You Are Not a Grant Writer or Technical Advisor. You Are a Social Impact Architect.

A few months ago, I was deep in conversation with a friend who works at the intersection of architecture and community development. We were doing what we often do, pulling apart the logic of how spaces get designed, who gets to decide, and what assumptions get baked into a structure before the first brick is laid. 

We live in the same part of London, a neighbourhood that has watched new builds multiply over the past decade. Mixed-tenure developments sold as integration. But look closer and the architecture tells a different story. In my block, there are two separate entrances — one for owners, one for social housing residents. Children in the social housing side cannot access the shared playground. The building is one structure. The design encodes two worlds.

We came to the conclusion that the most political decision an architect makes is what they leave out of the blueprint.

I've been sitting with that ever since. Because I kept thinking about proposals. About theories of change. About the context sections we write to explain why a community needs what we're offering. About all the decisions that get made — quietly, quickly, under deadline — about what to include, what to foreground, and what to leave off the page entirely.

We do the same thing. We just don't call it architecture.

But that's exactly what it is. And once you start seeing it that way, you can't unsee it.

There is a building in the South Bronx that no longer stands, but whose blueprints are still in use across the world. I found out about this special place whilst I was reading Cara Page and Erica Woodland’s Healing Justice: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care and Safety ( a great book btw) and I have been thinking its relevance to those of us across the intersections of service/program design, research and policy ever since.

Lincoln Detox was a drug detoxification clinic inside Lincoln Hospital — founded in 1970 by members and affiliates of the Black Panther Party, the Republic of New Afrika, the Young Lords, and Students for a Democratic Society.The community had been calling Lincoln Hospital a "butchers shop" for years. It had been suffering from a city that didn’t seem to care. When heroin began flooding the South Bronx, the municipal response was methadone: a pharmaceutical swap that community members called, correctly, another form of chemical control.

In 1970, Lincoln Detox hired a young activist named Mutulu Shakur as director of political education. Mutulu Shakur was affiliated with the Republic of New Afrika, a Black nationalist group that advocated for an independent Black nation in the American South. He was twenty years old. What he brought wasn’t a grant proposal. He brought an entirely different architecture of care.

Mutulu Shakur became interested in acupuncture after learning about its use as a widely dispensed community health service in Maoist China. He went to train in Quebec and California. He returned to New York and established Lincoln Detox’s acupuncture training program — one of the first of its kind in the country. And crucially: when asked whether they had permission to open the school, Walter Bosque — one of Shakur’s collaborators — recalled simply: “No. Were we gonna ask for permission? No, ‘cause they would’ve said no anyway. We just did it.” 

Every department was a collective — the administration, the counsellors, the nurses, the medical staff. There was no single leader. As Walter Bosque described it: “We tried to imitate the socialist methods around the world — from Russia, to China, to Cuba. That’s why I call it socialized medicine, because it had never been done in America before.”

In November 1978, a task force of 200 police officers closed Lincoln Detox down. As explored in the blog Of Part and Parcel Mutulu Shakur himself believed the government found acupuncture in revolutionary hands to be a specific threat. The protocol they developed — the NADA five-point ear acupuncture protocol — is now used globally PubMed Central, in clinics that rarely know its origin.

What architects actually do

When we think about architects, we picture buildings. But what architects actually do is design conditions — conditions for how people move, gather, rest, heal, learn, fight, survive. They work inside constraint (budget, zoning, structural physics) and still ask: what could this space make possible?

This is exactly what you are doing when you design a proposal, a programme, a theory of change. You are not filling in boxes. You are making decisions about load-bearing structures: what assumptions hold everything up, which walls can come down, where the light gets in, who has access to which rooms.

Sasha Costanza-Chock, in Design Justice, makes this visible with the question that program and fundraising functions in most non-profits, as well as the public sector have long evaded: who gets to be the designer? Most programme design — and most proposal design — is done by people who will never live in the building they are constructing. The community it is “for” gets consulted in the way you might show a tenant the rendering: something to react to, not something they shaped. Sasha Costanza-Chock names this directly in this chapter — design processes that exclude affected communities reproduce inequality, regardless of how good the intentions.

Lincoln Detox was doing design justice before there was a name for it. The people with addiction were the people designing the treatment. The community experiencing the drug crisis was the community building the response. They didn’t just serve the people. They were the people. That distinction is architectural.

