In the United States in recent years, the pandemic—alongside other crises and threats, including the country’s persistent legacy of racist violence—has surfaced similar patterns of community-centered survival and leadership, making them increasingly visible. These patterns, both domestic and abroad, speak to a single, profound truth that philanthropy must not only acknowledge, but also center in its efforts to support leadership development: Leadership that leads to equity is grounded in community wisdom.

Community-driven, collective leadership is tough to measure or understand using surveys or quantitative research methodologies. The knowledge in which it is rooted is borne out of generations of living and dying, singing and dancing, praying and working, and being. It is encoded in ceremonies and meals, transcribed in smiles, analyzed in barbershops, and disseminated through webs of relationships. Like those intact rural communities in Peru, communities all over the world know how to survive. They know what they need.

Perhaps the most important skill for people interested in supporting the leadership and wisdom of communities is the ability to know and trust it when they see it. For people who do not belong to a given community, this can be difficult. The faces of a community’s leadership can change on a month-to-month or even day-to-day basis. Frequently, the people who communities entrust with leadership, such as farmers who know the land but never attended college or street-smart neighborhood organizers who were previously incarcerated, are not the people who funders would entrust with it. When philanthropists seek to invest in leadership, they risk missing the leadership capacity that is right before their eyes.

Here are three tips from people who live and work close to injustice about how philanthropy can better recognize, support, fund, and center community-driven and collective leadership.

  1. Fund and support the unique knowledge, cultures, and practices that shape community leadership.
  2. Support community-defined leadership.
  3. Value the research skills and creativity of community members.

Read the full article about community wisdom by Brian Carey Sims at Stanford Social Innovation Review.