Our Mission
The Locally Led community wants to disrupt the traditional systems and thought around how we finance and support local CBOs, refugee-led organizations, and community-driven movements around the world…and in our backyard.
How will we do this?
It starts with listening first. We’ll be spending our first years primarily listening to those we seek to support. Through implementing our Locally Led ‘Listening Drives’ our collective of local partners, activists, and closely positioned allies will be ‘listening’ to locally-led organizations, advocates, and community-based movements about how they relate to those who support them and the kinds of relational support networks, spaces, and practices that empower them to support, accompany and advocate for the communities they stand in solidarity with.
Next, using what we’ve learned from the Listening Drives, Locally Led develops its annual strategy and approach to support—including deciding if we should even exist at all. The bottom line? Locally Led wants those we support and work alongside to dictate the terms of the projects, evaluation process, and how ‘success’ will be defined in each future partnership we make.
Organizations or grassroots movements receiving any form of support from Locally Led will be able to freely:
a) run projects that fit their capacity, expertise, and the unique needs of the communities they seek to impact
b) develop evaluation plans that fits their current organization’s capacity, guiding principles, and allows them to track and build towards the impact they seek to make in a way that best aligns with their goals.
“The international aid/development community needs to realize that a true commitment to locally-owned change, humanitarian response, and community development requires them to give away power/ownership…not acquire more.”
Committed to real local ownership.
Locally Led deeply believes in a decolonial approach to our work. We deeply believe that the best, localized solutions within the community development, movement, or humanitarian context are those that are led by the communities local to the place where investment, movement building, or a response effort is being undertaken…by those most affected by what is and will take place. This means organizations that are community-led, refugee-led, or locally-led. Therefore we concentrate our support and partnership to locally-led initiatives that are community-based, refugee-led or community-owned…and not international organizations.
