My biggest failure may not have been fundraising, but failing to truly empower communities

Last week I drove to Koringberg (a small farming town in the Swartland) to arrange the installation of prepaid electricity meters at one of Goedgedacht’s former Pathways on to Prosperity (POP) centres, where children came after school for a meal, homework support and recreational activities.

For many years the centre had been a place where children came after school for a meal, homework support and the security of knowing that someone was there to welcome them. It was one of those ordinary management tasks that probably occupies far more of a managing director’s time than most people imagine.

While the electricians were working, I wandered through the building. It was strangely quiet. I found myself remembering afternoons when every room seemed alive with children. Homework was spread across tables that were always a little too small, volunteers moved patiently from one child to another, and the kitchen somehow managed to produce enough food for everyone.

There was laughter, there were arguments and there was the ordinary chaos that accompanies any place where children feel safe. At the time, none of us imagined that one day the building would stand almost empty.

I found myself standing in one of the classrooms for longer than I expected. Looking out of the window, I wondered where many of those children are today. Some will have left Koringberg in search of work. Some will have families of their own. It struck me that, although the building is now quiet, that does not erase what happened there over many years.

Hundreds of children came through those doors. They found a meal after school, someone to help with homework and, perhaps most importantly, adults who knew their names and cared about how they were doing. Buildings can stand empty; the lives that passed through them do not simply disappear.

Funding crisis

The POP centre did not close because the programme had failed, nor because the community had lost interest. It was another casualty of the funding crisis that has swept through much of South Africa’s non-profit sector.

As donor priorities changed and long-standing funding partnerships came to an end, Goedgedacht found itself facing the same painful choices as many other organisations. We had to reduce costs, retrench staff and decide where our increasingly limited resources could make the greatest difference.

One of the hardest decisions was to consolidate our after-school programmes around Riebeek Kasteel and Riebeek West. Those two centres serve the largest concentration of children; they have strong partnerships with local schools and volunteers and they provide the best opportunity to integrate our work with our broader vision of supporting children and families during the first 8,000 days of life.

It was a rational organisational decision and, I remain convinced, the right one. That did not make driving away from Koringberg any easier.

People often describe retrenchments and restructuring as strategic decisions. I have never found that language particularly helpful. Behind every organisational chart is a person. Behind every salary is a family. Behind every saving is a conversation that no leader ever wants to have. The legal process eventually comes to an end, but the relationships do not.

I still meet former colleagues in the supermarket or walking through the streets of Riebeek Kasteel. Those encounters are never easy. I feel compromised. I carry a sense of guilt that is difficult to explain, even though I know why the decisions had to be made. More often than I care to admit, I quietly change direction because I simply do not know what to say. Those moments remain with me long after the spreadsheets have been closed.

A mental revisiting

I drove home thinking about electricity meters. A week later I realised I was still thinking about Koringberg.

During the past thirty-five years I have spent most of my working life in community development, first through the church and later through non-profit organisations. Over those years I have seen projects begin with enormous enthusiasm and quietly come to an end. Governments change, funding priorities change, organisations adapt and communities change with them. None of that is unusual. It is simply the reality of working in the development sector.

Yet there was something about standing in that empty building that forced me to revisit questions I thought had been settled long ago.

Almost at the same time, our board commissioned the most comprehensive independent evaluation in Goedgedacht’s history. It examined our governance, finances, programmes, leadership, strategy and long-term sustainability. By the time it was completed, it consisted of almost 700 pages of interviews, analyses and recommendations.

I welcomed it because I believed the organisation needed an honest external perspective.

What I had not anticipated was that, somewhere while reading those reports, I would begin asking questions about myself.

The evaluation observed that too much responsibility had gradually accumulated in the office of the managing director. It questioned whether stronger systems and more distributed leadership would have left the organisation better prepared for the financial pressures we were facing.

Explanation and justification

Like most people, my first instinct was to explain why that had happened. The past few years had been characterised by one crisis after another. Carrying additional responsibility had seldom felt like a deliberate choice. It simply became the way in which the organisation survived.

Only later did I begin asking whether explanation and justification are always the same thing.

Those thoughts were still with me when I found myself standing outside the POP Centre in Koringberg.

Before leaving, I spent some time talking to a few people about the future of the building and how it might still be used. We spoke about the years when the centre was full every afternoon, about some of the children who had come through the programme and about what the community hoped might happen to the building in future.

During the conversation someone remarked, almost casually,

“Goedgedacht always paid.”

There was no criticism in the comment. Nor did I hear it as a complaint. It was simply an observation. We moved on to something else, and the conversation ended a few minutes later.

Responsibility

I, however, did not move on quite so easily.

Those four words stayed with me for the rest of the drive home and, if I am honest, they have stayed with me ever since. The more I thought about them, the more I realised that they were probably not about money at all.

They were about responsibility.

As I reflected on those four words, I realised they echoed something I had recently read in the independent evaluation of Goedgedacht. One of its central observations was that, over time, too much responsibility had become concentrated in the office of the Managing Director. It questioned whether stronger systems and more distributed leadership would have left the organisation better prepared for the challenges it faced.

