Small non-profits’ modest presence in current literature reflects their modest physical presence. Unlike their larger counterparts that are often well advertised with recognisable logos and housed in city centre skyscrapers or in secure compounds, small non-profits have a humble presence; locating them can be difficult. Typically, I walked up and down streets, searching for a sign, finally finding an entrance hidden behind a crumbling wall, or down some narrow steps to an unassuming door, or in a shipping container obscured by bushes. If they are signposted, the sign is little and more likely to be a tab of paper with the organisation name wedged above a doorbell. One has a small sign stuck in the ground near the entryway, partially covered by a wild hedge.
The offices feel simple and homely, particularly the ones that are community-facing. The buildings are often old, in need of repair, and cramped. They often have simply decorated interiors, filled with mismatched office chairs, filing boxes, paperwork, and random trip hazards. I rang bells or knocked on doors and was invariably greeted warmly and invited inside.
One of the case study non-profits offers a typical example. It is located in a red brick house on a residential suburban street in Melbourne. You would walk past it without a second glance. It is as unassuming as the other homes in the neighbourhood. Half the street number has fallen from the letterbox but I knew it was the right place as the organisation’s inconspicuous name is scrawled across a small sign above the letter slot.
Inside, the waiting room is an enclosed front porch with soft old couches and brochures detailing local services. The interior is old although it is clean, bright, and airy. The lack of glitz and glamour give it a comfortable, welcoming ambience.
The director met me and showed me rooms that were once bedrooms and are now vibrant offices with desks fitted into every gap, piled with papers partially hiding the workers. She introduced a few paid staff and many volunteers and students. Added to the comparatively large workforce are numerous community members participating in various programs, filling the building. It seemed as though no one is turned away and any volunteer, student, or community member who wants to be a part of the organisation is welcomed. Indeed, as the director pointed out, social isolation is a key issue affecting recipients, highlighting the importance of this inclusive atmosphere. ‘They don’t feel like they’re coming to an organisation, it’s like a home’ she said.
Demonstrating Community Development Values
As this chapter seeks to clarify the case study organisations’ community development aspirations and provide context surrounding their operating atmospheres, this section examines case study non-profits’ commitment to community development values as presented through their documentation, voiced perceptions, and observed actions. These foundational understandings provide a guide for later chapters to critique the appropriateness of non-profits’ evaluative practices against their stated aspirations and offer a prompt for readers from other non-profits to explicitly consider their organisational values.
Key themes inherent in the case study non-profits’ vision and mission statements show aspirations to provide community recipients with economic and educative opportunities to enable agency, inclusive participation, independence, and empowerment to create positive, sustainable change in people’s lives. Despite the brevity of vision and mission statements, half of the twenty non-profits’ core statements highlight the need for all processes to be community-driven and owned. They identify the need for rights-based, bottom-up, social justice advocacy work to address embedded structural challenges through partnership and collaboration within and between communities and other institutions. While these vision and mission statements suggest that the case study non-profits seek transformative change, these statements do not necessarily result in adoption of a radical approach in practice. As such, these are simply aspirations.
Examination of organisational documentation demonstrates similar patterns to the development concepts discussed in Chapter 3 and the themes apparent in vision and mission statements above. Of the one hundred most common words used in the documents, twenty-two align with key concepts in international and community development, including participation, empowerment, inclusion, agency, and collaboration. Closer inspection in context shows stated commitment towards sustainable transformation through providing opportunities, addressing structural issues and barriers, and advocating for social justice. Documents highlight community recipients as holders of local wisdom with pre-existing strengths and agency who should be inclusively engaged in driving development processes, notions understood within the development as ingredients for transformative change.
Interviews and observations corroborate these findings from the documentation. During interview discussions about program and project design and implementation, seventy-two per cent of the non-profit practitioners specifically say that their organisations are guided by community-driven community development values. Others state that their organisations’ approach is human-centred, strength-based, feminist, rights-based, and asset-based community development. I witnessed commitment to these bottom-up notions in practice, as exemplified during my visit to a rural Australian non-profit. I stood with the director at the front desk in the main office and we noticed a woman walking up the pathway towards us. The director did not recognise the woman who was walking decisively with a heavy-looking plastic bag. The director greeted her cheerfully and the smiling woman deposited the bag on the front desk. The woman explained that the bag contained curtain rings and other items that she thought would be useful for one of the organisation’s craft group projects. The woman mentioned she is organising a walking club fundraiser for the non-profit. As she departed, the director told me that the bulk of their funding, and the ideas for their programs, come directly from the community. ‘It’s all local money. So it’s very personal’ she said. ‘Local clubs have fundraisers for us. So, you know, it’s as I say, the local knowledge and participation drives what we do’.
Key within the small non-profits’ understanding of development is their commitment to empowerment. In line with Sen’s (1999) capability approach, practitioners explain empowerment as a product of increased economic and educative opportunities delivered in a way whereby community recipients have choice and agency in decisions that affect their lives. Non-profit practitioners identify that they cannot bestow empowerment on recipients. Instead, they explain their role as providing safe spaces for people to have a voice, where they can listen to peoples’ concerns, and then, in the words of a practitioner from a case study non-profit in urban East Africa, ‘work hand in hand with them’. They explain that developing peoples’ self-esteem, cultural pride, problem-solving, and vocational skills are central to nurturing empowerment. This links back to Freire’s (1972) argument that empowerment is generated from the bottom up and can only be supported, not endowed, by others.
Practitioners in small non-profits state that community recipients are the experts in their own lives and that they are capable of defining their own needs and creating their own solutions. A director from a rural East African non-profit explains: ‘We completely believe in people’s ability to solve their own problems. What we have to do is listen to them to find out where the gaps are’. This was demonstrated during site-visits, such as when a training adviser in a South-East Asian non-profit consulted a large group of recipients to ascertain their training needs and then discussed how to action these needs in further detail with a smaller focus group. Additionally, at a drop in centre in Australia, a practitioner modelled this conviction by quietly listening to peoples’ stories before problem posing to elicit peoples’ own analysis of their problem, needs, and solutions.
