On June 30, 2022, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation informed the Local Public Sector Alliance that the Alliance had selected by Hewlett’s Gender Equity and Governance Program as a grantee for general operating support for 2022/23.
The general operating grant will provide a significant boost for the Local Public Sector Alliance, which had informally started its activities in 2021 as a professional network of advocates for inclusive and efficient decentralization and localization. LPSA was formally established as a non-for-profit organization in January 2022. The mission of Local Public Sector Alliance is to promote inclusive, equitable societies and sustainable global development by enhancing the understanding of decentralization and localization as complex, cross-cutting and multi-stakeholder reforms.
Hewlett’s operating grant will support LPSA’s efforts to ‘elevate the decentralization debate’ around the world by supporting LPSA’s knowledge development, knowledge sharing, and outreach and field-building activities. The upcoming annual work plan for 2022/23 will be finalized by the Board of Directors, informed by conversations with the LPSA Advisory Board and consultations with the Community of Practice that took place in June 2022.
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation is a nonpartisan, private charitable foundation that advances ideas and supports institutions to promote a better world. For more than 50 years, the Hewlett Foundation has supported efforts to advance education for all, preserve the environment, support vibrant performing arts, strengthen Bay Area communities, make the philanthropy sector more effective, and foster gender equity and responsive governance around the world. The foundation was established in 1966 by engineer and entrepreneur William R. Hewlett and his wife, Flora Lamson Hewlett, with their eldest son, Walter Hewlett. Today, it is one of the largest philanthropic institutions in the United States.
Hewlett’s Gender Equity and Governance program seeks to foster inclusive societies so that all people, and especially women and girls, are able to fulfill their life aspirations. Focusing on Sub-Saharan Africa, Mexico, and the U.S., the program makes grants to expand women’s reproductive and economic choices; increase governments’ responsiveness to the people they serve; and improve policymaking through the effective use of evidence.
Hewlett’s Inclusive Governance Strategy explicitly recognizes that elite capture of the institutions that manage public resources is enabled by social, political, and economic power imbalances that favor a small minority of society while systemically excluding entire populations based on their gender, birthplace, class, ethnicity, or other aspects of their identity. One of the key implementation markers of Hewlett’s Inclusive Governance Strategy is to increase in the participation of the local communities, especially women and youth in public sector decision-making, through the activities and campaigns of movements and coalitions.
As such, the Hewlett Foundation and the Local Public Sector Alliance share the goal of strengthening evidence-based, inclusive multilevel governance as a way to promote the efforts of underserved populations — especially women and youth — to exercise power so as to make the public sector more responsive to their needs.