Children’s ability to thrive is influenced by a web of unique local factors, including limited job opportunities and social mobility, geographic isolation, and lack of safe housing. To address these challenges, it’s key to consider local complexities. That’s where community-led impact comes in. Across rural America, civil society and the public and private sectors are coming together to actively engage local leaders in planning, delivery, and refining efforts to drive lasting positive change. positive change.
From eastern Tennessee to California’s Central Valley, we at Save the Children have seen how community-led approaches deliver results—from education to housing to community development. Here are some “dos and don’ts” for supporting community-led impact.
The dos: Best practices for community-led impact
- Develop collaborative partnerships. Leverage diverse expertise and resources by engaging local caregivers, faith leaders, business owners, and others with lived experience to review data and share different perspectives. Partner with local organizations, agencies, and institutions to develop solutions. For example, in Cocke County, Tennessee, parents’ feedback that expectations for kindergarten readiness were unclear inspired an awareness campaign with local media, businesses, and authorities to better provide information and support to families.
- Foster knowledge sharing. Sustainable community-led impact is possible when communities build capacities to continue the work independently. Communities of practice—a support network for groups with shared interests or professions—help those on the ground share questions, ideas, experiences and learnings; deepen knowledge transfer; and gain skills. Save the Children facilitates a monthly community of practice with partners across rural America. Remember the kindergarten campaign mentioned earlier? It has spread to at least two other communities through this knowledge sharing.
- Ensure mutual accountability and responsiveness. Shared learning drives partners to action, fostering mutual accountability. Regular assessments like surveys or feedback conversations help refine approaches and adapt to change, while demonstrating transparency in how feedback is integrated. For example, through a monthly check-in with the lead community organization in Quitman County, Mississippi, we identified duplication of efforts to convene local partners around similar issues. So, we reorganized to better integrate our efforts, enhancing clarity and coordination.
- Build and maintain trust. The cliché is true—partnerships move at the speed of trust, especially in rural areas, where personal and professional relationships are often intertwined. So, how do you nurture trust? By setting clear norms and expectations for working together, responding promptly to feedback, creating brave spaces that support authenticity, and addressing breaches like unkept commitments. We’ve seen how trust also fosters resilience—to tensions among partners as well as to external shocks such as disasters or funding loss.
- Honor the history of place. A report from The Trust for Civic Life highlights the importance of local context in building trust. Every partnership is influenced by the community’s history, including collective trauma and past relationships with outside partners. Acknowledging this history with openness and humility helps ground partners and changemakers in a shared context. This can be done through conversations, data walks to review and discuss key information, and root cause analysis to pinpoint underlying issues. In Quitman County, where 72% of the population is Black, we laid the groundwork with local partners by discussing the legacies of slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow; the history of partnerships with “outsiders” and learnings from these experiences.
The don’ts: Pitfalls to avoid for community-led impact
- Don’t get tunnel vision. Avoid a one-size-fits-all approach. Tailor strategies to community needs, resources, and local context by leveraging local assets and needs assessments, fiscal mapping, and community members’ input.
- Don’t fund and then neglect. Funding matters, but it’s not everything. Ensure communities have comprehensive support to pursue self-determined priorities—including providing training, offering grant management advice or facilitating strategic relationships. Once locally developed action plans are in place, step back so community partners can take ownership and decide where funding would be most impactful and lead implementation. In addition to funding opportunities, Save the Children also offers free professional development resources related to community-led impact.
- Don’t rush it. It takes time to build the strong foundation necessary for sustainable community-led impact. Convene cross-sector stakeholders, use data to establish a shared vision and goals, and collaboratively develop strategies to be refined over time. Ensure local partners have the operational capacity to implement programs, including financial management, talent development, and fundraising.
- Don’t impose unnecessary burdens. Rigid administrative processes can slow down local partners, drain energy and focus from important work, and exclude small or under-resourced organizations. Simplify applications, agreements, and reporting. Save the Children has received and integrated a lot of constructive feedback from local partners, and we’ve moved to a more open format that allows coalitions to tell us about what they think is most important for us to know.
- Don’t ignore power dynamics. Power dynamics exist in every relationship; ignoring them can hinder progress in driving community impact. I’ve seen communities tackle implicit power imbalances by using first names only—even for doctors, pastors, mayors, or judges. This practice helps everyone engage as “experts in equal measure.” Also avoid making communities mere backdrops for self-promotion or eliciting feedback that goes unheard.
Photo credit: Paul Ratje/Save the Children
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