A Caucasian Australian director of a rural East African non-profit takes this a step further, identifying that recipients in the African community where she works have much to teach ‘the white Westerners’ in ‘our disconnected society’ and that we need to ‘question that our way is best’. In light of this, she is developing mutual learning and skill-sharing connections between the African non-profit and her hometown community in regional Victoria. She remarks that these interactions change the lives of the Australians involved and empower the Africans who have engaged in this two-way skill sharing. This relates to the argument that there is a particular need for community development work in ‘developed’ regions where community bonds are being eroded. This director’s comments align with Ife’s (2016, p. 197) recognition that, ‘if we are interested in truly sustainable, relationship-based community development, the North has more to learn from the South than the South has from the North, and it is the North that most needs community development.’ The director clarifies that this is a universal need in developed regions rather than one that should focus solely on those who are ‘disadvantaged’ in our society.
Recognising that recipient voices are often submerged and unheard, non-profit practitioners highlight that part of their role is advocating for social change by challenging structural inequality and organising communities to influence transformation at an individual, community, and policy level. For example, I observed one instance where an Australian non-profit was compelled to advocate for their community recipients by highlighting structural injustices that continue to silence and marginalise them. In this example, a practitioner shared a poem about her experience as a sex worker. It is a raw and impassioned poem. She shared it in the non-profit’s newsletter as part of a campaign to hear sex workers’ voices. A subscriber to the newsletter, deeply offended by the poem, responded by calling it ‘gag-worthy pity porn’ and asked for an apology. The organisation responded, but not as the detractor presumably hoped. The director sent a message to its supporters that this response from a member of the public is exactly the kind of silencing of women’s voices and lived experiences that they oppose. Rather than issuing an apology to the reader, the director apologised to the poet. The director commended the poet’s bravery and her introduction precedes an open letter from the poet, responding to the criticism. The non-profit’s outright support legitimises women’s voices, giving the poet a platform to answer her detractor in a manner that strengthens and empowers her own position, and the position of women like her.
This organisation is a visible advocate for community recipients in other ways such as their attendance at rallies and in their persistent pursuit of policy amendments actioned through regular media releases, involvement in policy debates, and political activity. They seek to ensure that their advocacy work is topical and community-driven by prioritising staff hires from within their recipient group. This promotes connection and belonging between practitioners and recipients who are members of the same functional (rather than geographical) community and share common experiences, understandings, and values.
In hand with social change, practitioners in small non-profits comment that these changes must be sustainable. They see support for community-driven aspirations as vital to realising empowering, contextually sensitive, and sustainable social change in their organisations. This emphasises the importance of active participation and community-driven approaches that respect and acknowledge recipients as local experts. If it is not community-led, ‘it’s going to fall over when I walk away’ says the director of a remote East African agricultural non-profit. Practitioners comment that they cultivate sustainability by enhancing local awareness and respect for their programs, and by encouraging community input into program development, appreciating community-raised funds, and supporting recipients to give back to their community.
Despite this rhetoric, two of the case study non-profits demonstrate behaviours that contradict ideas of community-driven sustainability. Caucasian Australian executives in one African non-profit argue that they need to control decision-making processes and protect their funds because they are accountable to their donors, a point that highlights the potential for donor/non-profit power imbalances. This shows how top-down accountability and evaluation demands that threaten non-profit survival can adversely affect their ability to engender their development aspirations. Facing a different problem, another African non-profit provides seeds and education relating to farming and entrepreneurial practices but recognises that if no one provides the seeds, the program will cease. The director comments that she wants to include propagation techniques in the program but currently does not have the required resources. This simple need shows a downside of being small, which is considered in more depth later in this chapter.
Chapter 1 highlighted that this book accepts that small development non-profits aspire to enact community development values. Reference to these ideas in the interviews and documentation, and some level of observation of them in practice support this assumption. Later chapters in this book investigate the extent to which evaluation is either supporting or undermining the community development aspirations they espouse.
Practitioner Roles in Small Non-Profits
Understanding practitioner roles is important to examining evaluation in small non-profits for three reasons: (1) Practitioners’ description of their roles demonstrate their commitment to sound community development practice, which is a foundational assumption of this book and affects their approach to evaluation. (2) Confirmation that practitioners act in ways congruent with community development beliefs, and their explanations for why this is necessary, poses the question as to whether others working for or with these organisations, such as evaluators, should adopt similar behaviours. (3) Understanding the skillsets and workloads provides contextual information about practitioners’ realistic ability to conduct and use evaluation.
Throughout the fieldwork for this book, I observed many instances of practitioners working in ways that align with community development values. One example is Gideon, a practitioner in an African non-profit who regularly demonstrated his attention to recipient-driven programming, listening, and community advocacy as well as his placement as an insider within the community where he works. I followed him into one of the city’s many informal settlements on a bright sunny day. This happened to be the same settlement where he lives. He pointed out his house and waved at neighbours as we passed by. After a few minutes of following the thin tracks between corrugated iron lean-to houses, we reached the tiny dwelling of the woman we were going to see. She opened the door with a baby on her hip and invited us in. Gideon ducked his head to enter through the low door jam, but I am short enough.
We stepped from the muddy rutted street onto her neatly swept dirt floor. She knew Gideon as a neighbour and local liaison for the non-profit. She asked him to visit, as she wants her older daughter to receive sponsorship to attend the school just outside the slum. She offered us a drink and plastic chair and clasped her hands together. Her eyes looked worried but hopeful. He patted her arm reassuringly and they sat down to discuss her needs. He listened quietly and gave her his full attention.
