Giving Compass' Take:

• Emely Anico, Sydney Menzin, and Scott Warren discuss how those working to better the world can conduct their efforts humbly to maximize impact. 

• How can nonprofits be more humble without risking funding inflows? 

• Read about promoting social change effectively. 

Check out any non-profit’s mission and vision statements: the superlatives abound. Find your way to the impact part of the website, and the trend continues. Organizations purport life-altering changes that they’ve produced among the individuals they serve through a dizzying display of percentage increases, interspersed with dramatic stories of individual transformation. After examining a non-profit’s promotional materials and impact reports, attending galas, and hearing pitches, it is hard to believe that we still face any social or economic challenges. We have so many organizations solving all of our many problems.

The reality, obviously, is more complex. But as a sector purporting to solve community issues, it sometimes seems that we are unable to have real, nuanced conversations about the long, hard, real, unglamorous grind of social change work.

So how can we, and all non-profits, ensure that putting constituents front and center is not a slogan and tagline, but an actual reality? We must put concrete structures into place to ensure that constituents inform our work products.

  1. A constituent-centered approach requires ensuring that social change work itself becomes more democratic.
  2. A constituent-oriented approach involves prioritizing constituent voice and input in program development Rather than assuming that practitioners know what works best, informed by statistically-sound best practices, the people we are trying to serve should be part of any efforts to form, or reform, impact strategies. They cannot solely be seen as beneficiaries, or as people we are trying to help.

Read the full article about humble social change by Emely Anico, Sydney Menzin, and Scott Warren at Medium.