Creating and Leveraging Local Resources
a strategy for self-sustainability
More self-sustainability means having more autonomy and less reliance on external funding, expertise or decisions. It means having a larger capacity to choose and negotiate with other initiatives what’s best for your project and what’s not. It means an increasingly equitable participation, which will lead to development models that are more comprehensive and relevant for all, that is, more sustainable. Know more
Several development initiatives and projects reduce their dependence on external resources and become more self-sustainable by making the most of those human, material, knowledge and infrastructure resources that are readily available to them or to the communities they work with. This might even mean encouraging the creation of new local or in-house resources.
One of the ways to maximize these resources is by encouraging local community members to participate in the projects, since they can often provide new ideas and all sorts of other contributions, such as knowledge, infrastructure or labor. This helps diversify the initiative’s sources of support and also fosters the community’s sense of ownership of a project by incorporating their points of view, which will make an initiative more relevant to their needs and respond to their problems with more comprehensive solutions. In addition, meeting the project’s objectives with less reliance on external support (money, knowledge, etc.) helps initiatives negotiate the terms of that support on more equitable grounds.
Some initiatives create or leverage local resources by coming up with entrepreneurship programs that foster creativity and local skills, or by introducing barter systems and alternative currencies that promote the production and exchange of goods and services with less use of official money. Other projects focus on education as a way to develop local human resources for the future, either by educating children and youth or perhaps by offering workshops and training to better harness the participation of members of the beneficiary community or of the initiative itself.
When designing their interventions, some projects make it a point to identify and document all available local resources, as well as those that could eventually be tapped or even created. Some initiatives, for example, make the most of the know-how they have gathered with their work with a given community by providing consultancy services to other organizations for a price. Others establish agreements that multiply the value of their resources, such as matching funds: for each contribution of money, work, materials or infrastructure, their collaborators (foundations, governments) commit to contributing an equivalent amount of money.
There are many different ways of creating and leveraging local resources to make an initiative more self-sustainable. Take a look at how these projects have done it!
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