In a 2022 essay, Scott wrote about the importance of supporting leaders with direct experience of inequity. Some of the people best placed to describe a problem are not always the people invited to design its solution. That gap appears in many areas of public life, from education and healthcare to housing and economic opportunity. MacKenzie Scott has built much of her philanthropic approach around a related question: what happens when the people living with a problem are given more say in deciding how it should be addressed? Her observation was not simply about representation. It was also about knowledge, responsibility and where power sits when decisions are made on behalf of a community.
Scott included the line in her March 2022 essay Helping Any of Us Can Help Us All. Because it is informed by insights no one else can contribute, and because it seeds power and opportunity within the community itself, “The leadership of people directly experiencing inequities is essential, both.
The phrase “seeds power and opportunity” takes the argument beyond consultation. She was discussing her approach to giving and the importance of hearing from people whose lives are directly affected by the issues that organisations are trying to address. The wording makes two separate points. The first is about knowledge. Someone who has lived through a particular barrier may notice things that are invisible from outside it. The second is about power. When people from the affected community take leadership roles, resources and decision-making ability can remain within that community rather than being controlled entirely by outside institutions. Scott is not arguing that personal experience is the only qualification for leadership. Her wider writing points instead towards a broader principle: people who understand an issue through their own lives should have meaningful influence over the response to it. A charity working with people facing poverty, for example, may understand statistics about income, housing or employment. Someone who has personally moved between temporary accommodation and insecure work brings a different kind of information. They may know where a system becomes difficult to navigate, which requirements create unnecessary barriers, or why an apparently useful service is rarely used. Neither form of knowledge automatically replaces the other. Scott’s argument is that one should not be treated as sufficient while the other is ignored.
In a 2021 essay titled ‘Seeding by Ceding’, she argued that people dealing directly with inequities deserved greater attention in stories about the change they were creating. Because it changes who is making decisions, leadership is different. Because it is often the one with less access to money and institutional authority, scott’s approach places particular weight on the second perspective.
There is a difference between asking people for their views and giving them the authority to act on those views. A community can be invited to a meeting, asked to complete a survey or consulted during the design of a programme without having much influence over what happens afterwards. That is particularly relevant to philanthropy, where large institutions or wealthy donors can have substantial control over which problems receive money and which approaches are considered worth supporting. Scott has repeatedly written about moving some of that control towards the organisations receiving funding. She also wrote that solutions were best designed and implemented by others rather than centred on the donors providing the money. There is a practical question hidden inside Scott’s words: who gets to decide what a community needs? It is easy for outside institutions to define a problem from a distance. A funding body might describe a community through poverty rates, health statistics, educational outcomes or other measurements. Those numbers can be useful, but they cannot capture every detail of how people experience a system. A person who has lived with the problem can bring another layer of information. That does not make lived experience automatically correct. Personal experience can be partial, just as institutional data can be incomplete. The point is about the value of having both perspectives in the room, particularly when decisions affect the people whose lives are being discussed. Listen before deciding: Ask people affected by a decision what they actually need. Give people a real say: Listening has more value when their views can influence what happens next. Share responsibility: When working with others, let them take ownership instead of making every decision yourself. Trust people with experience: People who deal with a problem directly may understand practical solutions better than outsiders. Move beyond asking for opinions: If you ask someone for input, consider giving them a role in shaping the outcome. Make space for others to lead: Leadership does not always have to come from the person with the most authority. Share control where possible: In family, work or community decisions, involve the people who will be directly affected. Measure success together: Ask those involved whether a decision or solution actually worked, rather than judging it alone. Turn listening into action: The lesson is not simply to hear people, but to let what you hear influence your decisions. Get the latest technology news and updates. Download the TOI App.