We work alongside women-led organizations in the US South and Global South, and the foundations that fund them, to build what has been missing: the relationship infrastructure that makes locally led development last.
Ways to begin →
The further down the funding chain an organization sits, the more transactional its experience becomes. We bring the stewardship logic all the way down.
Many are trying to rebuild what was lost, but we believe that misses the point.
The old system did not work for everyone. The gaps existed before the crisis and the exclusions were structural, not accidental. What we need is not restoration but reimagination. 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.
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.
The dismantling of USAID, bilateral funding cuts, and the collapse of two decades of unfulfilled localization commitments made visible what was already true. Small, women-led organizations are among the most impacted, not because their work is ineffective, but because no one built the infrastructure, peer networks, or honest funder relationships that would let them lead.
This is true across the Global South. It is equally true in the US South, where decades of underinvestment have left small women-led organizations chronically under-resourced and structurally isolated from sustainable revenue.
We are not an intermediary. We work alongside organizations to build their own capacity to navigate and sustain direct funder relationships. The goal is their autonomy, not their dependence on us.
"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 inside organizations over time. We build the internal infrastructure that lets them show up differently with funders: stronger documentation, clearer theory of change, more honest reporting.
We convene practitioners across the US South and Global South who are doing adjacent work in isolation. The peer network is where the learning compounds and the sector builds a visible, credible bench.
We work with foundations on the other side: building the practices and honest self-assessment that make locally led grantmaking real rather than rhetorical.
We are a collective of practitioners across the peacebuilding, development, and humanitarian sectors who have spent years working at the intersection of organizational development, fundraising, and locally led development. Many of us are women of color, from the US South and the Global South, who have been in rooms on both sides of the funder-grantee relationship and watched the same gap open up in every context, from Jordan to Baltimore to Nairobi, 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 and required to prove legitimacy that our peers are assumed to have. We have worked inside Global South organizations, Northern funders, and large INGOs. We have seen how institutional survival pressures pull organizations away from the local commitments they publicly champion. We have sat with women-led organizations in Baltimore and Nairobi and Port-au-Prince 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 were dismissed because we were viewed as too local or fit the profile of a beneficiary. We have worked inside the systems we are now working to change, and that experience is the point.
We believe the era of top-down solutions is over. Real and lasting change comes from networks and collectives, from practitioners who trust each other across geographies and build together. For us, this is not an aspiration, because we have seen it work, and it is what we are currently building.
If you are at a crossroads, questioning whether to rebuild what was lost or take the lessons from the past and reimagine systems that are more equitable and work for everyone, join us.
We work with foundations through four entry points, depending on where you are and what you need. In all of our engagements, we work in partnership with local practitioners who are already rooted in the communities we serve. We do not parachute in. We build with people who are already there.
A structured process for mapping the relationship infrastructure across your grantee portfolio or geography. We conduct community-informed needs assessments, identify where isolation exists, and surface where peer learning is already happening informally. The result is a participatory framework built on what communities actually express, not assumptions about them.
An embedded engagement where we work across a cohort of your grantees over twelve to eighteen months, building organizational infrastructure and honest funder relationships from the inside.
A multi-year engagement building the full relationship layer: organizational development support, peer network infrastructure, and a foundation learning process happening in parallel.
We work alongside foundations to design community-informed processes for grantmaking and resource allocation. Starting with a needs assessment across your portfolio or geography, we help you build a participatory framework rooted in the expressed priorities of the communities you serve, not assumptions about them.
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 can start with a question, a shared frustration, or a hunch that the relationship layer is where the work is actually stuck.
info@groundworkweaver.org