A Guerrilla Impact Narrative

rethinking impact for social justice funding

“We have outsourced our relationship with uncertainty to certainty merchants.” – Diego Espinosa

‘But What is Your Impact?’

It’s a question we get asked frequently, especially when talking to (potential) funders, which often means, ‘how can I be sure that money is well spent’, or more vulgarly ‘are you getting the maximum bang for your buck’?

This reductive reasoning didn’t get us far in Keynesian economics, let alone will it adequately fit infinitely complex systemic political change.

“Don’t fund anyone who doesn’t do a credible job of determining their own impact. An organization that doesn’t determine its own impact is flying blind and you will be too.” – Kevin Starr

A rather unimaginative take in general, for flying blind can take us to surprising, exciting places, however if we are discussing humanitarian or welfare work, like needle-exchange programs or anti-malaria missions, then indeed, material tracking, human bodies receiving care, recovery times etc.. are all crucial metrics to monitor impact and to finetune this work. But if you transpose key performance indicator culture onto extremely complex, often nonlinear political change work (like connecting malaria not only to the presence of a mosquito in your bedroom but the more complex issue of neo-colonial exploitation and resulting poverty), this reductive reasoning becomes oppressive at best and misleading at worst.

While service provision is important, yes, I won’t turn down penicillin when I have an infection, service provision in social change is often just maintenance of the system (and all its failings). In fact, welfare structures often support the continuation of systemic shortcomings, because “look, we have new homeless shelters, and more food banks!”. They need to be accompanied by work that upends oppression, addresses power imbalances and results in actual structural/systemic changes. . Firefighting or plugging holes on a sinking ship are two imminent disaster avoidance actions, and they must exist, but if there is not much attention placed on addressing the causes of the fires or the holes, life will continue to be an exercise in imminent disaster tackling, and if the wider warning sign of say desertification or flooding there won’t be any trees left to burn, and entire coastlines will be underwater, so all our skills in firefighting and holeplugging will be of little use.

This perhaps is the key difference, behind wishywashy, nonpositional ‘social change’, and a more mature ‘social justice’ lens, which is built on an analysis of existing (complex) power inequities, historical context and lived experiences. A social justice approach is preventative, it ought to be disruptive, a radical shift from the structure in place that is a growing behemoth of a charitable industrial complex.

This is why we are also shifting the lens under which we operate. What we do at Guerrilla isn’t philanthropy, it’s participatory resource redistribution, but perhaps it has more to do with love of humanity than the word that literally means this.

And is this entire preamble, a classic lefty (now stereotype), of overthinking and avoiding to address the question, “but what is your damn impact then?”. The invitation is to keep an open mind. Sonja Blignaut highlights that “Obsessive Certainty Disorder” is a widespread (primarily Western) affliction. It is linked to anxiety and the widespread human need for control. It can have devastating consequences, especially when it comes to organisational responsiveness and innovation. This deep-seated need for certainty (or safety) can radically distort the work needed to bring about genuine safety. It means asking: ‘How might a restorative approach for creating justice and public safety look?’ rather than asking ‘What is the best program to reduce the percentage of re-offenders?’ While the former might lead to a deeply transformed society where, ultimately, prisons will be a relic of the past, the latter creates a sense of pseudo-safety while doing nothing to actually address the pain inflicted on people under capitalism.

Don’t Feed the Zombies

“It is impossible for organisations to “demonstrate their impact” if they work in complex environments. Asking them to do so requires them to create a fantasy version of the story of their work. This corruption of data makes doing genuine change work harder because it is difficult to learn and adapt from corrupted data.”

– Toby Lowe

Don’t Feed The Zombies, a piece in SSIR that states that “impact is a material change in the world that makes it a better place. It’s an observable, quantifiable difference, which can be measured in terms of specific outcomes. We’re talking about things like: kid’s lives saved, farmer incomes increased, deforestation prevented, more literate students, less CO2 in the atmosphere, HIV transmission prevented, cleaner urban air, rehabilitated fisheries, and rights achieved.” There are huge differences between these outcomes and so many others, especially in the political space are neither observable nor quantifiable, but funders copy/paste this mentality into Social Return on Investment – misguided business school thinking tainting entire outlook onto the world.

Performers as zombies..

“I quickly learned that in the real world, data is cleansed, re-presented and re-formatted until it tells an acceptable and neat story. Stretching the truth was seen as harmless and normal. Our behaviour was rational. We told lies in order to:

-Get funding

-Keep councillors happy

-Keep management team happy

-Impress government departments

-Get a good inspection rating

-Compete with other organisations in our region”

from Centre for Public Impact

We don’t want to become zombies collecting data we’re actually not interested in/that does not help us understand our work better. This is why we hosted a conversation with members of our activist council and funders circle to hone in on our impact narrative and hone our collective understanding of what impact means for the Guerrilla Foundation.