Standing outside the POP Centre in Koringberg, it struck me that perhaps the same observation could be made about the organisation itself. Over many years, too much responsibility had gradually become concentrated in Goedgedacht. We paid the salaries, maintained the buildings, bought the equipment, coordinated the programmes and solved most of the practical problems that arose.

I had never consciously connected those two observations before. Yet the more I thought about them, the more they seemed to be asking exactly the same question.

Service delivery might not mean empowerment

For most of my career, I have spoken about empowerment as one of the central objectives of community development. Looking back, I now wonder whether we sometimes confuse service delivery with empowerment. The two are closely related, but they are not the same thing.

There can be no argument about feeding hungry children, supporting families in crisis or creating safe places where children can learn. If I had to begin my career again, I would make exactly the same choices. Every child deserves the opportunity to flourish, regardless of where they are born or what circumstances they inherit. I remain deeply grateful to every donor who made that possible at Goedgedacht. Without their generosity, there would never have been a POP centre in Koringberg. There would have been no meals, no homework support, no volunteers and no opportunities for hundreds of children whose lives were enriched by the programme.

What I have become less certain about is something else.

Over many years, Goedgedacht paid the salaries, maintained the buildings, bought the equipment, coordinated the programmes and solved most of the practical problems that arose. None of those things was wrong. In fact, they were often necessary. Looking back, I struggle to see how we could have done otherwise.

Yet I have found myself wondering whether there comes a point when every development organisation needs to ask a different question. Not simply what more it can do for a community, but what more the community can begin doing for itself.

I do not ask that question because I think I know the answer.

I ask it because I am no longer sure that I have been asking the right questions.

Communities are complicated. Every community carries its own history, its own strengths and its own wounds. Poverty, unemployment, alcohol abuse, family fragmentation, migration, failing municipal services, struggling schools and an economy that increasingly leaves rural towns behind, all shape what is possible.

Young people leave to look for work and often never return. Community leaders grow older and are not always replaced by a younger generation willing or able to carry the same responsibilities. Decisions taken in corporate boardrooms or by donors thousands of kilometres away eventually find their way into places like Koringberg. Community development takes place within all these realities, not outside them.

The longer I have worked in community development, the less I have believed in simple explanations. Experience has taught me that there are very few easy answers and that every community has a complexity that only becomes visible once you have worked there for a number of years. Looking back, I have also come to appreciate something that perhaps should have been obvious much earlier.

The power of community

Communities are not waiting for NGOs to save them. Even in the poorest communities, there are people who care deeply about their neighbours, who volunteer quietly, who open their homes to children, who support local schools and churches and who somehow keep communities together in ways that seldom appear in reports or funding proposals.

Development organisations sometimes forget that we enter communities that already possess relationships, resilience and resources of their own, even if those strengths are not always immediately visible.

Perhaps that is why the remark, “Goedgedacht always paid”, stayed with me. It made me wonder whether, despite our best intentions, we sometimes made it too easy for responsibility to remain with the organisation. We paid the salaries, maintained the buildings, bought the equipment, organised the programmes and solved the next problem. None of those things was wrong. Most of them were necessary and, looking back, I am not sure we could always have done things differently.

Communities like Koringberg face challenges that are deeply structural. High unemployment, limited opportunities for young people, struggling schools and the changing priorities of donors are realities over which local communities have very little control. To pretend otherwise would be both naïve and unfair.

Yet I have found myself wondering whether there comes a point when a development organisation needs to begin asking a different set of questions. I do not mean that organisations should do less, nor do I mean that communities no longer need support. There will always be children who need a meal today, not five years from now, and there will always be families living with circumstances over which they have very little control.

Those realities remain, regardless of how we think about development. Rather, I wonder whether part of our responsibility is also to ask how people gradually discover their own capacity to shape what happens next, and how organisations can intentionally create space for that to happen.

Making space for initiative

Perhaps the question is whether, alongside providing services, we are also creating opportunities for people to take increasing ownership of those things that they are able to shape themselves. Are we recognising the leadership that already exists in communities? Are we making enough space for local initiative, even when it unfolds differently from the way we might have planned? These are not questions that lend themselves to straightforward answers, but I increasingly think they are questions that deserve far more attention than they often receive.

I ask them cautiously because experience has made me much less certain than I was 35 years ago. When I first entered community development, I often thought the challenge was to find the right solution. Today I am more inclined to think that every solution changes the situation and, in doing so, creates a new set of questions. Every intervention has consequences we never anticipated. Some are encouraging; others are more difficult to recognise until much later. Perhaps wisdom lies less in believing that we have found the right model than in remaining willing to learn, to adapt and, when necessary, to acknowledge that our assumptions may need to change.

Looking back, I think the evaluation and Koringberg were asking me the same question. One challenged how leadership had become concentrated in my office. The other challenged how responsibility had become concentrated in the organisation. Both pointed towards the same lesson: real leadership, like real development, is ultimately about creating the conditions in which others are able to take responsibility and flourish.

For two years I thought my biggest challenge was fundraising. Koringberg made me realise that the deeper question was never simply how to raise more money. It was how to ensure that, when organisations like ours eventually step back, communities are stronger because we were there. DM