In February, Ipas, the only international nongovernmental organization focused exclusively on abortion and contraception access, announced its 50th anniversary. More importantly for the philanthrosphere, the organization also announced radical changes in the way it will do business. Ipas’ new approach provides a look into both the opportunities and challenges of moving to a community-based decision-making model in a relatively small sector.
My colleague Connie Matthiessen took an in-depth look at Ipas back in May 2022. Far from being a traditional funder, Ipas’ actual grantmaking is just one aspect of an overall brief in the fields of abortion and contraception — work that includes research, training and providing advocacy tools in countries in Africa, the Americas and Asia. But while it only moves a relatively small amount of money annually, the nonprofits it funds are also small, with an average annual budget of about $150,000.
Part of the reason for that is abortion stigma among philanthropic funders, both stateside and abroad. While a lot more funding is available for reproductive care generally, organizations that center actual abortion care, like Ipas, tend to get much less attention from philanthropy. That timidity flies in the face of trends toward wider acceptance of abortion around the globe. And even in the U.S., where the Supreme Court sought fit to strip away long-held abortion rights last year, voters have punished the anti-abortion movement in the polls ever since.
Voters aren’t alone. For instance, the Boston Foundation, one of the oldest and largest community foundations in the country, has started an abortion fund of its own. Between strong voter sentiment and at least some wider backing from grantmakers, it’s hard to justify the timidity of other funders in the face of the fact that support for abortion rights and access is clearly a mainstream value.
Ipas, meanwhile, has announced plans to completely change its organizational structure, in part to remedy a global abortion ecosystem limited by top-down funding and disempowerment on the ground. But when an organization says it plans to remodel itself “with an eye to pursuing an antiracist, anticolonial approach to organizational design and management,” exactly what does that mean, and what practical impact does Ipas anticipate the changes will have, both on its internal operations and on the nonprofits that depend on it?
Building a “sustainable abortion ecosystem”
Ipas President and CEO Dr. Anu Kumar said that the new strategy is a natural outgrowth of her organization’s ultimate goal of building a sustainable abortion ecosystem. This means that Ipas takes a generalist approach encompassing all of the issues and practicalities that impact whether or not someone is able to access abortion. These include obvious factors like policy and political leadership, and perhaps less-obvious ones like community norms and the availability of the commodities (like associated equipment, medication, and even things like clean water) that are necessary to make abortions possible.
“We are moving into this model because of our strategy. Our form is following our function, as it were,” Kumar said. Ipas’ new form, Kumar went on, is a distributed decision-making model that starts with consultations with local stakeholders and then moves to Ipas’ local offices, which are staffed with people who live in the areas they serve.
“This model requires you to have a conversation with stakeholders about where we are in terms of abortion care in location X, whether that’s a province, a subregion or a country,” Kumar said, because “the only people that are qualified to make decisions about the state of an abortion ecosystem are local people. I do not have insight into the sustainable abortion ecosystem in Pakistan. I have ideas, and I have things that I’ve seen in other places, but I don’t know that environment well enough. But the local stakeholders do.”
As one example, Kumar said stakeholders in Pakistan recently told Ipas that they wanted to focus on developing their health workforce instead of working on policy. “And then the conversation becomes, ‘All right, who’s best placed to do that? Is it Ipas? Is it another organization?’ And that’s where this distributed decision-making model really comes into play, because it’s the local [Ipas] staff that then decide” who will take leading and supporting roles in the work that’s been agreed upon, and who will perhaps do something else entirely.
“How do we destabilize power?”
The wisdom of this approach belies the fact that other international organizations have consolidated their resources, expertise and decision-making authority into relatively few hands in even fewer locations. That’s exactly what Ipas seeks to address.
“If you think about the way power is amassed and held onto, particularly in the international development sector, but I would say beyond that as well, it’s really about three main things,” Kumar said. That is, money, knowledge and practice. So rather than function like a Gates Foundation, which sets the agenda for what gets researched or even what’s considered worthy of research through its funding — or like other Global North partners that determine the work grantees will and won’t do through everything from their RFPs and grant decisions to their reporting requirements — Kumar said that “we’re talking about, how do we destabilize power? How do we distribute power?”
The other main factor in the new model, Kumar said, is “kind of a radical transparency.” Information about the criteria for making decisions, the people who will make the decisions, and the decisions that are ultimately made are all shared throughout the organization so “there’s no hallway decision-making or deal-cutting that’s happening outside of the accepted process.”
But while Ipas has had a lot of success so far in involving the wider world of its stakeholders in decisions about the actual work, Kumar said that the process for distributing decisions about grantmaking is “less evolved so far” in terms of involving stakeholders outside of Ipas’ staff. Grantmaking decisions are distributed across the organization so that staff in Ipas’ service areas make grant decisions for those areas. And Ipas staff does seek out and get input from the wider field of stakeholders. But “having [potential grantees] be part of the panel itself is something that we’re now figuring out how to do,” Kumar said, adding that factors specific to Ipas’ work make it necessary to “kind of tread carefully” while setting up a process for participatory grantmaking.
For one, Kumar said, an organization that sits on a grantmaking panel would then be disqualified from receiving a grant during that round because of conflict-of-interest concerns. Further, many of the organizations Ipas works with and supports aren’t themselves focused entirely on abortion or contraception. These organizations may support Ipas’ mission, but their staff may not immediately understand the complexities involved in grantmaking specifically focused on those services.
Finally, she said, when it comes to abortion, “there aren’t millions of organizations to choose from” in selecting a participatory grantmaking panel. “There are a handful of really good organizations to choose from,” making concerns about potentially disqualifying any organization because of its service on a particular round’s grantmaking panel a pressing issue.
The challenges inherent in creating a fully participatory grantmaking process in a small, resource-limited section of the nonprofit sector might convince other organizations that the effort is either not worth it or that it’s unlikely ever to be fully successful. But for Ipas, those challenges are among the reasons it’s committing to its new decision-making model. “We realize that we need to seed and have more partners that can work with us in this area,” Kumar said.
Put another way, Ipas’ commitment to fulfilling its mission has led the organization to give up significant power, partially in the hope of supporting the creation and growth of even more groups with which to share that power while working together toward a common mission. Given that the consolidation of power and decision-making in the hands of top-down organizations, including funders, hasn’t to date had much success combating systemic inequities — including inequities in abortion access — perhaps more organizations should study and perhaps emulate Ipas’ example.
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