Dignity isn’t the by-product of development. It’s the foundation.

This blog also appears in Alliance magazine. Published here, this piece forms part of a series of essays about Possible Now. See the others:

• Blossoming at a new dawn – 30 years of Indonesia for Humanity
• Coming alongside Possible Now: From social innovation to a good society
• Exploring the future of a good society – relational networks focused on collective change and transformation
• From garden minds to garden practice: Supporting organizational regeneration while the ground is still shaking
• Possible Now and the journey from machine mind to garden mind). 
• Unlearning, relearning and learning anew

Jon Edwards

I was reading a blog recently on the ongoing review of Norwegian Development Policy. In it, the writer urges Norway to “launch a new, unifying idea: dignified development.”

I fundamentally agree — except with the idea that dignified development is either new or unifying. Dignity has the potential to be unifying, certainly. But it is not a new idea, and the international “development” world has paid scant regard to it for decades. It seems odd that development processes are not intrinsically dignified. Nevertheless, the processes that the international development community and international philanthropy use to carry out their work often do not treat people, partners, organizations or places with dignity. Lip service is paid in the glossy brochures; peel back the layers and the disconnect between rhetoric and behaviour is plain.

Being generous, I suspect this is partly unconscious bias. But it is also because dignity is too often treated as a side-effect of social change — a happy by-product — rather than a fundamental outcome in itself. Mainstream development practice assumes that if people had access to potable water, they would live dignified lives. My own view runs the other way: outputs like potable water are side-effects of intentional, dignity-centred development processes — not the reverse.

There have always been groups of people working together, in solidarity, on the edges — rejecting the mainstream and the status quo it maintains, largely because they have experienced first-hand the undignified ways the development world treats them and others. They have often worked in isolation, largely ignored by the institutionalized funding world (and, in many cases, ignoring it right back). For these groups, dignity is both a way of working and a goal in the work itself.

I’ve spent over 35 years working at the edges of philanthropy and grantmaking internationally, and I’ve always been curious about the role invisible concepts like dignity play in social change work. This piece sets out what I’ve learned — from research, and from practice — about why dignity has to be a starting point, not an afterthought.

What the data showed

In one previous philanthropy advisory role, I worked with the social statistician Barry Knight to dig into this question properly. We set out to measure factors we felt were critical to long-term community resilience but that are usually ignored because they’re conceptual and nuanced — hard to count — things like confidence, trust, leadership or the use of community assets.

Dignity kept coming up as a key theme. With support from a grant partner, we ran a series of dialogues with our grant partners to explore it further. A resulting report confirmed what I’ve set out above: dignity is both an underlying foundation for development to happen and a test of long-term developmental outcomes. Participants felt dignity is the “moral core” of development — more important than other more tangible outcomes. Dignity determines whether people feel respected, valued, and able to shape their own lives. Without it, development simply replicates colonial power structures.

Given its importance, how do you actually measure a poorly defined “cluster concept” like dignity? We knew precise scientific measurement wasn’t possible, but we tried anyway: we built a model of dignity in our data and ran a factor analysis against two other models of social change and development work. The first was a “service delivery” model — still, despite the rhetoric, the mainstream way of delivering programmes worldwide, where tangible outputs (education, health, livelihoods or other) dominate. The second was a “community philanthropy” approach, where the critical driver isn’t the output itself but the investment people make in changing their own lives and communities — the use and development of local assets, resources, and relationships, alongside confidence, trust, and dignity.

The cohort wasn’t huge — 75 organizations responded over a six-year period — and the usual caveats around self-reporting apply. What was important though was the diversity of respondents: local, national, international, small, large, academic, generalist and sector-specific. Organizations completed the same survey each year, covering mission, values, methods, indicators, the SDGs and “most significant change.”

“The headline finding? Across six years of data, organizations rooted in community philanthropy show the strongest relationship with dignity.”

The headline finding? Across six years of data, organizations rooted in community philanthropy show the strongest relationship with dignity. The correlation is substantial (for the geeks reading this, r = .409 where 0 is no correlation and 1 is a perfect one) — not as strong as a strictly linear model of change would demand, but in social science (and social change) terms, a distinct and strong pattern. By contrast, service-delivery models show virtually no relationship with dignity at all (r = .077).

This matters. It means dignity is not random — not an automatic, whimsical by-product of delivering services and goods, even through local “partners.” It is deliberate. Dignity emerges from ecosystems of trust, leadership and community philanthropy — not from projects, log-frames, or service delivery.

Why this happens: A failure of funding architecture

One of the defining characteristics of a community philanthropy approach is that communities — in every sense — take agency over shaping their own lives: defining their own problems, developing their own solutions, using their own assets and resources to put the work into practice, to bring about change. Claiming power. Controlling destiny.

When communities fund themselves in this way, even modestly, powerful things happen. Trust deepens. Legitimacy grows. People become harder to dismiss or divide. In contrast, organizations dependent on significant external financing risk losing the very thing that makes them strong: their rootedness.

“When communities fund themselves in this way, even modestly, powerful things happen. Trust deepens. Legitimacy grows. People become harder to dismiss or divide.”

We see the consequences everywhere. In the UK and beyond, politicians are exploiting weakened community ties. Governments duck responsibilities, knowing external actors will fill the gap — or they curtail action on human rights by branding it “foreign interference.” INGOs and multilateral agencies, despite rhetoric about “shifting power”, continue to operate through structures that centralize authority rather than redistribute it. The result is a system that talks transformation but practices maintenance.

