Partnership Is Not Extraction

Over the years, I have watched many organizations proudly talk about the importance of partnering with communities they hope to serve. I hear institutions say they want authentic collaboration, community engagement, and culturally responsive programming.

And yet, too often, what is being called partnership is not partnership at all. It is extraction.

“We would love to partner with you”

I have seen organizations secure funding to serve Latino communities, design entire programs internally, hire consultants to build strategies, create outreach materials, establish service models, and make nearly every important decision before ever reaching out to organizations that actually know and understand the community.

Then, near the end of the process, a culturally specific organization receives the call: “We would love to partner with you.”

But what that often means is something very different: “We have already built everything. We now need your help accessing the community.”

This is not partnership.

Community organizations bring expertise

True partnership begins much earlier. It begins with recognizing that organizations rooted in communities bring expertise that should shape the work from the very beginning.

Too often, institutions approach culturally specific organizations from an unequal power dynamic. The institution controls the funding. The institution controls the decision-making. The institution assumes expertise belongs to those managing the grant. Community organizations are made to feel fortunate simply for being invited into the process.

They may be asked to provide outreach, build trust with families, explain services, recruit participants, facilitate relationships, and lend years of community credibility to make the project successful. Yet they are offered minimal compensation. Sometimes they are not compensated at all.

Even more concerning, the institution may later report successful outcomes to funders without fully recognizing that trusted community partners made participation possible.

Translation at the end is not cultural responsiveness

I have also seen organizations hire consultants, often people with no lived experience or cultural connection to the community being served, and pay significant amounts for program design and strategy development.

Then, once the work is complete, culturally specific organizations are invited only to translate materials or provide outreach support. Somehow, the final program is presented as culturally appropriate simply because the materials now exist in Spanish.

Translation does not make something culturally responsive. Being invited at the end does not make something collaborative.

What true partnership requires

If your organization needs community trust to succeed, then the organizations that have built that trust deserve to be treated as experts. Not as outreach assistants. Not as translators brought in at the end. Not as convenient pathways to communities institutions have not built relationships with themselves.

True partnership requires shared decision-making. It requires recognizing community expertise as expertise. It requires compensating partners fairly for the knowledge, relationships, and credibility they contribute. And it requires humility.

Communities do not exist waiting for institutions to save them. Organizations rooted in those communities have often spent years building trust long before grant funding ever arrived.

The question institutions must ask

I believe one of the most important questions institutions should ask themselves is this:

Are we seeking partnership because we value community expertise? Or are we seeking partnership because we need access to a community we do not know how to reach ourselves?

There is a difference.

Communities deserve more than performative collaboration. Organizations serving those communities deserve to be treated not as beneficiaries of opportunity, but as equal partners whose expertise makes meaningful impact possible.

True partnership is not about inviting communities into work institutions have already designed. True partnership means building the work together from the beginning.