I’ve seen this in both organisational and community spaces. We step in with good intent, but without realising it, it becomes one side giving and the other receiving. There’s an invisible boundary that forms. On one side, the people with resources, plans, and solutions. On the other, the people those plans are meant to serve. And slowly, without anyone intending it, the gap widens instead of closing.
I’ve been there myself. Wanting to be useful, jumping in to help, only to realise later that I hadn’t fully understood what was needed. I had filled the space with my own assumptions about what would work. The intent was genuine. But intent isn’t enough if you haven’t really listened first.
Coaching taught me something different about this. It only works when it’s a real partnership. Both people are thinking, both are reflecting, both are co-creating. The coach isn’t there to hand over answers. The person being coached isn’t there to simply receive them. Something is being built together, and neither person walks away unchanged by that process.
I’ve started to wonder why more of our giving doesn’t work this way.
Philanthropy has the potential to do something extraordinary. But too often the model defaults to the same story. Someone decides what’s needed & someone else receives it. The knowledge, the lived experience, the ideas sitting on the receiving end of that equation, may never get to shape the solution.
What if we flipped that? What if the starting point wasn’t “Here’s what we think you need” but “What do you know that we don’t and what do you really need?”
This shift sounds small, but it changes everything. It changes who’s in the room, who’s asking the questions, who gets to define what success looks like (to them). It changes the relationship to something more authentic.
Organisations and communities that thrive, not just survive, always have this quality. Both sides showing up and contributing equally. Both sides are being changed in the process, and not one group arriving with a super-man (or super woman) plan and another group waiting to be helped.
This article was seeded by a conversation with one of the partners of SVP (Social Venture Partners).
