Community Foundation Ireland is one of the few community foundations operating at national scale in Europe, with the core mission of “equality for all in thriving communities”. Having recently reached its 25th anniversary, the Foundation decided to give a real gift to the wider field: hosting a Summit for community foundation leaders in Malahide, near Dublin, at the end of August.
Participants joined from the UK, continental Europe, the US, Canada and Palestine. The carefully curated sessions – and just as much the conversations between them – centred on the challenges communities share worldwide: growing social and political polarisation, democratic backsliding, the climate and biodiversity crises. Equal attention was given to the solutions community foundations are already putting into practice, from supporting community wealth-building to strengthening internal practices around donor engagement and the responsible use of technology.
As an international gathering, the event also showed the many ways the community foundation model is put to work around the world. In a recent article for the Johnson Center’s Field Focus series, Nick Deychakiwsky, Senior Program Officer at the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, describes the global convergence of two historically different interpretations of the community foundation model: the “historically asset-rich” community foundations on the one hand, primarily found in the US, Canada and the UK, and the “historically community-oriented” foundations, found across Africa, Latin America and large parts of Europe, especially Central and Eastern Europe.
His key observation is that the two models have moved much closer to each other over recent years, and that this convergence provided fertile ground for the deep conversations in Dublin. Asset-rich foundations, prompted by sharper critiques of philanthropy and by movements such as trust-based and participatory grantmaking, are deepening their engagement with communities well beyond their donor base and taking on a clearer community-leadership role. Community-oriented foundations, meanwhile, are doubling down on local resource mobilisation and long-term financial sustainability – a shift made newly urgent by the 2025 cuts to international aid, which stripped away funding that many of their intermediaries had relied on. Old stereotypes are breaking down, and learning now runs in both directions.
From models to practices
A reflection among European participants after the summit reinforced this point. What seemed to resonate most was not necessarily the comparison between models in the abstract, but seeing what community foundations actually do within very different institutional and social environments.
Examples from North America around worker buyouts and cooperative ownership, from Canada around community wealth-building, donor stewardship, investment pooling and the deliberate building of social capital prompted questions about what might be adapted elsewhere. At the same time, European experiences of community organising, participatory approaches and working closely with local institutions offered perspectives relevant far beyond Europe.
This suggests another way of thinking about international exchange in the community foundation field. Rather than asking which model others should emulate, it may be more productive to start from concrete challenges and practices: how are place-based foundations building trust in increasingly fragmented communities? How are they working with public administration? How are they using their assets (financial, relational, and reputational) to strengthen local economies? How are they bringing people in very different positions around the same table?
One particularly powerful idea emerging from the conversations was the need to be unwavering about values without becoming purist about strategy. In increasingly polarised societies, community foundations may need both a clear understanding of what they stand for and the ability to create spaces where people who disagree can nevertheless work together. Experiences with citizens’ assemblies, relationship-building and cross-sector convening offered different illustrations of how this can happen in practice.
This exchange also brought a useful reminder that the community foundation field cannot be neatly divided into Europe and North America, or asset-rich and community-oriented organisations. Context matters enormously. A national foundation in Ireland, a metropolitan foundation in Canada, a community foundation operating amid conflict in Palestine, or a locally rooted foundation in Central or Eastern Europe may work at radically different scales and under very different conditions. Yet some of the questions they face – around legitimacy, trust, sustainability, voice and their relationship with communities – are remarkably similar.
The Irish Experience
The Irish context, and the impressive track record of Community Foundation Ireland, were themselves a source of inspiration and learning for the participants. Part of what makes that record distinctive is the scale at which the Foundation works. Most community foundations are rooted in a single place; a national one can connect local experience to change across an entire country, which is what Community Foundation Ireland has done through a period of extraordinary change. Established in 2000, at the height of the Celtic Tiger, it has accompanied Ireland through boom, bust and one of the fastest social transformations in modern Europe: a country that learned to put its hardest questions first to constitutional conventions and citizens’ assemblies, and then to the ballot box — becoming the first in the world to legalise same-sex marriage by popular vote, and later extending reproductive rights by referendum. Those changes were won by citizens and civil society rather than by philanthropy, but they did not come from nowhere. From its earliest years the Foundation made grants to LGBT organisations, Travellers and migrant-rights groups, and it describes its contribution since in terms of linking evidence gathered on the ground with voice and action at national level. Like many of the other community foundations present at the summit, it has increasingly stepped into the role of convenor, bringing donors, non-profits, researchers and government together on equality, democracy and climate.
That capacity to bring people together, in an atmosphere that invites critical discussion, open exchange and shared learning, was on show throughout the summit. Denise Charlton and her team hosted the field with the same care, skill and generosity that run through everything the Foundation does, and the gathering will surely be remembered as a milestone for the global community foundation movement.
