What is Community-Centric Fundraising?

Community-Centric Fundraising provides guiding principles and a framework for nonprofits to engage in ethical and equitable fundraising. As a fundraising professional, I have adopted these principles and supported organizations in embedding them into their strategies, resulting in significant positive impacts on their communities and internal teams.

“Community-Centric Fundraising is a movement to evolve how fundraising is done in the nonprofit sector. Its goal is to support fundraisers and other nonprofit professionals to re-examine every fundraising philosophy and practice they have been taught, engage in vigorous ongoing conversations, and explore doing fundraising in ways that reduce harm and further social justice.”

Community-Centric Fundraising offers a lens for us to scrutinize the nonprofit sector and examine our complicity in perpetuating injustice. Many of us are passionate about pursuing justice and equity in the nonprofit sector. However, to truly pursue these goals, we must first understand exactly how we perpetuate the problems we aim to solve, especially through our fundraising methods.

Fundraisers hold so much power within organizations. Fundraisers hold so much power within this sector. As resource mobilizers, we must uphold an ethical standard and commitment to examine exactly how and why we are accumulating, mobilizing, and distributing resources. 

It's essential for me to be intentional about who we approach for support, how we approach them, and why we are approaching them. This consideration should be integral from the planning stages to the execution of our strategies.

Balancing these aspects can be difficult, but there are frameworks designed to help. One such approach is Community-Centric Fundraising.