This blog post has taken me a long time to write because of my anger and disappointment in Bond UK. If you look at the way they talk about themselves, you’d think they were engaging in transformative, radical decolonisation efforts. I was excited to work with them, but my experience showed me the exact opposite – which is sadly normal for our sector. So I decided to call them out on it.

[This is a long post, with a chronology of my experiences working directly with Bond. Read on for the irony of telling a UK-based organisation that words without actions are performative, that by gatekeeping based on race they’re building echo chambers of privilege, and that they need to do better, and all of this being stonewalled].

A quick intro: Bond is a membership-based platform, which also conducts training, has a jobs board for the UK, and hosts events and an annual conference for those in the nonprofit sector. While working at Open Society Foundations, I was a member of Bond and attended their training sessions. I subscribed to their newsletters and attended online events and conferences to meet others from our industry and to learn. Up until recently, I had always thought of Bond as a fairly traditional but harmless organisation.

I was asked to host a seminar for one of their working groups, on decolonising PMEL. Bond has working groups around different topics, including MEL. The MEL group was hosting a series of learning-based events for its members, and the request came from someone who does not work for Bond. Their working groups are fairly independent, with a forum and events organised by members, though with Bond’s support. Bond wanted to host an event to share new and emergent ideas for decolonisation, since they’d noticed the growing trend in PMEL to bring better diversity to the ways in which we do our work, including research. So far so good.

The person who asked me to host the seminar (for their privacy I won’t share their name) pushed for me to get compensation for my time preparing and then hosting a two-hour seminar with specific actions on how to decolonise PMEL. They were my biggest ally throughout the process – which took more than 7 months – yes, really.

They advocated for compensation, followed up, and coordinated the entire seminar. With three partners from the working group, they also helped facilitate the session itself. Without their support and commitment to the seminar, it would not have gone forwards and I would have been asked to work for free. So this is a public-not-public shoutout to this incredible person who put up with delays, shrugged shoulders, radio silence, and worse, for me. Ensuring I got paid took months since the decision was moved around from one department to the next. Then came a separate set of conversations on the amount.

The event evolved to focus instead on building a culture of PMEL in organisations, so I prepared group exercises, a rubric to begin using as a guideline, and thought about important lessons for NGOs to learn from in their frameworks.

A few weeks before the session, the working group announced my event, including an invitation link, with information I had prepared for participants to know what to expect, and what they should think about before the day. Here’s a screenshot:

So naturally, since my work had been shared on a forum, I wanted to join it. Prior to this, I hadn’t been invited or even alerted to the working group being an online place that I could join. I applied for membership, but was denied since “Our members are predominantly UK-based organisations working in international development. They are non-governmental, non-profit distributing and non-partisan.”

OK I thought, weird but fine. Let me try again, clarifying that I’m hosting an event and need to interact with participants. Pretty straightforward logic, can’t be that hard to argue with.

Yikes.

I first got radio silence, then I got passed around, again making me and my event someone else’s problem.

When I was finally able to talk to someone from Bond, I was met with hostility and gatekeeping, and a lack of interest in ‘allowing’ me to interact with people from my event. We aren’t even talking about my membership to Bond. We’re discussing the simple idea that I should have access to any forum where my event is being discussed.

Instead I was offered the option of emailing Bond with my message which they would post, and then let me know what the response was. Yeah.

I went through a few weeks of back-and-forth with them, arguing what I had assumed were fairly obvious and simple ideas that clearly we did not agree on.

1. If you are inviting someone to host an event, you have to pay them.

2. If you are posting about the event on a forum, they need to be able to see what you’re writing about them.

3. They need to be able to interact with the post and participants.

This is before we get to the larger issues of access, equity, and decolonisation!

1. If you are sharing resources on decolonising development, writing a new language guide, and hosting an annual conference where you talk about justice, your membership policies need to reflect that.

