their effectiveness, many local organizations in the global south anticipate COVID-19 having a ā€œā€ on their sustainability.

The pandemic ā€“ in addition to focusing attention on the value of grassroots organizations, on community solidarity, and on the potential to mobilize people to take action ā€“ confirms an urgent need to overhaul the existing architecture of philanthropy and aid that continues to be ill-equipped, not only at shifting power and resources closer to the ground, but also at seeing and engaging locally-owned alternatives to northern-based INGOs.

In the past decade, a new set of has emerged across the global south, local grantmaking funds and foundations (ā€œcommunity philanthropy organizationsā€) that offer more durable solutions, get money into the hands of local people, and blend external resources with local ones ā€“ doing so in ways that move away from ā€œdonor-beneficiaryā€ dynamics towards a notion of ā€œco-investment.ā€

The path to do this differently

ā€œWeā€™ve been reaching people and movements that weā€™ve never reached before,ā€ noted one community foundation in Brazil, where organized philanthropy and mass public giving are relatively new. The organization has gone from 100 monthly donors to 700 during the pandemic, and is raising funds not just for immediate relief but for social justice causes, too.

Community philanthropy ā€“ as both a set of practices and organizations grounded in core values of equity and justice ā€“ offers one pathway for civil society to do development differently. It lies at the heart of a agenda and .

Weā€™re not yet at the tipping point of community philanthropy receiving global acceptance, but these are strange, potentially transformative times. And around the world, local institutions and movements are rising, energetically and innovatively, to the challenge.

has been the Executive Director of the Johannesburg-based Global Fund for Community Foundations since 2006, overseeing its emergence as the leading global voice on community philanthropy as a core strategy for people-led development and shifting power closer to the ground. She’s on Twitter (@hodgsonjj) and LinkedIn (jenny-hodgson-65b8a68).

Click for the Next Story in the Power Series: Sharing Power at the Lawson Foundation

The principles and practices at that centre on community self-determination set the foundation apart from its peers in the international development sector. The foundation stands as a paradigmatic case of an organization working to redefine conventional philanthropy and shift power into the hands of grassroots communities. Such an approach is even MO salient in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has disproportionately impacted the most vulnerable and marginalized communities.

How a power shift started

Originally named ā€œIDEX,ā€ Thousand Currents was founded in 1985 by former Peace Corps volunteers who were disillusioned by the paternalistic model of international development. It came into existence with a vision that grassroots communities should determine their own development priorities, and it sought to direct financial resources to community-led initiatives. This approach, though perhaps obvious now, was provocative during a time when development aid was dominated by conditional loans and structural adjustment programs.

At first, the foundation made small, sporadic, project-based grants, but after several years of funding projects, it realized that project-based support addressed only symptoms of social problems, not root causes. In the early 2000s, it switched to a trust-based partnership model bolstered by sustained, unrestricted grants to grassroots partners working to tackle root-cause issues in economic development, womenā€™s rights and the environment in select countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Thousand Currents adopted an explicit strategy to support the long-term strategies and vision of its grassroots partners, not just alleviate their short-term financial needs.

Consider your own power and privilege as a funder

A decade later, Thousand Currents undertook another process of self-reflection and, rather unusually for a donor, asked its grassroots partners . It heard from grassroots partners that they valued the organizationā€™s partnership model based on trust, learning and , but they were surprised that the model was not more prevalent. They encouraged Thousand Currents to consider its own power and privilege as a Global North funder. In response, the foundation adopted a new theory of change and developed a to encourage other philanthropic institutions to adopt trust-based, philanthropic approaches that centre on grassroots wisdom and community self-determination.

Thousand Currents believes that change begins from within. Since 2009, the foundation has been led by women of colour. Its Executive Director, staff and board members reflect the diversity of the communities they serve. In 2016, Thousand Currents to affirm that systemic change is possible when the power of ā€œthousandsā€ of donors meets the ā€œcurrentsā€ of grassroots leadership and locally led solutions.

Philanthropy can best serve communities by being nimble and flexible, and by allowing communities to determine their own priorities.

Fahad Ahmad is a board member of , a public foundation in the U.S. that supports Global South grassroots organizations and movements led by women, youth and Indigenous Peoples. Heā€™s an instructor in ŠÓ°ÉŌ­““ University’s Master of Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership program.

Click for the Next Story in the Power Series: Forcing a Power Shift Globally

Family is perhaps the most familiar and complicated setting in which we all experience power and power relationships. I marvel at people who parent well, who somehow know when to dominate their children (change their behaviour by either imposing, preventing or persuading them of something) versus when to empower them (encourage or require their children to use their own smarts and make their own decisions).

From my vantage point, parenting is a challenge and balancing act. But being a child, whether adult or not, is also a challenge. Children have their own assets and sources of influence ā€“ say, technical know-how, ingenuity, time, networks. When and how should they dominate their parents, either by insisting upon a given course of action they see as wise, or by ruling out or cajoling them from something they see as unnecessary or misguided? And when and how should they empower them, respecting their abilities to decide and abiding by their decisions despite reservations?

When to dominate and when to shift power?

Just as the interdependent power relations in families are complicated and their consequences far-reaching, so are the power relations in philanthropy ā€“ particularly those between grantors and grantees. When, how and why should grantors dominate their grantees and the communities they serve? And when should grantors empower them ā€“ sharing and shifting the power to decide on what projects should be undertaken, how to design and implement, how to deploy the funds and other resources, or how to evaluate and report the outcomes?

Joseph J. Smith and Rebecca Darwent are two of the co-founders of the Foundation for Black Communities, which aims to be the first philanthropic organization dedicated to Black people in Canada. Photo by RenƩ Johnston.

Good in itself

Some see the sharing and shifting of power as whether by countering the effects of colonization, giving communities and their organizations greater control over their own futures, or by providing grantors who seek to promote social justice with a way to dismantle the inequalities built into their own funding regimen.

Shifting power is necessary

For others, shifting power is a ā€“ brought about by particular projects being complex, full of uncertainties and the need for ongoing course correction. Such projects defy upfront planning and linear, top-down direction. They require constant feed-back that’s informed by on-the-ground knowledge. They require grantees to be partners.

The long-term effects will outlive the short-term intervention

Still for others, the shifting of power offers a more effective . Turning ā€˜beneficiariesā€™ into, not project partners, but ā€˜co-investorsā€™ could increase the likelihood of projects having effects that far outlive the initial interventions. Grantors should therefore provide opportunities and incentives for grantees and their communities to apply their own assets of money, skills, knowledge and networks, to foster local leadership, strengthen local capacity and cultivate local buy-in.

The “Shifting Power in Philanthropy” series

Although attracting greater attention, the sharing and shifting of power is neither easy nor straightforward. It often butts up against traditional views of donorsā€™ and grantorsā€™ prerogatives. It challenges conventional understandings of managerial responsibility and patterns of accountability. It complicates established forms of Board oversight. It requires that lip service turns into organizational commitment, and that such commitment turns into actual practice.

Recognizing the need for and complications of shifting power within philanthropy, PANL Perspectives presents a multi-part series featuring the firsthand experiences of people who have seen that need and experienced those complications ā€“ both nationally and internationally. We hope you’ll read this series and join us in shifting the conversation about shifting power.

Calum Carmichael is an associate professor in ŠÓ°ÉŌ­““’s MPNL program and an editor ofĀ PANL Perspectives.

Click for the Next Story in the Power Series: Thousand Currents, Power & Privilege