This blog post was written by Rachel Lindley, our Chief Executive Officer.
Savings Group meeting in South Sudan.
Annually we report back on what Five Talents continues to do to be anti-racist and shift power to partners. We know that this is an ongoing journey rather than a race with a clear start and end point.
We’ve previously shared what we’ve been reading, listening to and learning. We’ve conducted a language audit which we now revisit annually - and, importantly, hold one another accountable to. While recruiting three new members of staff over the last year we tried to eliminate biases as much as possible by, for example, blind short-listing. We continue to use Memoranda of Understanding (our Grant Agreements) with partners which commit both Five Talents and the partner to the same standards, and we send quarterly grants to partners as soon as we have reviewed their finance reports. Previously, we did not release funding until all of the narrative and other quarterly reports we requested were 100% finalised. Sometimes this could mean partners had to wait a long time for funding whilst we resolved queries on a member story they submitted, for example. Those delays were unnecessary and exacerbated the power imbalance between us.
We’ve also held three ‘learning sessions’ over the past 12 months; in March, our Board and staff split into small groups to reflect on readings on decolonising fundraising, programmes and governance, then came back together to discuss how they applied to Five Talents. In September, we joined the BOND ‘Power in Development’ Conference, particularly engaging with sessions on ‘Becoming locally led’ and ‘Who should be telling a community’s story?’ All of our photography trips this year have been led by our partners. Finally, we revisited and updated our anti-racism action plan in December, aiming to identify two or three priority actions for 2023 but finally determining that many small actions may be equally important.
As this year began, we held a facilitated discussion across the whole Five Talents organisation (colleagues and Board members from Kenya and the USA joined virtually) to explore the shift towards decolonising fundraising. Some funders in the international development community now seek to fund locally-led civil society organisations directly - rather than through registered charities like Five Talents in the US or UK. We asked what this might mean for Five Talents and our partners in the future? There was much food for thought; we will revisit the discussion again later this year.
We’re grateful that the Savings Groups and Church partners at the core of Five Talents’ work are inherently locally owned & managed. At the same time we’re committed to ongoing learning and reflection, and to keep challenging ourselves and our norms. As ever, we encourage you to engage with the debates and hold us accountable too.