Local Giving for Social Change
Local Giving for Social Change program sets out to demonstrate the role that local resources harnessed and organized by civil society organizations, social movements, and community groups can play in amplifying voice and strengthen local ownership of development agendas. Local Giving for Social Change seeks to position local resource mobilization as a fundamental expression of civic participation.
The program is being embarked upon against the background of pandemic disease outbreaks such as COVID-19, Ebola and the associated restrictions, democratic deterioration, the shrinking space of civil society and increased climate of hostility towards the marginalized groups and the organizations that defend their rights, threats to civil society’s fundamental rights to freedom of association and assembly in Uganda. The Local Giving for Social Change will foster, promote and highlight new kinds of democratic and participatory approaches to giving using community philanthropy including building a broad base of citizens recognizing and claiming their own rights and the rights of others, and holding accountable governments and other stakeholders to account.
The program advocates for more equitable practices and approaches to build local power and voices based on the assumption that all communities have their own assets / resources such as money, skills, knowledge and networks when pooled together. By contributing their own resources, people start to feel a sense of ownership in their own development and act in ways that advance and protect their collective investments, interests and rights.
Through training, peer learning, and small grants, Local Giving for Social Change supports community groups of Women, Youth and People with Disabilities to mobilize funds, resources and other types of support for their work within their own context. GCDF believes that sustainable solutions to community problems requires joint action, sustained and coordinated responses by the effected vulnerable communities themselves.
GCDF started the “TWEYAMBE initiative”, Tweyambe is a Runyakitala word meaning “Self-help”, to mobilize communities and resources around local community initiatives that promote environmental conservation, Rain Water Harvesting, Kitchen Vegetable Gardening, soil and water resources conservation as well as adoption of new technologies in seeds, farm inputs, irrigation, value addition and storage. The initiative is driven by principles that everyone has something to give regardless of the amount or significance, every human being has a right to food, water, housing and other basic necessities of life regardless of their situation and that together, we can achieve social change.
