At Community Seed Fund, our name is not just a randomly chosen cliche. Rather, it reflects our philosophy on working with communities. Communities are of course much more complicated than a plant, but the analogy is useful. A healthy plant needs good soil, light, water, and various other conditions to grow. Likewise, healthy communities do not develop in a vacuum, they require various factors to develop. Much like the growth of a plant, a community cannot grow overnight, and careful attention must be paid to both long-term and short-term factors. Like a plant, we cannot control every factor, all we can do provide the plant the best chance to thrive. CSF strives to always work with appropriate scope, recognizing that many things are beyond our control. Rather than discouraging us, this focuses our efforts on where we can be most effective.
At CSF, we recognize that much like a plant, a community cannot be forced to grow. To make the most of our donors' generosity, we put a lot of thought into deciding where to plant the seeds. In accordance with our principles, before anything else, we select communities that welcome our initiatives, and we do not take the trust and goodwill of the communities we serve for granted. We also do our best to work within the socioeconomic realities of the communities we serve. We can control some things, and give a plant the best chance to grow, but ultimately, we don't directly control the growth. Our efforts are designed to help communities create the conditions for healthy, resilient, and local growth, but we recognize that ultimately, it is the people of a community that are in control of their destiny. Rather than imposing an outside structure of development, we seek to empower communities to grow as they see fit. When carefully managed, crops can produce more seeds and be replanted indefinitely, and our aim is for the communities we serve to be healthy and free from dependence on outside aid.
Related Posts
