Our Team
We are a trans-disciplinary team leaning into each others’ strengths.
In 2013, Courtenay Cabot Venton was asked to evaluate a Self Help Group model in Ethiopia. As an international development economist who has spent decades helping donors, governments and organizations to identify programs that have the biggest impact on reducing poverty around the world, she was blown away by the changes that these women’s groups were making in their communities – setting up schools, starting small businesses, advocating for access to services, and stopping childhood marriage. She founded the Share Trust in 2018 because she saw a mounting interest in the ability of SHGs to create transformational change in their communities, and she wanted to support the ecosystem of organizations working in this space by building the evidence base and facilitating collaborations between like-minded actors, influencing both policy and programming to amplify the approach.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, Courtenay was asked to lead a team of experts advising on the UK government’s global COVID-19 response. This led her to experience firsthand that while millions of dollars of emergency funding were coming online, very little was going to local and national organizations on the ground because international systems were poorly equipped to support these community-led responses. She joined forces with Chilande Kuloba Warria from the Warande Advisory Centre in Kenya and Brendan Cullen, founding member of Co-Impact, to strategize how to structure a community based response that could also receive substantial government funding. Together they developed the Local Coalition Accelerator to build bridges between bilateral funders and coalitions of local actors - with SHGs and community based structures at their core.
This partnership broadened the Share Trust’s mission to more holistically support and strengthen the SHG ecosystem globally, taking into account the systemic barriers and opportunities these groups face to more effectively scale community driven collective action.