THE CENTRALITY OF COMMUNITY

The individuals and groups served by nonprofits are variously described as beneficiaries, clients, constituents, participants, partners, and stakeholders. I generally prefer to identify them as a “community” or simply “people we serve”; however, I recognize there is no ideal descriptive term given the complexity of this relationship.

A community can be defined broadly. For example, the American Red Cross serves those “suffering in the face of emergencies” around the world. Community definitions can also be narrow, such as for the Irving Park Community Food Pantry in Chicago that serves those experiencing food insecurity in “the 60641 and 60618 ZIP codes.” Or maybe your community is a mixture of both. For instance, the San Francisco Symphony “exists to inspire and serve audiences and communities throughout the Bay Area and the world through the power of musical performance.”

Understanding the community you serve is central to everything your organization does. As we’ve seen, your mission is defined by who you serve and how. Your impact is measured by the change you help bring about for members of that community. Ensuring the community is a partner in your efforts, not just a passive recipient, has the potential to deliver much greater and more sustainable outcomes for its members. It ensures they have greater power to influence and shape programs that work for them. It brings greater buy-in and accountability and an increased chance of delivering real change.

Community is at the heart of nonprofit organizations. And yet, remarkably, until quite recently, most nonprofits saw members of their community as passive recipients of their aid, not as active participants. Nonprofits, and charities in particular, have a long history of deciding what is best for the communities they serve, with little to no input or involvement from those communities. This dynamic is reflected in the use of the term “beneficiaries” or “recipients” to describe those served, the implication being that they are not partners in efforts that directly impact them.

The top-down approach by nonprofits reaches its most extreme in the concept of the “white savior”—the white, Western development organization or individual who flies into low-income countries in Africa and elsewhere to offer “solutions,” lacking any deep understanding of the problem or context. Sadly, this caricature is too often a reality. Even when engagement is not overtly exploitative, a tendency can persist (e.g., within Western research organizations) to focus on extracting information without engaging the community in follow-up advocacy and action or considering how the community members might be affected.

And this behavior doesn’t just happen in low-income countries. A similar dynamic plays out in the US, the UK, Canada, and across Europe. Whenever a marginalized population is receiving support from external actors who lack sufficient understanding and consideration of the agency of those they are purportedly serving, a similarly unhealthy and often exploitative dynamic unfolds.

CASE STUDY

The Problem with “Raid and Rescue”

As the anti-slavery sector developed in the 1990s and early 2000s, many nonprofits focused their time and energy on a “raid-and-rescue” model to address sex trafficking. This typically looks like a sting operation where an individual poses as a client at a brothel thought to be trafficking children. Police follow with a raid in which assumed victims are removed and detained. After their “rescue,” they might receive shelter or rehabilitation services, though they often don’t.

But this model—common in the sector at the time because it was viewed as effective and lent itself to sensational news stories and emotional fundraising pleas—is problematic, for many reasons. First, it frames human trafficking as solely a criminal enterprise and relies on police to ensure the safety of vulnerable people. Blanket raids treat all people as victims and disregard any sense of personal agency.³ Police force people to leave without their consent, often detaining sex workers who choose to be there, many of whom are also subject to violence and demands for bribes at the hands of police. For those who have been trafficked and are grateful to have been removed from their traffickers, aftercare (such as shelter and counseling) is often short-term and poor quality, and can even re-traumatize survivors. In the bigger picture, the raid-and-rescue approach is heavily focused on sex trafficking and ignores the existence of many other forms of trafficking. It denies the larger factors that are at play and fails to address root causes. Without efforts to change exploitative systems, those who are “rescued” are easily replaced with other vulnerable people. Many survivors return to the exact same economic situation as they were in before being trafficked and are at high risk of being re-exploited. The raid-and-rescue approach has been most prominently touted by large, white-run, often religiously affiliated nonprofits in the US and Europe that focus on conducting rescues in low-income countries and do little to build relationships with local communities or organizations.^*

For far too long, nonprofits did not take seriously the harms of this approach, even when evidence was right in front of them, including individual testimonies, research, and many newsworthy cases of abuses by police and in shelters.

