To raise awareness and mobilize religious communities to coordinate their local fundraising work, as a strategy for institutional sustainability. This was the aim of the Local Fundraising Course held between 19 and 22 March in the city of Belém (Pará). The training is part of the Change the Game Academy run in Brazil by CESE, in partnership with the Dutch agency Wilde Ganzen.
The training group was made up of people from several expressions of faith from distinct operational contexts, with 17 representatives from 12 organizations, including churches, ecumenical organizations, African-origin religious worship houses and one indigenous organization. A mixture of training, exchanges and group dynamics enabled the participants to reflect on and draft their first strategies to attract human and financial resources to their projects, as well as to expand their partnerships by strengthening their networks.
The course aims to improve on what the organizations are already doing. CESE has run training in this area since 2011 and has followed the shifting perceptions about fundraising and its importance for groups as a result of the course. “These training sessions have valued the exchange of experiences between groups who, with CESE’s methodological support, seek to strengthen their networks, open up new fronts of support, and pursue strategies to approach and retain partners. Organizations have thus begun to take a broader view of this field of operations,” said Marília Pinto, CESE’s Communications Analyst and Training Facilitator.
Similarly, Lucyvanda Moura, CESE’s Projects and Training Advisor, also a course trainer, sees the initiative as an opportunity for organizations to guarantee their sustainability and autonomy: “A lot of funds circulate through grassroots power, either through their networks, partnerships or generated by the organizations themselves, but they still treat these informally. We have seen that, through the courses, the organizations have begun to see these issues as strategic, to avoid dependence on projects or grant funding, for example,” she noted.
The training methodology ensured that the participants had the freedom to demonstrate the particular features of each community of faith, and encouraged the exchange of experiences between churches, African-origin religions and the indigenous organization.
Marília Gabriela de Freitas, representing the Mansu Nangetu Institute, a Candomblé Worship House, attended the course and emphasized the importance of including African-origin religions on it: “Our ancestral knowledge is often spoken about and when we participate in these spaces we learn to write projects.” Regarding the methodology, which ensured everyone participated in the activities and felt part of a whole, Marília Freitas added, “seeing the inclusion and how the facilitators made an effort to include People from the Worship Houses is really great.”
With roundtable dialogue, group presentations, exercises and games that even involved “defending” unusual causes, the course encouraged participant interaction to successfully share knowledge.
Rosane Aparecida, representing the Anglican Episcopal Church in the Amazon and a volunteer for Brazilian Caritas North Region II, said that her expectations of the course had been met: “I thought the course would be boring and tiring, but it wasn’t. It surpassed my expectations and provided lots of opportunities I hadn’t had before, I never imagined it would be so accessible.”
As well as religious institutions, CESE invited another partner of Wilde Ganzen (which created the programme) to the course – the Tapajós and Arapiuns Indigenous Council (Conselho Indígena Tapajós e Arapiuns: CITA). Representing the organization, young adult Rainer Jarakaí noted the importance of grassroots participation in these arenas. “Young people are getting mobilized and we need to be included in these arenas of discussion, we need to occupy these rights arenas,” he declared.