The way the charities engage people with lived experience of their cause is problematic, a sector consultant has said.
Khadijah Diskin, head of education and resident scholar at JMB Consulting, said that the sector needs to share power with people with lived experience.
She told Fundraising Magazine: “It is problematic in the way we invite people who are marginalised to tell us about their marginalisation.
“Although we don’t tend to see television ads with children with flies around their mouths anymore, we will invite a vulnerable and marginalised person into a room with people who don’t look like them, who are way more powerful than them, and ask them to recount stories of the awful things that they’ve been through.”
Diskin told Fundraising Magazine there should be a “shift” away from this as “we already know how bad things are for people”.
She continued: “We should be looking at how, in our infrastructure, we can embed that recognition right from the outset.”
Engagement with marginalised communities ‘should deeply trouble us’
How charities engage with marginalised communities “should deeply trouble us” as there is a notion that charity workers know more than those they aim to help, Diskin said.
“How we engage with marginalised communities should deeply trouble us. In the charity sector there is this notion that they don’t know anything, we have to go there and solve it.
“We will pay someone a high salary to go into those communities and manage projects when there is local expertise that is being paid substantially less. We need to break away from this and let go of our need for control and dominance.”
Diskin told Fundraising Magazine that there is a strong lineage of imperialism in philanthropy which still has a “significant hold on the charity sector”.
This is visible through the language the sector still uses today, Diskin argued, with it being passed down by “colonial missionaries”.
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