Rewriting the Script for Accountability in Nonprofits and Philanthropy
Map the scripts keeping accountability in the social impact sector performative, then flip them. Reimagine the story through a template/process from your work. Leave with a redesigned artefact to share and people to keep building with.
Course Overview
You log in every morning with a nagging feeling that the pile of documents on your to-do list isn't exactly the most impactful thing for the communities you care about.
You write the report that goes up seven layers above you and comes back watered down to talk about "empowerment and enhanced resilience".
You double-check the logframe that measures what's easy to measure, not whether a real problem was solved.
You're sure this is the sector for you. You're also fairly sure this is not the best way to serve communities.
This isn't about laziness, or bad faith, yours or anyone else's. It's that the accountability architecture most of us work inside, made up of results frameworks, 15-question reporting portals, or grant applications built for a board that's never stepped foot in the communities they fund, was designed for whoever's reading it, not for the people it's supposed to serve. Once you see that clearly, you can't unsee it.
This course uses theatre as an analytical lens (not a role-play exercise, no worries :) ). Drawing on Erving Goffman's dramaturgy, actor power mapping exercises, and a variety of storytelling traditions, we'll map out exactly why your reporting requirements, budget templates, and information flows work the way they do, and why the people they're meant to serve keep getting cast in non-speaking roles.
Across six sessions, you'll move from diagnosis to redesign:
In the first half, we're looking at the actors, the scripts and expectations that steer their performance, and what audience your accountability processes are really performing for. Whether that audience sits one desk over, or three continents and four sign-offs away.
You'll map your own project or portfolio against those frameworks, working in pairs to diagnose who actually holds the power to change what, and where the real blockages sit: a distant HQ, a cautious board, a funder who's never once asked for anything different.
In the second half, you'll flip the script, reimagining your accountability system with the people it's meant to serve as the protagonists, and redesigning the processes that follow from that.
Because most people taking this course don't hold the authority to rewrite their organisation's accountability system alone, we'll dedicate time to something we won't pretend is easy: building a real advocacy strategy for one specific change you want your organisation to make. You'll develop it one-on-one with a peer, and you decide how much - if anything - you want to share with the wider group.
In the final sessions, you'll bring a real tool from your own work (a results framework, a grant report, a budget template, a monitoring dashboard...) and rebuild it from the ground up.
You'll leave with two things: a concrete, redesigned accountability artefact you can actually use, and a real advocacy plan for getting one piece of it adopted where you work, something to put in front of a line manager, a grants committee, or a board.
This isn't about making peace with the system, and it isn't about proving you were right to be frustrated. It's about understanding it precisely enough to move the one thing that's actually within your reach.
Who Is This Course For?
*The specialist inside a large, layered organisation. You work at a big INGO or a UN agency. You're further from the people your work serves than you'd like, and still have more reviewers and sign-offs "above" you than you'd want. You didn't design the reporting chain. You just have to work inside it.
*The philanthropy professional trying to do trust-based work inside a cautious institution. You believe in shorter applications, real relationships with grantees, funding people instead of auditing them. You keep hitting walls: a board that calls TBP a fad, a risk committee that quietly wants the old paperwork back "just in case." You're not naive about power. You have some of it, and you're trying to work out what to actually do with it.
*The consultant who's seen this play out across a dozen clients. You move between nonprofits, INGOs, UN agencies, and foundations, and you keep recognising the same patterns wearing different logos. You want language and a framework precise enough to name what you're seeing, and specific enough to actually help a client redesign something, not just diagnose it and leave.
What You'll Learn
- Read the accountability systems in your own working context (i.e. reporting requirements, information and approval workflows, public vs private communications) through a new lens, with a clearer sense of where the leverage points are
- Redesign a real accountability tool or template from your own practice (results framework, log frame, reporting template, or budget) based on a reimagined script with affected communities at the centre
- Diagnose where real decision-making power over your accountability processes actually sits, and distinguish what you can change unilaterally, what needs buy-in, and what's genuinely locked for now
- Build a concrete advocacy strategy for one specific change to your organisation's accountability practice, developed with a peer and shared at your own discretion.