We left the woman and baby and walked about a kilometre to the school. Gideon brushed invisible dust from his pressed trousers and smoothed his starched shirt. We walked towards the main building, a blue concrete monolith, where the school principal greeted us and shook our hands firmly. We sat in the principal’s office and the two men discussed the progress of the non-profit’s sponsored children who attend the school. Gideon leaned right back in his chair. Several times, he leaned forward and interrupted the principal to ask a question. His character changed slightly since we left the woman in the informal settlement. There he was a quiet listener, in the school he advocated for the children and monitored the school’s processes.
Like other practitioners in the case study non-profits, Gideon is extending his ability to facilitate development practice through engaging in further tertiary study. Non-profit practitioners have skillsets and formal qualifications that are diverse and varied, from doctorates in community development to high school finishing certificates. Ninety-four per cent of practitioners interviewed for this book are studying or already hold tertiary qualifications relating to their work in small non-profits. This includes degrees in development studies, community services, counselling, public health, family therapy, and psychology. However, three practitioners, two of whom are founders of their non-profits, have no qualifications post-high school and are not currently studying. ‘I have the university of life’ says the founder of an African organisation. ‘I finished year twelve’ says the founder of an Asian one. ‘I have nothing that would especially qualify me to do anything except I guess admin skills that I learned over the years. I was a [party plan salesperson] for five or six years. Also doesn’t help in any way’, she says, denigrating her honed interpersonal, organisation, and communication skills.
Six practitioners have training they feel is barely applicable to the development work they do now including qualifications in information technology, banking, engineering, film studies, arts, and trade. Despite feeling that their ‘unrelated’ qualifications are inapplicable, observation and document analysis demonstrates the utility of these ‘unrelated’ skills. These non-profits showcase high-level graphics work in their reports, produce quality documentaries of their projects, apply business skills to develop their organisations, construct technical computer systems for managing recipient data, and maintain plumbing and electrical equipment in their buildings.
When discussing their roles, a common thread is that each practitioner takes on a vast array of roles. ‘My title is CEO, founder, director, administration person, chief cook and bottle washer’ exclaims the director of a South Asian non-profit with a wink. The director of an Australian non-profit explains that this is, ‘because we’re a very small organisation everybody has to double and triple up. I’m responsible for fundraising. I’m responsible for overseeing the financial management or governance. I’m responsible for [human resources] and staffing concerns. Um, and everything else’. When asked about her role, an executive in an Australian non-profit comments that ‘because it’s a small organisation, it’s everything’. Another Australian director calls herself a ‘Jack of all trades wearing many, many hats’. This corresponds with the organisational literature that recognises multiple roles undertaken by individual staff members as being a distinctive feature of small organisations (Volery, Mueller, & von Siemens, 2015), as well as of small non-profits (Gioacchino, 2019; Rochester, 1999).
Each of the case study non-profit organisations have local practitioners (or partners in two cases) who live and are native to the non-profit operating area. This brings potential for greater contextual awareness and pre-existing networks, but also the possibility of ingrained biases and power dynamics between particular local groups or members. Despite this potential adversity, inclusion of local practitioners is ‘the preferred option’ in development work, providing lived experience and local knowledge as well as encouraging greater relevance and local ownership (Ife, 2016, p. 366).
In cases where the executive non-profit practitioners are outsiders, all but one (introduced above as feeling first and foremost accountable to donors) discuss their purposive steps to ensure locals are heavily involved in the non-profit’s program development, decision-making, and implementation. Practitioners in small non-profits identify this local inclusion as imperative for enhancing the community-driven and bottom-up processes necessary for sustainable and relevant development initiatives. For example, during observations of a South-East Asian non-profit, foreign consultants facilitated training sessions in one of the main towns as requested by local practitioners. Local practitioners disperse this knowledge to the remote villages where they reside to support community-driven projects. Similarly, at South Asian non-profit, I observed how the organisation sought to encourage community-driven development by stepping back and including locals in the needs assessment, development, and construction of wells.
During my time with this South Asian non-profit, we visited a remote village, only accessible by foot and wading across a shallow river. As we arrived in the village, a woman with a large container was working a water pump to gather fresh water. The non-profit funded, provided equipment, and helped install this well. However, the villagers told me that they built their well. The village leader explained that he saw (the non-profit organisation’s) local well diggers working in a neighbouring village. He approached them and asked how he could get a well in his village. The men discussed options and secured a number of the villagers to help build the well. As such, the villagers have only ever seen local faces in connection with the well.
The Australian director (who was in the village with me to support a fledgling education program) leaned sideways to me and said she is happy to hear that the villagers feel ownership of the well. She highlighted that they have been empowered by this process, rather than disempowered by foreign charity. ‘That’s why none of the wells we install have name plates saying who installed them’, the director comments as we walk away from the village. ‘The ones with the name plates are the ones that break down and then get abandoned because no one has ownership of them’.
Bottom-up, community-driven ownership of programs and projects is important to the case study non-profits, in line with community development values. However, sixteen of the twenty non-profits have directors who are outsiders to their recipient group. Outsider status in itself is not counter to community development values but it raises fundamental questions around notions of power and the potential for, possibly inadvertent, colonising practices. Recognition of this power imbalance necessitates, among other things, thoughtfulness around shared and non-directive leadership roles. In an illustration of power-sharing, the Australian founder of an African non-profit moved herself to the role of board member, explaining that a highly capable local person was better equipped to be director. As well as power-sharing, this example demonstrates an enactment of the development value whereby outsider practitioners seek to make themselves redundant. In additional examples, directors demonstrate humility and power-sharing by deferring program development and decision-making to locals and other staff. A director of another African non-profit highlights that their organisation’s work is ‘based on what communities had already articulated was important and then just trying to sort of support that’. She notes that this approach opposes much of what is occurring in the sector ‘where the international NGOs [non-government organisations] would put out tenders and the local NGOs would have to sort of mobilise to apply for those’. While most of the non-profits grapple with insider/outsider divisions and potentially colonising practices, two of the case study non-profits showed little recognition of these tensions with outsider founder-directors dictating direction, seemingly unaware of local community capacity and agency.
