DESIGNING OTHERWISE

A newsletter for people who design programs and research and want to do it differently

Issue 06 | What I Was Reading When Everything Shifted

We are one week out from the Design for Social Impact Accelerator. Five spots remain. I'll come back to that at the end. But first, something I've wanted to share for a while.

People sometimes ask me where the intellectual framework behind DFSI comes from. The honest answer is: not only from the sector. Yes, I have been inspired in conferences, trainings and fundraising masterclasses.

But mainly, it has come from books. Most of them written nowhere near the social impact sector. None of them trying to help anyone write a better grant application.

Here are four that most directly shaped how I design programs, and why they're woven into the DNA of everything we do in the Accelerator. The full list of eight lives on Substack if you want to go deeper.

1. Cedric Robinson —The Black Radical Tradition

I used to think the problem with programs was quality. Better tools, sharper logframes, more rigorous evidence. Robinson ended that.

He showed me that capitalism didn't arrive racially neutral and get corrupted , it arrived already racial, built on enslaved labour and colonised land. Once I had that, the categories I'd been writing into every proposal, developing, fragile, low-capacity, stopped being descriptions and revealed themselves as part of the same machinery that produced the wealth I was applying to.

Robinson is why I now start a program design by asking what produced the conditions , and what people were already doing about it before I arrived.

2. INCITE! — The Revolution Will Not Be Funded

This is the book that introduced me to the non-profit industrial complex — the idea that the sector doesn't censor radical work, it funds it into something else. Domesticates it. Turns movement into deliverables, political demand into measurable output.

I had watched organisations I loved soften over successive funding cycles and never had a name for what was happening. INCITE! gave me the name. And with it a different question, not how do I design a better programme? but what is this funding architecture designed to make impossible?

It's why I now treat budgets and grant structures as political documents. Because money is not neutral infrastructure. It is design and it designs us back ( check out our free Participatory Budget Tool)

3. Linda Tuhiwai Smith — Decolonizing Methodologies

I cannot write the words research or baseline or capture learnings without a small flinch now. Smith is why.

She lays out how research has been one of colonialism's sharpest tools — how the act of studying, measuring, and theorising communities has been a way of taking from them while calling it knowledge. For anyone in MEL, this book is not optional. It asks the question our frameworks are designed to avoid: whose knowledge counts as evidence, who is the knower and who is merely the known.

When I teach data reframe and refusal tactics in the Accelerator, Smith's ideas are sitting in the room.

4. Cara Page & Erica Woodland — Healing Justice Lineages

This one reframed everything I thought I knew about psychosocial support, those services so often arrive detached from any analysis of what is causing the harm. Care as a sticking plaster over a wound the system keeps reopening.

Page and Woodland showed me that care, designed well, is not a service tacked onto a programme. It is the political work itself. The examples they share in their book emphasise how important it is to treat the conditions, not just the people.

There's a pattern across all eight books I didn't plan. Every one of them refuses a separation the sector treats as natural. Robinson refuses the split between race and capital. INCITE! refuses the split between funding and politics. Smith refuses the split between the researcher and the researched. Page and Woodland refuse the deepest one — between healing and liberation.

The sector lives in those separations. Our proposals depend on them.

The work I'm trying to do, and the work the Accelerator is built around,is the slow practice of refusing them too.

Something to sit with this week

Is there a book, a thinker, or an idea that changed how you understand the work — but that you've never been able to bring into a professional conversation without it feeling out of place? What would it mean to be in a room where that thinking was the starting point, not the exception?

Read the full list of eight on Substack → 

So what actually changes?

People come into the Accelerator carrying something heavy. The proposal they wrote last month that sanitised everything they actually know about the community. The participation process they facilitated that they knew was performative but didn't have the language or the solidarity to challenge. The budget they inherited that made genuine co-design structurally impossible. The gap between what their organisation says on the outside and what happens on the inside — and the exhaustion of holding that contradiction alone.

Eight weeks later, something has shifted. Not because we've given them a new toolkit,  though there are tools ( here are couple of freebies- the Participatory Budget Tool and Power audit tool) . But because they've been in a room with twenty people who share their analysis, doing the slow work of practising differently together.

What you'll learn to do:

You'll learn to design equity-centred programs, not as an add-on or a values statement, but as the structural logic that runs through every proposal, every budget line, every evaluation framework. You'll learn to name what's wrong with the dominant model and build something different in its place. You'll learn to work the system from the inside — to find the cracks where power can be redistributed, even under real constraints.

And you won't learn it alone. You'll learn it alongside practitioners, CBO leaders, researchers, and funders from across the world and from guest faculty who are doing this work at the sharpest edge of the sector. Here are four of our six guest speakers who will be sharing their expertise with the group:

• Martha Awojobi — CEO of JMB Consulting and curator of Uncharitable, Martha has spent a decade naming racism in the charity sector  precision and  clarityr. They'll be bringing that lens directly to how we think about funding relationships, funder power, and what genuine accountability looks like.
• Craig Pollard — Founder of Fundraising Radicals and altFUND, Craig has built his practice around one conviction: that fundraising knowledge and tools belong to everyone, everywhere,not just the Global North institutions that currently hold them. He'll be in conversation with us about what it actually looks like to resource social change on your own terms.
• Katie Donovan-Adekanmbi — Founder of BCohCo and Bristol-based inclusion and cohesion specialist with a decade of work embedding equity not as policy but as living organisational culture. Katie brings the practical, relational expertise of what it actually takes to change how institutions behave on the inside, not just what they say on the outside.
• Valerie Goode — Founder of Coco Collective and the Ital Community Garden in Lewisham, Valerie's work is a masterclass in what community-led design looks like when it's genuinely rooted — in land, in ancestral knowledge, in the conviction that self-sufficiency and healing are themselves political acts. She brings a perspective on program design that reaches beyond the sector entirely.

This is not a lecture series. It is a collective practice space, where the community itself is  part of the methodology. Where we unearth the problem together, solution-build together, and leave not just with new tools but with people who will still be there when the institution does what institutions do, and you need to think out loud about what to do next.

Here is what participants consistently tell us changes:

• They find language for what they already know. The instinct that something is wrong becomes a framework they can name, use, and teach to others.
• They stop working alone. The isolation that drives burnout and assimilation starts to break down when you have a community of practice that understands the contradiction you're navigating — and stays with you after the eight weeks end.
• They go back to their work differently. Not with a new job or a perfect institution. But with clearer eyes, sharper tools, and the collective capacity to make better choices inside the constraints they're actually working in.
• They practise prefiguratively. The how of the Accelerator reflects the what — every session is designed the way we're asking participants to design their own programs. With care, with accountability, with power shared rather than performed.

This is not a course that will fix the sector. We are not promising that. But it will change how you move inside it. And sometimes,when you're carrying what most of you reading this are carrying,  that is exactly what's needed.

One week out. Four spots left.

The Accelerator opens June 5th 2026. It won't run again until 2027.

If this newsletter has been landing , if you've been doing the exercises, sitting with the questions, forwarding it to colleagues,  the Accelerator is where we go deeper. Together. With people across the world who are carrying the same analysis and are ready to practise differently.

Eight weeks. Capped at 20. Four spots remaining.

We offer parity pricing, payment plans, and bespoke pricing for teams — because the room should be accessible to the people who most need to be in it. If you have questions about whether this is right for you, reply to this email. I read every one.

Secure your spot — June 5th 2026 →

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