Top-down, Meet Bottom-up: Sharing Power In Philanthropy

Johnson Center
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Wielding-power-in-philanthropy

Giving Compass’ Take:

• This Johnson Center post examines power dynamics in the social change sector and inverting traditional notions on who should wield it: We must put community voices first.

• Action items discussed include practicing humility and making sure there’s plenty of room for equity at your table. What would be the measurements of success in these areas?

• Here’s more about understanding the relationship between philanthropy and inequality.

Does change come from the bottom up or top down?

The simple answer is both — it often happens when there is collective leadership creating pressure on the outside of an institution, and allies inside the institution or with the power to influence the institution leveraging that pressure to create change. These two groups of leaders, however, are very different. As our social, political, economic, and media bubbles move further apart and become less porous, creating linkages among them has become more challenging. We must understand the dynamics that allow bottom-up and top-down to work together: the need for people to believe in their ability to lead and the need for leaders in positions of traditional power to share or give up power.  Two new books offer important insights on how power has often operated and how it might operate more inclusively.

First we must understand and encourage bottom-up leadership. Six years ago, I wrote Everyone Leads: Building Leadership from the Community Up to share my lessons from twenty years developing more than 5,000 diverse young leaders across the United States through Public Allies. We saw a teen mother in community college eventually become a White House lawyer, a deli worker become a top disability rights advocate, a shoe salesman become a top public health leader at a major hospital.

We learned through hundreds of stories like these that leadership is a muscle everyone has, and that like any other muscle it can be developed with practice and exercise.

Read the full article about sharing power in philanthropy by Paul Schmitz at johnsoncenter.org.

Since you are interested in Impact Philanthropy, have you read these selections from Giving Compass related to impact giving and Impact Philanthropy?

  • This article is deemed a must-read by one or more of our expert collaborators.
    Click here for more.
    Are You Being Served?

      Here at Feedback Labs we stress the importance of 3 simple questions: what do people want? Are we helping them get it? If not, what should we be doing differently? These questions lie at the heart of solid constituent feedback loops. But what do they mean for the practice of monitoring and evaluation? That was the topic of a frank conversation convened in May by the World Bank and Feedback Labs. The term delivery has in fact often encompassed everything except responding to what people themselves say they actually want and need. Keith Hansen, Vice President for Human Development at the World Bank, and Feedback Labs’s Executive Director Dennis Whittle sat down at RMES Together 2017 for a candid discussion of what an emphasis on serving people means for monitoring and evaluation. Marie Gaarder, Manager for Human Development and Corporate Evaluations at the World Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group, set the stage for the conversation, describing the emphasis on delivery in the World Bank’s current strategy. Monitoring and evaluation professionals have a key role to play in realizing the Bank’s strategic aspirations. How can we ask of the people we seek to help, are you being served? It can be a tricky question, especially at a formidable institution like the World Bank. In the course of their discussion, Keith and Dennis recognized that in the past, monitoring and evaluation have often been about compliance, bureaucracy, and meeting output rather than outcome goals. Dennis noted that, when he worked at the Bank, evaluators from the Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group were seen as performing autopsies on projects. Since the projects were already finished, the evaluations could not make them better. Instead of describing why a deceased patient died, he asked, “How could monitoring and evaluation make a living patient healthier and more productive?” Read the source article at FeedbackLabs __________ Megan Campbell helps to set the learning objects and agenda for Feedback Labs by helping determine the right questions to ask, and how we should ask them.

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If you are looking for opportunities to take action and give money to Impact Philanthropy, here are some Giving Funds, Charitable Organizations and Projects aggregated by Giving Compass where you can take immediate action.

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