When the Freedom Fund started a decade ago, we explicitly focused our approach on building partnerships with locally led grassroots organizations that take a nuanced and holistic approach to trafficking. These groups are best placed to identif y and carry out anti-trafficking interventions that fit the local context and are informed by the needs of the community. While this approach may sometimes mean providing care and services for survivors identified during a police raid, it more often means building community-level awareness and resistance to exploitation, working to address root causes (like exploitative business models and a lack of economic alternatives) to ensure people are not trafficked in the first place. It also means helping survivors to navigate the justice system in order to prevent perpetrators from exploiting others. While some organizations continue to focus on a raid-and-rescue framework, the tide has changed in the sector and the majority have taken up other approaches.⁴

Over the last decade or so, in a belated but seismic shift, forward-thinking nonprofits have expanded their understanding of the role of the communities they serve, with increasing recognition of the communities’ agency and the need to tangibly shift power to members of these communities so they have the resources and support to define their own trajectory.

What does this mean in practice? There are several ways nonprofits can change their relationships with communities from being top-down and one-sided to healthy and intentionally built partnerships.

START WITH YOUR STAFF AND CULTURE

Ideally, your organization is broadly representative of the community you serve. Your staff need not be drawn predominantly from members of that community, but nor should it comprise staff entirely from outside that community (as is too often the case). There is a middle ground. You should always be seeking to build a team with a wide range of expertise, including leadership expertise, fundraising experience, research and technical expertise, and deep expertise on the issues confronting your organization and sector. Community members bring personal experience of the challenges your organization exists to address, and a deep understanding of what works and what doesn’t, in addition to all their other skills and attributes. People who have experienced homelessness, hunger, domestic violence, extreme forms of exploitation, and the range of other wrongs that your organization might be seeking to address bring an understanding and knowledge of the relevant issues that other staff in your organization will not possess.

But hiring those with personal experience is not always feasible, regardless of your intent. Nonprofit recruitment can be challenging at the best of times, and if you are only recruiting from the community you serve, you are probably going to significantly limit your pool of candidates. While hiring those from within or close to the communities you serve should be a priority, when you do hire staff without a personal connection to the community or issue, be sure to consider how they think and talk about the issues on which you work, as well as the potential power dynamics between staff with varying connection and experience.

You may struggle to find community members with the level of experience and qualifications you are looking for. This can become a self-perpetuating problem if you don’t take steps to help them acquire the necessary expertise. At the Freedom Fund, we have started investing in survivor leadership by creating fellowships for those who have experienced slavery. We’ve also set up a movement-building program for survivors of slavery or for those who are from the vulnerable communities with which we work, and a fund to provide unrestricted grants to organizations led by survivors.

Regardless of the composition of your staff, building a culture that centers on the experiences and expertise of the community you serve is critically important. That’s a culture of respect, curiosity, learning, and humility. It’s the opposite of the savior complex, where staff believe they have all the answers and nothing to learn from those they serve.

You can support and promote this culture by ensuring you have members with personal experience on your staff, arranging visits (both ways: staff to the field, and from the community to your offices), bringing in speakers, and repeatedly reminding staff of the importance of sharing knowledge and experience.

UNDERSTAND THE DIFFERENCE IN POWER

It’s all well and good to talk about serving a community and building a partnership rather than a top-down relationship, but you must not gloss over the very real differences in power that contribute to the problem in the first place. Nonprofits have long been able to get away with imposing solutions and excluding those they serve from their decision-making because they hold much of the power in those relationships. They generally have the resources, particularly funding, so desperately needed by the relevant community (hence why “beneficiaries” is so commonly used as a description), and access to decision-makers and other powerholders. In contrast, members of the community being served usually lack direct access to these resources. They may also be suffering from significant deprivation, making them highly vulnerable. At its most extreme, this power differential enables exploitation and abuse of the community that the nonprofit is committed to supporting.

