Issue 01 | The Most Powerful Job Nobody Talks About

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

You're receiving this because you're part of the Design for Social Impact community — whether you've taken a course, attended a workshop, or signed up for updates at some point. Thank you for being here.

I'm launching something new: Designing Otherwise, a free fortnightly newsletter for funders, org leaders, and practitioners thinking critically about how programs get designed and who gets to shape them. Every two weeks I'll bring you a provocation, a practical tool or exercise you can use immediately, and a window into the thinking behind the Design for Social Impact Accelerator launching June 2026.

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For the past fifteen years I've been designing programs, writing proposals, facilitating participatory research, and slowly reckoning with the power embedded in all of it.

I've come to realise that if, like me, you design programs or write proposals, you are holding one of the most powerful — and least accountable — roles in the social impact sector.

You decide which problems get amplified. Which communities get described as "vulnerable" versus "visionary." Which interventions make it into the budget. Which voices shape the strategy and which get consulted after the fact.

That's not technical work. That's political work. And most of us were never taught to treat it that way.

The thing we need to name

In most organizations, proposal writing has become program design. The deadline drives the process. Communities don't shape programs — templates do. And once the proposal is approved, you're locked into whatever you managed to articulate in three frantic weeks.

We know this doesn't work. The evidence of failed, unsustainable programs is everywhere. And yet we keep doing it — because it's what funders expect, because we're under impossible pressure, because changing it feels too risky when you're just trying to keep the lights on.

One thing you can do this week

Pull up a current proposal or program design document — something live, something you're working on now.

Find three places where you describe the community or population you're working with. Ask yourself:

• Does this language center deficit or dignity?
• Would the people described recognize themselves in these words — and feel respected by them?
• Whose knowledge is visible in this framing? Whose is absent?

You don't need to rewrite the whole thing. Just sit with what you find. Notice the choices that felt automatic.

That noticing is where different design begins.

Going deeper

I wrote a longer reflection on this — on my own complicity, the school feeding meeting I sat in as a trainee who'd relied on free school meals, and what it would look like to genuinely redesign how we write proposals. You can read the full piece on Substack → Access Here

Coming in the next issue: Why "participation" in program design is almost always consultation in disguise — and what the difference actually looks like in practice.

The Design for Social Impact Accelerator opens June 5th 2026. Eight weeks of abolition-informed, regenerative program design practice — for people inside constrained systems who want to do it differently