Design programmes
you're not ashamed of.
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The Social Impact Programme Canvas is a guided, values-first design tool with a thinking partner that pushes back when you flatten the politics. Work through it honestly, and it generates a funder-ready concept note, a theory of change in your own language, and a learning framework that doesn't lie.
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Get the Canvas — from £27The recognition (the problem)
You already know what good design looks like. You're just rarely allowed to do it.
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There is a particular kind of programme design that gets funded. It's sleek. It's scalable. It has a theory of change that moves in clean, linear arrows, and it uses the word innovative at least three times before page two. And it is, very often, describing something the community has been doing for years.
We've all written that version. The "capacity building" line that assumed a deficit where there was a tradition. The co-design process that was really consultation. The logframe we knew was a fiction, filled in anyway. We write the version that gets funded, and we file the version we believe somewhere we don't have to look at it.
The problem was never that you lacked a template. The sector is drowning in templates. The problem is that almost none of them ask the question that decides everything else: who is in the room when this gets designed, and whose knowledge are we treating as the starting point?
This tool asks it. And then it won't let you skip the answer.
What it is
Not a form. A thinking partner.
The Social Impact Programme Canvas walks you through designing a programme from values first — positionality, community assets, power analysis, theory of change, delivery, governance, and how your work contributes back to the wider ecosystem. Everything in one place, exportable, yours.
What makes it different is what sits on every question: a "push me on this" button. Hit it, and you get a thinking partner — built in Jess's voice — that names what's strong, surfaces what you're avoiding, and shows you what going further would actually look like. It's the colleague who reads your draft and asks the one question you were hoping nobody would.
A form accepts whatever you type. This notices what you're routing around. And most of programme design is what we're routing around.
How it works
You work through the canvas section by section — on your own, or in collaborative mode with a team or community group, with facilitation prompts built into every question. Before anything gets generated, the tool runs a co-design integrity check: an honest moment where it asks who actually shaped this design, and who merely reacted to it.
Then, on the ÂŁ97 version, you hit generate.
Think it through.
Seven sections, rooted in decolonial and abolitionist design practice. The thinking partner pushes back as you go.
Check your integrity.
The co-design check and a language audit catch the colonial residue before it hardens into a plan.
Generate the documents.
The canvas turns your honest answers into outputs you can take straight into a bid.
Service One:
Bespoke Non-Financial Support for Your Grantee Portfolio
What it produces
 What you walk away with
The ÂŁ97 version doesn't just hold your thinking. It produces the documents the thinking is usually trapped inside someone else's template to create.
A funder-ready concept note:
around 450–500 words, in your own register, with alignment notes for funders like Esmée Fairbairn, the National Lottery Community Fund, and Paul Hamlyn.
A structured theory of change:
long-term vision, intermediate outcomes, activities and outputs — written in your language, with complexity held rather than flattened into a clean arrow.
A non-extractive learning framework:
outcomes with indicators tagged participatory, qualitative, quantitative, or critical quantitative, so you can see at a glance whether your evidence is built with people or extracted from them. It includes a note on what you will not measure, and why.
A plain-language community summary:
so the people the work is for can read what was designed, in words they'd actually use.
Why it's built the way it is (trust)
The politics are in the tool, not just the marketing
Most tools hide their politics. This one says them out loud, in the design choices.
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It uses capacity mobilisation, not "capacity building" — because the communities we work with aren't short of capacity. They're short of resource, recognition and power. The budget includes a wisdom fund: a line that pays for the community knowledge most budgets extract for free. There's a narrative consent step before anyone's story becomes your evidence, and a data sovereignty prompt about who owns what you gather. And there's that section most measurement tools refuse to include — what you will not measure, and why.
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None of this shows up as a feature you can sell. It's the whole point.
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Who it's for
This is for you if —
You design programmes inside institutions that were never built for the politics you hold. You've read some of the books — Roy, Rodney, Gilmore, Costanza-Chock — and you have more of the analysis than you usually get to use. You're tired of templates that ask none of the real questions, and tired of being the only one in the room who thinks this way.
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You don't need to have read everything. You need to have felt the contradiction.
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This was built by someone still in the work alongside you — not above it.
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WHAT PARTICIPANTS LEAVE WITH:
A personalised action plan, tried-and-tested methods grounded in their actual work, and membership of a global community of practice spanning INGOs, CBOs, academic institutions, and policy teams.
For foundations: Rather than training your grantees to produce better data for you, we help them build knowledge systems that serve their own decision-making first — and that can translate into language external systems recognise, without erasing what matters.
What you will notice in your partners after this programme: they bring you evidence that is more honest, more specific, and more useful — because it was generated by people who had a stake in understanding it, not just reporting it. They challenge evaluation frameworks that flatten their work. And they come to learning conversations with you carrying the voices of the communities they work with, not just proxy indicators.
The result is a funding relationship grounded in real knowledge — not performance.
