The Groundwork Weaver Collective works alongside small, locally-led organizations, primarily women-led organizations in the US South and Global South, and the foundations that fund them, to build what has been missing: the relationship layer that makes locally led development work and last.
The further down the funding chain an organization sits, the more transactional its experience of the sector becomes. We bring the stewardship logic all the way down.
The funding crisis facing local NGOs is not new. The dismantling of USAID and the collapse of two decades of localization commitments did not create it. They exposed it.
For fifteen years, the sector has made localization commitments with little investment in the infrastructure that would make them operational. Small women-led organizations in the US South and Global South are among the most vulnerable in this crisis. Not because their work is wrong, but because no one built the organizational infrastructure, peer networks, or honest funder relationships that would let them lead and survive disruption.
What closes that gap is the relationship layer: the conditions under which an organization can tell a funder what is not working, and actually problem-solve together, without fear of losing the funding. For many organizations, that honesty is structurally impossible right now.
The Groundwork Weaver Collective is not interested in rebuilding what existed before. It is interested in building something different: a way of working fueled by authentic relationships, honesty, and room for trying things that may not work. A system where organizations can show up as themselves rather than perform a version of themselves that funders will recognize and fund.
"If you have come to help me you are wasting your time. If you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together."
Working alongside small NGOs to build the infrastructure for sustainable fundraising, and developing genuine peer partnerships with likeminded organizations. Not donor-driven capacity building designed to make NGOs legible to Western funders. The opposite: building their autonomy, their collective voice, and their relationships with each other.
Representing the interests of organizations in the funder conversations they are not in the room for. Naming what is extractive about current practice, helping foundations understand what their grantees actually need versus what they are asking for, and prioritizing direct, honest conversation between donors and organizations.
Working directly with foundations to help their existing grantees connect, collaborate, and work better together. Many foundations fund organizations in the same space who have never meaningfully engaged, and sometimes compete for the same funds. We help foundations see their portfolio as an ecosystem, not a list of grantees.
Direct work with organizations provides ground truth. Ground truth makes funder advocacy credible. Credible advocacy changes conditions for organizations. And portfolio ecosystem work creates the peer connections that make the whole system more resilient. The end result is sustainable investment.
Grassroots movements led by Black women and women of color are among the most underfunded in American philanthropy, despite leading some of the most transformative community work in the country. They navigate burdensome applications and the constant need to prove they are worthy stewards of funders' resources.
The same dynamics at an international scale: disproportionately positioned as implementing partners rather than leaders, distrusted first, and pushed to reshape themselves into forms that Western donors recognize as legitimate in order to access limited funding.
The same dynamic that makes it hard for a Black and brown woman-led nonprofit in Atlanta to access foundation funding makes it harder for a women-led civil society organization in the Global South to access the same. The struggle is not only cross-state. It is cross-border.
We do not sit between funder and organization, controlling the relationship and positioning local organizations as implementers. We sit alongside the organization, building its capacity to have a direct, honest relationship with its funders. The infrastructure we build, the funder relationships, the navigational intelligence: all of it belongs to the organization. The Collective is structured to make itself unnecessary from day one.
Twenty years ago, on a service learning trip to San Lucas Toliman in Guatemala, I heard a story from Father Gregory Schaffer that has stayed with me. He described a neighbor who came home one day with his head low. The neighbor said he had discovered that day that he was an animal. His boss had told him he was doing his job wrong, a job he had done his whole life, so he spent the day doing it wrong on purpose, because the alternative was losing the income his family depended on.
Father Greg told him he was not an animal. The organization he built grew from a simple conviction: that community-led solutions to community-identified challenges, built on relationships of mutuality, are the only path to lasting change. That story became my compass.
I think about it every time I see a local organization changing who they are to avoid losing funding: revising their mission, reporting success too soon, believing they need to perform for donors. I have thought about it as a funding partner, inside local organizations, and inside large INGOs.
I am Haitian-born, and my connection to the Haitian development community is both professional and personal. At a legal aid organization in Jordan, I built its first fundraising unit from inside a Global South organization while maintaining direct relationships with major Northern donors. At a major US peacebuilding institution, I grew a program portfolio from $500,000 to $15 million.
As a Black woman who has navigated international development and philanthropy without many people who look like me, the experience of being assessed before I have spoken, and required to prove legitimacy that my peers are assumed to have, is not abstract. It is my lived experience, and it is not incidental to this work. It is what makes it possible to sit with a women-led organization and honestly say: here is what is happening in that room, and here is how we make sure you do not have to reshape yourself into something unrecognizable to get what your community needs.
The Collective is built on a bench of practitioners who bring that same experience from different contexts and geographies, so the work is not dependent on any single person and can grow with the organizations and foundations we serve.
Three entry points, each with a defined scope and a clear deliverable. Foundations can start where they are ready and move deeper as trust and evidence build.
A defined, time-limited engagement: an honest assessment of which organizations in your existing portfolio are ready for embedded support, what each one needs, and what a cohort pilot would look like with real names attached. It can also center a single longstanding partnership where a foundation wants to build a genuine sustainability plan before a departure.
A foundation or small funder collaborative covers the cost of a dedicated practitioner working across the portfolio, building peer connections between grantees and advocating on their behalf. This works particularly well where grantees need support but program staff do not have the bandwidth to provide it.
A fully embedded engagement with five to eight organizations drawn from the foundation's portfolio: fractional practitioners inside each organization, regular peer convenings, funder advocacy on behalf of the cohort, and a portfolio ecosystem assessment at the close. The deliverable is a cohort that is more resilient, better connected, and in more honest relationships with its funders than when the engagement began.
As the funding landscape shifts, foundations have a new opportunity to rebuild a system with their grantees that creates the conditions for sustainability. If you are a foundation asking some of these same questions, we would love to think together with you about what comes next.