CDA's 30-Year Tapestry: Community Wisdom in Global Action
“I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am.”
– South African philosophical concept of Ubuntu
Imagine a loom, holding a large tapestry, partially woven. The design is intriguing for the many colors, textures, and styles. And the warp threads are visible – the strong, but thin, basic threads around which many hands have woven, enabling the tapestry to continue being created. For three decades, CDA has listened to the weavers and laid down the warp threads they need to persevere, to innovate, and to bring their unique style into being.
With our founding belief that people belong at the center and a core value of working in a spirit of hope, CDA seeks out those community members or practitioners weaving peaceful, positive change. In learning with them, we are committed to reorienting the power structures that limit what our collective tapestry can become. And we are radically curious about what we can create together – those approaches, tools, and standards for what transformation takes, and the strong fabric of effective, accountable action.
Today’s challenges are historic and also familiar from the crucible in which CDA was founded. Genocide in Rwanda, the Truth and Reconciliation experiment in South Africa, challenges to sovereignty on every continent, and growing social and economic disparity all informed Do No Harm as an original warp thread. As issues and contexts shifted, new sector-wide questions arose, focusing CDA’s learning priorities and yielding new warp threads.
The concept of Peace Writ Large and the framework for Collective Impact today inform peacebuilding effectiveness; the Listening Approach and evidence for “the how” of shifting power is accelerating responsible change at organizational and systems levels; standards of community engagement and humanitarian risk are the basis for centering “accountability for how our work has an impact not only on the sources of tensions today but also in the future,” as recently reflected by CDA founder Mary B. Anderson.
Weaving future humanitarian efforts, reimagining development, and building peace will need still more warp threads. Today, 19 of the 25 most climate affected states are also at risk from weak governance, conflict, or violence that stifles civic space and freedoms. Thirty years of evidence tells us that responsibly addressing such immense challenges is only possible with holistic thinking. CDA is already learning with people navigating these complexities in all global regions. The systems approaches and standards of practice we’re creating together are poised to be the warp threads for years to come.
People belong at the center
In an era of information overload and performative organizational communication, deep listening is a radical act of genuine understanding for meaningful change. For CDA, listening is not merely a passive skill but an active, transformative practice that centers the lived experiences, perspectives and agency of people at the heart of humanitarian, development, and peacebuilding efforts. This approach challenges the long standing power dynamics positioning communities and people at the other end of aid as experts of their own realities.
Time to Listen represents a watershed moment in this philosophical and methodological shift. The research exposed a critical gap between the systemic structures and intentions of the aid community and the lived experiences of communities, highlighting that good intentions are insufficient without genuine, nuanced understanding.
Building on this foundation, “RISK III: From evidence to action” further demonstrated the transformative potential of deep listening. What stood out was not just the richness of these narratives of introspective recognition that the system we’ve created isn’t working for us, but the strategic intelligence of traditionally underrepresented knowledge in international discourse.
CDA recognizes that communication is never neutral; it’s always embedded with power dynamics, historical contexts, and relational complexities. Thus, our approach to listening goes beyond a mere data collection approach. It represents a profound epistemological shift, from seeing communities as objects of intervention to recognizing them as active agents of their own transformation. Deep listening is respect, a practice of humility, and ultimately a radical reimagining of how change happens.
The Listening Project
CDA’s listening methodology informs every aspect of how we work, particularly leading to work on community engagement and accountability, peacebuilding effectiveness, and locally led development.
Time to Listen represents the cumulative evidence of the Listening Project, and a deep recognition that proximate actors are doing incredibly impactful work that is under-recognized and under-celebrated.
The lessons in the book informed USAID’s locally led development policy, and defined how the sector thinks about effective and accountable development practice today.
Nearly 10,000 people have downloaded Time to Listen and the corresponding discussion guide since 2012.
Nearly 1,500 people have downloaded the guidance on responding amid uncertainty and managing risk in humanitarian settings since 2022.
Humanitarian Risk: Evidence to Action
Through Risk I and II, InterAction identified the most critical questions for humanitarian practitioners, then sought CDA’s partnership to design a way to learn with colleagues across the globe. Listening to 179 humanitarian practitioners from 39 countries, representing 52 international and local NGOs, helped Risk III create the most robust data set and analysis to date related to risk management in humanitarian response and operations.
CDA and partners created practitioner tools, organizational change guidance, and policy priorities that put people at the center of decisions for managing humantiarian risk.
