A third category of partners consists of peer organizations and networks, which are working on similar or overlapping issues to those of your organization. Most nonprofits give too little thought to collaborating with peers, often because peers are seen as competitors for funding or attention. But almost invariably, much more can be achieved by aligning other actors to your cause than by acting alone. And the most effective way to create alignment and scale impact is to collaborate closely with peers and networks—which we will explore in the final chapter.
CHAPTER 8
The People and Communities You Serve
Ensure They Are at the Center
Life’s most persistent and urgent question is: What are you doing for others?
—Martin Luther King Jr.1
A few years ago the United Nations Security Council held its first-ever session on modern slavery and human trafficking, and I was invited to give a briefing to its members. The session was held in the striking Council Chamber in the UN building in New York. With a monumental painted mural overlooking an impressive horseshoe-shaped table, this is the beating heart of the United Nations. Fifteen ambassadors sat around the table, along with the heads of a few UN agencies, me, and one other non-UN speaker: Nadia Murad, a young Yazidi woman from Iraq. I made my presentation, and then it was Nadia’s turn to address the Council ambassadors. She spoke with a quiet dignity as she gave a heartrending account of how ISIS fighters captured her village in Sinjar, murdered several of her brothers, and committed unspeakable abuses against her and her sisters, including selling them into sexual servitude.2
Nadia’s testimony was compelling and distressing, and I watched as usually inscrutable ambassadors were visibly moved by her account. But Nadia wasn’t there to simply share her experience; she had concrete demands for action from the United Nations and member states. She made a powerful case for substantive measures they could take to help address the plight of the Yazidi people, and particularly the women and girls who had been so horrendously abused by ISIS. Within a couple of years, many of those measures had been implemented.
Three years later, Nadia was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Ever since, she has used her global platform to advocate powerfully on behalf of Yazidi women and girls, and more broadly against genocide and sexual violence. She founded Nadia’s Initiative, a nonprofit dedicated to the rebuilding of the Yazidi homeland in Sinjar after the destruction wrought by ISIS. And she campaigns globally to draw attention to the continued plight of the Yazidi people and the need for justice for survivors of sexual violence. Her advocacy is all the more compelling and impactful given her tragic, personal experience of the atrocities unleashed on her own people. It’s also more the exception than the rule—as too often nonprofits don’t put the community they serve at the heart of their work, but instead treat them as passive recipients of their programs. But Nadia’s example is a stark demonstration of how compelling the voices of community representatives can be when they advocate directly to those in power.
In this chapter we’ll explore why and how you should center the community your organization serves in the work.
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.
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