Midy Aponte-Vargas has written one of the clearest statements of philanthropy’s core problem I’ve read this year. The operating-system framing is right. Capacity-as-deficit is right. The argument that more flexible funding is only a gentler version of the old system rather than a new one is right. And coherence — whether an institution’s parts are in honest relationship with its commitments — is a better question. I don’t want to soften any of that. The diagnosis deserves underlining, not qualifying.
I do, however, want to push on the hardest problem that the piece does not quite reach: how capital gets allocated. As I read it, the piece dismantles the old allocation logic with real force, and by way of alternative says, in effect, “fund what already exists in communities and expand what is already proven.” But “already proven” rewards the organizations that are already visible, already legible, already resourced enough to have generated proof. Without more structural reform steps, this is likely to default to funneling money to precisely the well-known institutions the argument is trying to de-center. A critique of legibility cannot rest on “fund what’s proven,” because proof is legibility.
This matters because when you remove an explicit allocation rule and don’t replace it, you don’t get less concentration of power and you don’t shift power. You get more discretion in the current model. And discretion exercised by funders at a distance from the problem is the nub of the existing problem. “Trust the communities” is a disposition, not a mechanism. Absent a mechanism it collapses back into the program officer’s judgment: the status quo with better manners.
So the reset Aponte-Vargas rightly calls for needs a way to move money that is neither the old scorecard nor unaccountable discretion. I’ve spent some time on this. A fictional walk-through is here: a fund that allocates on independently assessed capabilities — defined not by the funder but by all the constituents of the problem together (funders, implementers, community, government) — with the measurement of the problem deliberately separated from the measurement of what organizations do, and with capability scores made public so the whole ecosystem can learn.
There is a deeper democratic argument underneath this, and it is worth making explicit. Amartya Sen’s central insight about social choice is that every judgment about justice or welfare rests on an informational basis — the particular set of things a society treats as relevant. The question is never whether to evaluate, but what counts as evidence and who decides. Authoritarian systems keep that basis narrow — output, obedience — so whole categories of harm never register. Democracy, for Sen, is government by discussion, and its distinctive power is to expand and contest the informational basis through public reasoning, which is how open societies come to see famines and exclusions that closed ones miss.
Read this way, Aponte-Vargas is saying that philanthropy’s informational basis is impoverished: funder-legible, attribution-obsessed, and blind to frontline knowledge. But the Senian correction is not to shrink the formal basis back toward the tacit and the relational and trust the result; it is to open it — to make the information that governs capital the product of sense-making amongst everyone who carries the problem. That is what constituent-defined capabilities are. And the word is not borrowed loosely: it is Sen’s and Martha Nussbaum’s, an evaluative space built around what people are actually able to be and do — extended here to the institutions and relationships that determine whether they can.
Now to the objection she — or any reader — would be right to raise: isn’t capability certification just the old scorecard with a new name — the apex of the legibility regime, not its replacement? It would be, if it claimed to be objective. It doesn’t. The defense is not that the measurement is neutral; no allocation rule is neutral, they all encode values. The defense is that the values are made explicit, negotiated by the people who carry the problem, and revisable — and, crucially, that the funder sits inside the accountability loop rather than above it.
That is a different claim from “we found the right metric.” It is legitimacy through a relationship-centering process, not objectivity through measurement. The power doesn’t disappear; it becomes visible and contestable. That is more than the current system manages.
This is also why I’d extend Aponte-Vargas’ own best word rather than contest it. She lands on coherence, and I think she’s right. For me, coherence is a capability, and it can be assessed — not by an auditor’s checklist, which would corrupt it into a box-ticking exercise, but through the voice of the people an institution is accountable to. (That is the proposition behind Constituent Voice, which I helped build.)
Trust, local knowledge, local accountability — the things she rightly says the old apparatus can’t see — are not un-measurable. They are relational capabilities, held across a system rather than banked inside a single organization, and they belong on the funder’s ledger as much as the grantee’s. The old machinery missed them because it was hunting the wrong kind of capacity in the wrong unit. The answer is not to stop measuring. It is to measure the right things, at the level of the relationship, and the measuring is done by those constituent of the problems being addressed.
Let me push back hardest on my own argument. Certification regimes can reproduce professionalization bias, rewarding the organizations fluent in being assessed, which reinforces the broken status quo ante. Designing against that is the live, unsolved problem, and anyone selling certainty here is rightly suspect. But “it is hard to do well” is not an argument for falling back on discretion, which is both harder to do consistently and impossible to see.
You cannot reset the operating system by deleting the allocation function — you have to rewrite it. The opportunity now is to embed the allocation function in the ecosystem. The unit of thinking and action is no longer the single organization or stand-alone intervention. If we want effective networks, then coherence is the right question, now at the network and not just the organization. Constituent-defined, independently certified capability is one serious attempt at an answer — and the field badly needs the argument about which answers actually hold.
David Bonbright is a social entrepreneur, co-creator of Constituent Voice, and currently a principal at Deep Fathom. The capability-based funding model described here draws on work he is developing with Deep Fathom.