Proposals as contested sites

Here is something most proposal writing guides won’t tell you: a proposal is a contested site. I came across this term in academia and it essentially means: 

A contested site is a location, monument, or geographical area whose meaning, ownership, or use is under dispute, often featuring clashing historical narratives, political ideologies, or cultural memories 

Every proposal encodes assumptions about who has knowledge, whose problems are legible, what counts as evidence, and which futures are worth funding. Logic frameworks, theories of change, results hierarchies — these are not neutral scaffolding. They are load-bearing walls built on particular epistemologies. They tend to privilege linear causality over systems thinking. They render visible what can be measured and invisible what cannot. They reward communities who can translate their reality into the language of the funder’s architecture.

Most proposals never get this far. Context sections describe communities as “underserved” or “marginalised”— two words that remove the agents doing the underserving or marginalisation. Problems float free of their histories. The politics get edited out somewhere between the first draft and the funder submission, and we learn to call that professionalism. That sleight of hand deserves its own examination — and we’ll come back to it. But for now, notice that it happens. Notice where in your own proposals the political history of a problem quietly disappears.

When Mutulu Shakur and the Lincoln Detox team designed their programme, they made the opposite choice. They understood addiction within a political context — exploring how it harmed individuals, families, and communities, and what role governmental institutions had played in drug trafficking and profiteering.Their theory of change was explicitly structural: you cannot detox someone from heroin without addressing the conditions that made heroin available and appealing. They built political education into the programme itself.

No funder asked them to do that. They designed it anyway.

Three architectural principles for proposal design

So what does it actually mean to practice proposal design as architecture? Three things I keep coming back to:

1. Design for load, not for aesthetics. The most beautiful-sounding theory of change is worthless if the load-bearing assumption — that people will change behaviour without structural change, cannot hold the weight. Identify what your proposal actually rests on. Name it explicitly, even when it’s uncomfortable.

2. Ask who is in the room where the blueprint is made. Not in the consultation phase. In the design phase. Costanza-Chock’s principle, along with many others in the equity-design space, is that design should be led by those most affected by the outcomes. That’s not a nice-to-have. It’s a structural requirement. Programs and services designed without input from the people who they are intended for tend to fail the people who will use them.

3. Design for the building you need, not the building they’ll fund. Lincoln Detox did not design an acupuncture school because a funder asked for one. They designed it because heroin was killing their community and they needed it. The funding question came second. This is a discipline. and in a sector that has learned to design programmes backwards from funding criteria, it is a radical one.

What gets shut down

I would be dishonest if I didn’t say this plainly: the most “architecturally” rigorous proposals e.g the ones that name structural causes, centre community power, reject deficit framing, and build towards genuine self-determination, are often the hardest to fund.

Mutulu Shakur believed the government found acupuncture in revolutionary hands to be a specific threat. Of Part and Parcel Lincoln Detox was shut down not because it failed, but because it worked, and because what it was building was something the state was not willing to sanction.

That is the political edge of this work. You are not just designing programmes. You are making decisions about what gets built in communities, by whom, toward what ends. That is social impact architecture in its most literal sense. And like all architecture, it is never only technical. It is always also political.

The blueprint Mutulu Shakur and his comrades drew in the South Bronx in 1970 is still in use in clinics around the world. Most of those clinics don’t know his name.

We should know his name. And we should know what kind of designing he was actually doing.

Something to sit with this week

Reading about Mutulu Shakur's approach to community-led design made me reflect on my practice. You don't need to overhaul everything ( or potentially you do, but lets start small-small!) . Before your next proposal, meeting, or design session, try holding one of these:

• Who is in the room where the blueprint is being made? Not the consultation room. The design room. If the people most affected aren't shaping the design from the beginning, what are you actually building — and for whom?
• What are your load-bearing assumptions? Find the one thing your whole theory of change rests on. Say it out loud. Ask whether it would survive contact with the community it concerns.
• What would you design if you started from need rather than from what's fundable? You don't have to build it tomorrow. But knowing the answer tells you something important about the gap between what's possible and what you're currently proposing.

These aren't abstract questions. They're structural ones. And structure, as any architect will tell you, is where the building either holds, or fails.

These linked in articles are the companions to the Design for Social Impact newsletter. If you’re a practitioner, funder, or org leader ready to go deeper — the Design for Social Impact Accelerator opens in June 2026 and is an eight-week, global classroom and learning community for non-profit, philanthropy, and academic professionals who shape proposals, fundraising, and strategy—and who are ready to rethink how social impact, and aid, is designed, led by a faculty of folxs with lived experience of being "“designed for” and recipients and designers of social justice programs