Competition is all around us. In the natural world, competition has been around since life has been around. Plants compete for sunshine and soil nutrients. Animals compete for food, for mates, and more. Even single celled organisms compete. In societies around the world, there is competition all through life; in play, in music, in sports, in school, and so much more. And of course, within the social impact world, regardless of whether you work in a corporate citizenship team, a non-profit, at a grantmaker, in a social enterprise or in public service, there is competition everyday. People in the social impact world are competing for board positions, for policies, for eyeballs, jobs, donors, funding, and so much more. 

But how much competition is healthy? 

Some might argue that social impact teams aren’t supposed to compete for resources, and that it’s a waste of time, energy and money. Instead, they would say, teams should coordinate and collaborate better and often. Some argue that larger, more established, and more prominent organizations, with greater resources end up winning most of the time because they have multiple advantages, right from the starting line — from advocacy power to money for grant writers. 

While most non-profits and funders don’t have an explicit view on whether competition is good for social impact, it’s practiced almost everywhere. Funders don’t typically have regular reflections on whether the competitions they host for funding are fair. Community service organizations don’t typically have regular reflections on whether the competitions they host for jobs are fair. In fact, competition has become such an integral part of how teams carry out their missions, it’s not even a thing people see anymore. It blends into the background. It’s just there, as a way of working, as something we accept and live with, as something that people have always done. Few recognize it, and ever fewer question it. 

There are organizations like the XPRIZE Foundation in the US that explicitly say competition is how good ideas come alive. Their mission is to leverage the power of competition to catalyze innovation and accelerate a more hopeful future by incentivizing breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity. They use large-scale global competitions to crowdsource solutions to the world’s greatest challenges. Winning teams take home millions in prize money. They’ve hosted competitions to tackle oil clean ups, boosting literacy rates, and even rapid and inexpensive covid testing. They have no issues publicly proclaiming that competition is good for social impact. 

I want to dive into a specific type of competition that’s taking place in the social impact world — between younger, emerging organizations and older, more established organizations. 

This competition for relevancy, legitimacy, funding, air time, donors, talent, and more is real. It’s more pronounced when the older, established organization is the only one that has done what it does for years — in the business world, this type of an organization holds what’s called a monopoly. 

While the social impact world doesn’t generally use the term, these types of organizations are all around you, working in causes you care about, and in your communities. You may even be working at one.

I’ve been curious about the relationship between younger and more established organizations for a number of years, having been part of starting a foundation, a non-profit, a community of practice, and a social enterprise. In the past two years, since the pandemic began, with volatility and uncertainty still with us, I heard anecdotally that younger entities, less than five years old, are being crowded out by more established organizations. So, I wanted to dive deeper. I reached out to 10 changemakers who lead entities that are less than five years old — some of these are non-profits, some social enterprises, some intermediaries and some aren’t even incorporated yet but operate under the auspices of an established organization. I asked them how they would describe the relationship between them and the more established organizations in their field.

In short, it’s unhealthy. And there’s a lot of hugging and healing to do.

A common theme in my conversations is that established organizations tend to exhibit hyper-competitive traits like secrecy, hoarding, and uncooperativeness. This could manifest in multiple ways; examples I heard include saying no to a letter of support for a grant, poaching donors, and using their power to participate in a funding competition that’s already designed to tilt in their favour.

One changemaker described government calls for proposals in particular as being rigged in the favour of dominant players, comparing it to some of the actions during the WE Charity scandal: “Not everything of what WE Charity did, but enough of what WE Charity did with the government still goes on. And these organizations get away with it because who’s going to question them? If I do, they won’t give us any money.” 

Another said, “[More established organizations] feel threatened by us and so they are finding any opportunity to use their power to sabotage our work.” Another changemaker said, “I think established organizations are feeling frustrated by our visibility and rise, so they try to hoard everything…hoard access to funding, hoard resources.” Another said, “They have seen us as competition from day one; and I’ve gone to them for advice, but you can tell they don’t want us to exist.” And another changemaker said, “It’s like they think we’re going to steal their ideas, donors and funding so they have become cautious and aggressive.” And yet another: “The older organizations see what we do and then copy our ideas. That’s not a good way of working. That’s not collaborative.” I also heard, “We’re fighting [for] the same cause but they don’t share anything.” There’s more, but I’ll stop there.

Let all of that sink in for a minute. 

These experiences and perspectives are from changemakers in diverse regions and working on diverse social, global and environmental issues. There are enough of such voices to say this is cause for concern. In my mind, these are the attributes of a dysfunctional relationship. In addition to all of these experiences, when you piece together the donations, funding and endowment data from organizations such as Imagine Canada, Philanthropic Foundations Canada, Community Foundations of Canada, and CanadaHelps, you can get a glimpse of which types of organizations have and get more money. With some minor exceptions, the majority have been around for at least a decade. Many for more than two decades. 

So, what’s going on?

The social impact world has a complicated relationship with competition. As one changemaker put it, “When we have power, when we’ve made it, we want to hang on to it, and hang on to it forever. Some of them talk about shifting power, but where is the concrete action?” The ongoing challenge, one person noted, is that while competition can be positive, what is being experienced is a tone of “destructive competition,” which perpetuates incentives, mindsets and behaviours that aren’t healthy. It increases the funding stress in smaller and newer organizations, and it also results in “a loss of trust in established organizations,” a changemaker told me, by smaller, younger players. The dysfunctional relationship isn’t the fault of any one organization, it’s the culture changemakers have inherited and practice everyday. It’s an unhealthy cycle that’s the responsibility of all of us to end. 

Social change anthropologists, if there are such people, would have a field day studying the long tail of competition in social change, looking forwards and backwards. What are the values it inculcates? What are the narratives around overhead or fairness that changemakers have inherited because of the culture of competition? What kind of ecosystem does this type of dysfunctional relationship create 15 years from now? 

If you work in an organization that’s more than five years old, it’s time to have a truthful introspection on your advantages in a competition, the advantages you create when you host competitions, and your attitudes when you compete with younger entities in your field.

When I asked changemakers what they want from their more seasoned counterparts so that newer organizations can flourish, the common thread wasn’t money or knowledge. It was integrity. 

Vinod Rajasekaran

Publisher & CEO

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