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.
Just as importantly, the shift gives agency to that individual to tell her own story in her own voice. Such advocacy should not be conducted as a “show-and-tell,” but rather to empower those most directly impacted to help shape policy decisions.
To support such advocacy, you will often need to provide advocacy training, use your relationships and networks, and bring community members to conferences and other events where they can directly access officials, funders, and other powerholders. You will need to make space and release control. And cede power.
The most important relationship your organization will have is with those it serves. They are central to your organization’s purpose. But to effectively serve that community, you also need resources, particularly funding. This makes your funders another critically important partner for your organization, and we’ll explore that relationship in the next chapter.
PEOPLE AND COMMUNITIES ACTION POINTS
Ensure Those You Serve Are at the Center
Put the people and the community your organization serves at the center of your work.
In so doing, recognize the very real differences in power between your organization and those it serves, and identify ways to help shift power to them.
Continuously seek community feedback on your work and act on it.
Promote those you serve by supporting them to advocate on their own behalf and helping them get access to those in power.
* Perhaps the most problematic raid-and-rescue nonprofit is Operation Underground Railroad (O.U.R.), a US anti-trafficking organization that received a lot of publicity in 2023 with the release of the film The Sound of Freedom, based on the story of its founder and former CEO, Tim Ballard. For a critique of the film from the perspective of survivors and anti-trafficking experts, see Aubrey Lloyd and Erin Albright, “Sound of Freedom Is Everything an Anti-trafficking Film Shouldn’t Be,” openDemocracy, August 10, 2023, https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/sound-of-freedom-tim-ballard-operation-underground-railroad-trafficking-film-review/. For more in-depth coverage of O.U.R.’s problematic raid-and-rescue model, see Anna Merlan and Tim Marchman, “Inside a Massive Anti-Trafficking Charity’s Blundering Overseas Missions,” Vice, March 8, 2021, www.vice.com/en/article/bvxev5/inside-a-massive-anti-trafficking-charitys-blundering-overseas-missions; Anna Merlan and Tim Marchman, “A Famed Anti-Sex Trafficking Group Has a Problem With the Truth,” Vice, December 10, 2020, https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7a3qw/a-famed-anti-sex-trafficking-group-has-a-problem-with-the-truth; Meg Conley, “Called by God,” Slate, May 11, 2021, slate.com/human-interest/2021/05/sex-trafficking-raid-operation-underground-railroad.html; Thomas Stackpole, “The New Abolitionists,” Foreign Policy, accessed December 10, 2022, foreignpolicy.com/2015/07/22/the-new-abolitionists-mexico-dominican-republic-human-trafficking-mormon-our/; Anna Merlan and Tim Marchman, “Tim Ballard Left Operation Underground Railroad After Investigation into Claims Made by Employees,” Vice, July 18, 2023, https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7b3ex/tim-ballard-left-operation-underground-railroad-after-investigation-into-claims-made-by-employees.
* For more details of these results, see Dan Vexler, “Are We Staying True to Our DNA?” Freedom Fund website, January 12, 2023, www.freedomfund.org/blog/true-to-our-dna/.
CHAPTER 9
Funders
Build Resonant Relationships to Encourage Giving
The hope you feed with your gift is likely to feed your own.
—MacKenzie Scott1
One of the more joyful experiences in my nonprofit career started with an enigmatic email, from someone I’d never heard of, with an obscure email address and domain. It read:
I support the efforts of donors who are interested in giving to Freedom Fund after learning about your work through a wide range of sources . . . I was hoping to schedule a quick ~20-minute follow-up call to discuss next steps . . . Given donor confidentiality, which I’ll explain further on the call, this conversation should be just the two of us.
A hazard of being a nonprofit CEO is that I regularly receive pitches from fundraising consultants, often framed to imply donor interest in the Freedom Fund. This email was sufficiently ambiguous that I thought it might be one of those. I couldn’t find any information about the sender on the internet to enlighten me one way or the other. But I was also aware that one of the world’s most generous philanthropists, MacKenzie Scott, was in the process of making a round of big grants to impactful nonprofits, and that she operated with a high degree of confidentiality. So part of me hoped that this email was a prelude to a grant from her. But given how many other organizations deserved her support, I largely discounted that possibility.
