The European Forum Alpbach is a unique place where reflection meets action. It brings together young people alongside leaders from politics, business, civil society, and science to shape ideas for a stronger democratic Europe. At this year’s forum, Kathrin Dombrowski, Coordinating Director at ECFI, contributed the perspective of community foundations. In this article, she shares her key takeaways from a two-day workshop exploring how philanthropy can embrace system change approaches.
At the European Forum Alpbach 2025, the Foundation Workshop on Philanthropy for Systems Change centred on a question that philanthropy often struggles with: how do we move from treating symptoms to addressing the root causes of the problems our communities face?
To guide discussion, we used the image of a problem tree. The trunk shows the problem as it is felt day to day. The branches are the effects that spread from it. The roots are the deeper causes. Much of philanthropy works on the branches, and sometimes on the trunk. But if we want lasting change, we need to work on the roots.
This metaphor speaks directly to the role of community foundations. Because they are rooted in place, they can see the whole tree in a particular locality – symptoms, problems, and causes – and to connect the people and institutions who must work together if change is to be possible.
The potential of place-based systems change
Community foundations are not issue-specific. They focus on the wellbeing of the whole community in a defined place. That means they can see how problems interconnect: how poverty links to health outcomes, how polarisation links to declining trust in institutions, how housing links to education and employment.
Their role is not only financial. They build bridging social capital (connections between people across lines of difference) and linking social capital (relationships between communities and institutions with power). These are the conditions that allow systems to adapt, heal, and transform.
Examples of practice
Several community foundations are already working in this way:
- Foundation Scotland is working to implement an upstream mindset. It focuses on preventative action – funding initiatives that stop harm before it happens, rather than only responding once problems have taken root.
- The Community Foundation for Northern Ireland has sought to understand and address the root causes of racist violence. Alongside immediate support for affected communities, it has invested in grassroots groups tackling hate and disinformation, and in research that helps reveal what lies beneath visible outbreaks of violence.
- The Fondazione Comunità di Messina in Italy has pioneered a model that moves far beyond grant-making. It invests in productive assets that generate what it calls relational goods—solidarity, dignity, belonging. By strengthening the “ social soil,” it creates the conditions in which healthier systems can grow.
Each of these examples shows community foundations looking beyond the leaves and branches of the problem tree and deliberately engaging with the roots.
A field still in transition
At the same time, it is important to be honest: community foundations are not perfect. Many remain tied to traditional donor-driven models or focus narrowly on transactional grantmaking. Others want to adapt but face real barriers in the form of limited resources, capacity constraints, or restrictive funding terms. In many European countries, civil society space is shrinking, making this work even harder.
The potential for systems change is there, but it is unevenly realised. What is needed now is a wider adoption of a systems change mindset across the field, and support that allows foundations to experiment, take risks, and work patiently at the roots of problems rather than only at the surface.
From promise to practice
Systems change is complex and slow. It requires patient resources, long-term trust, and the ability to work across divides. Yet much philanthropy still expects short-term outputs and visible results. Community foundations show another way: one that is local, grounded, and relational.
At ECFI, we see community foundations as essential infrastructure that can contribute to systemic change. Their local embeddedness gives them the insight to understand the causes of problems and to recognise system failures along with the legitimacy to convene diverse actors around shared solutions. To support this role, ECFI is committed to identifying, documenting and sharing examples of systemic change approaches in the community foundation field to promote a systems change mindset and enable learning, collaboration and progress.
