This brief has been prepared following an online discussion (16/9/2025) involving community foundation support organisations¹. The purpose is:
- to clarify our understanding of how community foundations and their supporting infrastructure at national, European, and global levels engage in advocacy;
- and to explore how this individual and collective advocacy effort can be enhanced.
We have approached the topic of advocacy in its broadest sense i.e. the process of generating public support for or informing and/or influencing decision-making in respect of public policy. We see this as relating to both the institutional form and functions as well as the actions of community foundations. It can range from addressing legal, fiscal, and cultural barriers to the establishment of a community foundations, through to policy and systems change that might impact on a particular issue, area, or group.
What was evident from the discussion was that everyone involved in community foundations and their development engaged directly or indirectly in some form of advocacy work. National and international support organisations play a critical role in raising awareness about community foundations, helping create a favourable operating environment for their establishment and development (in particular in countries where there is ‘closing space for civil society’), and in some cases addressing particular topics and policy issues, where there is a collective interest. Community foundations themselves, depending on their scale at the very least engage in advocacy firstly to highlight their unique role and value added in their locality but also in some cases, where appropriate, as advocates for or advocate partners in systems and systemic change that will impact on the lives of people in their locality.
An advocacy framework is helpful to understand and connect advocacy action locally, nationally, and internationally. This should be considered when developing a plan for advocacy and exploring potential partners and audiences.
It is evident that there is enormous potential in improving competencies and effectiveness at community foundation and support organisation levels and collating the advocacy effort across the community foundation movement.
Advocacy in Focus / A framework for thinking about advocacy for community foundations
The framework below for thinking about advocacy for community foundations was considered and further developed.
Participants identified with three interconnected dimensions – two relating to the institution itself (who and what it is, what it does, and what its potential might be) and the third focused on the work of community foundations (directly as an implementer / researcher and / or indirectly as a funder / partner):
- Visibility / raising awareness about the organisation, and this particular form of institutional area-based philanthropy (relating to both form and function) to build confidence and trust. This includes over-coming being mis-understood due to high profile activities e.g. being identified only as highly effective emergency responders;
- Informing / influencing the operating environment for the establishment and running of the community foundation – this can relate to legal and fiscal issues that provide the boundaries within which a community foundation can operate, but also to practice, including for example promoting a culture of philanthropy, introducing technology and mechanisms of giving, implementing innovative approaches to grant-making / investment etc);
- Addressing issues and topics in order to help move upstream and to change systems and public policy (i.e. to address market and public sector failures and get to root causes of issues). A particular value here of community foundations as generalists with an interest in a defined geographic locality is that they understand interdependencies and critical intersectionalities as they impact on their locality. It is recognised however that to be effective in this dimension of advocacy they need to operate at a level at least equivalent to some meaningful level of public policy intervention and / or partner with others as appropriate.
Advocacy partners and advocacy audiences
Community foundations and their support organisations engage in advocacy directly, but more often indirectly. They therefore consider a wide range of organisations, as both potential partners and audiences for their advocacy effort.
Examples are shown below at various level of operation.
We are all advocates
All participants recognised that they are engaged in advocacy, mostly indirectly, in partnership with others, providing them with evidence from practice, knowledge of interdependencies and critical inter-sectionalities e.g. climate change, health, and inequality as they relate to each other in their specific locality.
Specific added value of community foundations in relation to advocacy includes:
- Their reach across countries (and continents) and deep into territories brings a unique local – global perspective and potential for working with a range of partners to test new ways of working and to derive learning that can inform advocacy;
- Community foundations can support advocacy organisations and/or deploy their convening and connecting power to facilitate the advocacy process, the product of which may be implemented by others;
- The value of being a trusted and not aligned with a single cause, was noted. The credibility and offer of objective, evidence-based opinion, in the form of ‘constructive /soft influence’, was considered to be respected by public sector executives.
Success in advocacy requires building a constituency, having informed insight on the topic; being skilled in participating in or facilitating mechanisms for dialogue (in particular between sectors and at various levels); remaining neutral but championing the impact and solutions. The right to advocate has to be earned. Nevertheless, the challenges associated with ‘taking a stand’ along with the potential politicisation of being aligned with causes were also highlighted. Finally, there was a desire to make better use of being part of a European and global network, in order to draw lessons more widely, gather more evidence, and to amplify the voice of the field.
[1] The discussion was convened and facilitated by ECFI, the national support organisations UKCF (UK), and FFRC (Romania) provided prompting inputs and other contributors to the discussion included representatives from ACFB (Bulgaria), AEF (Spain), AFF (Finland), Assifero (Italy), Konekt (N. Macedonia), Trag Foundation (Serbia).
