What I’m thinking about this week
When the field meets headquarters
This week, the Power Shift podcast hosted two guests on opposite sides of the power spectrum.
It was interesting to see the conversation oscillate between the hurdles of aid in practice for communities impacted by conflict, and the complexities at donor headquarters, particularly for bilaterals.
At one point, Michael Kohler explained how “tricky” it is for him to explain his work to his fellow German citizens, whose tax dollars pay for the kind of aid that fellow guest Nadine Saba receives. Particularly, how hard it is to communicate that Germans need be accountable to their “beneficiaries”.
The perceived benevolence of the “haves” once again trying to claim ownership of impact, and subservience from those impacted.
A spotlight on community philanthropy
Also this week, my friend (and fellow Proximate board member) Eshban Kwesiga was on the Policy Digest podcast, talking about his work driving community philanthropy with #ShiftThePower. There was so much in this episode!
Eshban touched on some really triggering themes for me. For instance, the double standard of accountability. Think about how international NGOs can get away with so much, while local NGOs are held to impossible standards under the guise of transparency and accountability.
To wit: no one bats an eye when an INGO spends thousands of dollars to print out “nice to have” pamphlets for their events. But if a local NGO tries to print anything out, we have to justify (and report) every single printed page. And don’t even think about printing in color!
But the episode didn’t just focus on critiques. On the topic of resourcefulness, Eshban spoke about a book club that collect dues every month that they then allow each member to designate for donation to an institution of their choice.
These are not large sums of money, but they are meaningful. He argued that these young people were practicing community philanthropy, and I could not agree more.
From needs assessments to asset mapping
Jessica Oddy-Atuona is a great follow on LinkedIn these days. Last week she called out how funders need to "stop with the needs assessments".
Needs assessments are inherently problematic because they assume that there is a lack; a deficiency. Because funding is tied to these narratives of scarcity, community organizations "learn to describe themselves in the language of need rather than strength—because that's what gets funded.”
There's an alternative approach out there: asset mapping. Asset mapping is a way to look at what a community brings to the table: rather than trying to figure out what’s missing, it figures out what’s available.
That could include everything from people who own cars and can offer rides or help deliver things, to people who can prepare meals, to people who will show up whenever you call them, to people with tools.
It’s time to start mapping assets rather than assessing needs. For more on this topic, check out this column I wrote last year, The Story of the Half-Built Road.
A shift in perspective for America
I talk to a lot of Americans in the course of my work and it's been interesting watching their reactions to the Trump administration's steady dismantling of the US's diplomatic and humanitarian institutions.
In their distress, they confessed to feeling completely lost; they’ve never been here before, they don’t know what to do.
I sometimes offer them some reassurances that they are not the first people to watch their country fall into chaos.
I often think about a conversation I had with an Afro-Colombian woman about black reparations in the Caribbean and Latin America. When I asked her if she would speak to an American reparations movement, she grimaced. Americans, she explained, always make it about them and try to tell us what to do.
I sometimes reflect on the limited history and social that my American friends have access to. The modes of activism, advocacy and movement-building in the American vernacular sometimes seem limited to what worked in the 1960’s during the civil rights era.
When Americans manage to remove their rose colored glasses that allow them to bemoan their “civil rights,” they will come to terms with the fact that they are actually advocating for their human rights. Racism is a human rights issue. Bodily autonomy is a human rights issue. Gun violence is a human rights issue.
With this shift in perspective, it’s easy to say that you have access to centuries, if not millenia, of activism, and movements, and models that have stood up to all manner of oppression.
I will explore this further in later issues, join the conversation! Email me at iclerie@impact.ht.
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