Today’s global landscape is shaped by a web of complex and interconnected crises, creating cascading effects on international peace, security, and development. Conflicts such as those in Israel/Palestine, Sudan, Ukraine, and Myanmar are not isolated events; they are deeply intertwined with global trends of fragility, climate change, and many more challenges. As these crises evolve, they contribute to a more volatile and fragile world, while simultaneously giving rise to new forms of violence and instability.
Humanitarian, development, and peacebuilding efforts require a holistic view, navigating complexity with a nuanced understanding of context. Each intervention occurs in environments shaped by historical, social, political, and economic dynamics, which influence both challenges and opportunities. Solutions that work in one setting may be ineffective or even harmful in another. Engaging local actors, leveraging Indigenous knowledge, and adapting to the sociocultural fabric are fundamental to foster trust, enhance legitimacy, and ensure that initiatives align with community priorities. Recognizing these layers is essential for designing and implementing effective strategies that promote resilience, inclusion, and long-term sustainability.
Navigating complexity demands flexible, adaptive strategies. CDA integrates systems thinking into our collaborative learning approach to help all stakeholders address root causes, manage risks, and achieve meaningful outcomes in the interconnected realms of humanitarian response, development, and peacebuilding.
Environmental Peacebuilding
We’re applying our collaborative learning approach to the environment-fragility-peace nexus, learning with communities that struggle at the forefront of, yet thrive in the face of, crisis. We’re building evidence-based tools that integrate local knowledge and capacities for resilience.
We’ve developed an updated Reflecting on Peace Practice (RPP+) methodology to map the interconnections of social, political, economic, and environmental factors that reinforce the vicious cycle of climate vulnerability, conflict, and fragility. We’re working with local actors to identify pathways to build climate and conflict resilience aligned with community priorities. CDA’s vision is for these partnerships to equip effective action in the most complex environments today and in the critical decades to come.
Read our article in the special issue of Development in Practice: “Necessary complexity in the Anthropocene: new approaches in socio-ecological systems thinking, Do No Harm, and fragility integration“
I met CDA through an RPP workshop – systems thinking, mind blown. I shared it with basically everyone I came into contact with – in Lebanon, in Syria, in Yemen, and so on. And everyone I worked with who was trying to figure out how to do things on the ground, whether they called themselves peacebuilders or not, found this incredibly useful […] CDA has been the north star for my work and everyone I’ve worked with has found it similarly transformational.
After having read and heard so much about CDA’s impact in the peacebuilding field, I finally had the pleasure of working with them on the nexus of environment, fragility, and peace. It was an honor for me to witness the fantastic team developing a tool for practitioners, putting demands and knowledge of local communities front and center. It is heartening to know that organizations like CDA make sure that local actors are central in finding solutions to all challenges across different fields!
Over 2,300 people have downloaded the Conflict Sensitivity & Public Health Emergencies tool and corresponding resources since 2020.
Conflict Sensitivity and Public Health Emergencies
During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Conflict Sensitivity & Public Health Emergencies was developed in response to practitioner requests for guidance in addressing public health emergencies and conflict dynamics simultaneously.
Practitioners who helped inform this tool looked beyond the specific relationship between COVID-19 and conflict to the broader context and systems in which these dynamics exist. “Conflict Sensitivity & Public Health Emergencies” is inspired by the challenges the COVID-19 pandemic presents, but it is also designed to be used in any public health emergency context and systems-informed application.
This resource was co-developed by Ruth Rhoads Allen and our late colleague and friend Sabina Carlson Robillard. Sabina was an integral part of CDA for over a decade. We miss her deeply.
Shifting power: Creating equitable partnerships
The risk presented by the polycrisis of rising conflict, climate change, and authoritarianism is too high not to do development, peacebuilding, and humanitarian aid effectively and sustainably. It’s essential for power dynamics to transform to ensure that people most closely affected by the polycrisis lead the response and have adequate resources to do so, and that the international community is organized to stand in solidarity with them.
At CDA, we aim to move the rhetoric of “locally led development” to reality – equipping systems change to shift power. We do this by supporting organizations, projects, and teams to implement responsible transitions and transformations from international to local leadership. Whether it’s through supporting organizational transformations, facilitating strategy development processes, providing evidence to inform project-level transitions or USAID transition award processes, CDA has supported dozens of partners around the globe that show what’s possible when power shifts.
