Beyond Policy: Five Conversations Funders Can Have to Support Meaningful Safeguarding Practice
by Gladys Onyango, Director of Program Learning & Impact
Safeguarding policies are essential to ensuring organizations are committed to running safe organizations and programs that actively promote and protect the welfare of their constituents and the communities they work with. However, as funders, we need to go beyond whether or not grantee-partners have a safeguarding policy and seek to understand how organizations navigate issues of power and its potential abuse in their work.
Here are some ways that funders can meaningfully approach safeguarding conversations with partners without focusing solely on policies.
1. Values, leadership, and culture: Values capture an organization’s core identity and what it considers most important. They also serve as a pact between individuals in an organization, guiding how they show up and relate with each other, their constituents or clients, and the broader society in which the organization operates. Safeguarding policies and procedures may not always address every potential issue in an organization. In such challenging situations, values can serve as a north star for an organization by guiding the right thing to do. A funder might ask a grantee how their values have recently aided or hindered them in navigating a tricky situation or ethical dilemma in the organization; another question could be around the behaviors that are tolerated and not tolerated by an organization, requesting specific examples of how they have enforced this. In some cases, organizations may not have made this link between their organizational values and behavior, so such conversations may help make the connection more explicit.
2. Governance and oversight: Public benefit organizations have a legal and ethical obligation to conduct their activities transparently and in a responsive and accountable manner to their constituents and the wider public. Accountability questions tend to be relegated to after trust is broken or a problem such as a scandal has occurred or are addressed in reaction to tricky questions and pressure from funders, regulators, and the general public.
Investing in safe organizations and safe sectors is, therefore, also about supporting organizations to set up effective boards, management systems, or other governance and oversight mechanisms. This enables non-profit leaders and staff to balance the needs of diverse stakeholders in their decisions, actions, and activities and to hold each other to account when commitments are not met. The organization’s governance should fit its identity and mission (whether a community-based initiative, NGO, membership, or network organization) and reflect in an organization’s board composition, board charters, minutes, and internal policies and procedures. The absence of these could indicate issues around decision-making and power, an example being where an organization is oriented entirely around its founder.
3. Community involvement and accountability: Integrally, safeguarding is also about organizations having appropriate mechanisms to involve their constituents in program design, monitoring, and implementation. Are constituents seen as assets, as people with agency over their lives with valuable ideas for solving problems, or as passive beneficiaries of programs and services?
The best programs we have seen actively engage people and communities with lived experience — as advisors, staff, volunteers, and advocates. This results in genuinely responsive and holistic programs that treat the constituents as the “experts” and leverage community assets and partnerships to serve them as whole beings with multidimensional needs. On the flip side, we have seen top-down programs and impact initiatives that treat constituents as problems or, worse, mere numbers — the results of which are often always undignified, piecemeal services that fail to create a real impact or even cause harm in the lives of the people they are intended to benefit. As part of improving safeguarding, funders can support grantees in setting up meaningful community involvement and accountability systems, as well as effective channels of receiving and acting on constituent issues, complaints, and general feedback in a timely and effective manner.
4. Quality and safety in programming: Non-profits and social enterprises (especially ones providing direct services such as child and youth programs, healthcare, education, and skills training) constantly struggle to balance limited resources with funders’ growth expectations and pressure to reach more constituents and extend every dollar. These pressures come with the risk of providing lower-quality services and making programming choices or compromises that could jeopardize the wellbeing of those they exist to serve in the first place.
Funders can support safe programming by listening to grantees’ perspectives on providing quality services while keeping staff and volunteers safe as they implement programs. They can help organizations to hire qualified personnel that are well-compensated and supported to do their jobs. They can also assist partners in conducting safeguarding program risk assessments and allocate additional funding towards mitigating risks that might arise in their programs and operations. Consider an organization running an after-school life skills program where schoolgirls occasionally stay late into the evening: the funder could allocate an additional budget line for transportation to ensure the girls get home safely at the end of the day. Flexible funding also plays an essential role in enabling organizations to cope and respond to emergencies and other unforeseen situations that could negatively impact constituents.
5. Storytelling and impact communication: Storytelling remains one of the most powerful tools for organizations to connect with audiences, move them to action, or raise funds. It is also an area that comes with an ethical responsibility to ensure that organizations are telling stories to empower rather than exploit those they are working with. The same risks of abuse and exploitation exist in M&E, data, and measurement practices when conducted in an extractive way and geared solely towards generating impact reports for funders.
Ethical and safe communication is an integral part of safeguarding. Funders have an opportunity to engage and support grantee partners to strengthen their practices around informed consent, confidentiality, anonymity, and data protection. Funders should also publish constituent impact stories from a place of strength and dignity and avoid reinforcing potentially harmful stigmas and stereotypes about populations and social issues.
Creating safe spaces for funder and grantee-partner discussions on these five issues can be a way to approach safeguarding conversations in practical and right-sized ways that inspire and catalyze tangible action across different areas of an organization.
