Community-Centered and Collaborative Fundraising

Community-centered and collaborative fundraising values and principles reflect a movement to shift fundraising toward equity, collective well-being, and community self-determination. These values grow out of long-standing traditions within many BIPOC communities, including mutual aid, cooperative economics, resource pooling, communal care, and shared decision-making. Building on this wisdom, nonprofit leaders and fundraisers from BIPOC and other historically marginalized communities formalized principles and introduced the term Community-Centric Fundraising (CCF), launching communitycentricfundraising.org in 2020.

The modern CCF movement challenges the power imbalances and donor dominance embedded in traditional philanthropy and invites fundraisers to evolve their practices so that donors, staff, volunteers, and community members participate as partners in a collective effort guided by community priorities. Community-centered and collaborative fundraising is not a one-size-fits-all model; how it appears in practice will vary across organizations based on their community, culture, relationships, and capacity. 

LIL hosted a workshop on this topic in December, 2025. Below, you'll find relevant materials and resources that were generated from this workshop.