Letter from the Founder & Director

We have much to celebrate.

Firelight’s 2005 Annual Report marks our sixth year of grantmaking (October 2004 through September 2005). In Fiscal Year 2005, 100 grants totaling over $1.3 million were made to organizations addressing the needs of children and families affected by HIV/AIDS in 10 African countries. This includes funds granted through the Firelight Donor Advised Fund at Tides Foundation (see page 80). In March 2005 Firelight’s 10th Advisory Board meeting was held in Cape Town, South Africa – the first ever to be held in Africa. In August 2005 Firelight published and made widely available its first joint advocacy document, The Promise of a Future, to call donor attention to the importance of supporting family and community-based care.

We also have great challenges before us.

Even as increasing funds become available to address HIV/AIDS globally, only a trickle makes it to the ground. Yet we know that most of the care that AIDS-affected households in Sub-Saharan Africa receive comes not from governments or large NGOs, but from the local community. Neighbors, community initiatives, and faith-based organizations are responding to the crisis at their doorsteps. The vast majority of these responses operate without any external recognition or support, and they are being stretched thin as the crisis grows. If we are going to effectively reach households, where the impact of poverty and AIDS hits hardest, we must be willing to engage with and invest in community responses.

Firelight’s effectiveness as a grantmaker is determined by our ability to work strategically, in collaboration with, and with great sensitivity to, communities on the ground. Our outreach, partnerships, and growth as an organization strive to achieve these goals, and continue in response to an urgent need to step up support reaching children and families at the grassroots level.

From our grantmaking work, we have learned that the key to supporting children orphaned and made vulnerable by HIV/AIDS is to strengthen the capacity of families and communities to care for them. The Promise of a Future calls attention to this fact. Investing in organizations that build family and community capacity through locally driven strategies results in concrete improvements in children’s wellbeing that are sustainable on a local level.

While institutional care will continue to be needed as a temporary response and “last resort” for children with no other means of support, orphanages are not the answer. Orphanages are expensive to maintain and often fail to meet the developmental needs of children. It is a heartrending fact that many children now placed in orphanages have living family members who are willing but unable to take them in because they lack the means to do so.

Without sentimentalizing families or communities, we need to recognize the developmental imperative – children grow best in families – and respond by helping to ensure that children remain in supportive family care. This means investing in programs that strengthen the family and community safety net, such as campaigns to reduce stigma and discrimination, income-generating activities and material support for caregivers, daycare and education programs, child abuse prevention, and support groups for caregivers. We invite you to read the profiles highlighting a few of these strategies in this annual report.

We do not believe in oversimplifying the issue by advocating only for community-based investments. Supporting programs at the national level, such as sustainable development strategies, social welfare benefits, and the provision of universal basic services including education and health care, are critical to the wellbeing of children and families. At the same time, funders focused on government and policy-level interventions need to recognize the interdependence between these larger efforts and community participation. Successful roll out of antiretroviral treatment, for example, is dependent on the active engagement of local organizations. It is these groups that are often in the best position to work with community members to identify individuals in need of treatment and to offer the social and emotional support that are crucial to effective treatment.

For our part Firelight is committed to ensuring the community response is recognized and supported for the lifeline that it is. Firelight Foundation recognizes that our responsibility as a grantmaker is about more than just money. Our grantees have repeatedly told us that they value our respectful partnership as much as the dollars we give. From the beginning our goal has been to support local leadership and community ownership, as these are the very qualities that make grassroots responses more sustainable than any effort initiated from the outside.

To our donors, colleagues, and grantee-partners, we express our deepest solidarity and appreciation as we continue to work together to make the world, community by community, a better place for children and families.

With gratitude,

Kerry Olson – Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Jennifer Astone – Executive Director