Despite the high proportion of outsider directors, all twenty non-profits have insider staff. For example, all of the practitioners in one African non-profit, apart from the director, are not only local to the specific area of operation, but are from the recipient group of slum-dwellers, women, young people, and former street children themselves. These practitioners identify that this helps them understand the communities they are working with on a deeper level and they comment that they have significant influence over organisational decision-making. As mentioned previously, one of the practitioners in this organisation now earns enough from her wages to move out of the informal settlement but tells me that she wants to stay there so she can maintain her close connection with recipients. The director of this non-profit explains the value of practitioners’ local knowledge and connections within the community, highlighting that projects implemented without drawing on this knowledge have previously failed. He specifies that the unsuccessful initiatives failed due to poor contextual knowledge and a lack of networks and community buy-in.
Non-profit practitioners demonstrate behaviours that align with community development values by actively listening, engaging in mutual learning, seeking to understand local knowledge and contexts, relationship building with communities, sharing power, devolving decision-making, and cultivating community ownership to enhance sustainability. Interestingly, these behaviours align closely to the evaluator behaviours identified as necessary for enhancing evaluation utilisation as captured in Chapter 3.
Additionally, practitioners highlight that working in small non-profits requires multitasking and a more holistic understanding of the external and organisational context than may be required for practitioners in larger non-profits who are more likely to be engaged in neatly defined specialist roles. This overview indicates the capacity of small non-profit practitioners to do and use evaluation by explicating their roles, values, and skills.
The Perks and Pitfalls of Being Small
An assumption exists that small non-profits generally wish to become big, erroneously implying that growth is the only way to scale-up impact. Practitioners refute this when asked about the positives and negatives of being a small non-profit. They identify ninety-six advantages and forty-nine challenges, nearly two-thirds of responses highlighting the positive aspects of being small as opposed to being large.
A positive of small non-profits, identified by a quarter of practitioners is that they have more flexibility and nimbleness than their larger counterparts. This includes more control over how funding is spent and where funds are sourced, freedom to react quickly as needs arise without being burdened by bureaucracy, space to seek new and creative ways of doing things, and liberty to speak truth to power without being muzzled by suppressive funding agreements. Additionally, small non-profits can be more effective than large ones by offering value for money, forging stronger and closer relationships with individuals and communities, maintaining organisational unity and cohesiveness, and focusing on niche areas of specialisation at the organisational level.
A board member from an African non-profit highlights that freedom to ‘choose who we approach to be donors’ provides small non-profits with more control over funding allocation. As small non-profits’ funding tends to come from small grants and community donations, this translates into funding that a board member from an Asian non-profit comments has ‘less strings attached and far more trust in the CEO’ than is the case for organisations with large funding contracts. A practitioner from an Australian non-profit corroborates the benefit of funding freedom, ‘We’re not funded [by government] which is great. So, although we do get grants, they’re not restricted funding. So, they’re flexible. And I hope we don’t get government funded’. Other practitioners who appreciate their donor’s flexibility and trust echo this sentiment, highlighting that restrictive funding hinders their ability to pursue bottom-up agendas. While practitioners identify the flexibility of small donors as a positive, funding changes driven by technocratic neoliberal policies that promote bigger as better and competition between grant-seeking non-profits are making external funding conditions increasingly challenging.
The nimble, flexible, responsive, and adaptable positives that practitioners identify as defining small non-profits occur due to diminished bureaucracy. Practitioners highlight that this deft approach is considerably more difficult in lumbering large non-profits. This nimbleness can help small non-profits react quickly to crisis, with practitioners from two Asian non-profits mentioning that their organisation’s small size allows them to access restricted and ‘unglamorous’ areas without ‘attracting too much attention’, and provide a tailored response instead of the one-size-fits-all approach of many larger non-profits.
In one example, a case study non-profit in Asia developed an innovative program that enabled them to access communities that are technically off-limits due to government restrictions. This Asian non-profit conducts training workshops in the main town of a conflict zone several times a year for representatives from a number of remote villages. The village representatives make the, sometimes arduous, journey to the town from their villages and congregate at the centre for a few days of training before returning equipped with new knowledge to their respective villages.
The aim of this training is to provide the village representatives with community development and peacebuilding tools, activities, and ideas that they can take back to their villages and implement in their communities. For this reason, the villagers are called ‘facilitators’ as their role, which is paid for by the non-profit, is to facilitate peacebuilding and development initiatives within their own communities. While this approach makes sense logistically due to the remoteness of their villages, situating the training in the main town also minimises issues with government controls against non-locals in remote areas. It also enables development facilitated by insiders. Facilitators gather knowledge and ideas from a number of different trainers over time and use whatever tools they feel will be most appropriate in their village. The facilitators have the independence and freedom to engage their communities in a context-sensitive way to empower and develop themselves from the bottom-up.
While a lack of ‘red tape’ can mean small non-profits are more ‘chaotic’ and may fail to have important safety, risk, and regulatory procedures in place, in other ways small non-profits’ diminished bureaucratic processes are seen as a positive by practitioners. Directors from an Australian and an African non-profit respectively identify that instigating change is ‘a lot easier in a small organisation than a really large one’ and that new ideas can be actioned ‘very quickly and very easily without that bureaucracy to get in the way’. Practitioners from an Asian non-profit comment that they can ‘meet together very easily, we can meet very quickly, and we can make change’. Practitioners in two Australian non-profits sit in single open-plan offices, a set-up that promotes conversation where they constantly discuss programs and activate change. One of these practitioners laughs and confirms their process for implementing change is to, ‘just turn around have a chat and “oh like that’s a good idea!” and we can implement it’. Practitioners qualify that this lack of bureaucratisation increases accessibility, particularly for community members and potential volunteers. A board member in a South-East Asian non-profit sees it as an opportunity for innovation, as the risk-averse approaches that can stifle experimentation in larger non-profits have reduced hold over internal processes in small ones.
