As one foundation CEO bluntly put it to David Callahan of Inside Philanthropy: “People keep yelling at [philanthropy CEOs] to give out more money — but for what?” It’s a fair question. Many of the same ideas keep resurfacing. Convenings repeat. But something vital keeps getting missed.
If you are tired of the same old pitches, let me offer a quiet answer — hidden in plain sight.
All over the world, the civic infrastructure you care about hasn’t collapsed completely. It’s being re-stitched together, not only by organizations and movements scrambling to adapt, but by people who have relational capital and are already adapting. I call them invisible weavers.
They aren’t frozen by uncertainty and stress. They never were. And they may be the fixers you never knew you needed to make distributed assets go further.
Meet the invisible weavers: the system in motion
Invisible weavers aren’t a new category on your grantee list. They’re the ones making your existing investments work better — and go further. They’re the ones connecting the dots when formal systems falter and when frameworks show cracks. They move between sectors, roles and vocabularies: donor to NGO, movement to ministry, global north to rural community. That loop isn’t a liability — it’s a superpower.
Lina María Jaramillo in Colombia moved between peacebuilding roles in USAID projects and a grassroots organization she co-founded. When the aid taps turned off, she didn’t freeze; instead, she shifted her energy to where opportunity was strongest: community ties she helped weave over a decade. That’s the descongelado mindset she writes about — unfrozen, attuned, always moving.
In Zimbabwe and across Southern Africa, Rachel Gondo bridges public finance systems and civic organizing, working not just to advocate but to make budgets actually work for people. She knows how to navigate from spreadsheet to street because she’s been in both.
In Uzbekistan, Ainura Dzhunushalieva draws on what she learned in Kyrgyzstan about accountability around improving determinants of health to stitch together new pathways for youth-driven climate resilience. She doesn’t wait for an inspiring new narrative to land on her desk. She adapts the approaches that fit. Quietly. Creatively. Strategically.
Field practitioners have worked with invisible weavers like these around the world: In Moldova, when projects ended and civic education still had to be modeled and strengthened by doing, in and beyond the classroom; in South Africa, when democracy and anticorruption work kept going despite changing donor priorities; in Peru, where volunteer women in the Amazon asked donors to help them set up small businesses so they could earn a living while continuing their work to improve patient care quality.
They don’t get stuck in the binary of “repair vs. reinvention.” They bridge. They stretch. They persist.
What invisible weavers do that strategy decks miss
Invisible weavers don’t shout their strategies. They live them. Their work doesn’t start with future scenario planning but embodies it — it starts with people, pressure, pragmatism and possibility. They:
- Navigate contradictions without losing coherence.
- Mobilize invisible assets — relationships, trust, timing.
- Keep problem-solving alive when institutions stall and uncertainty is rife.
- Build loops of legitimacy — across state, private, civic and community actors.
- Hold civic space open by doing, not just imagining.
They’ve kept civic life stitched together during economic collapses, COVID, political polarization and upheaval, and yes, previous funding freezes and shrinkages. Not hypothetically — literally. In Muchinga, Zambia, I met community-led water committees that kept pumps running long after donors exited. In the USA, activists navigated cryptic legalese to show new ways to address the opioid crisis in counties and state legislatures, affected communities, among donors and at pharma offices, as well as in the national media.
In North and South Kivu in the DRC, local facilitators grabbed megaphones to keep communities safe under lockdown. In Nepal, they pulled resources in creative ways when a natural disaster hit Mangaltar. Known for their translocal approaches, many invisible weavers across the Global South play a crucial role in facilitating innovative and resilient community and peer-led HIV responses, and thrive on confronting complex challenges.
This adaptive “invisible weaver mindset” is something I’ve seen firsthand in my own home state in Southern Brazil. As the state government sidelined the open government agenda by shelving the multistakeholder Open Government Partnership’s local planning processes, mission-driven bureaucrats, university partners, and civil society and private-sector actors chose not to focus on dead-end compliance and external expectations. Instead, we put the cart before the horse — actively identifying and acting where a meaningful difference could be made to solve real problems and patch our society one stitch at a time.
By working with municipalities in the conservative “European Valley” region of Santa Catarina, we strategically convened actors from across the ideological spectrum, focusing on putting open government principles to work on a tangible problem: Prosecutors in different jurisdictions were requiring each town to follow its own set of disclosure rules, resulting in inconsistent practices and confusion. Together, stakeholders co‑created a locally owned open‑procurement standard that both small towns and larger cities could adopt. This and similar efforts show that even when we don’t all vote the same way, people can unite around improving the processes they care about.
None of this showed up in most crisis playbooks. But it provided a path forward to keep problem-solving alive amidst unpredictability, tensions and divides.
The opportunity philanthropy is missing
In the push to find ways to respond and overcome the current crisis, we may be missing what’s already quietly working where continuity and change meet. Invisible weavers don’t demand a new orchestra — they are the rhythm section. And we need them now more than ever.
They don’t need rescue. But they do need recognition and more targeted support, and crave connection.
What they’re asking for isn’t another panel “about them.” It’s a chance to talk to each other. To surface the shared strategies they already use. To help us all learn from lived experience, not just legacy models. A peer-led space to clarify what’s working, what’s emerging, tell the untold stories that could inspire us all, and make a case for how funders can better back those already building forward.
This isn’t just a feel-good idea. It’s a smart investment to leverage distributed assets, to ensure scarce dollars go further, and to bring muscle memory, tested experience in crisis, and relational capital that add more than the sum of the parts.
What funders can do
- Don’t fund a category. Fund a function. Invisible weavers help your other investments go further — by bridging, adapting and translating.
- Join us in supporting a demand-driven Weavers to Weavers convening as a testbed for a new kind of learning, alignment and narrative-building.
- Reframe the search. You don’t need to start from scratch. Start with what has endured. And who.
When organizations freeze, invisible weavers keep moving.
When our mental models can’t bridge our past and future, invisible weavers lead by working with the contradictions.
And when the sector feels stuck, invisible weavers know how to open it, provide fresh ideas and angles and inspire us.
Florencia Guerzovich, based in Brazil, is a Non-Resident Fellow at Accountability Lab. She brings 24 years of savvy monitoring, evaluation, research and learning leadership across global philanthropy and development.
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