When Professor Nicola Banks met Chibwe Masabo Henry at a conference on global development, she knew they shared the same drive to change a broken aid system. So months later, when Chibwe left her role with a major INGO, Nicola invited her to see what they could build together.

The result was One World Together (OWT), a social enterprise building a new financial infrastructure that works with and for communities and revolutionising global giving in the process.

OWT would be focussed on reaching community organisations directly, enabling them to break out of restricted project-based approaches to development and to take control over their own development. It would follow a model of sustained, predictable investment, “not just helping in crises, but helping communities to thrive into the longer term”.

The ‘magic’ with One World Together’s approach is trust rooted in deep partnerships – Solidarity Funds are given on a no-strings attached basis, knowing that communities themselves know what’s best for them.

One World Together collects microdonations at scale, aiming to mobilise individual givers around the belief in a better system that worked for communities and build a new form of global solidarity that can invest in a better future.

Through their first year of operations OWT discovered that they hadn’t just built a more effective system, they’d created a more efficient one as well, with each pound donated securing up to 50 times the community impact than traditional donations. This is because community partners receive so much more of your donation (rather than 10 times more being absorbed into UK infrastructure and operations costs) and because each pound received is five times more valuable to them because of its flexible nature.

In other words, the OWT approach would deliver many times the impact of the traditional funding approach. Achieving the same level of community impact as the £15,000 in Solidarity Funds that partners have invested in local solutions would require £750,000 of donations into the existing charity system.

If you believe that it is communities themselves who should decide how to create change and want to get behind trust-based, transparent and transformational giving that makes every penny count, then joining One World Together’s New 1% couldn’t be easier. Simply join here, selecting an affordable monthly donation that suits you.

In the years to come, the OWT team are aiming to unite ‘The New 1%’, a global movement of everyday people and organisations that choose solidarity over saviourism. This will enable them to work with many more community partners in the UK and globally. As Nicola says about the team, “we may be small in scale, but we’re bold in ambition… we’re hopeful we’ll get there, because the world needs us”.