Why us
What began as a USAID reform effort has grown into something more.
Centering local leadership in development and humanitarian work is at the heart of Local Works Global.
Locally led development is not a new idea. Many organizations, particularly those led by Majority World experts, have advanced principles of locally led development for decades: community power, decolonized aid, trust-based resourcing.
We bring a unique experience: we implemented locally led approaches across 64+ countries inside the world’s largest bilateral donor in the face of structural resistance. We know how to translate locally led principles into policies, funding mechanisms, and operational shifts — even inside systems not designed for this. We know how funds flow through large institutions, where bureaucratic barriers stall progress, and where real leverage exists.
Our purpose is to bring what we know to shift practice, move resources, and help make locally led development the norm.
Where we came from
Local Works was a major reform effort led by 577 global USAID staff members to make America’s foreign assistance more equitable, sustainable, and aligned with local priorities. Over the past decade, we managed a cumulative budget of over $600M, elevating local leadership and connecting communities with the resources they identified to solve their own challenges.
This work made clear that the barrier to locally led development has never been lack of community capacity, but institutional willingness. Institutional willingness can and must be changed.
What we’re building on
Across 200+ programs, we learned what it actually takes to shift power inside resistant systems. Just a few of the communities we worked alongside were:
Strengthening grassroots mutual aid networks in conflict environments including Ukraine and Sudan
Advancing indigenous-led disaster risk management in the Ecuadorian Amazon rainforest
Sustaining community-based, cross-sector collective action to address a heroin epidemic in northern Myanmar
Empowering local humanitarian response systems in Armenia and Syria
Investing in youth-led innovation and entrepreneurship platforms across Zimbabwe and El Salvador
Advancing education decentralization in Angola for greater community ownership
The experience we’ve gained
We know how to move money differently. We know how to restructure grantmaking processes so communities lead them. We know how to facilitate the internal institutional change that makes locally led approaches stick.
That knowledge was built over a decade inside USAID. We're harnessing it to make locally led development the norm.
It is not an innovation, but a necessity. Communities have always held the knowledge, relationships, and vision to lead their own change. What has failed them are donor agendas, restrictive funding, and development systems built on colonial assumptions that expertise flows in one direction. Those systems are being disrupted now. The organizations, evidence base, and political relationships needed to replace them with something better have to be built before the window closes.
We've supported locally led development at scale within resistant bureaucracies — imagine what's possible in systems designed to support it. Join us.