Who Signs Your Proposals? The Invisible Architecture of Power in Program Design

This is a longer reflection on power, programme design, and proposal writing — shaped by my own complicity, mistakes, and learning over the past fifteen years. It’s not a how-to. It’s an invitation to look more closely at where power hides.

I've had a wonderfully slow start to 2026. I'm gradually finding my rhythm again after maternity leave, and in these quieter moments, I've been reflecting on the past 15 years of my career, specifically, the immense power I've wielded, often without fully acknowledging it.

For most of my professional life, I've been designing experiences for other people. As a teacher, I loved the ritual of new terms: developing schemes of work, crafting lesson plans, building resources that would shape how young people learned. Later, when I moved into the humanitarian sector, the scale expanded dramatically. I was designing entire education programs, sometimes for thousands of children, teachers, and communities across multiple countries.

Now designing programs and writing bids for funding based on that design isn’t a neutral practice. It’s one of the most powerful,  and least accountable roles in the social impact sector.

When proposals become the design process

In my humble opinion, proposal writing and program design should not be the same thing. But in most INGOs that I have worked for, they've become indistinguishable.

To me, program design should be a deliberate process of understanding context, building relationships, analysing systems, testing assumptions with communities. It should happen before you ever approach a funder.

Whereas proposal writing is creating a document to convince a specific funder to resource work that's already been co-designed.

But that’s not what happens.

Most of the INGOs I worked in, the proposal deadline became the design process. You figure out what the programme should look like at the same time as you write the document that will lock that design in for the next three years.

When I worked as a globally positioned education adviser, I remember proposals shaped almost entirely around what fitted a funder’s theory of change, what could be squeezed into ECHO, UKAID, or Dubai Cares log frame templates, and what sounded innovative enough to be competitive.

Communities didn’t shape those programmes. Templates did.

And once the proposal was approved, we were stuck with whatever we’d managed to articulate in those frantic three weeks.

I have vivid memories of being holed up in offices, frantically typing away at proposals, cross-referencing minimum standards, pulling statistics from desk research about contexts I'd never visited. I was making decisions about education systems I had no lived experience of, yet by virtue of my position, I got to determine what the funding would look like if successful. How many teachers per student. Which core interventions to include. What the budget would prioritize.

If I am completely honest with myself, early on in my career, I rarely thought about the power I was holding.

The Myth of “ Localization”

Nowadays, although I no longer work as an aid worker, I still notice that there is a lot of talk about "localization”, this buzzword that insinuates shifting power to local organizations and communities. Across the UK charity sector, there have been similar calls for more funding for smaller, community-based organisations. But if we're honest, nothing has fundamentally changed in how programs get designed or proposals get written.

About fifteen years ago ( wow I sort of gasped writing that), I remember sitting in a meeting at an INGO in London where a debate unfolded around school feeding programs. A room full of people making organizational policy decisions about whether to support school feeding in education in emergencies interventions . The people in the room were literally taking a stance to tell the World Food Programme that they were against funding going towards the distribution of cornmeal in a new education program that was being designed.

I was a trainee at the time. And I had relied on free school meals as a child.

I sat there, stunned, listening to people who had never experienced food insecurity theorizing about the "dependency" school feeding creates, about "better" interventions, about why we should oppose this approach. People who had no idea what it meant to be a kid whose main meal came from school. Who'd never felt the particular shame and relief mixed up in that experience.

The disconnect was staggering. And I didn't have the language or the positional power at the time to name what was wrong with that room. 

Yet this example was “normal” for the humanitarian sector during the 2010s—a bunch of people far removed from the issue, making definitive calls about what communities need, how resources should flow, based on what the "evidence" says.

And despite all the rhetoric and anti-racist, decolonial statements that came out in 2020,  I don’t know if that much has changed when it comes to proposal writing and program design.

Participation is still, at best, consultation. And even that consultation rarely extends to the budget. Communities aren't being asked to determine who gets what, when, and why. They're not co-designing the financial architecture of interventions that will affect their lives.

