POWER SHARING AND RECIPROCITY

Why They Matter, and Why Nonprofits Need Them Most

What Do We Mean by Power Sharing and Reciprocity?

Almost every relationship between organizations, or between an organization and the people it serves, carries some imbalance of power, who has the money, who has the expertise, who gets to define the problem, who gets to decide when it's solved. Power sharing is the deliberate practice of noticing that imbalance and redistributing decision-making authority rather than simply managing around it. Reciprocity is its companion value: the expectation that help flows in both directions, that the party with fewer resources still has something real to give, and that the party with more resources has something real to receive.

Dave Siburg's use of accompaniment as a framework treats these as inseparable. Mutuality, in that framework, is “built upon giving and receiving trust as we grow together,” and empowerment means recognizing that relationships carry asymmetries of power and working to “balance and correct those asymmetries” rather than simply accepting them as fixed. Social psychologist Kenneth Gergen's research backs this up empirically: he found that valuation, treating another party's contribution as genuinely worth something, fosters coordinated action, while evaluation, positioning oneself as the judge of another's contribution, shuts that coordination down. Power sharing and reciprocity are, in effect, evaluation's opposite: a discipline of granting real authority and real value to the party that convention usually treats as the recipient.

The clearest large-scale expression of this shift is what philanthropy now calls trust-based philanthropy, an approach, per the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project, that emphasizes “shifting the power imbalance between funders and nonprofit leaders toward greater trust, shared power, and mutual accountability,” taking a grantee-centric stance in which funders become “partners to and enablers of nonprofits' self-determined goals” rather than their evaluators. That's power sharing translated into concrete practice: multi-year unrestricted funding, streamlined reporting, and decision-making pushed toward the people closest to the problem.

Why Power Sharing and Reciprocity Matter for Any Organization

The instinct to hold onto decision-making power feels efficient, fewer voices, faster decisions, cleaner accountability. But Elinor Ostrom's research into how communities successfully govern shared resources found something durable and repeated across very different settings: institutional arrangements work best over the long term when the people affected by the rules have a real hand in shaping them, and when the benefits and burdens of the shared effort are distributed in a way participants perceive as legitimate and fair. Ostrom's collaborators (Poteete and Ostrom) put it plainly, what determines whether collective action holds together is less about the specific attributes of any one participant and more about whether the arrangement itself is seen as fair by everyone in it.

Peter Drucker's foundational view of organizations reinforces the same point from the management side: an organization is “a system of the highest order,” built on people “contributing voluntarily of their knowledge, skill, and dedication.” Voluntary contribution depends on people believing their contribution is genuinely valued, not merely extracted. An organization that hoards power, internally among staff, or externally with the communities and partners it works alongside, is, in Drucker's terms, damaging the very system it depends on to perform.

Reciprocity carries its own separate logic worth naming directly: one-way help relationships create dependency, and dependency is fragile. A relationship where only one party gives creates an obligation that's difficult to sustain and easy to resent. A relationship where both parties are understood to be contributing something real, money in one direction, local knowledge and legitimacy in the other, say, is a relationship built to last, because both sides have a stake in keeping it going.

“If funders and donors truly want to make a difference in our unpredictable society, we must give up some of our power and listen to the leadership of those closer to the ground.”

— National Center for Family Philanthropy

Why This Is Especially Important for Nonprofits

Few sectors run on power imbalance as structurally as the nonprofit sector does. A funder holds the money; a nonprofit holds the need. That asymmetry shapes almost every interaction, grant applications, reporting requirements, board composition, even which problems get named and funded in the first place, and it has historically flowed in one direction: funders set the terms, and nonprofits adapt to them, whatever the cost to their own strategy or capacity.

