We work alongside small, women-led organizations in the US South and Global South, and the funders who support them, building the systems and the honest relationships that let them lead and sustain themselves beyond any one donor.
Ways to begin →What we have seen dismantled in the United States since January 2025 has been hard to watch. A field built over decades, gone in weeks and months. The impact has been immeasurable and the recourse has been almost none. The redirection of European bilateral funding toward national security priorities has compounded it even further.
Many are in a rush to rebuild what was lost, while others are talking about reimagining. The real question is not how to restore what existed before, or rebrand what we already knew, but whether it was ever working for everyone.
The old system did not work for everyone, and we all knew this. The gaps we are seeing exposed today existed long before the crisis, and they were not hidden. For years, local NGOs have been naming these gaps, and studies surveying organizations in their own communities confirmed them. They were set aside, because addressing them would have meant changing the system. This moment demands that we act on what we already know, and center those who have been telling us for years.
That kind of change takes all of us, especially those with tangible power through resources. The opportunity, if we are honest enough to take it, is to build something that actually works for the people it was supposed to serve all along.
Small, women-led organizations in the US South and Global South were already operating on the edge, and the reasons are similar in both places. Internationally, years of unfulfilled localization commitments have left organizations across the Global South isolated from the infrastructure they need. In the US South, a long scarcity of regional capital, together with entrenched racial and gender bias, routes funding away from organizations led by women of color. These organizations are held back not because their work is ineffective, but because little attention has been focused on building the networks and honest funder relationships that would let them lead.
In its 2024 report on locally led development, the OECD found that it is often funders' own systems, their policies, financing, and management processes, that decide whether local organizations can lead. The barriers sit on the funder side more often than named. In her 2026 study "Letting Go, Without Losing Coherence," drawing on over 150 programs, Florencia Guerzovich identified a recurring function, invisible weaving, which is present where locally led development succeeds and absent almost everywhere else. The weaver is the person holding the relationship together, trusted by both sides, carrying the hard truths across the table, keeping things alive through staff changes and funding cycles. Funders rely on them everywhere while rarely noticing or acknowledging their work. The Groundwork Weaver Collective was built to do this work with intention, alongside both funders and organizations, and to document the lessons so that they can be more broadly shared and replicated.
Three structural barriers make this cycle challenging to break.
"If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together."Lilla Watson, Aboriginal activist and educator
We work alongside small organizations, building with them from the inside, not as an outside consultant, and not as an intermediary. In the funding chain, the organizations near the top get stewardship, real time, trust, attention, while the ones at the bottom get compliance and reporting. The further down you sit, the more transactional it gets. We bring that stewardship all the way down, to the people doing the direct work. Everything we build, the systems, the relationships, the know-how, belongs to the organization and stays when we leave. We are built to make ourselves unnecessary.
We start by helping an organization see itself clearly. Through an organizational assessment, we work with leadership to clarify vision, mission, and strategy, and to understand the organization's real financial picture, not the one it performs for funders. From there we build the internal infrastructure that lets them show up differently. Clearer strategy, stronger systems, more honest reporting. What we build belongs to the organization and stays inside it, holding together through staff changes and funding cycles, not just for as long as one leader remains.
We convene practitioners across the US South and Global South who are doing the same work in isolation from each other and rarely get the opportunity to connect across borders. The larger, well-funded organizations get access to these opportunities while the smaller women-led ones are too often left outside. It is often assumed that women-led organizations in the US have more access than those in the Global South, but they face similar barriers. The forces holding a small organization back in Montgomery are the same ones, although at different scales, at work in Nairobi or Port-au-Prince, so they have real things to teach each other. We help them build lasting relationships where they support each other directly, and the knowledge stays inside each organization, not with us.
We work with foundations to help their grantees connect and collaborate, and to build the honest self-assessment that makes locally led grantmaking real rather than rhetorical. We also carry the translation, making sure what an organization actually experiences reaches the funder without being sanitized on the way up.
We are a collective of practitioners, many of whom are women of color from the US South and Global South, from the peacebuilding, development, and humanitarian sectors. We have spent years in rooms on both sides of the funder-grantee relationship, and watched the same gap open up everywhere, between what funders needed to know and what organizations felt safe enough to say. We know what it feels like to be assessed before speaking, to prove legitimacy our peers are assumed to have, and to sit across from a funder calculating how much truth is safe to tell.
We have seen how institutional survival pressures pull organizations away from the local commitments they publicly champion, and have sat with women-led organizations and said honestly, 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. We have also watched local organizations get paraded on panels to name these gaps, to assure partners they were seen, while the answers they gave were set aside because they did not fit the system.
Right now, we are watching 'rebuilding' and 'reimagining' become their own kind of business, a way to attract funding and to look different. Our years of experience have shown us that the research has been done, that our local partners have repeatedly told us what needs to happen for localization to succeed, and that now is the time to listen and act on what they have said.
We believe the connections between these organizations are not a nice-to-have. They are how change actually happens and lasts. The relationships, the trust built across geographies, the sense that you are not doing this alone, that is the work. For us this is not an aspiration. We have seen it work, and we have seen what happens when donors invest in it.
We built the Groundwork Weaver Collective because we want to work with women-led organizations who know that calculation of how much truth is safe to tell, and with funders ready to sit with hard, slow change, who have seen it done, tried it, or want to try. If you are at a crossroads, questioning whether to rebuild what was lost or build something that finally works for everyone, join us.
Every foundation is in a different place. Some have found creative ways to make localization work, and are ready to go deeper, while some want to understand what is possible before committing. We are ready and equipped to meet you where you are.
A good first conversation. We map the relationship infrastructure across your existing portfolio, identify where organizations are isolated from each other, and show you what a deeper engagement could look like with real names attached. Produces something concrete and useful regardless of what comes next.
A foundation or funder collaborative funds a dedicated practitioner to work across their portfolio over twelve to eighteen months, building peer connections between grantees and advocating on their behalf with other funders. Designed for foundations whose grantees need sustained support that program staff cannot provide across a large portfolio.
A fully embedded engagement with five to eight organizations from your existing portfolio. We work inside each one, convene them as peers, advocate on their behalf with funders, and close with a portfolio assessment. The deliverable is a cohort of organizations that are more resilient, better connected, and in more honest relationships with their funders than when we started.
The collective is building a peer network across the US South and Global South. If you are navigating this funding moment, you do not have to do it alone.
If you want to connect with practitioners facing similar challenges in other regions, reach out. The peer network is where the learning compounds and where isolation becomes solidarity.
We are actively listening to what local and community-based organizations need most right now to sustain their work. Your ground truth shapes what we build. Your experience and your relationships are what make this real.
If any of this resonates, we would like to hear from you. We are in an early phase of development and are looking for a small number of foundation partners who want to build this infrastructure together. The conversation does not have to be about a formal engagement. It can start with a question, a shared frustration, or a hunch that the relationship layer is where the work is actually stuck.
If you are navigating this funding moment and want to connect with practitioners facing similar challenges in other regions, we want to hear from you. The collective is building a network across the US South and Global South, and your experience and your relationships are what make it real.