I am guessing that across development organisations, what typically happens is this: someone sits at a computer, conducts desk research, maybe facilitates a "needs assessment" (which I've argued elsewhere should be stopped), and then crafts a proposal that will determine resource flows and program structures. We call it technical. Evidence-based. Best practice. But it's still a handful of people, far removed from the communities affected, architecting what's possible.

The Invisible Power of Wordsmithing

If you write proposals or design programmes, you hold extraordinary power.

You create the context. You decide which problems are amplified and which are minimised. You select which statistics matter. You frame communities in ways that make them “fundable” — often through deficit, not dignity rather than assets, agency, and existing solutions.

You architect what's possible. Through your budget lines and activity descriptions, you're literally building the boundaries of what can happen. Will there be flexibility for community-led adaptation? Or will every dollar and deliverable be predetermined?

You shape narratives. The language you use, whether you describe people as "vulnerable," "marginalized," "beneficiaries," or as "community leaders," "changemakers," "partners"—has real consequences for how they're perceived and treated.

A couple of years ago, I was talking with Dr. Genevieve Greer and she named something I'd long felt but never articulated: as a proposal writer, there's almost no accountability. You don't sign proposals. Your name isn't attached. If you write something harmful, inaccurate, or just plain stupid, there's no way to trace it back to you. The proposal becomes "the organization's," and individual responsibility dissolves.

I think this invisibility is dangerous. It allows harmful practices to continue unchecked. It means the people wielding the most power in resource allocation are often the least accountable.

We Need to Do This Differently

Proposal writing and program design need to come from a fundamentally different place.

For those of you working within organisations, can you imagine if program design and proposal writing processes started from an abundant mindset rather than a scarcity-driven, frantic one?

If we actually built in time for meaningful participation—not rushed consultations to tick boxes, but genuine co-design processes where if the people most impacted by the issues shaped budgets, strategies, and success metrics?

Imagine if we took an anti-oppressive approach to how we describe communities and contexts? And employed cultural sensitivity readers, like publishers do, with the task of  interrogating our language, challenging deficit narratives, and ensuring that the people we're writing about would recognize themselves in our descriptions—and feel respected by them.

And what if proposal designers actually had to put their names on their work? Sign it. Own the choices we make about how we describe communities, what we prioritize, who we center.

I'm saying it because what we're doing now doesn't work. We have decades of evidence showing that programs designed without genuine participation from the people they're meant to serve don't create lasting change. We know this. The data is there. The failed and unsustainable projects are everywhere.

But we keep doing the same thing. Why? Because it's what funders expect. Because we're working under impossible deadlines. Because it's what we know how to do. Because changing it feels too hard, too slow, too risky when we're just trying to keep the lights on and the programs running.

Who is Paying for All of This?

And even if there is an element of copy and paste to many proposals, most organizations still invest dozens—sometimes hundreds—of hours into proposal development with no guarantee of funding. Staff time, community consultations, partner coordination calls, budget iterations, all of this labour happens speculatively, often with a 5% success rate or lower.

Most fundraisers would say that organizations can't afford to do genuine participatory design. They can't pay community members for their time and expertise in co-designing programs before they have funding confirmation. They can't invest in the relational work that meaningful co-creation requires.

This essentially means the current system demands extensive unpaid labour from organizations (particularly local ones with fewer reserves) while funders bear no cost until a proposal succeeds.

So maybe we need to be advocating for funders to actually resource the design phase. Provide design grants that allow organizations to meaningfully engage communities before writing a single word? Which would mean proposal timelines would have to be measured in months, not weeks, allowing for iterative co-design rather than frantic desk research.

This would fundamentally shift who gets to participate in shaping programs—and it would stop wasting dozens of people's time on proposals that were never going to be funded anyway.

"But What's possible right now"

I know what you're thinking. "This sounds great in theory, but I'm a consultant on a three-week contract to turn around a proposal. Or I'm an over-worked fundraiser or technical advisor in a precarious job market. I don't have the luxury of months-long participatory processes."

