Why HCW is Leaning into Empowerment of Local Leadership

For over 10 years now, HCW has deliberately begun shifting to a focus on community collaboration and empowerment of local leaders in our work to prevent orphanhood. There are many components to this transition, including child welfare, cost effectiveness and sustainable change in the community. The focus of this article will be on the critical role of local leadership to own change initiatives in their communities and the role we now play in supporting and nurturing these local leaders to drive positive change.

As a starting point for anyone in the non-profit arena, we should all acknowledge that it’s incredibly easy to disempower local leaders in the name of “doing good”…in our case, it was caring for children who had lost their parents. We wanted so much to care for each child, ensure they were healthy, get them to school, etc. Those are all worthy objectives. But approaching this work from our perception of one child’s immediate needs was short-term in nature and did not take into account the broader landscape that needs to be addressed to promote long-term change. Our stated goal is to help children worldwide and that goes beyond just caring for a single child in need. Although “what does this one single child need” might be a simpler problem to solve, our focus needed to be “how do we create a positive environment for children to grow up in?” If we don’t find ways to encourage education, create jobs, address community needs for adequate health care, etc. what lasting change have we accomplished in the long run?

Given HCW’s desire to address these longer terms concerns as well as shorter term care of children, we had to do some hard, deep reflection on how we were operating. We found that we were often behaving in ways that were disempowering local leaders. We realized that we had become in many ways, the “decision-makers”, often directing the actions of local leaders for the good of the children we desired to serve. With this insight, we realized the inherent flaws in this approach.

First, when we disempower local leaders, we assume that “we know best”…We have the answer; we know how to get something done; we know what is best for the children. This of course is presumptuous of us due to the culture differences, distance, resources, skills and knowledge. Additionally, this presumption often lead us to not listen adequately to local leaders and their perspectives. It was easier to tell them what to be done, and since we hold the purse strings, is it any wonder that they would acquiesce to our approach?

Second, when we disempowered local leaders through our actions, we created a dynamic in the local population of “wait and see”. We found that decisions were not being made at the local level until leaders had heard from us…even if they knew the solution needed. This “wait and see” attitude has the affect of slowing everything down. Getting anything done would take longer and cost more when leaders waited for our approval to take action.

Third, when we disempowered local leaders, the surrounding community saw their “wait and see” attitude which had the effect of undermining the trust and credibility of these leaders. People won’t follow leaders that they don’t trust and who lack credibility, which ends up having a negative effect on the community, even when local leaders try to initiate positive changes to improve the community.

At HCW, we have been working on transitioning the way we work with our allies for quite a while now and though it hasn’t been easy, what we have found is that empowering local leaders, involving the entire community in change initiatives, and transitioning our roles to become supporters, nurturers, and consultants (vs. decision makers) brings about change faster and that change is much more likely to stick because there is now ownership at the local level. Change is no longer a “program” that we forced upon them; it is THEIR change efforts that are creating positive change. This results in greater success in both caring for children and helping to create strong, more resilient communities for these children to thrive in. Ultimately, we believe that is the key to addressing even the most pressing problems faced by our allies.

Rick Auman

Chairman, Helping Children Worldwide Board of Directors