The trust-based philanthropy movement exists precisely because that default stopped being acceptable to a growing share of the sector. Its six core practices, among them giving multi-year, unrestricted funding and minimizing administrative burden, are concrete mechanisms for handing real decision-making authority back to the organizations closest to the work. Wiley's 2024 research on relational philanthropy found that unrestricted funding does more than ease cash flow: it “empowers grantees to use grants for their own communities of practice,” letting nonprofits respond flexibly to the actual conditions on the ground rather than to conditions a funder specified from a distance. The Global Fund for Children's 2025 Global Impact Study reached a similar conclusion using participatory methods: flexible funding, non-financial support, and trusting relationships were what actually contributed to partner organizations' growth and sustainability, not tighter oversight.

This same power dynamic repeats inside a nonprofit's work with the communities it serves, not just with its funders. Fund for Shared Insight's Listen to Community initiative, launched in 2025 with partners including Grantmakers for Effective Organizations and the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, was built specifically to help funders and nonprofits listen in ways that “take into account power dynamics, enable reciprocity, and lead to greater community ownership and self-determination.” The insight behind it applies just as directly to how a nonprofit engages the people it serves: a program designed entirely by staff and imposed on a community, however well-intentioned, reproduces the same imbalance a nonprofit might rightly object to in its own funder relationships.

There's a resource argument here too, one consistent with Dave Siburg's capacity leveraging framework. Small, resource-constrained nonprofits, like the small water systems his work describes, often have real assets that go unrecognized simply because they aren't the kind of assets that show up on a balance sheet: local trust, cultural knowledge, longstanding relationships, legitimacy that no outside funder or partner organization can buy. A relationship built on reciprocity recognizes and draws on those assets. A relationship built on one-way giving overlooks them entirely, and, in doing so, wastes exactly the capacity a genuinely collaborative approach could have leveraged.

Why Purpose and Mission Focus Has to Anchor It

Power sharing can be practiced badly, as a slogan, or as a diffusion of responsibility that leaves no one accountable for outcomes. What keeps it from collapsing into either failure mode is a shared, clearly held sense of mission. Sharing power isn't valuable because distributed authority is inherently better than concentrated authority; it's valuable because the people closest to a problem usually have the clearest view of what the mission actually requires, and an organization that keeps decision-making concentrated at the top risks optimizing for its own comfort rather than for the purpose it exists to serve.

This is where Dave Siburg's reframing of the central question of accompaniment becomes the test for power sharing as well: not “how can I help you,” which still centers the party with more power, but “how can we help each other achieve our missions.” That question only makes sense, and only produces good decisions, if both parties are genuinely oriented toward a shared purpose rather than toward protecting their own institutional position. A funder practicing trust-based philanthropy because it's become fashionable, without genuine mission alignment with its grantees, will abandon the practice the moment it feels risky. A funder practicing it because shared mission requires it will not.

The same discipline applies inside a nonprofit's relationship with the community it serves. Reciprocity only functions as intended when the nonprofit is honestly asking what the community's own goals are, not simply inviting community members to validate a plan the organization had already made. Mission focus is what makes that honest question possible, an organization secure in its purpose can afford to let a community help redefine the path to it, because the destination, unlike the plan, isn't up for negotiation. An organization uncertain of its own purpose experiences power sharing as a threat rather than a strength, because it has nothing stable enough to hold onto while control is genuinely shared.

Bringing It Together

Power sharing and reciprocity ask organizations to give up something that feels, in the short run, like control, and to trust that genuine partnership, sustained over time, produces stronger and more durable outcomes than one-way direction ever could. Ostrom's research on collective governance and the sector's own rapid embrace of trust-based philanthropy both point to the same conclusion: arrangements perceived as fair and reciprocal by everyone involved are the ones that hold together when times get hard.

For nonprofits, whose entire mission depends on relationships with funders, partners, and the communities they serve, that lesson is close to existential. An organization that keeps sight of its purpose can share power and practice reciprocity without losing itself in the process, because the mission, not the org chart, remains the fixed point everyone involved is actually working toward. That's what turns power sharing from a risk into what it's meant to be: a way of building the kind of trust that lets a mission-driven organization accomplish, together with others, what it never could have accomplished holding all the power alone.