I get it. I've been in both those positions.

But we're not talking about perfection. We're talking about choices within constraints.

There's this concept I think and have written about a lot—constructive complicity. This isn’t about excusing harm. It’s about recognising where we sit,  and choosing redistribution over purity. Most of us don't have the luxury/courage of quitting every organization with problematic practices. We have bills to pay, people depending on us. But if we're in the room, if we have access to resources and decision-making spaces, then we have a responsibility to make it our business to radically redistribute. Reparative theft, if you will, as Remi Joseph-Salisbury and Laura Connelly like to call it. 

Even on a tight timeline, you have choices. You can choose language that centres dignity rather than deficit. You can be transparent in your writing about what you don't know. You can name when you're making assumptions. You can build in budget lines for community-led decision-making that give future flexibility, even if you can't co-design the whole thing now. 

And if you're holding the program design and proposal writing pen? You can do this in many different ways. For example, you can : 

• Document what you're seeing - Keep notes on extractive practices, even if just for yourself. Sometimes just naming it helps you stay clear about what's wrong.
• Find your people - Build relationships with program staff who actually work with communities. They often have crucial insights that never make it into proposals. Create informal working groups or peer learning spaces where you can share strategies.
• Ask questions in meetings - "Whose voices are missing from this conversation?" isn't confrontational, but it plants seeds. You can gently disrupt power by asking questions.
• Be strategic with budget lines - Sneak in "community advisory stipends," "participatory review processes," "local partner co-design workshops." Once it's in the budget, it's harder to remove.
• Use funder language against itself - If the RFP mentions "community-led" or "locally-driven," hold them to it. Ask "how can we resource that properly?"
• Create informal feedback loops - Even if formal processes don't exist, you can share draft sections with program staff or partners for input before final submission.
• Ally with finance/operations - They often care about realistic budgets and timelines. Frame participation as risk mitigation.

Even within serious constraints, we make dozens of micro-decisions every day. Those decisions compound.

And look, if you're a consultant surviving proposal to proposal, you're also operating within an extractive system. The precarity isn't your fault. But it also doesn't absolve us from thinking about the power we hold, however temporarily, when we're the ones with our hands on the keyboard.

We Can Do Better

I don’t write this from a place of certainty. I’ve been complicit in the very practices I’m critiquing. I’ve rushed proposals, flattened complexity, and made decisions from far away. But sitting with that discomfort has made one thing clear to me: the architecture of programmes and proposals is never just technical. It quietly determines whose knowledge counts, whose time is valued, and whose futures are made negotiable

And here's what I believe: The people designing programs and writing proposals can be catalysts for genuine systems change. But only if we're willing to interrogate our own power, challenge the norms we've inherited, and commit to doing the messy, relational work of authentic co-design.

The architecture of proposals might seem technical, even boring. But it's profoundly political. Every choice we make, from word selection to budget allocation, either reinforces existing power dynamics or disrupts them.

So I'll ask you: Who signs your proposals? And what would change if you had to put your name on every word?

A note on what Design for Social Impact is building in 2026

These questions about power, accountability, participation, and repair are what led me to rebuild the Design for Social Impact Accelerator/Designing Otherwise: Power, Proposals, and Redistribution

We only meet for eight weeks (although the sessions are carefully designed and far from frantic).  We’ve designed an abolition-informed, regenerative programme for people designing programmes and writing proposals inside constrained systems — alongside CBO leaders who live with the consequences of those decisions.

I don’t believe courses fix systems. But I do believe they can create shared language, solidarity, and leverage, and help us practise differently, together.

As always, our faculty of facilitators are excellent! More on this to come but as part of our social enterprises mission, we prioritise paying systems-impacted people who are passionate and skilled in sharing their knowledge skills, and experiences of being recipients of and providers of social impact. 

If you’d like to learn more about the next cohort launching in June 2026, you can find the details here: https://www.designforsocialimpact.io/designforsocialimpactaccelerator

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