TED Community » JENNIFER Lentfer

More About Me

I'm passionate about

Enhancing the practice of facilitating the development of sovereign local organizations and social movements in the developing world.

An idea worth spreading

Larger-scale financial support of local initiatives, grassroots leadership and small, often “informal” movements in the developing world is a way to transform the current aid system, and the world. When grassroots groups are the setters of priorities, the controllers of resources, and thus the drivers of development, donors can help build local sovereignty through small grants programs. This change in approach can also enable donors better identify, leverage, and scale the efforts of respected local leaders who have the sustained commitment, effort and insights (just not the resources) to make sustainable, long-term changes at the community level.

Talk to me about

Unleashing the power of grassroots groups in the developing world.

People don't know that I'm good at

"Showing" pigs at the county fair as a child. I was junior show[wo]manship champion in Thayer County, Nebraska.

My TED Story

I've always said that it was easier for me to move to rural Zimbabwe than to Detroit. This farm girl turned aid worker's deep sense of community enables me to understand and explain the vital role of local leadership and ownership in making international aid more effective. In working with international NGOs and philanthropies over the years, I found myself continually frustrated by the limitations of donor-controlled, project-based funding. Today I work to place community-driven development initiatives, which can be more genuinely responsive to local needs, at the forefront of aid.

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• A comment on Conversation: What would you do for the world with $1 million?

  Aug 9 2012: Give 1,000 aid workers (local and international, cleaner to country director) a social change investment fund of US$1,000, over which they have total personal discretion.
  Task each of us to find an “under-the-radar” grassroots organization, leader, or initiative worthy of support. The only stipulation is that as fund managers we must find a group that has been in existence for at least three years and has never received international assistance. (With estimates of grassroots organizations around the world at four million, this will not be as hard as it sounds.) Only one-page proposals and reports allowed.
  Aid workers spend plenty of our time in budgets and logical frameworks. What will happen if we have total freedom to break the rules…take a risk!?! During the year, the fund managers will be tasked to just have fun! We must find a person, an organization, or an idea that inspires us. We can learn more about a topic of interest. Our mandate will be to tap into the enthusiasm that drew us into this work in the first place.
  At the end of one year, the fund managers in every organization get together and share what we’ve learned through facilitated and documented reflection exercises. We distill good practices and actionable insights about what is required to unleash the potential of grassroots leaders and movements. We will let the truth hang out. We will admit that some investments didn’t go as planned.
  We will let that be okay.
  If we are serious about “flipping the aid system” to put more local and national actors in the driver’s seat of development, we have to let go and learn in myriad different ways. These investment funds could help us release the “pressure” of bringing about large-scale impact in order to more deeply understand the local processes that bring about change. If we’re forced to think micro, we may actually build a more inclusive discourse on aid that changes our understanding of what we value (local ownership) and what we measure (social change).

• A comment on Talk: Julia Bacha: Pay attention to nonviolence

  Sep 3 2011: Recommended reading for people who enjoyed this talk: Hawken. P. (2007). Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming. New York: Viking Press. Demonstrating the extent, diversity, and strength of local movements around the world.