Additionally, as a US-based INGO with close proximity to donors, INGOs, and other traditional power brokers in the Global North, we aim to use our influence to shift funding practices, INGO structures, and governmental policies by leading sector-wide working groups, engaging in policy advocacy, and doing our own internal work.
Stopping as Success (SAS+)
Stopping as Success is operationalizing #ShiftThePower. The SAS+ consortium of CDA, Search for Common Ground, and Peace Direct has supported 10+ active transition processes and organizational strategies, helping to shift power from international to local leadership in 30+ countries.
As part of the Local, Faith, and Transformative Partnerships Hub at USAID, the Stopping as Success program helped inform the agency’s overall localization agenda. SAS+ is specifically listed as one of three illustrative learning activities on locally led development in USAID’s 2022-2026 Learning Agenda.
With SAS+ formally ending in April 2025, the team is publishing new resources to support the implementation of responsible transitions while ensuring key lessons are embedded into USAID policy and other organizational structures. SAS+ is also dreaming about what comes next and looking for partners on the journey.
CDA’s compendium of lessons learned, best practices, and tools are key in guiding global and local organizations to successfully navigate prevailing delicate power dynamics and development environments. […] They facilitate difficult conversations and invite new perspectives […] ensuring no one is left behind on the journey to achieving sustainable development.
On the journey of responsible transitions and shifting the power, CDA is a trend-setter, a stewarding guide, and a wise mentor. CDA models an accompaniment approach that is values-led and action-oriented. Through a thoughtful research-based approach and by bringing local insight to the forefront, CDA has shaped and redefined our measures for success and solidarity.
CDA’s systems-based approach gave us an eagle-eye view of the organization as a whole and how change is interconnected. We used this way of thinking to push for organizational change. Since then, the organization as a whole has taken joint ownership to initiate changes across the organization. CDA was key in propelling us forward. CDA’s learning accompaniment approach is a real value-add other INGOs could benefit from.
Civil Society Engagement
The changing nature and pace of humanitarian crises have not only changed the way the sector works, but also exposed critical gaps in how those closest to these crises are engaged in response efforts.
CDA partnered with the Danish Refugee Council’s Civil Society Engagement Unit – listening to 54 country level and global staff across 7 countries – to assess the organization’s civil society engagement practices, identify factors that are supporting or serving as barriers to DRC’s civil society engagement goals, and identify options for improving those practices across the organization.
From Where I Stand
CDA’s From Where I Stand virtual learning platform is based on one question: What if the evidence base for local leadership, aid policy, and INGO practice was based on the diverse experiences and ideas of those leading humanitarian, development, and peacebuilding efforts in their own contexts?
We’ve published nearly 50 blogs since 2020, amplifying the voices of local leaders from over 15 countries.
What’s next?
Laying down the warp threads to decolonize humanitarian aid, peacebuilding, and development demands radical introspection, leaning into discomfort, and reimagining ways of being and doing. It demands transforming power dynamics that have historically positioned external actors as ‘unbiased saviors’ and local communities as passive recipients. This journey is simultaneously personal and systemic. It requires courage and care to examine entrenched narratives, challenging the comfortable assumptions that have historically perpetuated inequitable frameworks, and confronting uncomfortable truths about inherited colonial structures that perpetuate systemic inequity.
As we work towards this new future, we are actively living into our Do No Harm values in critically understanding and partnering with donors and partners that build relationships in non-extractive ways. By intentionally seeking fewer, deeper partnerships, we are cultivating more meaningful, reciprocal relationships, challenging traditional hierarchical models, and centering and making space for lived experiences. And, sometimes, this means saying “no” to work where our partners are better placed to lead. We are also continuing our internal imagination practice and organizational restructuring through our Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice work.
This transformation journey is a practice of collective reimagination and mutual learning. By embracing uncertainty and complexity with care, we are asking generations of internalized practices to change and doing the work to transform ourselves, our organization, and the systems we work in. We will continue to listen deeply, partner equitably, and center collective healing and sustainable change to weave together systems approaches and standards of practice in the years ahead.
As the proverb says, “I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am.”
CDA’s impact is ultimately what we weave together. We are grateful to all CDA collaborators for your continued partnership.
Photo credits, top to bottom: Julie Edgely, 2009 (CC BY-SA 2.0); Nowaja, Pixabay; Isabella Jean, 2007; Ethan Crowley, 2012 (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0); Siad Darwish, 2022; Shah Arafat Rahman, 2020; mawuafrica.com; Elly Maloba, 2024; hadynyah, 2020.
