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A recent conversation brought to mind Gandhi’s observation “Whatever you do for me without me, you do against me…” I’d been facilitating a strategic process with an organisation whose executive director told me about an earlier experience with strategic planning in 2008: “… [it] didn’t really help us move forward, it wasn’t the right time and we never asked for it. Our partner was concerned about our organisational development; they wanted to use this process to identify our strengths and weaknesses and generate a capacity building plan, but it was their idea, their project, not ours. It was supposed to be [...]

Welcome to the Well Grounded blog! This will be a space for reflection about the challenges facing African civil society organisations today – particularly the challenges they face in their own organisations, in developing collective action with others and in identifying how to open and occupy space for real and positive change. As time goes on, we hope that many different people and organisations get involved in the conversation, challenge ideas, provoke discussion and debate and share solutions. When Iola Leal and I set Well Grounded up in 2010, both of us, from a forest campaigning background, had worked for a [...]