In 2023, a group of senior leaders from some of Australia's most respected impact organisations were asked a simple question: how many of you have a board that reflects the communities you serve?

Fewer than 14% was the proportion of philanthropic funders in Australia who agreed their executive and leadership teams were culturally diverse.

Alternatively, over 50% of the leadership within those communities these same funders served, was culturally diverse. A statistic that helps us see that the organisations closest to the ground doing the hardest work are more representative of the people they serve, than the institutions deciding where the money goes.

Take a moment to think about that.

This is a belonging problem and it isn't confined to philanthropy. It runs through the impact sector like a fault line, visible only if we choose to look at it, and in the few times it is called out. It also stays invisible if we’ve spent our career not having to do either of those things.

This is the Belonging Gap.

The distance between an organisation's stated commitment to the communities it serves and the degree to which those communities are actually present in decision-making, in leadership, in the way strategy is designed and stories are told.

The gap is not always intentional and this is what makes it so persistent.

Most leaders in the impact sector are people of genuine conviction. They come to this work because something in them demands it. They believe in equity and yet research from the Centre for Social Impact and the Jumbunna Institute tells us that almost 70% of grant recipients feel their values are incompatible with those of the organisations funding them.

So incompatible that they choose not to apply; and this should stop us. They choose not to compete and fail, or to simply try. They have decided from the outset that there is no point.

James Baldwin wrote that not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. Most sectors, and especially the impact sector, are very good at facing the problems outside their walls. However, we must confront how less practised we are at facing the ones within.

The Belonging Gap lives inside our organisations. In our boardrooms where faces don't reflect the communities we say we serve. In strategies written without the people they were written about sitting in the room. In the grant applications process built around a Western model of evidence (metrics and measurables) that assumes one way of knowing is the only way that counts.

Our team have watched organisations spend years building beautiful impact frameworks and then wonder why the communities they care about feel distant or even worse, simply absent. We’ve come to realise that it wasn’t a question of the right framework, but rather a question of cultivating, designing, a sense of belonging.

Belonging, properly understood, is both something felt and something we design. It is something structural, reflecting the degree to which an organisation's identity, its composition, culture, and decision-making actually reflects the people it is accountable to.

When these conditions are present, we observe an inherent legitimacy. The organisation feels real, authentic, true, relational and legitimate. The organisation feels trusted.

When these conditions are absent, even the most well-resourced, well-intentioned organisations are working at a fraction of their potential, and the communities they serve know it.

Some questions our team are putting to senior leaders in the impact sector are:

• Are the people your organisation exists for, present in the decisions you make?
• Are they present at the table when strategy is designed and set, where funding is directed
• Are they in the room when the organisation decides what it stands for?
• Are you listening to their voices, or are they simply consulted, and surveyed?

Very few organisations can answer these questions without the discomfort of truth. Which in itself is a keen observation about how most of our institutions are built, and an invitation to ask whether we're willing to build them differently as we step into the future.

Because belonging implies something reciprocal from all of us. A mutual sense of stewardship so the future of our organisations, and the society they function in thrives.

It requires of us something more; to ensure that the communities we serve are not just the beneficiaries of our work, but are woven into how that work is conceived, funded, directed, designed and measured.

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Source: Centre for Social Impact & Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research (2023). From Colour Blind to Race Conscious: A Roadmap to Action Diversity and Inclusion in Australian Philanthropy.
Photography: Jurien Huggins