Philanthropy needs to do more listening and less talking

Stacey Thomas offers three pieces of advice to help philanthropists turn good intentions into best practice and the key is in listening.

Philanthropy is quite fond of latching onto buzzwords like “impact” or “systems change”, or pledging its commitment to “honour lived experience”. While the intentions might be good, the practice often lags behind.

When you’re sharing a cup of tea and a biscuit in the loungeroom of an older woman who’s been doing it tough financially for most of her life but insists that there are so many others who are more deserving of help, even though her story has brought you to the brink of tears, you listen. Intently.

When sole parents who’ve faced the heartbreak of having their kids hide the notes for expensive activities like school camp share their stories and tell you what kind of help they really need to reduce the financial struggle, you listen.

What we’ve heard and learned at The Wyatt Trust throughout our conversations with more than 40 older women and sole parents is that the hot topic of the cost of living has been a hot topic for years, if not decades, for more Australians than we care to admit.

With the cost of living reaching highs not seen for decades, the media, politicians, our friends and family, are all talking about it. Inflation and interest rates are now topics of conversations over coffee, maybe around the playground while children are playing, certainly on people’s minds as they tap their card at the supermarket.

But what has been lost in the recent public dialogue about inflation is that the cost of living, and the difficulty in making ends meet, has been a constant pressure for hundreds of thousands of Australians for years.

During our conversations, I met Stephanie* an educated single parent who until recently was employed as a primary school teacher. She needs surgery for a medical condition but there are weeks when she can’t even make it to her doctor’s appointments because she can’t afford to pay for the petrol required to get there.

I also met Debbie*, a woman in her late 50s who is increasingly anxious about what her later years will look like. She described the incredible stress of worrying about how much her landlord is going to raise her rent when her lease comes up for renewal each year.

Debbie can’t afford any more increases and given the rapid increase on rents, fears that her pension won’t be enough to help her find another place to live if she had to move. She’s worried about retirement too and suspects that she’ll have no choice but to “work forever” in her casual jobs which see her work 7 days a week. Debbie told me she’s so tired of trying to make ends meet and never quite getting there.

For Stephanie and Debbie, these cost of living pressures did not materialise over the last six months – this has been their reality for many years.

Throughout our weeks of listening to the stories of lived experience these women so generously shared with us, three key actions stood out that are worth sharing with other philanthropic funders. While we know that long-term solutions require nationwide policy and systemic change, these are small but significant actions we can all take to help shift the narrative about financial hardship in Australia:

Lead with empathy. Some of us may be feeling the pinch ourselves which can make it a little easier to relate to another’s financial struggles. But if that isn’t the case, remember to lead with empathy rather than sympathy. Try to understand what someone else is going through, rather than how you think you personally would approach it.

Leave your judgement at the door. While your intention may be to truly understand a complex situation, there may be decisions being made that you don’t understand, and that is ok. It is no one’s place to judge how someone has landed in the situation they are in.

Understand that the solution is already there. If you are providing direct support to a person or family, no one knows what they need better than they themselves do. Give people the control to choose the support they need and what will work best for them.

These tough times that so many find themselves in are not going away in a hurry, and there will always be people who struggle with the cost of living. Our challenge is to ensure when this becomes a distant memory for some, we don’t forget those still living it.

* Names have been changed to protect privacy