An emerging Guerrilla impact narrative

1. Grantmaking – funding the underbelly of movements

Our impact is in funding the right groups not the right project/campaign. So any discussion of impact needs to connect to our selection criteria. Groups need to share our values, have a systemic root cause analysis of the issues that are affecting their lives, defined an angle that is rooted in their own lived reality to address these issues and who are in it for the long run, not for a ‘project’ before moving on to other topics. They actively build connections with an intersectional lens and see themselves as actors in a wider ecosystem of struggles and tactics. They know their position in that ecosystem and have an understanding of why their tactics make sense in their movement and political context at a certain point in time. Importantly, they have the ability to be self critical, reflect and learn about their work as they go along. There’s not as many grassroots groups as you’d think that fits this bill.

Finding and supporting such groups, trusting them with implementing the activities they see fit, allowing them to navigate and build power is the main impact of our work. If there’s a successful campaign that manages to change a law, hold power to account, upend exploitation and oppression in a specific context, or a concrete outcome in terms of massively raising public awareness about a certain issue we are of course excited. Ultimately, we’re doing this work to contribute to social justice. But we do understand that with grant amounts of 1500-20.000 EUR these cases will be rare and we acknowledge the need to support people in their experimentation, political education and learning and in building connections and building out the ‘field’ from which large campaigns and other impactful actions can emerge.

2. Other activities

On top of funding, we try to contribute to reflection and sensemaking in the field and shift narratives in activism and philanthropy. Here, we used to track and report the number of coaching calls with grantees – while interesting to know in terms of planning staffing (we still track it but don’t report it anymore), this cannot be an impact metric if we are serious because there’s a power dynamic involved (funder demanding participation in regular calls). Neither is the amount of participants in online events or readers of our website a good enough indicator of actual impact. Again, they can be tracked – but only to spark discussion and for example feel into how happy we are with the ratio of effort put in vs. reach of any specific offer. But this needs to be seen in context. Connecting a handful of activist groups working in the same field through an online P2P exchange that took hours to find a date for to bring everyone into the same Zoom room might sound like very little. If 3 of those groups re-connect again to start a European Citizen Initiative a year later, this was time well spent. We’re trying to build connections first without expecting immediate outcomes. We try to create conditions for collective sensemaking and learning to happen. To foster people’s understanding of the field, the realities of groups in other countries who work on related issues, build a mycelium that can nourish and connect giant trees but that also has an existence in its own right. Slow process, number of events are only an approximation here.

Impact as Hyper-Rationalist Hallucination

Effective Altruism Evangelists
The map is not the territory folks.
Dogma of deep quantification, western ways of knowing valued above all else.

“Our species will not be released from the stranglehold of emotionalism that anchors it to hallucinations” – Thomas Legotti (because yes below that seemingly cold-calculated fact-based scientific-objectivity lies a very human vulnerability, the need to control, to be able to predict something and to mitigate uncertainty).

Campbell’s Law 1976: “The more that any quantitative (and some qualitative) social indicators are used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”

Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”.

George Box’s aphorism: “All models are wrong, but some are useful”.

Emerging Conclusions/Tensions/Questions

Impact is a widely misunderstood term, either used willy nilly or majorly overused to mean very different things.
Fetishisation of outcomes gets us to miss the forest for the trees, particularly problematic when it comes to addressing systemic social injustices.
Grantee performativity is catalysed by funder demands to demonstrate impact.
Capitalist society is obsessed with metrics, commodification and reductive proxy thinking that enables easier manipulation of variables while not taking into account complexity of life.
What happens when we focus on intention and learning loops rather than impact?
Tensions arise when the system demands justifications and proofs.
Measurability of achievements is sometimes not visible
Hyper-rational thinking is internalised since childhood, from numeric-based school placements that constantly produce and reproduce self-criticism.
How to measure something we value and with which lenses, and we need to change our relation to power while doing this work?
How to create a new way to present “results” and potentials?

If we’re not asking organisations to demonstrate their impact, how can we create accountability for spending resources well?

This is a great question. Fortunately, it also has a couple of straightforward answers.

Remember — asking people/organisations to demonstrate their impact doesn’t create accountability — it creates a bunch of fantasy data. So, we don’t have accountability right now, we have the performance of accountability. Accountability is great — let’s create some.

Ask people/organisations to be accountable for experimenting and learning together — collaboratively. Create accountability for enabling the healthy systems, which are how positive outcomes are actually achieved in the real world. If you don’t know how to do this, there are lots of examples of organisations doing this in practice…

Appendix

Alternative Perspectives/Conceptualisations of Impact..

Multitudes Foundation