The Enduring Power of Locally Led Institutions

More than two decades ago, Eurasia Foundation (EF) began spinning off its country offices into independent organizations. Today, the institutions it helped create in Moldova and Ukraine are still operating under local leadership, raising their own funding, and strengthening civic life. Their longevity reflects a deliberate strategy: transfer authority, invest in local leadership, and create institutions equipped to chart their own futures.

EF began in 1992 as a grant-maker funded by USAID to support civic and economic development across the newly independent countries that emerged from the Soviet Union’s collapse. The investment on behalf of the American people was always meant to be temporary.

As then-president of EF, Bill Maynes wanted to make sure that the impact endured. The next phase of EF’s mission: turn country offices into locally registered, locally governed foundations meant to stand on their own.

Each country got a task force and shared a checklist: build a board, register under that country’s nonprofit law, train staff to raise money beyond EF itself.

“Our goal was not to replicate a single model,” said Lisa Coll, now EF’s president. “It was to create strong local institutions capable of charting their own course while remaining grounded in the values that brought us together.”

This was the start of the EF Network—a constellation of independent, locally led institutions that grew from EF’s partnerships and continue to drive development in their own countries today.

“If you give resources to people, and they can make their own decisions about the best ways of using those resources, it’s going to lead to a common good that’s a net benefit for everybody,” said current EF board member Eric Boyle, who oversaw the Ukraine-Belarus-Moldova region as a staff member during the transition.

When Sorin Mereacre was hired into EF’s two-person Moldova office in 1998, it was as a project assistant working alongside a country representative and a driver. Today, he is president of East Europe Foundation Moldova, and the non-partisan coalition for free and fair elections his organization supported in 2004 ahead of an intensely competitive parliamentary election continues to safeguard democratic processes and is cited by the UN.

The Moldova and Ukraine institutions formed a bit differently. Moldova stayed close to the original grant-making model, distributing funds to local NGOs. The organization in Ukraine grew in a different direction, becoming more of an implementer that competes for funding and runs its own programs directly.

Mereacre said 95% of East Europe Foundation Moldova’s current policies trace back to what EF handed over in 2010.

Asked why local ownership matters, Mereacre didn’t complicate the answer:

“Local people, who are living in the country – doesn’t matter where, Moldova, U.S., Ukraine, Georgia – they know better about the situation, about the needs, about the challenges, about opportunities.”

Whatever else has changed in the region since – and a great deal has – the institutions EF built to survive independently are still standing, offering a powerful case study in how to foster locally led development.

Rather than creating permanent dependence on international assistance, EF invested in local leaders, strengthened institutions, built coalitions, helped shape policy, and equipped organizations to sustain themselves.

This article was authored by Paisley Holland, a summer intern with Eurasia Foundation.