“Funding is...a matter of collective experimentation – and even of historical creation or invention.”
This quote – from Brazilian academic and activist Marcelo Lopez de Souza – sums up one of the key lessons we’ve learnt from working with a diverse range of community development practitioners and academics from across the globe who are grappling with the pitfalls and possibilities of using different funding models: there are no easy answers to the dilemmas associated with resourcing egalitarian social and economic change. Instead we have to name and deal with the complex ways in which power operates through different funding arrangements, and experiment with new ways of generating resources while holding firm to the principles of participatory democracy.
