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Lessons from East Africa on Effective Community Organizing
For the last seven years, Sasha Fisher has worked with communities across East Africa to build, test, and refine a facilitated collective action process to combat poverty in East Africa. Since 2010, the organization she co-founded, Spark MicroGrants, has partnered with more than 140 villages facing rural poverty across Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi. Spark facilitates six months of weekly community meetings. At these meetings, an average of 64 women and men sit together, set goals for the future of their village and plan for a local project. Spark provides an $8,000 seed grant upfront to make the project a reality, as well as two-and-a-half years of management support.
Sasha recently compiled three of their learnings from their work in East Africa and published how she believes these can help strengthen and sustain community-organizing efforts in the United States and beyond.