Jenny Hodgson
Global Fund for Community Foundations (South Africa)
"Johannesburg in early December is a great place to be. Summer is in full swing and the city is starting to empty out for the long holidays. This December, the Global Summit on Community Philanthropy will make it a particularly good place to be!
The Summit marks a milestone for the global community philanthropy field, for a long time the smaller, poorer- and perhaps more strongly-rooted - version of its North American siblings, and almost entirely absent from the language and frameworks of mainstream development. Today, community philanthropy is better connected as a field and clearer about its purpose – both in emphasizing and demonstrating the essential role that local funding plays in building strong communities, but also in offering external or larger development actors ways in which their resources can catalyze and build on local ideas and agency rather than undermine them.
But the purpose of the Summit is larger than that: we want to bring people and institutions together from all over the world for a conversation about how development can be more effective, build on what existed locally, and shift more power to the ground. Community philanthropy offers a set of tools to help achieve that. We look forward to welcoming you to Joburg!"
People Behind the Summit
