Failures from the Field
When was the last time you saw a nonprofit announce that it has not reached its goals? Media from the development sector — tweets, conference speeches, grant reports — tends to paint a rosy picture of high-impact programs. We are inundated with accounts of large-scale progress, massive outputs, and touching stories that are rooted in a one-dimensional depiction of success. If every nonprofit was actually accomplishing half of what it reports, there would be no poverty in the world.
I have spent the past 15 years as an executive at Ubuntu Education Fund. On the surface, our trajectory seems simple: what started as two men distributing supplies out of a broom closet to township schools in Port Elizabeth, South Africa has grown into a state-of-the-art Centre that is a beacon of hope for an entire community. However, Ubuntu did not get to where we are today through this linear, easily marketable story. Our journey has been complex and nuanced, and full of risks and failures. We have learned the most from our failures, spurring pivotal changes to our approach and programs and resulting in long-term impact. Nearly two decades after our founding, we are still taking risks, pushing our work forward, and learning from our setbacks. A simple success story cannot encompass this trajectory.
Ubuntu is not alone — failure is an inherent part of every organization’s growth. It is impossible to create deep impact, empower a community, or alleviate the crippling effects of poverty without taking some transformative risks along the way. That is why we need to open the narrative in the sector to include lessons from failure, as well as celebrations of success. We need to stop exaggerating impact without exposing our struggles. Development leaders take risks and they fail, but they also change lives. Why can’t we risk being honest?
The second season of my podcast series, “Failures from the Field,” aims to spark a truly honest dialogue around social change. Through candid discussions with professionals across the development sector, “Failures from the Field” is placing risk, failure, and the “un-success” story at the heart of the conversation.
Here are some key lessons from the second season of “Failures from the Field” that all development leaders can learn from:
1. You cannot create deep impact without first taking care of yourself.
It is easy to glamorize development work — to focus on inspiring success stories, prestigious awards, and impressive impact statistics. In doing so, however, we lose track of an important reality: development is tough. It is physically, socially, and emotionally draining. Nonprofit leaders struggle under immense weight of responsibility, and often face great personal risk. Shin Fujiyama is the Founder and Executive Director of Students Helping Honduras, and has been named a CNN Hero. Despite his accomplishments, he admits that “I guess I wake up everyday thinking about maybe giving up. I think a lot of social entrepreneurs do.”
Jimmie Briggs, journalist and Co-Founder and Executive Director Emeritus of Man Up Campaign, stresses the need for self-care. His advice for anyone entering the field of development work? “You need to be able to step away from gender violence, gun violence, or AIDS prevention… You need to… remind yourself that life is holistic. It is not just about one issue, or one thing, every single day.”
2. Development is not delivered, it is enabled.
Dennis Walto, Executive Director of Children’s Health Fund, pointed out that “you can’t deliver development, it’s enabled. And you have to provide the enabling environment for people to do that.” This includes ensuring that stakeholders, community members, and staff play an active role in their own development. Employees must be compensated fairly and the local community needs to be engaged on multiple levels. Most importantly, the “people who are going to benefit from your effort have to have equitable and authentic participation,” says Jimmie Briggs. Merely delivering interventions in a new context is not only impractical, it can lead to dangerous outcomes. Aspiring social entrepreneurs can learn from the failures of those before them, and carry out the right kind of development — contextualized and based in the community.
3. We need to incorporate honesty into the traditional funder/ grantee relationship.
There exists a deep-rooted paradox in the development sector: funders want innovative and disruptive ideas to tackle the complex issues of poverty, but it is difficult for risk-takers to actually execute these concepts. There is a lack of structure and trust: grantees are not always open about the risks they face, while funders avoid risky projects and may discontinue funding when projects fail. This disconnect leads to asymmetrical relationships, where funders hold disproportionate power and the realities on the ground are not addressed.
Boris Bulayev, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Educate!, explains how funders naturally disincentivize evidence-based projects by raising the stakes for NGOs that present in-depth evaluations of their work. “I think it is a natural human bias,” says Boris, “you want more information, but you’re going to look more critically at the things you have more insight into.” This trend supports a dishonest conversation between funders and grantees; intensive evaluation should not lessen an organization’s ability to get funding if a project is having long-term impact. Zainab Salbi, Founder and Former CEO of Women for Women International, argues that “we are missing an honest, real, unapologetic conversation” between funders and grantees, and that “we must have an appetite for talking, not pitching.” The more honesty we incorporate into this relationship, the more likely these disconnects can be addressed.
4. Change doesn’t happen overnight.
Producing transformative results takes a long time. Reverend Jesse Jackson explains that “those who will be change agents must be prepared to be long distance runners. You don’t move big boulders with a single punch.” Let’s all be more honest about our capacity to change a life, start a movement, or build an innovative product, in a short amount of time. Alex Torpey, entrepreneur and formerly one of the youngest mayors in New Jersey, explains that “[change] is not going to happen in an election cycle. It may take months or years to actually see results.” John Hope Bryant, Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Operation Hope, admits that “the industry has to be reflective and say, are we achieving our objectives? No. Are we eradicating poverty? Not clearly fast enough.” Despite this, John reminds us to focus on hope: “it’s a challenge. But every challenge is meant to be managed.”
Subscribe to Failures from the Field to hear more authentic conversations with innovators, understand unheard realities in the sector, and learn the most important lessons — the failures from the field. Catch up on Season 1 and stay tuned for the release of Season 2 episodes starting on January 3rd.