Those working at the edges have watched the pattern repeat: when local organizations become implementers of someone else’s agenda, community ties erode. The scramble for external resources frays trust, solidarity and mutual support — the very foundations of collective action. This is not a failure of communities or community organizing. It is a failure of the funding architecture.

Time-bound projects, externally-defined problems, and rigid compliance regimes do not build dignity, and they do not build power — not even the power to act for oneself. They extract power: power over, not power with. They turn people and organizations into delivery mechanisms rather than civic actors. They reward alignment with donor priorities over responsiveness to community realities. And they let governments abdicate responsibility for basic rights and services.

From direction to accompaniment

In her Possible Now blog, Jenny Hodgson refers to horizontal ways of working. That resonated. In a previous advisory role with an international grantmaker, the team I worked with coined the term “horizontal philanthropy” to describe what we were trying to do: we felt we had no legitimate role to play unless we came alongside what people and organizations were already doing with their own resources. That shift — from direction and control to accompaniment — felt profound.

It means:

• Loosening the strings, allowing local organizations to act autonomously.
• Trusting local knowledge.
• Investing in relationships rather than deliverables.
• Strengthening organizations rather than fixing problems.
• Placing funder requirements below community priorities.

This is not soft or naïve. It is disciplined, political work — and it is hard. We ran into the barriers many face: legal advisors, financial controllers and risk-averse boards, all rooted in persistent colonial mind-sets that assume communities cannot be trusted with their own futures.

Yet we also saw what happens when funders operate differently: confidence grows, networks strengthen and the invisible infrastructure of collective action becomes visible.

The most important insight from this work is that the infrastructure that matters most is not physical or financial — it’s relational. Trust, solidarity, mutual support, shared purpose, local assets, collective confidence: these invisible phenomena are the bedrock of community action. They are the ties that bind communities and enable them to act. They are slow to build, easy to overlook, and impossible to replicate through project logic. But they are the only foundation on which lasting, durable change can grow.

“The most important insight from this work is that the infrastructure that matters most is not physical or financial — it’s relational.”

The transformation people seek — to value and be valued — cannot be achieved within political and economic systems that reduce everything to commodities and returns on investment. Those systems are designed to extract, not to nurture. They reward scale, not depth, and operate through control, not connection.

Many trusts and foundations espouse values like trust, equity, and transparency. Yet their practices often contradict them. They demand accountability without offering it. They preach equity while reproducing inequity, both within their own institutions and in relation to other actors. They claim trust while designing systems built on mistrust. These contradictions are not inevitable. They are choices.

Practices that undermine dignity — and practices that build it

In the Dignity and Development dialogue referenced above, organizations identified the behaviours that support or undermine dignity in practice.

Practices which undermine dignity included:

• Power blindness — failing to understand local hierarchies, oppression or cultural norms.
• Replicating colonial dynamics — outsiders defining needs, controlling resources and imposing language or systems.
• Creating dependency instead of building agency.
• Ignoring the voices of those affected by development.
• Undignified behaviour by staff — including exploitation, disrespect or paternalism.

Practices that build dignity included:

• Do No Harm — intentional reflection on how actions affect people’s sense of worth.
• Inclusive framing — using empowering political narratives (e.g. “inclusive society” rather than “fixing deficits”).
• Co-creation — doing things with people, not to.
• Human rights frameworks — grounding work in rights to participation, non-discrimination, accountability and empowerment.

Private, institutionalized philanthropy is not going away, and its structures will not transform overnight. But it can choose to operate differently — more horizontally, more relationally, more courageously.

What funders must do

For this to happen, funders must:

• Recognize that legitimacy comes from communities, not institutions.
• Recognize that dignity is a design principle, not an afterthought.
• Invest in people and relationships, not projects.
• Accompany rather than direct.
• Dismantle internal practices that are at odds with their stated values.
• Trust communities to define problems and solutions.
• Recognize that change takes time — be patient and invest long-term.
• Accept that transformation is slow, messy and emergent.

There are already examples of philanthropy doing this well. They are exceptional — in both senses. They are the exception not because such work is impossible, but because it is hard and often uncomfortable. Discomfort is the price of transformation.

The edges are the centre

Organizations at the edges, having worked in relative isolation for decades, are beginning to join up. Conversations are taking place between people and organizations who have rarely had the opportunity to meet, to share, to celebrate together, to think and plan at scale. Progressive funders, among others, have been helping to drive this connectedness: recognizing with a privileged birds-eye view, that the connections across portfolios of grants are as critical as the funded work itself.

“Organizations at the edges, having worked in relative isolation for decades, are beginning to join up. Conversations are taking place between people and organizations who have rarely had the opportunity to meet, to share, to celebrate together, to think and plan at scale.”

Some key themes are emerging from these conversations — the dialogue on dignity is one. These organizations are building a powerful voice, and as the old international development structures and practices crumble, it is the work and lessons from the edges we need to listen to. The emergent alternative world.

Kamala Chandrakirana of Indonesia for Humanity calls this Blossoming.

The question for philanthropy is not whether it can change. It is whether it is willing to. The data makes clear that other ways of working are not only possible but achieve greater long-term impact.  The work at the edges shows us what is possible: communities acting with agency, building their own assets, strengthening their own ties, and imagining futures beyond scarcity and control.

Philanthropy’s role is not to lead this work but to come alongside it — to nourish what is already growing, and to remove the barriers that keep people, organizations and communities from flourishing. To be humble. To listen. To learn.

By: Jon Edwards, a freelance consultant, working with philanthropy, grantmakers and others to help transform organizations and practice. He can be contacted at jonedwardsconsulting@proton.me.