CASE STUDY

When Nonprofit Staff Abuse Their Power

Oxfam GB is one of the world’s leading and most highly respected humanitarian organizations, working around the world to deliver aid and assistance to those in dire need. Following the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, a number of its staff were accused of sexually exploiting and bullying vulnerable Haitian women and girls. This led to official inquiries into these and other alleged abuses, which found widespread failings at the organization.

In response to these findings, the then Oxfam GB CEO, Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah, responded:

We work in some of the world’s highest-risk contexts, from conflict zones to places where people are struggling to survive environmental disasters. These can be places where the rule of law has broken down, and where violence and sexual violence may have become institutionalised. Those providing support, whether local people or those who arrive as part of the aid effort, can find themselves in positions of extraordinary trust and power. Our shame is that we did not do enough to prevent that power from being abused . . . At its heart, this is about power. It’s about redefining the relationships we have with each other, with the partners we work with and, most importantly, with the communities we serve. But we need to be humble and recognise that how we work is going to be just as important as what we do . . . We cannot allow our institutional culture to reflect the inequalities and abuses of power that, as an organisation, we spend so much time and effort trying to eradicate.⁵

In an ideal world, those power differentials would not exist. But they do, and ignoring them doesn’t help. Rather, the best approach is to acknowledge that they exist, and then identify ways in which power can be shared with and shifted to the community you work with.

INTERVIEW

Good Intentions Are Not Enough When Working with Communities

Sophie Otiende is the CEO of the Global Fund to End Modern Slavery, a global anti-slavery fund. Before this, she helped found a survivor collective in Nairobi, Kenya. Prior to that, she worked for community-based organizations in Nairobi that focus on feminism and women’s rights, children’s rights, and modern slavery. Here she shares her experience of carrying out community-based anti-trafficking work, and reflects on problematic assumptions made by many NGOs when entering communities.

I have been privileged to experience shifts in my life from working as a community leader in Nairobi to my current role as the head of a global funding organization. Over the years, each role I have taken has had its fair share of lessons about the work that we do in international development. In every role I have been seen as a representative of the communities I come from. As a survivor leader from Kenya, my lived experience has always been primary in the work that I do. It has always been from this perspective that I reflect on development work done in communities.

As we work in communities, we all make certain assumptions. Some are not important, but some fundamentally shift our approach and the tools that we use. One assumption that most development organizations forget is that development work as we practice it will, in most cases, be foreign to the people we claim to serve. Yet, most of our organizations enter communities with the assumption that those communities understand what we are doing. The second assumption is that the work we are doing is right for the community. These assumptions come with the expectation that communities will accept our work and that there is no need for explaining, interpreting, or even working for buy-in from the community. I have seen how this has caused harm, primarily by excluding the very people that we claim to serve. To be a foreigner means that you speak a foreign language, you have a foreign culture, a foreign identity that is different and we should never forget that.

Another assumption we make is that just because we are helping, our power will always be used for good or rather have a positive impact in the community. We also assume that “help” is always empowering to the people we support. However, good intentions are not enough. We can still harm with good intentions. As a survivor leader, one of the things I have accepted is people’s curiosity when it comes to details of my experience. The curiosity is well intended, the knowledge that we get from hearing about survivors’ experiences can inspire people and ultimately lead people to act but this curiosity can be harmful. Not all survivors enjoy telling their stories and, in most cases, our experiences are not the only thing that we want remembered. Communities want to be part of the process rather than just be beneficiaries of interventions we make. The way we share power is by cocreating interventions in communities rather than coming to implement them. What we have to realize is that communities were surviving before our interventions and they will continue to survive after we leave; ensuring that our interventions go beyond the timelines that limit us, requires us to share the power we hold to them.⁶

SEEK AND ACT ON COMMUNITY FEEDBACK

Your work will be better informed and positioned to drive change if you actively seek input and feedback from the community you serve. This should be obvious, but too often nonprofits don’t actively solicit contributions from those they serve for a number of reasons, including: the organization’s culture may not value listening to others; leaders may assume that those implementing programs already know all there is to know; or resources may be tight, and listening to the community may be considered an unnecessary extra burden. Whatever the reason, you must continuously seek input and act on it as best you can.