The space to think outside strict procedures and practice requirements can move small non-profits beyond the inertia that lingers in some of their larger counterparts, and allow small non-profits to come up with new, inventive ideas and strategies. A program developer in an Asian non-profit defines this as, ‘that freedom and innovative space. I wouldn’t have had that whether volunteer or paid, in a large organisation or a midsize organisation. The freedom to go out and create my own thing and pilot it to a point where it could be taken up as the major program within an organisation. Couldn’t happen if you weren’t small’. This view is supported by a board member in an Australian non-profit who mentions that she appreciates the ability to be creative and inventive ‘because you don’t have boundaries around you like in a big organisation’. Although this flexibility is largely beneficial, it does leave potential for improvised development approaches similar to my early career experiences of ad hoc activities in small non-profits.
While reduced bureaucracy and limited hold of new public management doctrine within internal operations can allow innovation to flourish in small non-profits, practitioners in these organisations also identify that freedom from restrictive funding contracts allows them to speak out about social injustices without fear of funding loss. A director from an urban Australian non-profit explains that, ‘sometimes small organisations can be braver because they don’t have big funders who they’re beholden to…so there can be sort of a willingness to speak out and be really brave…that ability to move and advocate and create change is what’s exciting about [small non-profits]’. Practitioners highlight that this is why they are careful about from whom they accept funding. A director from a suburban Australian organisation suggests that small non-profits should ‘only go for funding that meets your vision and mission’ or they risk losing their way and investing all their energy into following the demands of the donor. This raises important questions regarding the extent the power relationship between donors and non-profits affects non-profit’s ability to conduct worthwhile and appropriate evaluation.
Advocacy is identified by practitioners as a vital role of the small non-profits and a place where they can make a real difference, particularly as they are frequently unbounded by the risk aversion that can accompany larger grantees. The director of an urban Australian non-profit with a strong social justice voice adds that, ‘it’s small organisations who have really set the agenda and got things moving…often if you don’t have the little ratbaggy organisation kicking things on it doesn’t happen’.
Financial summaries in annual reports demonstrate that small non-profits use their finances prudently and tend to spend at least ninety per cent of their funding on direct program costs. Some of the non-profits profiled in this book, particularly those that are reliant on private donations, spend close to one hundred per cent of their funding on direct project costs with separate donors specifically covering items such as director’s stipends, audits, or registration costs. Practitioners stress that they keep overheads small and prioritise program spending rather than administrative and office spending.
Thriftiness is demonstrable as eight of the twenty case study non-profits researched for this book do not have a dedicated head office; instead working from their homes, local libraries, nearby university campuses, and on project sites. The director of an urban East African non-profit uses the dining table in his small apartment as an office while his young children run around the room. His car, which is used almost entirely for work-related travel, would fail roadworthy standards with its broken seatbelts, non-winding windows stuck partly open, and worn tyres covered in puncture-fixing cork-plugs. Of the twelve case study non-profits that do have offices across the four continents, a couple is large and modern while the others are modestly decorated and understated, as much to make them feel unintimidating for community members as a reflection of their frugality. For example, a suburban Australian non-profit barely had space for me to pull up a chair and conduct an interview in its cramped portable office, practically filled with non-perishable foodstuffs and silvery sleeping bags for their community recipients. To meet the staff at another suburban Australian non-profit, I had to serpentine through an active playgroup to reach their shared space in a local council building.
A director of a rural East African non-profit feels that people look at ‘those huge pots of money’ given to large non-profits and assume that means those organisations are having a more significant impact than small organisations. She highlights that it is important that people know that ‘there are a lot of really small grassroots organisations doing great things’. A director of an urban East African non-profit corroborates this view and believes that ‘a lot of smaller organisations are able to use the money more effectively [than larger non-profits] and spend a lot more of it, nearly all of it, on actual programs’. Practitioners comment that they wish the value for money of their approaches was better known; ‘donors love that’ chimes a board member from a non-profit in Southern Africa. This highlights the potential for small non-profits to assess their value for money and then broadcast that information widely, while remaining cognisant of the limitations of value for money approaches such as reductionist outcomes and ‘sausage’ proxy calculations (Shutt, 2015, p. 65).
Part of this commitment to frugality is due to passion and, as stated by an Australian director, a ‘genuine desire to do better for the client group’. Passion for the work results in directors and other staff working voluntarily or for small stipends or wages significantly less than sector averages. The motivation is ‘passion not money’ says a practitioner from an urban East African non-profit. While passion has potential to be misguided, with examples such as foreigners supporting ‘orphanages’, practitioners identify passion as a strong positive in small non-profits. One Australian director remarks that ‘people put in 200 per cent every single day to drive the organisation because they really do care’.
This genuine heart for the work they are doing was visible during my observations of practitioner interactions with recipients, colleagues, and supporters. All of the organisations I observed demonstrated tight-knit relationships with their colleagues and with recipients; evidenced through gestures such as greeting hugs and smiles, kind words, and personal conversations about people’s families, health, and lives. During informal conversations at a rural Australian non-profit, practitioners spoke fondly of community members and colleagues. They specifically highlighted their love for the director, mentioned that community members provided them with the best ideas for developments, and told me stories about individual children whose photographs adorned the office walls. As I sat with them during lunchtimes, they discussed their connection to community.
- Shireen:
‘I just love it here. I was born here but then I moved away when I turned seventeen. But I maintained a close association with [the town] and I came back eventually. I think the local experience really helps us do this work. We know a lot about what is going on, by osmosis.’
