Too often, we think of nonprofits as organizations that exist to meet a need in our community. Someone needs support, so we build something to offer it. The need is real, and over time, we can begin to believe that keeping the service going is the goal.
But what if we allowed ourselves to imagine a structure that goes beyond that? Rather than focusing on our ability to keep meeting the need, we choose to commit to gently changing the conditions that created it in the first place. Our work could help build a future where our community has everything it needs, and the service we created is no longer necessary. Through this commitment, we transition our mentality from holding people through what’s happening now, and become dedicated to co-creating the autonomy to thrive in the future.
From Service to Systems Change
The true spirit of nonprofit programming is to work toward closing a gap. That means the work isn’t intended to support someone in the present alone, it’s about building the systems, resources, relationships, and conditions that make the problem less necessary tomorrow. In many ways, the goal should be to work ourselves out of a job.
When a nonprofit becomes more efficient at responding to the same problem, that is simply the baseline. The dream is that, someday, the problem has changed. And that means we have to stop treating exhaustion and sacrifice as evidence of how much we care. A system that requires people to continually give beyond their capacity may be surviving, but survival is not the same as sustainability.
Our Contributions Are Rooted in Our Experiences
It’s natural that every individual that enters the nonprofit world is going to be coming from a specific place of experience. For some of us, our experiences are woven into how we’ve witnessed our community within systems of oppression. We’ve personally experienced the same challenges that nonprofit programs address, watched someone we love experience it, or spent years wondering why the world was built this way in the first place. For us, eradication is the dream.
Other people may simply want to help. They might give a few hours, make a donation, volunteer at an event, or offer their expertise when they can. I don’t think we need to choose between those contributions, there is room for all of them. And, there is an opportunity to connect those individual acts of care to something larger, so that every contribution has a place within a bigger vision for what could become possible.
A small contribution can still be part of a much larger movement.
When Impact Becomes an Image
It can be easy to mistake activity for change. We can have the fundraiser, the partnership, the program, the meeting, the event, the campaign, and a beautifully curated story about all of it. We can have many people working very hard and still find ourselves standing in the same place years later.
Fundraising is an area greatly impacted by this mentality. Nonprofits are often asked to do more with less, so raising money can become its own form of survival. We tell stories about the people we serve, invite donors into the work, and celebrate every contribution. And, we may pass on the reflection of what the community actually needs to become more independent of the system. What would it look like to raise enough resources not simply to keep the program alive, but to build the conditions that allow community to thrive?
Partnerships can work the same way. A partnership can look impressive from the outside while organizations quietly duplicate each other’s work, protect information, or build parallel programs because they’re not sharing what they already know. However, the most powerful partnership often isn’t the one that looks the most impressive, it’s the one that helps the work move forward.
Designing for the End Game
This way of thinking has to reach beyond programs and into the systems surrounding them.
How do employees experience the organization? Do our systems simply make sure people do what they are supposed to do, or do they create space for people to tell us what’s working, what’s not, and what could become better?
How do we think about community feedback? Are we collecting stories because we need evidence of impact, or are we listening because the people closest to the work may see possibilities we can’t see from inside the organization?
How do we tell our stories? Are we always telling people what we’re doing right now, or are we helping them imagine the future we’re working toward?
I want our stories to have an ending. Not because the community disappears, but because the conditions have changed enough that the community no longer needs us to survive. Imagine being able to look back years from now and say, we helped build something that no longer needed to exist in the same way. That’s real impact.
The SGH & Co. Belief System
In my work, I don’t see myself as a humble servant who happens to have useful skills. I see myself as someone with expertise, experience, and imagination who can help close a gap that should never have existed in the first place. The communities we serve should have always had access to the resources, opportunities, relationships, safety, and power we are trying to create.
So I keep coming back to the actual questions that need answers:
What happens when we actually give people the tools to move beyond the conditions that have held them back?
What happens when a community that has spent generations creating something from almost nothing is finally given the resources to create from abundance?
What might they build when they are no longer spending all of their energy trying to survive?
Honestly, I think that possibility is a little dangerous. It sounds incredibly powerful to put that much possibility into the hands of people who have been told for generations what they could not become.
Our work isn’t to create systems that keep people dependent on us, it’s to create the conditions for people to become more free.
The most beautiful thing we can build is a system that eventually gives people enough space to simply live, create, lead, belong, and become whatever comes next. We’re not trying to make the problem more sustainable, we’re trying to change the system that created it.
About the Author: Shannen Garza Hakim is a Systems Designer, Social Entrepreneur, and Belonging Advocate. Through SGH & Co., she helps mission-driven organizations build sustainable infrastructure, strengthen programs, and create systems rooted in belonging.
