Sharing power with your nonprofit’s stakeholders is both a noble aspiration and a formidable challenge. While the essence of nonprofit work revolves around serving the community and addressing societal needs, the dynamics of power within many organizations often present significant hurdles to achieving genuine collaboration with beneficiaries and other stakeholders, not to mention empowering those folks to become true decision makers within organizations.
Today, we’re exploring four of the key reasons why sharing power with stakeholders is so hard for nonprofits, and then we’re discussing what we can do about it.
1. Nonprofits Have So Many Stakeholders
Yes, your nonprofit has a lot of different stakeholders. You might think this challenge is unique to your organization, but it’s not. Interacting with and involving a large and diverse range of stakeholders is something that nearly every nonprofit must wrestle with. From board members and staff to volunteers, donors, beneficiaries, partners and community members, nonprofits navigate a complex web of relationships and interests. Balancing the perspectives and priorities of these stakeholders while maintaining organizational coherence can prove daunting.
2. It Can Be Time Consuming and Difficult to Reach Beneficiaries
Effectively sharing power with beneficiaries poses a distinct challenge for nonprofits, especially when beneficiaries’ current experiences and life situations hinder meaningful engagement. Many organizations struggle to connect with the individuals and communities they serve, particularly those facing socio-economic disparities or health challenges. For example, it’s often not realistic or mission-aligned to expect someone who is dealing with housing insecurity, food insecurity or a health crisis to have time to participate in opportunities like listening sessions or venues like stakeholder boards where they could have the chance to help shape your nonprofit’s strategy and approach.
3. Boards Are Out of Touch with Beneficiaries
The disconnect between nonprofit boards and the beneficiaries their organizations serve is a pervasive issue that undermines efforts to share power. Often composed of individuals with expertise and financial means, boards may lack firsthand experience or understanding of the challenges faced by the beneficiaries of their nonprofit’s programs and services. While many boards have taken great efforts to build relationships between their board members and beneficiaries, and some have even begun including beneficiaries or former beneficiaries on their governing boards, the nonprofit sector still has a long way to go in this regard.
4. Entrenched Power Dynamics Favor Board Members, Donors, and Funders Over Beneficiaries
Within many nonprofit organizations, entrenched power dynamics perpetuate inequalities and privilege the interests of board members, donors, and funders over those of beneficiaries. Structural barriers, implicit biases, and traditional hierarchies often marginalize the voices and agency of the very communities nonprofits aim to serve, or at the very least, exclude beneficiaries from having a seat at the table where important decisions are made.
So what can we do about it?
Barriers to sharing power are very real, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution that will work for every nonprofit. Instead, we believe there is a real need for resources and a learning community for nonprofits that are interested in exploring achievable methods for authentically sharing power with their stakeholders. We know that, together, we can develop best practices that will help the Shared Power PhilosophyTM truly take hold across the sector.
Would you be interested in tapping into Shared Power resources and a learning community of like minded nonprofits?
Take this three-question survey to tell us, and to help us shape what it might look like.
We’re currently in the early stages of exploring offerings that would help the nonprofit sector build its capacity to share power, and we’d love your help shaping our path forward.