This can be done in various ways—for example, by conducting surveys or focus groups of the community, setting up standing councils or other structures with community representatives, or carrying out participatory action research.

Seeking input not only improves the quality of your interventions but can build buy-in from those you serve, as it demonstrates a degree of accountability. If they understand that you seek and act upon community feedback, you will earn greater trust.

INTERVIEW

How to Include Community Perspectives in Your Work

Further observations of Sophie Otiende, CEO of the Global Fund to End Modern Slavery and Community Leader in Kenya.

What can we do to ensure that our assumptions about communities do not lead to exclusion or lead to harm? Here are a couple of key lessons:

We need to hire community members—this is important because they act as a bridge that we can use to get into communities and as ambassadors for our work. Local experts do not only bring knowledge of the work, they also bring lived experience, which is a lens that will ensure that we understand how our interventions will be received. Finally, hiring from the communities is not just about representation but is also one of the most effective ways to invest in those communities.

We need to recognize that trust is a process and it’s not our right—our work relies on communities trusting us and they do not owe us that trust. Our work is paralyzed when we are not trusted, yet I rarely see organizations invest time in relationship-building in communities. Understanding that trust is a process also requires the investment of time, this is why designing long-term work in communities is better than short-term projects. The longer we have to implement interventions, the better. Long-term interventions allow us to build trust.⁷

At the Freedom Fund, our community includes those individuals in slavery or at risk of it, and the 150 frontline organizations with which we partner that work directly with those at risk of exploitation. We took too long to start surveying our partners, but now we commission an independent nonprofit consultancy to do this, seeking our partners’ anonymous feedback on what we are doing well and what can be improved. The survey consists of standard questions that the consultancy has been asking for years on behalf of ninety leading international nonprofits and foundations, with more than seven thousand local partners participating during that time. This standardization allows the consultancy to benchmark organizations’ results against others who have taken the survey.

Overall, our partners rated the Freedom Fund significantly above the global benchmark average on nearly all the questions. The consultancy advised that our results on some questions were the highest they had ever received, specifically on Freedom Fund’s flexibility in letting partners adjust their plans mid-grant, our transparency and accountability, and our efforts to shift power to vulnerable groups. And where the results were not as positive, it provided us with a valuable opportunity to discuss with partners and find ways to address the issues they raised. Besides the valuable feedback we obtain, the fact that we do the survey is well received by our partners, and helps strengthen the relationship.^*

SUPPORT COMMUNITIES TO ADVOCATE FOR THEMSELVES

Many nonprofits are professional advocates for the causes they support, with well-trained staff who lobby officials and other powerholders. Habitat for Humanity says, “we advocate to change policies and systems so that we can eliminate barriers to adequate, affordable housing.”⁸ March of Dimes declares that they “lobby both Congress and the Administration and maintain strong relationships with policymakers across the political spectrum. Our priorities include a wide range of maternal child health issues.”⁹ To support its work on refugees, World Vision is “educating members of Congress about the refugees’ realities in the region and working to maximize humanitarian aid to those in desperate need.”¹⁰

This model of advocacy is a powerful way of driving change—but it can be even more powerful when those you are advocating for make the case themselves. A key way to shift power is to support members of the community you serve to speak on their own behalf—as we saw with Nadia Murad in the opening section of this chapter. To take another example, a refugee describing to members of Congress the perils of her journey out of Taliban-run Afghanistan to seek asylum, and what can be done to improve outcomes of the many thousands in her situation, is likely to be compelling, and far more compelling than a nonprofit staff member making the case on behalf of the refugees. Or picture a formerly homeless person advocating to city hall officials on behalf of a planning application for the shelter nonprofit that provided her refuge and options when she most needed them.