You know that friend you can’t really vent to? The one who never empathizes, but always launches into their ultimate solutions to your problems? There’s never a probing or compassionate question; just a speech that sounds like “I know better, here’s what you’re doing wrong and here’s what you should do instead.”
In a recent SSIR cover story, “Where Strategic Philanthropy Went Wrong,” Mark Kramer and Steve Philips verbosely explain the shortcomings of philanthropy to their peers. To their non-peers, however, it felt more like having decades of activism mansplained to us.
The authors are not wrong in many of their observations. They argue that philanthropy has ultimately failed those it is meant to serve by making so many choices about how to help people. Instead, they argue, philanthropy must allow people to make the choices about what they need and how to get it.
This call for a sweeping solution of “empowerment philanthropy” minimizes participatory, asset-based, community-led, and trust-based models that have been around for a long time in the Global South. I’m dizzy at the idea that this proposed solution is what will resonate with some funders and they will “go back to the drawing board” of philanthropy, only to innovate where others are already, demonstrably successful.
I’m not the first person to critique Kramer and Philips’ article, and I won’t be the last. But I will take a different approach to my critique, from my perch in global development. As American philanthropists debate what’s worked and what could work in philanthropy, I suggest they take a look at what’s worked for centuries in other parts of the world.
A Global Perspective
One of the article’s most prominent critics was the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s Phil Buchanan. In a long blog post, Buchanan explains that Kramer and Philips’ core arguments are not only over-simplified; they have been around for years.
Buchanan is right in his critique, but I want to go a bit further. As someone who has more experience with global philanthropy and international development, I would like to implore the SSIR and CEP audiences to join the global conversations about transformative change that have been going on for decades.
I get it, “empowerment philanthropy” is just a rebrand of trust-based philanthropy or localization. The authors’ concept of people leading their own change comes from asset-based community development and community philanthropy, both of which are derivatives of historical collective living models found all around the world, like lending circles and communal labor.
The article, like so many before it, ignores the long history of grassroots leaders in the Global South screaming into the void about a better way to be supportive.
Empowerment Meets Development
Since there seems to be an audience for these ideas, allow me to take a moment to tell you about the Movement for Community-Led Development. The MCLD is a community of practice of movement builders and community organizations who have sought for decades to decolonize and decentralize development. Their mission is to “shift the power so that low-income communities successfully achieve their own visions and goals.”
The MCLD community emphasizes asset-based approaches that work with existing capacity and build from that. Communities are leaders of the change they wish to see and they invite external stakeholders to collaborate with them in their vision.
Case in point: a few weeks ago, aid was delivered to one of the most dangerous and inaccessible neighborhoods in the capital of Haiti. Humanitarian distributions are rife with issues, even more so in a conflict zone, but this particular distribution was unique. Why? Because my colleague advocated with the agency to establish a partnership with community-based organizations rooted in trust and respect of local capacity.
The local group was able to define the parameters of access to their various neighborhood sections, ensuring a safe and equitable distribution of food without compromising people’s dignity. Call it empowerment philanthropy if you want; I call it a model of support that works.
In the MCLD mindset, true philanthropy or development is the praxis of Lilla Watson’s famous quote from the ‘80s: “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
The Show Must Go On
American philanthropy and development are not that different, especially given the scale of US nonprofits that operate in the “majority world,” as MCLD refers to the Global South. So there is no sense operating within the ethnocentric construct of American Western exceptionalism. People who need nonprofit programming, regardless of where they are, have always known what was best for themselves. They’ve also always known how they were being oppressed and by whom.
While I can appreciate that the audience for whom this article was written might find some thoughtful insights, I can’t help but agree with my friend Jara Dean-Coffey when she reflected that “This settler-created philanthropic industrial complex has a tendency to proclaim what is good and what is not, and that in and of itself is an expression of power and privilege, no matter how well intended.”
I sincerely hope the authors’ peers will understand and apply the good parts of their counsel. In the meantime, the folks “on the ground” are going to shake off the sensation that we’ve been slapped in the face with our own advocacy. And we’ll press on.
As we always do.
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