What is Firelight?

Firelight is a multi-donor fund that raises money from foundations, institutions, and individuals to support community-based organizations (CBOs) that are working with their communities to drive systems change for children and youth in eastern and southern Africa.

Change lasts when it comes from within.

Firelight believes in the power and right of African communities to create lasting change for their own children and youth. We believe that lasting change will come when communities have agency to create safe, strong and nurturing environments where children and youth thrive and are able to realize their extraordinary potential.

The best answers are already in the community.

We believe that lasting systemic change for children’s rights and development needs to value and involve child, youth, adult, parent, and community perspectives, knowledge, practices, and institutions. Along with global best practices, they must be valued in the role they play in lasting systems shifts for children.

We support the community as change agent.

We believe that relevant, impactful, and sustainable change at the community level comes when:

• Community members determine, own, and drive the change process; and

• Change actions focus on addressing the underlying systems and root causes of concern – rather than only reacting to symptoms.

The best support comes from those you know.

Firelight believes that community-based organizations and community leaders are essential but often unsupported assets in helping communities ensure safe, strong and nurturing environments for their children and youth. Supporting CBOs and communities to fully realize their own agency and capacity and enables them to sustainably and effectively improve the life trajectories of their children and youth over the long-term.

We shift power.

Firelight invests in African community-based organizations (CBOs) to work with their communities to identify, analyze, and address their own most pressing priorities. We do this through a flexible and supportive system of grants, mentoring, convening, and learning in which CBOs determine their own definitions of need, opportunity, action, change, impact and success. They work with their communities to build shared visions of sustainable change and realize the true potential of children, youth and the communities themselves.

We support local organizations with what they need, in the way they need it.

Firelight’s core program and learning team is based in southern and eastern Africa and is supported by a global Board of Directors and Advisory Council. Firelight is driven by communities and community-based organizations (CBOs) themselves and responds to their self-identified needs with flexible, long-term funding, technical, organizational, and programmatic capacity support. In this way, we do philanthropy differently.

We build and share the evidence that it works.

In order to influence a global practice of funding local community-driven systems change, Firelight gathers evidence, leverages networks, and seeks to share the voices and realities of communities, children, youth, and community-based organizations.