Collaborate with all Stakeholders

I love to imagine what could happen when organizations engaged in global development, the donors who fund them and the communities they aim to serve would engage in open collaborative discussion about programs, projects and desired outcomes.  

Organizations would minimize conflict between what their donors think they want to pay for and what their beneficiaries and staff really understand about the kind of work that's most needed to effectively redress some of our world's most unbalancing imbalances; 

Donors - who have, most often, lived a completely different global community reality than those whom they aim to help - would broaden their own insight into the complex issues they hope to impact, and learn to better invest in addressing root challenges with informed, passion-based creativity and intellect;

Beneficiary communities would begin to feel like they actually matter as partners in a shared desire to help our world thrive, instead of as numbers reported to donors that justify long-entrenched, dependency-based global power relationships (arguably, one of our world's most unbalancing imbalances today lies - and lies to us - in the very fact that the world does not yet hear the unfiltered voice of those whom global development efforts aim to serve);

With openly communicative relationships between all of those who aim to play a part in achieving balance and well-being in our global communities, positive change would become a living, breathing, undeniable human story. It would be a story with more creative minds writing the twists to it's plot, more hearts exerting love on the rendition of it, and more souls believing through seeing that change really is happening in our world - one lost voice heard, one friendship forged, and one micro-success celebrated together at a time.

More faith in our world's thrivability will unlock every door to achieving a thriving world: open communication channels between all stakeholders in global development efforts, large and small, would give us that. Today, every organization has unprecedented tools available to make that level of inclusive stakeholder collaboration possible (opt-in-evitable, even). How long will it be before we begin demanding it as a new norm?  

I love to imagine what could happen...