Community Foundation : A MFP’s Perspective

Posted in Feature Stories, Policy Briefs, Programme Documents, Publications |
June 2nd, 2009

CFs, A Concept of Community Empowering

Direction and successful parameters are much more determined by synergetical efforts that are layed down one each other between three developing actors. Civil Society’s roles (masyarakat madani)  have function as a balanced point of sustainable development that tend to be very important, since partnership with civil society sector will be able to create equal space of dialogue. Spacious and equality dialogue atmosphere should be dedicated for those whose complexity problems and conditions in which are being faced by community today.

Once the awareness of Civil society’s roles in sustainable development come up to be familiar with the development part and is absolutely required, the civil society itself as the fact remains some basic problems that are as follow: the existing gap of long term development work of financial support, where there are no sufficient capacitation to be acting as a development actor comprehensively and weaknesses of institutional infrastructure that is capable in positioning the civil society as an equal partner. The factual is demonstrated that there are no local civil society  institutions are existing and strong enough to represent the ownership and interests of the civil society itself.

In the other hand, current development of investment could not create a significant high rate of poverty level within the community to be turning down. Global oil high rise prices from time to time as for an example, automatically reducing the purchasing power of community and reducing the government’s budget allocation to do direct services for community/society in the sector of economic, health  and education.  At the same time, land conversion tends to be supplying the bioenergy demands that makes scarcity of and expensive price of food commodities. Foods prices increase time to time that create the community’s quality of life becomes poorer and fragile. The programme assistances for community are evolving everytime that circulate around. Even the programmes are from the government itself or donor agencies, it seems that the programmes could not solve successfully the complexity of poverty situation being faced.

It is important to involve civil society sector. The paradigm of civil society engagement is a new perspective in the partnership constelation for supporting sustainable development. Empowering the civil society pillar in the long term period should fully be supported by public domain (government) and private sector (business entity). However the equal position, roles and strength of each single sector would broaden the synergetical efforts that cross one each other and determine how much the successful hints of sustainable development could be achieved.

Hence today, the strategy of community empowerment is essential which is specifically expected to strengthen the civil society’s position as a partner in the development process, in addition they could respond to the situation of community’s problems that are specific in each single region; however the community empowerment strategy with its capability of embodying decentralization conception and local autonomy plus awakening and engaging the rest capability and potentiality of all stakeholders on the local level itself, having long term perspectives that stay in consistent way preserving the principles of sustainable development.

Community Foundation, or community’s self sufficient institution (simply called CFs) is an answer for an empowering community conception that has a long term perspective. It is supported by an endowment fund and crafting partnership strengthening with other partners. This institution grows up to fill the capacity issues gap and attempting resources diversification for civil society sector. CFs is a not for profit organization that reflects variety of community on specific geographic lanscape, it plays to mobilize resources and distribute them in an appropriate way accordingly to local capacity and needs, that is also focusing on concern on the critical issues that aims at scaling up the quality of life of community as highly as possible.