This article about mobilizing local resources in Latin America is also available in Spanish. Download it here.

In the age of advanced digital mapping, futures thinking, and agentic AI, it’s ironic that what philanthropy in Latin America might need most is a simple road map to mobilizing local resources.

Our destination is clear: a future where people are coordinated and ready to solve the problems that affect them. One where the diminishing flows of international and national funding are balanced by growing resource mobilisation at the local level.

What’s not clear, incredibly, is how to get there. While a few trailblazers are forging ahead by reshaping community philanthropy through a local lens, (see Connecting Communities Across the Americas or RACI’s work on Reimagining the Future of Civil Society), others have barely started out, daunted by the complexity of the terrain and the scale of the journey.

Nevertheless, a decade on from the radical promise of #ShiftthePower and the rise of localisation within international development, there are now clear signals from within Latin America about which roads to take, which dead ends to avoid, and how to overcome the barriers in our way to mobilizing local resources.

When Mobilizing Local Resources, the First Challenge to Navigate Is Language

For many years, nonprofits and grant makers have been enthusiastically promoting individual giving programmes to tap into the generosity of the expanding middle class across Latin America. Yet, the mainstreaming of the ‘donate now’ button and the vocabulary that surrounds it are, in my opinion, problematic when trying to mobilize local resources.

Simply translating ‘donate’ in English to ‘donar’ in Spanish masks a deeper connotative divergence. Positive or neutral in English, for many people across Latin America, ‘making a donation’ is subconsciously associated with ‘ayudar a los más necesitados,’ that is, helping the needy or the poor.

Our shared colonial history, the influence of the Catholic Church, and persistent governmental paternalism, accordingly imply two associated narratives: either ‘giving as charity,’ where the rich help the poor and the powerful help the powerless, or ‘giving as sacrifice,’ where one’s resources are depleted in the act of giving.

Read the full article about mobilizing local resources in Latin America by Anita Gallagher at Alliance Magazine.