What's Included
Live Sessions
Interactive classes with your instructor
Session Recordings
Lifetime access to all recordings
Community Access
Connect with fellow learners
Certificate
Proof of course completion
Course Modules
Act One: Setting the Stage
We start with a broad discussion on the purpose and practice of accountability in the aid/social impact sector. You'll meet the theatrical lens that runs through the whole course: Erving Goffman's ideas of impression management, script, and role, and the deeper root beneath them in W.E.B. Du Bois's work on double consciousness, decades before Goffman. We'll touch briefly on Frantz Fanon's writing on performance as survival. Through individual reflection, you'll examine a real interaction from your own work and start identifying the roles and scripts already operating inside it.
Act Two: Reading the Room
Individual performance is only half the picture. This session zooms out to the systems that hand people their roles in the first place; who gets cast where, and why. We'll use a simplified version of a "types of power" framework (based on Mazzano's "Theatrical Conception of Power") alongside Homi Bhabha's work on how colonial power writes scripts that are designed to keep the performer just short of full legitimacy. As a whole group, we'll map the social impact sector's actual stakeholders onto this: who holds which kind of power, and what script they're expected to perform.
Act Three: The Master's Tools
Power doesn't only live in people or structures, it lives in objects. This session turns to the templates, forms, and frameworks that structure so much of aid work, treating them as active parts reinforcing power structures rather than neutral paperwork. In pairs, you'll take a real reporting or results template and dissect exactly what roles and power it encodes. We'll also look at where there's more room to deviate from its expectations than anyone usually tests.
Act Four: Beyond the Hero's Journey
Every accountability document tells a story, whether it means to or not, and most of the aid sector is still telling the story of white saviourism. Drawing on Jonah Sachs's work on narrative and the idea of the "myth gap" (a story that's stopped matching reality), we'll name the sector's default hero's journey: nonprofits as heroes, donors as mentors, affected communities as background extras. We'll then look outside the European hero-and-conflict template to other narrative traditions, including examples like kishōtenketsu and Anansi stories from West Africa, and use real, publicly available communications material to practise rewriting the story with a different protagonist.
Act Five: The Mentor's Tools
Now the redesign begins. Returning to the artefact you examined in Act Three, you'll rebuild it as what we're calling a "mentor's tool": something that allows a funder or intermediary to support the local community as a protagonist, rather than to perform compliance for an audience above them. Working in pairs, guided prompts will walk you through rethinking the channels, frequency, and substance of the information your redesigned tool asks for and shares.
Final Act: Curtain Call
The closing session is where the redesigned artefacts become real. Each participant presents their reworked tool to the group and receives structured feedback and (of course!) applause. You'll choose an accountability buddy from the cohort to check in with after the course ends, and one specific, concrete action for the following week. You will leave with a working draft you can actually put in front of a colleague or a boss.
Real-World Project
You'll bring a real document from your own work into the course (a results framework, log frame, reporting template, or budget template) and you'll leave with a redesigned version built around a different set of assumptions about who accountability is for. Working in pairs across Sessions 4 and 5, you'll first reimagine the script your current document is performing inside, then rebuild the document itself: different indicators, different questions, different relationships baked into the structure. The final session is for presenting what you built, choosing an accountability buddy from the cohort, and committing to one specific action to share it in the week that follows.
Session Schedule
About the Instructor
Activist-Evaluator.
Sonja works at the intersection of monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL), decolonial development practice, and performing arts. She has spent nearly a decade as an evaluation specialist working with international NGOs, asking the difficult questions and insisting on real accountability even when that became uncomfortable. She lives and works in the tiny Caribbean island of Dominica, where her consultancy Island Impact is supporting grassroots organisations to navigate the funder relationships that this course is built around. In 2024/25, her company designed, self-funded and implemented a 6-months NGO Accelerator programme for local NGOs. Sonja has also completed summer schools and intensives in acting and musical theatre at Trinity Laban Conservatoire, City Academy London, and LAMDA. She has not (yet) performed on Broadway or the West End (you never know!) but instead has spent years building and running community performance work, including a foundation course in acting skills and a musical theatre programme. She currently leads the first improvised theatre group in Dominica and teaches singing 1:1. She does not think these two careers are separate things.
Frequently Asked Questions
$400
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October 13
20 students max
6 sessions
