Perry Maddox explains how his organisation banned the word beneficiary to help shift the power in international development.
Shifting power is on trend.
From social campaigners to NGOs to donors, everyone’s talking about shifting the power.
The phrase is certainly on everyone’s lips in International Development, present in all the latest strategies and all over social media with the #ShiftThePower hashtag.
Problem is, there shouldn’t be such a buzz.
Less Hashtag, More Day Job.
We hold up an unflattering mirror when we talk about shifting power.
Don’t get me wrong, we must face into that mirror. Recent years have made that all too clear. We desperately need to talk about shifting the power, and that’s the problem.
Shifting power shouldn’t be a new trend in our work. Shifting power is what good social change work is all about. It always was.
We’re not superheroes wielding power to save victims or rescue the helpless. Real impact and real change begins with the agency, ability and potential of every person to lead change – in their lives and their communities. That’s the power that counts.
Over the years we’ve gone astray, often despite good intentions. Big problems require big solutions, the logic went.
So we built dams but flooded villages. We designed massive interventions from London or Lusaka, without listening to those the work serves. Gigantic organisations were built for scale and went on to behave like cut-throat corporates. We needed funding, so we fundraised with crying children and white saviour imagery.
At some point, we started calling people beneficiaries.
The people who matter most. We call them beneficiaries. Occasionally partners, sometimes clients. Never leaders. Beneficiaries. Passive recipients of our work.
In this relationship, the people without power.
The Big Beneficiary Problem.
Language matters, a lot.
The way we describe people shapes how we perceive and act toward them. Are you as likely to involve a beneficiary in design and budgeting as you would a partner? Would you ever portray a client in exploitative imagery with tears running down their face or in the arms of some rich, white foreigner?
When we say “beneficiary”, we claim power.
It’s endemic. Funding proposals outline programme beneficiaries. Donors want reports on beneficiary reached. We talk about beneficiary feedback.
Why don’t we just talk about feedback? There are so many good alternatives: partners, clients, customers, service users, stakeholders, and leaders are a few. I rather like “people.”
On the surface, describing someone who benefits from our work as a beneficiary is sensible enough. Jargony, yes. Inherently wrong, no. The problem is easy to observe in practice, though.
Do staff not benefit from the salaries we earn in this work? We’re not beneficiaries, we’re staff. Do governments and donors not benefit from our work? They’re partners. Only certain people are called beneficiaries.
Staff and partners are in the room, making decisions. Beneficiaries, not so much. I hope I don’t need to explain how these groups differ in their diverse identities, experiences and demographics. Or why that’s a huge problem.
No matter that “beneficiaries” are the experts on their lives and communities, they’re the ones without the power in this kind of relationship.
That’s the big beneficiary problem.
The Small Change We Can Make To Shift The Power.
Of course we need to shift the power.
Recent scandals laid bare how much must change among development actors, from workplace cultures to hero mythologies. We have much to change.
We have even more good practice to build on. Exciting work like power-shifting philanthropy, growing commitment to diversity and inclusion, the rapid spread of feminist thinking, and placing greater value on community leadership are beginning to reshape our field.
So let’s tap into what makes our work great and keep challenging ourselves. As leaders, there’s one simple change we can make to lead the way, now:
#BanBeneficiary
Ban your organisation, your people and yourself from using the term.
What’s left in place of “beneficiary” may be an awkward pause at first. Followed by a conversation. What should we say instead? Partner, client, leader? The conversation alone may well change how our people think and how our organisations act.
At Restless Development we banned beneficiary several years ago, opting for changemaker. It’s not perfect, and we’re still figuring it out. We’re not even using changemaker universally yet, but the positive impact is undeniable. For more ways like this that we shift power in our work, check out this great series on power-shifting.
One small change of a word changed us. It reminded us that impact doesn’t end when we deliver our work. Impact begins there, when the people we serve go on to lead far beyond our work. Far beyond us and usually without us.
After all, aren’t we in the business of putting ourselves out of business?
Now that’s shifting power.
9 Comments
Thank you for this, Perry. There is power in how we call our constituency. In Nigeria, we call them leaders or change partners. We are working to co-create a better world together and we need to #banbeneficiary.
Great to hear from you Joshua, and I couldn’t agree more that this is about working as partners. I’m glad this piece hit the mark. It’s brilliant leaders like you that I hope to support with Just Open Leaders!
Thanks Maddox, Restless is indeed phenomenal and unconventional in its entire approach to work. I find the word- beneficiary rather limiting and dis-empowering. I have wished to be called young leader or change maker than just a supported young person. Thanks for sharing. Very insightful.
Totally agree… calling somebody ‘supported’ or beneficiary is just so patronising. And yet, it’s something I’m sure I was doing just a couple years ago. Language is so powerful, and that’s why I think we as leaders need to be a bit more intentional about the words we use. Thank you for the kind feedback 🙂
#BanBeneficiary is brilliant – can we create a movement around this? Changing a word may seem deceivingly simple but its a shift in mindset, a re balancing of a relationship and respect that can be lacking in international development.
Quite simply, people or humans are who we work side by side with. No fancy jargon needed.
Language matters.
Agreed… it’s got to be ‘people’ right? Not sure where the jargon so often creeps in on us – perhaps in a desire to be ‘professional’ or perhaps we’re just repeating what we’re taught and told – but it so quickly becomes insidious. I’m game to try to #BanBeneficiary for sure. Could start from civil society, but equally I wonder if a couple donors could be bought in to spearhead and drive grantees along the path. Maybe just a brutally simply photo/video campaign of people declaring themselves not to be beneficiaries?!
Less Hashtag, More Day Job. Nailed it!
At Mind we use ‘service user’ and ‘client’ a lot. I like Restless’s ‘changemaker’ but I like even more your comment that ‘it’s not perfect – we’re still figuring it out’. It’s often not about the specific words we use but the intent and meaning behind them. And I agree, ‘people’ seems a pretty good place to start (-:
Too right Not to let ourselves off the hook, but the moment ‘changemaker'(or client, which is a good one) starts to feel automatic, we’re probably going to need to reopen the conversation. I think it’s just one of those things we have to choose to ‘worry’ about a little bit to keep intent and meaning at the front of our minds. Got to agree, we rarely go wrong when we treat people as people.
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