- Wendy:
‘I’ve been involved in the community for most of my adult life through sporting clubs and school, Boards, and various organisations in the community. I think a lot of parents and people undersell their role in the community.’
- Helen:
‘I’ve always been here too! Well I worked in [a neighbouring town] for a number of years, at the school, but now I’m here again. It’s nice because we know everyone. I mean, especially [the director], she knows everyone. It takes her an awfully long time to shop. It’s really useful for following up on people who have attended our programs though. If we want to know how they are doing now, we know where to find them!’
This depth of local knowledge and closeness to community was apparent in the case study non-profits, a closeness often diluted in larger non-profits somewhat removed from community and beholden to top-down donor agendas and expectations of professionalisation. As I followed the director of an urban East African non-profit through the narrow tracks of an informal settlement, he stopped to chat a multitude of times and appeared to know everyone’s name. Similarly, the director of a remote South Asian non-profit seemed to know every child in the areas where she worked. Not only to know their name, but also their history, family members, current interests, challenges, and aspirations. I witnessed practitioners and community recipients at the various non-profits touch one another’s arms, pat children’s heads, hold hands, and hug one another.
Practitioners note that they can foster personal connections with recipients and be closer to community than practitioners in larger non-profits. ‘I feel like people are so much more connected’ says the founder of a rural East African non-profit. ‘I feel like they are an extension of my family’. Practitioners mention that these relationships are allowed to develop in small non-profits in a way that they cannot in larger ones.
Stavros works for a small urban Australian non-profit part-time, with the other part of his time working at a large non-profit. He contrasts the ability of small non-profit practitioners to build relationships with community recipients, against staff boundaries that ban practitioners in larger non-profits from personal disclosure and touch. Social work therapist, Tosone (2006, p. 93), explains that ‘the professional boundary is an arbitrary construct therapists employ to maintain the illusion between their personal and professional affective realms’. While these rules are there for a reason, and Stavros readily admits that they are important and require an appropriate balance of common sense, he highlights that the freedom to be closer to community recipients with whom he works results in authentic rapport rather than the more superficial rapport he has experienced working for larger non-profits. He suggests that touch offers recipients a feeling of safety and care, a sentiment reflected by renowned trauma specialist, van der Kolk (2014, p. 217), who describes ‘the healing powers of attuned touch’ as ‘Gestures of comfort’. Practitioners in small non-profits discuss that this closeness is part of the reason they have strong recipient engagement and outcomes, a claim supported by van der Kolk’s belief in the fundamental need for caring and personal connections between workers and recipients to enable growth and change. Tosone (2006, p. 94) describes this relationship as ‘the bottomline curative element’. The small organisation where Stavros works focuses on supporting women who are often scorned and ostracised by their families and society. I watched Stavros demonstrate this attuned touch during his conversations with recipients, I see their shoulders drop in release when he reassures them with a gentle pat on their back.
Practitioners in small non-profits highlight that the ability to build relationships between recipients, staff, and supporters has a number of other benefits such as increased accessibility, a unified approach, and feelings of ownership shared by all stakeholder groups. The director of a suburban Australian non-profit comments that, ‘I hate this big, big, big, everyone getting swallowed into big agencies. It makes it so bureaucratic. It becomes too onerous for people to access it. Like here, we make it so easy for people to access us. They just walk in. And so making it less onerous on the community is important’. Similarly, practitioners describe that ‘small NGOs are easy to deal with…because you deal with their management directly’ and that the fact that they are ‘human-sized’ results in recipients not feeling ‘intimidated’ or ‘overwhelmed’. The director of a remote East African non-profit explains that small non-profits offer a ‘boutique’ experience.
Adjacent to close connections with community recipients, the close connection between practitioners is discussed as having values additional to just creating an enjoyable and protective workplace. Practitioners comment that ‘there is a sense of teamwork and it’s collegiate’ and that they ‘know each other and are friends together’. More than this, practitioners highlight that this closeness results in a flatter structure that is consensus-driven and conductive to change and innovation. A program manager in a rural South-East Asian non-profit identifies that this sets them up well for evaluation as they trust each other and are willing to discuss their programs and strategies openly and honestly.
Providing this window on context demonstrates some of the advantages and opportunities facing small-sized development non-profits. Small non-profits’ flexibility, closeness to communities with whom they work, and capacity for innovative solutions places them in an ideal position to utilise evaluative processes conducive to their development aspirations.
While practitioners from small non-profits were easily able to identify positives of being small, they pinpointed fewer negatives. The two most common negative themes facing small non-profits concern lack of resources and marginalisation within the external environment. While lack of resources was unsurprising, the extent to which practitioners claim marginalisation affects their ability to operate and be effective is alarming. What were originally sourced as general pros and cons of being small demonstrates that organisational barriers and enablers affect multiple facets of operation, including evaluation. Lack of resources will obviously limit small non-profits’ capacity to do and use evaluation. However, and pertinently for evaluation, the extent to which small non-profits are ignored, unheard, and undermined by society, government, and large non-profits could affect external perceptions of how effectiveness is evidenced, pressure normative evidence hierarchies to elicit donor trust in results, and limit opportunities for learning and dissemination of findings.
‘We go under the radar’ says a practitioner from an Australia non-profit. ‘It’s like we’re forgotten’ and ‘overlooked’ add practitioners from two other organisations operating within Australia. A third of comments regarding the negatives of being small identify these problems of invisibility, isolation, and lack of voice. A sub-contractor from a suburban Australian non-profit comments on the exclusion of small organisations from sector alliances, networks, and CEO forums. She says that their size means ‘it’s really easy to become completely forgotten and negated’. ‘The little ones get squeezed out’ confirms the director of a West African non-profit. The sub-contractor adds that this is ‘the biggest downfall of being a small NGO. It’s awful’.
