Welcome back to What’s Taking Root, a series I’m curating for Proximate Press that highlights emerging ideas and resources to deepen grassroots grantmaking. I’m a philanthropy practitioner and ecosystem weaver who has mapped 100+ resources to reimagine philanthropy and global development.
As the global funding landscape changes, who gets to shape what comes next?
As world leaders gather for the UN General Assembly amid a profound shift in global development financing, the questions facing philanthropy are harder to ignore. Official development assistance fell 23% in 2025—the largest contraction on record—and is expected to decline again in 2026, placing greater pressure on organizations and communities already navigating deep uncertainty. At the same time, the OECD reports that only 11% of cross-border philanthropic funding goes directly to local entities. Philanthropy cannot fill the public aid gap, but it can make choices about where resources go, who makes decisions, and what responsibility it takes for its actions.
In this second edition, we explore responsible exits, connective tissue as an essential resource, and investing in local giving ecosystems.
Root: Will funders reckon with the consequences of exits?
What happened with USAID should never have happened. The consequences of its dismantling also make visible something that happens regularly on a smaller scale across philanthropy and aid: the sector rarely invests in exits and their consequences. When a grant ends, a foundation changes strategy, or an aid program is abruptly cut, organizations and communities are left to navigate what comes next, often with little power to shape the transition.
A recent New Humanitarian piece argues that humanitarian organizations need to treat exit as an ethical responsibility rather than simply an operational endpoint. Similar questions are emerging in philanthropy. From the Guerrilla Foundation's critique of power-blind spend-downs to the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project's reflections on closing multi-year funding relationships, the message is consistent: how a funder leaves matters, and exits should be co-created with grantees and the larger ecosystem in mind.
It also raises a larger question about responsibility. Are funders separate actors that can enter and leave ecosystems at will, or are they part of interconnected systems whose health they have a responsibility to consider? Russ Gaskin challenges funders to ask: What role is the ecosystem telling me to play? If funders want to be responsive to communities, that question must begin long before funding ends.
Resources:
- “The Dark Side of Sunsetting” (Ivan March, Guerrilla Foundation)
- “How to end well: Humanitarians must better plan their exits” (Isabel Munoz Beaulieu, Molly Gilmour, Melissa Gatter, Qundeel Khattak, Puspita Hossain, Eefje Hendriks, and Nil Akdede in The New Humanitarian)
- “Ending Well: How Can Grantmakers Close Funding Relationships with Care?” (Sebastian Africano, Beth Collins, Anna Hernandez, Pui Ling Tam, and Dr. River Sturdivant on Trust-Based Philanthropy Project blog)
- “The Most Effective Funders Are Trying to Disappear” (Russ Gaskin, CoCreative)
Action: What would it look like to co-create an exit plan with the people who will live with its consequences? Consider using the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project's Ending Well questions as a starting point for a conversation with grantee and community partners.
Root: What gets cut when resources appear scarce?
When funding tightens, direct services and programs often take priority, while less visible connective tissue, such as leadership development and networks, can become harder to fund. Yet these investments are often what enable organizations and movements to adapt, build relationships, share knowledge, and sustain collective action over time.
Learning is one example. The Let’s Keep Learning initiative highlights how learning and evaluation are shifting in a rapidly changing landscape, arguing that learning is not a luxury and that this is an opportunity to bring it closer to communities. The new Learning Philanthropy Framework similarly positions learning as central to a foundation’s culture and practice beyond internal accountability and board reporting, while the emerging Accidental Evaluators community underscores the need to invest in community-rooted learning that naturally occurs among community actors, such as organizers, artists, and teachers.
The same logic applies to other forms of field infrastructure. These investments rarely yield clear, linear outcomes, but serve as the connective tissue that helps organizations and movements become more resilient and powerful.
Resources:
- “Learning Is Not a Luxury: Bringing Learning Closer to Decisions and Communities” (Claire Nolan, Yvonne Belanger, Sarah Stachowiak on the Center for Effective Philanthropy blog)
- The Learning Philanthropy Framework (The Convive Collective)
- “The Search for the Accidental Evaluator” (Hafsa Mustafa and Carri Munn with the Fito Network)
Action: When resources appear scarce, what should we protect because it’s essential to the strength of the field and movements? Start from a place of learning by taking The Learning Philanthropy Framework Self-Assessment or join a public launch webinar on October 14. Learn more about the Accidental Evaluator community for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color practitioners and join an upcoming conversation.
Root: What if we stopped asking who will replace aid and invest in local giving ecosystems?
As foreign aid contracts, much of the conversation has focused on who will fill the gap. But Global Majority voices are asking a different question: what if the goal isn’t to replace aid, but to build something different? Several new pieces challenge assumptions about what counts as philanthropy and argue for investing in, rather than substituting for, community philanthropy.
Across Africa and the wider Global South, practitioners are pointing to locally rooted systems of giving, mutual aid, diaspora resources, community philanthropy, and domestic resource mobilization that already exist but have often been overlooked or bypassed by global development.
For grassroots grantmakers, this shifts the question from “How do we get more money to local organizations?” to “What would help local philanthropic ecosystem grow and become more resilient?”
Resources:
- “The Global South Has Already Solved Your Funding Crisis” (Farkhanda Zahoor in Nonprofit Quarterly)
- “Cross-Border Giving: From Aid to Investing in Community Philanthropy” (Dana R.H. Doan on the Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy blog)
- “Reimagining Development, Redistributing Power and Reclaiming Agency” (Charles Kojo Vandyck in Development Report)
- “Navigating the Future of Development: African Philanthropy’s Role” (Project by Projects)
Action: How can you go beyond grantmaking to the grassroots? Consider how you can also support local giving systems and community-rooted philanthropic infrastructure.
Also worth digging into. . .
- Should private foundations fundraise? A LinkedIn discussion started by Edgar Villanueva
- Misgivings, a new podcast by the Kindle Project
- The Funder Report Card, a new self-assessment tool by Peace Direct for Global North funders committed to shifting power
- Framework for Funders: How to Identify Local Partners That Are Creating Real Change, a new guide by Roots for Development
Thanks for reading!
