In Ngilai, Kenya, a group of women faced a problem that affected both their livestock and their land. Deep gullies were injuring animals and accelerating erosion, making it harder for grasses critical to grazing and rangeland health to take root.
Through Thriving Futures – a methodology developed by Legado, a global nonprofit that works alongside communities to build healthy communities and landscapes – community members identified the restoration of Long’ori gully as a shared priority. They then picked up their shovels and completed the planned restoration work – a tangible milestone within Ngilai’s broader, ongoing efforts to restore its rangeland.
Yet the interesting part of the story wasn’t the restoration work itself; it was how the community organised around restoration in the first place. That process involved listening, convening, facilitating, and deciding together, all whilst building trust and legitimacy. Those activities created the conditions for community members to identify the community’s priority, build support for it, and act together.
The Ngilai Community Conservancy supported the effort in a culturally meaningful way, helping formalise meetings of the Women in Rangelands Committee. The women who took up the restoration work became known locally as the “Gulley Mamas.” A conservancy leader described the group as unlike anything he had seen before: women had organised themselves around rangeland restoration, an issue often associated with men’s work.
At The Bridgespan Group, our research on community-driven change (CDC) has explored how lasting and equitable change depends not only on what communities receive but also on whether they have what they need to shape their own futures. This article builds on that research and draws on Legado’s experience supporting community priority-setting in practice to illustrate a broader point: when funders resource the process by which communities name priorities, validate decisions, navigate trade-offs, and organise around locally legitimate action, they strengthen the conditions that make lasting outcomes more likely.
This is what it means to fund the process.
Why Process Matters
At its heart, CDC is about strengthening a community’s power – in forms such as agency, shared vision, and inclusive leadership – and its assets, such as knowledge, skills, and financial resources. It treats community members not as recipients of aid or as partners in implementation, but as owners of their own development agendas.
That process does not happen automatically. Communities are inherently collective and diverse. They include people with different priorities, histories, lived experiences, levels of influence, and access to power. Developing a shared agenda requires dialogue, trust, negotiation, and inclusive decision making over time.
In this context, funding the process is not just a planning exercise. It is the set of activities through which community members identify shared priorities, make decisions, navigate trade-offs, build leadership, and shape interventions. It may include:
- Early-stage planning or “year zero” work (more on that below)
- Community listening, engagement, and convening
- Facilitation and negotiation
- Participatory problem definition and agenda setting
- Local leadership development and decision-making structures
- Intentional inclusion of marginalised groups in ways that influence decisions
- Iteration and adaptation as priorities evolve
These activities matter because they help communities move from participation to ownership. They are how communities build the agency, legitimacy, and accountability needed to act on shared priorities. In that sense, process is both a pathway to better outcomes and an important outcome in itself.
For funders new to CDC, the convenings, the facilitation, and the community meetings can look a lot like programme delivery. But they are doing something different: driving toward what the solution should be, who shapes it, and whether the community genuinely owns it. Those are the most durable parts of the work because the CDC process doesn’t end once programme implementation begins; it’s an asset unto itself, with a life of its own that continues to strengthen the community and its members over time.
In Action: Priority-setting can build civic capacity, not just plans
The process is often treated as a step that communities move through on the way to implementation. But inclusive priority setting can also build capacities that outlast any single project. When community members have repeated opportunities to identify priorities, deliberate with others, and engage local institutions, they can strengthen their ability to advocate for their needs beyond the life of a programme.
Internal learning from Legado’s Thriving Futures sites suggests that participants report a stronger ability to engage with and advocate to local government and institutions, as well as stronger social cohesion and inclusion in decision making. These findings illustrate why process matters: it can help communities build the shared confidence, relationships, and civic muscle to keep advancing their priorities.
How Funders Can Fund the Process – From Year Zero Through Implementation
The CDC process involves communities in decision making rather than taking a consultative approach. Communities shape plans rather than respond to them. Marginalised community members have real influence in the process. And there’s accountability – but with the CDC process, accountability opens the door to possibilities, rather than constraining the community.
How grants are designed, structured, and assessed makes a big difference in whether CDC takes hold. That often means thinking about grants differently, about investing in the process of community-driven change that will, in turn, lead to project implementation. It also means investing in the foundations of a strong CDC process—what we call “year zero” investments. A few things we’ve seen to be helpful include:
Fund before the project is fixed. Early agenda-setting, listening, relationship-building, and community planning require support before a detailed implementation plan can be developed. Rather than asking applicants to define solutions or outputs upfront, funders can support process-first proposals that outline how communities will identify priorities, build ownership, and make decisions. These activities will shape year zero.
Budget for facilitation, leadership, and people. CDC is human-capital intensive. Conveners, facilitators, local leaders, community engagement staff, translators, and coaches are central to the work. Treating these roles as investments, rather than overhead, makes visible the labour required to support meaningful community ownership.
Use flexible, multiyear funding where possible. Communities need time to build trust, navigate trade-offs, test ideas, and adapt. Grant structures that allow for iteration can better reflect the realities of CDC than fixed timelines and rigid output requirements. It’s also key to ensure that a portion of the budget remains flexible and responsive to emerging community priorities.
Deliberately fund inclusion. Participation is shaped by practical barriers, social dynamics, and power. Funders can resource the conditions that enable people from marginalised groups to influence decisions, including transportation, childcare, translation, accessibility, compensation for their time, and facilitation approaches designed to shift whose voices are heard. This costs more than exclusion and, too often, is what gets trimmed in a budget.
Measure what makes outcomes durable. Alongside implementation milestones, funders can track indicators of ownership, agency, representation, legitimacy, and collective action. Traditional reporting often asks, “What was delivered?” But for CDC to flourish, funders should instead ask:
- Who shaped the work?
- Whose priorities were elevated?
- Did marginalised groups influence decisions?
- Did community members report greater ownership and agency?
- Are local leaders and groups better able to engage with institutions?
- Is decision making seen as legitimate?
- Can the community adapt its plans based on learnings?
These questions can help funders understand not only what was delivered but also whether communities strengthened their ability to sustain and adapt the work over time. They expand what accountability looks like in ways that help the community itself learn and improve, not just the funder.
In Action: Process indicators can reveal what helped the change happen
Outcome data can show that something changed, but it rarely explains why. For funders supporting CDC, process indicators can help reveal what enabled a community priority to move into action: who participated, whose voices shaped the decision, whether local leaders were able to convene others, and whether the process was perceived as legitimate.
In Ngilai, community members identified rangeland restoration as a priority and later organised collective action around it. Looking only at the restoration outcome would miss important parts of the story: the meetings that built shared commitment, the role of women’s leadership, the support of local governance structures, and the trust that helped turn a named priority into action. One community member later described the experience as one of the first meetings she had attended where she could point to a tangible result and where a women-led effort had been visibly supported. That’s the process at work. Hearing stories like that helps explain how outcomes became possible and what communities may be able to sustain or repeat.
Expanding Accountability
CDC begins when communities have the time, resources, and authority to decide what implementation should look like, who should shape it, and how decisions should be made. For funders, this does not require choosing between accountability and investment in process. It requires expanding the view of accountability itself. Funders can ask not only what was delivered, but also who shaped it, whose priorities were elevated, what changed in the community’s ability to act, and what signals suggest the work can last. Funding process is ultimately a bet on durability. It recognises that lasting change depends both on what communities receive and on what they can sustain for themselves.
Edited by Robyn Porteous