Practitioners identify that their non-profit organisations are niche subject matter specialists on their focus area, but they get minimal attention and cannot afford advertising to increase their visibility. They shout, ‘“Hey, look at us! We have expertise in this specialised area. Use us as the subject matter experts. Use us!” But [our] voices aren’t heard’ says the sub-contractor from the Australian organisation. The director of an urban East African microfinance non-profit explains that representatives from the Australian Government asked him to fly to Canberra to showcase the organisation’s work. He discussed their achievements, and the barriers that Government could ameliorate in support of small non-profits, with passion and hopefulness. He tells me this with animated hand gesticulations and raised eyebrows. Then, shoulders slumping, he says, despite this, he saw no resulting change in governance procedures for small non-profits and his passionate and actionable pleas were ignored, confirming his struggle and isolation.
Practitioners from two small Australian non-profits blame this invisibility on their inability to undertake and disseminate strong evaluations that could evidence their good work and help improve their competitiveness among other organisations contending for funding in the neoliberal market. One director’s long career in the Australian non-profit sector has shaped her ‘personal quite strong belief…that small organisations do better work [than large non-profits] with vulnerable people’. She admits that this conclusion is ‘based on nothing scientific but my own experience’, demonstrating the need to prove to others the worth of small non-profits through rigorous evidence. She highlights that investing in examination of small non-profit impact would be highly worthwhile and could change approaches to social programing. Another Australian director confirms that, ‘some of the really innovative and powerful things that small organisations do can get lost because they aren’t able to produce the evidence to show that what they’re doing works’.
The director of a small urban non-profit in Australia identifies there is a ‘misguided’ approach towards social programing which assumes that ‘bigger is better…imposing a market-approach to something that’s not a market. We’re not factories. We’re not working with widgets’. She claims that ‘smaller organisations are increasingly under-appreciated’; a move that she identifies as ‘really short-sighted’. She recognises that it is easier for donors to support ‘super big NGOs who are increasingly conservative because they don’t want to lose what they’ve got.’ This point links to a positive of small non-profits highlighted in the section above which identifies their ability to be brave and advocate for their beliefs and social justice, a movement often diluted in risk-averse larger non-profits that fear jeopardising their funding.
Interestingly, only three practitioners (one in each Africa, Asia, and Australia) explicitly mention insufficient funding as a downside of being a small non-profit. Two practitioners argue that the real negative is lack of stable or sustainable funding, an issue of particular concern to small non-profits who comment on the difficulties of operating in financial insecurity; highlighting that this can result in the sidelining of important matters, such as evaluation. In a similar vein, practitioners identify that their lack of funding restricts their access to grant writers. However, the director of an Eastern European non-profit qualifies that, ‘Saying that, we haven’t found that [insufficient] funding has held us back’.
Another ten practitioners identify the negative outcomes of limited or unsustainable funding as lack of staff. Practitioners discuss their frustration at wanting to be able to expand their work and ‘do more’ but being thwarted by lack of funding that translates into lack of available staff. ‘It would be good to have more help’ says the director of an urban East African non-profit, ‘like more manpower’. Practitioners comment that the lack of funds make it difficult to attract and retain good staff and mean that many roles need to be undertaken by one person. Despite wanting to do more, practitioners mention they do not want to become big and lose the essence of being small. This aligns with Uvin, Jain, & Brown’s (2000) analysis on scaling-up without growth that highlights potential ways to scale-up including developing models for uptake by other organisations, strengthening expertise in niche areas, and partnering with grassroots civil society groups.
As time and money is limited, and small non-profit practitioners are already stretched, this impacts their ability to receive training and professional mentoring. In line with comments regarding isolation from their sectoral fellows, practitioners lament that working in a small non-profit restricts their access to professional growth with limited opportunities for progression or training. They identify that there is often a lack of ‘in-house expertise’ on particular subjects, such as evaluation, with a corresponding gap in available staff mentorship. Although there are opportunities for broad learning due to each staff member undertaking multiple roles, practitioners voice a desire for enhanced connection to peer-support, field experts, and training opportunities.
While practitioners discuss their long hours and multiple roles, only one comments that this is a negative saying, ‘It’s a lot of work. You just make it as you can’. I observed many examples of the long hours and stretched staff in the case study organisations throughout my research for this book. My observations of an urban East African organisation illustrate a ‘day in the life’ of a small non-profit. I stayed with the director’s family and saw him work every day from six in the morning until nearly midnight.
The morning starts early in this east African city. Despite urbanisation, my room in the director’s house was quiet and dark with just a chink of first morning light shining through the curtains and a single bird singing on the concrete wall that surrounds the apartment. I shuffled into the bathroom for morning ablutions and saw the director already sitting at the dining table with his laptop sending off accountability reports to individual donors. As soon as the bank opened, he set off to organise donor transfers from Australia and pay school fees for children who had been living on the city streets.
The non-profit has no designated office other than the director’s home and the work that they do involves outreach to a number of different organisations, informal settlements, and villages. As part of their work is supporting children on the street to reunite with their families when appropriate, this means they may be travelling far into the countryside or even into neighbouring countries to follow-up on children they continue to support and monitor through school and beyond. Suffice to say, travel is a big part of daily life for this non-profit.
Our first stop was a council-run boys’ home for children who have been picked up living on the city streets. The boys’ home offers a place to stay and meals but little more. The non-profit has been developing a relationship with the boys’ home for a number of years and provides additional support to the boys offering them a sports program, encouraging and supporting them to attend school when they are ready, and helping them return to their families or other kin where feasible, appropriate, and requested. As we drove up and parked on the dusty square of land outside the buildings, boys started to surround the car. The director took a first aid kit out of the back of the four-wheel drive and the boys came forward with a range of ailments, injuries, and skin infections. One had an abscess on his face. The director took a photo of the abscess and sent it to a WhatsApp group of doctors for an opinion. Many of the boys had scabies. One had a swollen foot that he sprained in a pit latrine. After attending to the other boys, the director arranged for the boy with the abscess to go to the dentist. The director lugged a sack of bread from the back of the car and started handing out cob loaves and French sticks. The children jostled for the bread, stuffing it down their t-shirts and hiding loaves under their arms to grasp for more. ‘Thank you! Thank you!’ they called as they ran off to munch on their catch.
