Community Accountability: A Key Capability of Transformational Charities

In organizational life, accountability can be elusive. In many settings, fear keeps individuals from being accountable for their actions; in others, teams haven’t done the work to build the trust and practice the healthy conflict that equips them to be accountable to shared goals. But one point of accountability is always present: clients will demand what they need, especially of the charities that claim to support them.

Junxion’s Transformational Charity Framework sets out a range of operational structures and performance standards for contemporary charities. At the centre of the framework are five ‘Key Capabilities’ that guide the Transformational Charity to be more resilient and impactful. We’ve written about three in previous posts: Empowering Leadership, Supportive Operations, and Strategic Agility. The fourth is Community Accountability.

Or is it more elusive—like a community of interest or a community of practice? Our answer is ‘all of the above’—or more accurately, all those who meaningfully contribute to or rely on the affairs and impacts of the charity.

The building blocks of accountability are trust and integrity. Any organization must continually earn trust: mistakes are bound to happen, so how we recover is important. (We might think of trust like a well that can be tapped, but must also replenish.) And every organization that aims to endure must deliver on its commitments—or explain why it can’t. That’s integrity—and it may not always be easy, but we trust organizations and leaders who do the right thing even when it’s hard.

There are five essential elements to Community Accountability that the Transformational Charity must uphold:

Addressing Power Dynamics

Access to resources is always going to vary from one person or group to another, but accountable organizations work to reduce the friction, ensuring that those who have been historically overlooked are not continually underserved.

Likewise, the conscious use of authority inside organizations can have a meaningful, positive impact on community members’ experience of those organizations. Conscious leaders set a tone of inclusion and strive to ensure their staff, clients or constituents, partners and allies, vendors and suppliers all feel a sense of belonging in the ecosystem around the charity. Openness and transparency are readily accessible to all leaders, and are the antidotes to unconscious, unhealthy, or unjust uses of power.

Centering People Around the Charity

Transformational Charities consider staff members’, funders’, and beneficiaries’ expectations and experiences in all decisions, across all departments. This is not only essential to ensure nobody is left marginalized, but it also ensure the charity avails itself of the best ideas, understands the perspectives of its community(ies), and equips itself to respond—supporting the Strategic Agility we discussed in our last post.

Put another way, the Transformational Charity puts relationships first in its decision calculus. As opposed to organizations or leaders that are biased towards transactions, healthy, modern organizations recognize that how we work is as important as what we achieve. By putting relationships first, and honouring the needs, efforts, and aspirations of community members, the Transformational Charity embeds itself in that community as a vital partner and resource.

Building Partnership & Networks

Successful partnerships constitute a transparent exchange of insights and ideas between or among mission-aligned organizations and people. By cultivating this interchange, they learn together, and find complementary ways to resolve community challenges—or achieve community goals!—that are of mutual interest and benefit.

Put it this way: A truly aspirational purpose or vision is unlikely to be achieved by a single actor. So partnerships are essential to the achievement of meaningful pursuits.

Showcasing Work

Transformational Charities openly share progress, learning, successes and failures, breakthroughs and shortcomings. They distribute what they learn, in order that allies and peers need not make the same mistakes and accelerate their progress.

There is a significant trend in business toward transparent sustainability and social impact reporting, sitting alongside the long-standing tradition and requirements for financial reporting in publicly listed companies. Many business leaders embrace non-financial disclosures because of the dialogue it provokes with allies and peers—so open reporting is more than accountability to beneficiaries. It’s a dialogue with all stakeholders.

Exceeding Community Expectations on ESG

Environmental, social, and governance factors represent opportunities and risks for all organizations—not just businesses and certainly not just companies in the financial sector, where ESG was first popularized. Transformational Charities accept that they have obligations to pursue their mission and that they must do so within the carrying capacity of Earth, while providing for the needs of employed populations.

Community Accountability is the fourth of five Key Capabilities we’ve identified as crucial to ensuring charities’ long-term success in a rapidly changing world. While it can appear complicated and beyond the reach of smaller organizations, it’s fundamentally about building healthy, open, trusting relationships with community members… which is, after all, imperative to ‘charity.’ 

Interested in transforming your charity? Read our Transformational Charity Framework, an outline of the contemporary imperatives and capabilities charities need to develop to thrive for the next decade (and beyond.) We’ve also created an assessment to help your organization identify strength areas and improvement areas.