Accountability

Paternalism and white saviorism fuel the non profit industrial complex. Most organizations are set up to go into poor Black and brown communities with no training or analysis on what causes the systemic issues they are supposedly trying to solve. ⠀
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Have you ever tried to solve a problem without asking the person who is suffering what they think will work? We all have a pretty good idea of what we need and what’s not working for us. So why is there no framework to ask the community about what it wants or to give them power to hold organizations accountable for the work they do. Doing a needs assessment is often to tool used to gather data on folks in poor communities served by non-profits, but this just perpetuates pathologizing and stigmatizing folks trying to survive. ⠀
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Think about the work you do…⠀
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✔️Who are you accountable to?⠀
✔️Who sits in your board room? ⠀
✔️Who gets to make decisions?⠀
✔️Who dictates where the funding goes?⠀
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If you’ve never thought about this or if the folks you serve don’t hold any power to answer these questions in your organization…you’ve got work to do. ⠀
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Antiracism requires shared power. Antiracism requires accountability not just upwards to supervisors, managers, executives, the Board, the funding stream and the contract holders but also and most importantly to the folks who we serve. ⠀⠀