The People Closest to the Problem Are Often Farthest From the Decision

I have been thinking about how often decisions are made for people without ever being made with them.

In nonprofit work, we talk a lot about community voice, empowerment, dignity, and lived experience. Those words sound good in mission statements and strategic plans. But they only mean something when the people closest to the work are actually invited into the conversations that shape it.

Too often, the people experiencing the problem are nowhere near the room where decisions are being made.

The employee answering the phone every day knows what people are confused about.

The person delivering the program sees where families are struggling to participate.

The community member receiving the service knows whether it is truly helping.

Yet decisions about programs, policies, funding, and priorities are often made without asking any of them what they are seeing.

Reports and data are important. I believe in measuring outcomes and understanding whether our work is making a difference. But numbers cannot tell us everything.

A report can tell us how many people attended a program. It cannot always tell us why someone did not return.

A dashboard can show us whether we reached a goal. It may not show us the barriers people faced along the way.

A survey can collect answers. It cannot replace a real conversation with someone who trusts us enough to tell the truth.

Leadership still has a responsibility to make decisions. Listening does not mean every suggestion becomes a policy or that every person will agree with the final outcome. It means the decision is informed by the people who understand its impact beyond what can be seen from a conference room.

There is also a difference between asking for input and creating genuine influence.

If the decision has already been made, inviting people into the conversation afterward is not inclusion. It is simply asking them to accept what has already been decided.

That is where nonprofits must be careful. We cannot speak about giving people a voice while ignoring them when their voices challenge our assumptions. We cannot claim to value lived experience only when it supports the direction we already wanted to take.

Sometimes the person with the most valuable insight does not have the biggest title. Sometimes the employee who rarely speaks in meetings understands the problem better than anyone else in the room. Sometimes the community member we consider a recipient should have been treated as a partner from the beginning.

The strongest leaders are not threatened by that kind of knowledge. They recognize that proximity creates expertise.

Before making the next major decision, perhaps we should ask:

Who is missing from this conversation?

Who will carry the consequences of this decision?

What might they know that we do not?

And have we created a space where they can answer honestly?

The people closest to the problem should not always be the farthest from the decision. If our work is truly about people, then the people most affected by it should be more than names in a report or numbers on a dashboard.

They should be heard.

With listening and humility,
Just Catrina