Solutions
Through the Solutions work at NEAR, we are co-creating, uplifting, and amplifying local solutions that radically increase local and national leadership and ownership of systems change initiatives.
NEAR’s solutions portfolio is evolving into a hub model in 2025. The Solutions Hub creates an environment for our members, partners to ideate, co-design, co-create, test and scale solutions that address structural and systemic challenges faced by the communities they serve. Through active collaboration with leaders and experts across academia, philanthropy, the aid, private, and public sectors, our members and partners can develop and pilot transformative solutions.
Innovative Financing
We are incubating innovative financing models that are driven by local leadership, that shift the balance of power and decision-making from Northern donors to Global South leaders and the communities they represent.
The Change Fund
Launched in 2022, the Change Fund is NEAR’s flagship financial mechanism. The Change Fund is a scalable and flexible grantmaking process administered by NEAR and governed by an elected Oversight Body consisting of NEAR member representatives. The Change Fund has evolved from its initial emphasis on efficiently and swiftly awarding and disbursing funds amidst some of the most complex crisis and complicated operational and regulatory contexts.
Change Fund grantees often operate at the intersection of humanitarian response strengthening resilience, the climate crisis, and shoring up livelihoods. The Change Fund strategy is continuing to scale and adapt in recognition that local organizations work with their communities to address pressing challenges that don’t align with the aid sector’s traditional siloed approaches.
The Change Fund Windows
Emergency Response: a flexible, rapid-response funding mechanism delivering immediate, direct support to NEAR member organisations responding to humanitarian crises. Grounded in the principles of local leadership and trust-based grant making, this window enables frontline organisations to respond swiftly to emerging disasters without the delays often associated with traditional humanitarian funding mechanisms.
Displacement: a funding modality designed to support refugee-led and locally led organisations addressing the unique challenges faced by displaced communities. As displacement crises continue to grow in scale and complexity—driven by emerging and protracted conflicts, political instability, and the climate crisis —millions of people remain uprooted, often without access to adequate resources, decision-making power, or sustainable solutions. The Displacement Window focuses on partnerships with local organizations and leaders who possess deep contextual knowledge and are best positioned to provide effective and adaptive responses often not feasible within traditional aid structures.
Bridge Funding: launched in 2025 to strengthen and help sustain locally led responses in some of the most difficult places around the world amidst the US Foreign Aid Suspension. The Bridge Funding Window is a rapid-response financing mechanism that delivers direct, flexible, and unrestricted funding to most affected NEAR members through $25,000 grants. This initiative is a critical stopgap to ensure that NEAR members significantly impacted by aid suspensions can continue serving their communities.
Read the latest blog on the Change Fund here.
Locally-led Financing Mechanisms
Through advisory support and incubation models, NEAR co-creates the design, implementation and evolution of locally-led funding mechanisms with our members and partners in a variety of countries.
Bulsho Fund
Established by Somali communities, for Somali communities, the Bulsho Fund is a pooled fund designed to provide direct, flexible funding to local organisations, cooperatives, and community groups. The Bulsho Fund works alongside communities to identify needs and co-create responses through trust-based and adaptable approaches. The Bulsho Fund supports climate resilience, livelihoods, displacement, and social services, especially in areas where traditional funding struggles to reach while also ensuring resources are tailored to the realities of those most affected.
The Bulsho Fund has supported close to 30 impactful projects across Somalia, in partnership with farming cooperatives, Internally Displaced Persons, suburban communities, and nomadic groups. Projects include the installation of solar-powered irrigation systems for farming cooperatives, the electrification of rural maternal health centres, and the distribution of solar cold storage units to women-led market traders. Through community-driven processes and locally led implementation these initiatives have created jobs, improved food security, increased access to health services, and empowered women and youth. The Bulsho Fund is more than a financing mechanism, it's a blueprint for localised, resilient development in crisis-affected contexts.
Nepal Resilience Fund – CORE Fund
The Nepal Resilience Fund (CORE) is a locally led pooled fund focused on humanitarian response, disaster risk reduction, and community recovery in Nepal. Launched in 2023, CORE is governed and implemented by a consortium of Nepali NGOs and rooted in national systems and leadership ensuring that both emergency response and long-term recovery is grounded in local knowledge and priorities. The fund prioritises swift, context-driven solutions that respond directly to the needs of affected communities. CORE is guided by a dual governance structure: an Oversight Body responsible for grantmaking decisions, and an Advisory Group supporting long-term strategy, advocacy, and fundraising. Designed to reflect local realities, the fund sources support from a diverse base—ranging from government and philanthropic partners to diaspora networks and crowdfunding within Nepal.
CORE provides a model for how communities can lead effectively both in moments of crisis and throughout recovery, and redefines what effective, sustainable, and locally-owned humanitarian financing can look like. CORE is committed to proactive, community-centred response, quickly and effectively mobilising through trusted local networks. Following a detailed design phase, the CORE Fund moved into prototype implementation in early 2025, testing its locally developed grantmaking and operational processes. Pilot projects have already delivered recovery support to flood-affected communities, and implemented fire-preparedness measures in another province, including pre-positioning relief items ahead of the dry season.
Beyond Financing Mechanisms + Solutions
NEAR collaborates with members and partners to ideate, design, and implement innovative solutions that benefit the communities affected by multifaceted challenges.
RESPACE Initiative
The RESPACE Initiative (Reimagining Equitable Global Spaces and Infrastructures for Sustainable Peace) is a bold, collaborative effort to transform how peacebuilding is imagined, led, and sustained. Co-convened by Conducive Space for Peace, Reos Partners, and NEAR, RESPACE brings together a diverse group of change agents from around the world to rethink outdated global peace systems and envision alternative infrastructures that are inclusive, locally rooted, and equitable.
Rooted in transformative scenario planning, RESPACE explores possible futures for peacebuilding -- from fragmented and securitized landscapes to collaborative and community-driven models. RESPACE centres the voices of civil society, social movements, and local leaders particularly from the Global South, who are often excluded from global decision-making spaces. RESPACE is unique because of its translocal, trust-based approach—connecting peacebuilders across levels and regions to co-create strategies, challenge the status quo, and shape a more just global system rooted in solidarity, equity, and local leadership.
Participatory Unified Localised Early Warning System (PULSE)
Bridging Ancestral Knowledge and Technology for Early Warning Systems
The PULSE initiative integrates ancestral knowledge with technological innovation, promoting more effective early warning systems and anticipatory action that are adapted to each context. In collaboration with communities, PULSE explores how the aid system can be positioned to not just react to the climate crisis, but to actively anticipate, mitigate, and address potential emergencies before they escalate.
In Guatemala and the Philippines, PULSE pilot projects designed with local communities are combining ancestral knowledge with artificial intelligence and big data analysis to improve community preparedness and resilience.
To know more about our Solutions work, you can also read our Strategic Plan 2024-2026