Average NPS: 9.0/10 · 56% of participants gave a perfect score
For eligible UK-based participants, the programme links to the University of East London's Social Justice MRes — with pathways to fully or partially funded postgraduate research study through UKRI.
Learn more about Research Design for Social Impact
What working with us changes for foundations
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Funders that engage with DFSI over time don't just offer better professional development.
They find themselves in more honest conversations with their partners.
- They start receiving proposals that challenge their frameworks — and have the capacity to recognise that as a sign of strength, not a compliance problem.
- Their staff stay longer, because the  work they're doing feels aligned with why they came into the sector. And their portfolios start to reflect something closer to their values — because the organisations they fund are no longer translating their best work into a language designed to make it invisible.
That is what we mean by changing the conditions. Not just improving the programmes.
Shifting what the relationship between funder and funded makes possible.
Service Three:
Designing Otherwise — Asset-Based Proposal Design
Most grant writing courses teach people to write better needs statements. Designing Otherwise teaches people to stop writing them.
Designed for foundations investing in grassroots and community-led partners, Designing Otherwise is a dual-track training that works at both ends of the funding relationship — equipping grantees to propose from a place of strength, and equipping foundation staff to receive and reward what they find.
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What changes
GRANTEE TRACK
- Proposals written from community assets, not community deficits
From: performing need → To: articulating power - Stronger funded proposals with values-aligned funders
From: generic applications → To: targeted, grounded pitches - Confidence to hold their own theory of change
From: funder-shaped narratives → To: community-led framing - Reduced time and harm in the proposal process
From: exhausting deficit writing → To: generative documentation
FOUNDATION STAFF TRACK
- Ability to read and champion asset-based proposals
From: deficit-trained review → To: strength-literate assessment - Capacity to spot and name deficit framing in applications
From: unconscious extraction → To: critical grantmaking lens - Shift in criteria and application design
From: compliance questions → To: asset-inviting prompts - Partnership posture with grantees, not gatekeeping
From: funder as judge → To: funder as co-investor
Shared system-level outcome
A funding relationship where the proposal tells the truth — about assets, about power, about what change actually looks like
Grantmaking infrastructure that rewards proximity and community knowledge, not just grant-writing fluency
A foundation portfolio that reflects its values — not just its application form
Why Work With Us
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We are a practice built by people who have worked inside the sector's contradictions for over fifteen years — as humanitarian aid workers, community-based organisation founders and leaders, classroom teachers, PhD researchers, community organisers, and grant recipients — and who have sat on both sides of the funding relationship.
That proximity matters. We know what it feels like to write a proposal that sanitises your politics to get the grant. We know what it costs a community-led organisation to perform impact for an audience that was never really listening. And we know that most capacity-building is designed to make that performance more polished, not less necessary.
We offer something different because we are something different:
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We bring insider knowledge, not outside expertise. Dr. Jessica Oddy holds a PhD exploring inequities in youth programming and aid systems, has worked in over 15 countries including in domestic programming in the UK and humanitarian response. Our faculty includes Black feminist researchers, decolonial practitioners, and community organisers — people who have been inside the systems your grantees are navigating, not just studied them.
We are formally accountable to rigorous standards. We work in partnership with the University of East London and the University of Bristol, funded by UKRI. Our programmes are not aspirationally anti-oppressive — they are built on frameworks that have been tested with hundreds of practitioners across 30+ countries and linked to accredited postgraduate research pathways.
We will tell you the truth. If a programme design isn't serving your partners, we will say so. If your foundation's reporting requirements are part of what's exhausting your grantees, we will name that too. Honest partnership is not a value we display on a website — it is what we are contractually committing to when we work with you.
We believe foundations have a genuine role in shifting the conditions that make good work harder. Non-financial support is one of the most powerful and underused tools available to you. We can help you use it in a way that actually changes something.
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All partnerships are scoped through an initial conversation — contact us at [email protected] to discuss what fits your portfolio.
Partnership investment
All partnerships are scoped through an initial conversation — contact us to discuss what fits your portfolio.
What working with us changes for foundations
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Funders that engage with DFSI over time don't just offer better professional development.
- They find themselves in more honest conversations with their partners.
- They start receiving proposals that challenge their frameworks — and have the capacity to recognise that as a sign of strength, not a compliance problem.
- Their staff stay longer, because the work they're doing feels aligned with why they came into the sector. And their portfolios start to reflect something closer to their values — because the organisations they fund are no longer translating their best work into a language designed to make it invisible.
That is what we mean by changing the conditions. Not just improving the programmes.
Shifting what the relationship between funder and funded makes possible.
Ready to explore a partnership?
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Whether you're looking for bespoke non-financial support for your grantee portfolio, cohort access to our open programmes, or a conversation about what your partners actually need — we'd love to hear from you.
Email us at [email protected] or visit designforsocialimpact.io to learn more.
We don't do sales calls. We do conversations. Get in touch and let's figure out together whether this is the right fit.