I asked why a number of the boys were not in school during the day. The director replied that they are encouraged but not forced and that it takes time. Having learned from previous errors that pushing children to attend school or to reunite with their families too soon is unsustainable, he stepped back and recognised the virtue of patience.
One of the teenage boys was returning to his family in a neighbouring country in the morning. The non-profit had already bought him supplies for the journey but his only footwear were some old broken flip-flops. Another sixteen-year-old boy was about to return to high school but he had no school jumper, no school shoes, and only a small Dora the Explorer backpack. A staff member at the boy’s home said the backpack he had was fine as it was functional and not broken. We walked both boys down to the nearby market that sprawls through an enormous informal settlement. The boy with the flip-flops chose a pair of yellow Adidas sneakers from a market alley heaped with newly cleaned piles of second-hand refurbished sneakers. He smiled as he held his new shoes for the director to photograph in preparation to send to his donor. The other boy chose his jumper, shoes, and a large, black schoolbag befitting a teenaged high school student. He looked very ready for high school and stood straight and proud in his photo for donors.
We drove to the next destination. A boarding school out of the city limits. We stopped at an intersection and spent about an hour waiting for the traffic to move in the sweltering heat. The car window on my side was broken, stuck with a perpetual two-inch gap at the top. While the two-inch gap previously frightened me due to reports of hijacking and other violent crime, I was now thankful for the tiny breeze it allowed through. A man on a motorbike with another man holding on behind him pulled up aside the director’s window and pointed out that he had a flat tyre. Once we finally detangled ourselves from the traffic we pulled into a petrol station and asked the assistant for a tiny amount of petrol; handing over a few crumpled paper notes. The director showed the assistant the flat tyre and a few men lumbered over and crouched to look at it. They squirted water on the tyre to identify the hole then dug a larger hole in it with a screwdriver before stuffing the hole with a plug of cork and cutting it off flush with the tyre. Knowing now what this patch work looks like, I noticed that all four tyres were riddled with these quick patches. Two minutes later we were on the road again, feeling lighter and enjoying a smoother ride.
After the boarding school we drove back to the city and pulled up to a trailer sheltering a permanent educational program the non-profit is running in one of the informal settlements. There are about forty children attending the building per day, using the space to do their homework and receive extra help from the local facilitator. The non-profit hopes to extend the concept into other nearby slums. The facilitator mentioned that she needed a light for the small room at the back and the director explained that it is on its way.
From there we visited two schools where children the non-profit sponsors attend. This school monitoring is an almost daily occurrence as the director and other non-profit practitioners consistently confer with the multiple schools and with the children’s families. The director makes sure the children are looking well, are happy, learning, and receiving their included lunch meals. He meets the principals and other teaching staff to maintain and develop relationships. On this day, he dropped off a small fuel-efficient cooker at one of the schools for a sponsored child to take home to her parents in fulfilment of a promise.
One of the non-profit practitioners met us at the second school and I interviewed him sitting under a tree. He was dressed in a dazzling pressed white shirt with smart black trousers and shiny shoes. After our interview, we dropped him off at his house in the centre of an informal settlement with its tin houses and vista of activity. Part of his role is identifying gifted children in the slum and offering them the opportunity to attend school. As school is expensive here, and many of the children are needed to earn money for their families, school is not a given. His place as an insider, and that of the other local practitioners working for or with this non-profit, provides a balance to the Australian director’s honorary insider position.
We arrived home at night for a late dinner and, as I prepared to go to bed, exhausted, the director was back on his laptop uploading the day’s photos and preparing the accompanying accountability reports. His wife was on the phone to a former street boy the organisation had reunited with his family, speaking to him in his local language.
This example demonstrates the variation and busyness of roles in small non-profits, where mainstreaming community development values and evaluative mindsets could sometimes be pushed behind pressing needs and task lists. However, this chapter has shown that, on the whole, these non-profits conceptualise community development as a bottom-up, recipient-driven process of positive and sustainable change that focuses on building local connections, advocating for social justice, and addressing structural barriers to people’s agency. Practitioners highlight empowerment as a key desired outcome of their work and, rather than articulating complex theories about empowerment (which are contested and unsettled in the literature), they provide examples of practices and strategies to enhance inclusive and active participation, devolved decision-making, and access to economic and educative opportunities.
Further, illuminating practitioner roles and the positives and negatives of being a small non-profit highlighted the challenges limiting these organisations’ capacity to undertake and utilise evaluation. Practitioners identify twice as many positives about being a small non-profit than negatives. This suggests that, overall, small non-profits have an optimistic outlook regarding their work. Their ability to be flexible and nimble, specialise in niche areas, get close to communities, use funds prudently, and be innovative and brave present some of the reasons why focusing on these diminutive organisations is beneficial. Despite many positives, a minority of practitioners note that they are overworked, underpaid, and struggle to be everything to everyone. A lack of resources, namely, staff, funds, and skills, can create challenges for evaluation while their marginalisation from the wider development sector minimises their ability to debate and impact dominant discourses.
Given a significant majority of global non-profits are small, this overview provides an insight into the real-world operating conditions facing these organisations. Ultimately, this chapter has conveyed, from the perspectives of practitioners in small non-profits, the values and behaviours that are important to these organisations and highlighted the political, funding, and internal environment in which they operate. This provides a scaffold, bound by values and context, with which to analyse the value of their evaluative processes.