2. This means you need to have a clear membership policy for people from different backgrounds, organisations, and countries.

3. If you discriminate access, you need to make this clear and acknowledge that you are not being the supporter of equity you are positioning yourself as. Your marketing team needs to have a chat with your membership team.

Here’s a YouTube recording of the session.

I had to upgrade my Zoom membership and get a recording myself, since Bond informed me during the event that it would not be recorded – even though every other event had been.

I call them out towards the end of the workshop, but owing to time I couldn’t say everything I’d prepared. (I wanted to make sure the group work and Q&As had plenty of time, rather than monopolising.) So here’s the full script I had planned:

I have some uncomfortable truths about Bond to share. Despite the theme of the recent Conference, latest publications, and how Bond would like to be seen, it is not an equitable organisation. I have not been able to join it as a member, since I do not make enough money, and am not based in the UK. This means that until last week, I was unable to join the forum on which this event was listed, to talk to you all and engage.

If you’re based in the UK, you can be an individual or organisation member. But if you’re overseas, you need to be making half a million pounds, and have audited accounts that you have to share with Bond. Why would you share your private, audited accounts with strangers?

Imagine what this means for the profile of organisations from outside the UK that are allowed to join – first of all, no individuals or consultants are eligible. Only large organisations.

Which makes Bond an echo chamber.

The fact that there are groups on Caste and Development, or for Small NGOs, and that there is little caste diversity outside the UK, and small NGOs outside the UK are not invited, is so absurd. I have tried calling them out on this and explaining that in the small NGOs group, you should have small NGOs represented. As it stands, all members of Bond groups are:

1. small UK-based NGOs

2. large UK-based NGOs

3. large international NGOs

Now yes, small UK-based organisations do have a lot of experience navigating difficulties and would have a lot of experience to share. But shouldn’t small NGOs from every country be given the chance to be represented in a group like this?

In the Caste and Development group, I can’t even imagine the kind of echo chambers that happen. Yes, large groups overseas would have experiences with caste and would have staff from different caste groups. Likewise for those in the UK. But as any researcher will tell you – by deliberately limiting representation, that is a huge sampling bias!

Back to my experience. I asked, point blank, how can I be a member? And got evasive response, which basically adds up to: you can’t if you’re not in the UK.

I’ve had a huge supporter for this seminar. I’m so grateful to her persistence in ensuring I was compensated for this seminar. We tried to get membership access for me – for the simple reasons that I wanted to join and my work was being shared on a forum and it’s simply logical to be added to it.

After weeks of back and forth emails where I’ve tried to explain how terrible this discrimination is and why it has to change, I was finally allowed temporary access to just this one group, for a few weeks.

Given the theme of the latest conference and how Bond talks about itself and its publications, this gatekeeping is unacceptable.

It would be such a simple step to open up membership, it hardly needs management or staff time – which is the excuse we were given. If you’re going to publish a new language guide, then that attitude has to come through in your policies too.

Otherwise, it’s empty words which are self-congratulatory, and there’s no substance or intention behind them.

The only reasonable conclusion is that Bond is gatekeeping its membership, knowledge, resources, and access to this group. Which of course is horrendously unfair. There is no reason for this.

The extra excuses Bond hides behind are astounding. Senior leadership and its Advisory Board has been blamed. The Board meets often enough for broader membership to have been discussed at any time over the past decades, if equity was something Bond cared about. The fact that they have not, and that despite asking I got no indication of whether, when, and what kind of conversations around equity are happening at Bond, tells me that they are not interested in this.

Which brings me to an overall piece of advice I share with all clients – don’t hide behind your policies, articles of incorporation, or any excuses. If you’re called out on something, sit and listen and do better. Especially if you are called out by someone from a marginalised group and you as an individual are not, or you represent an organisation that is not in a marginalised space.

If you are gatekeeping, if you’re speaking about equity while practicing inequity, own up to it.

Otherwise it’s performative allyship and you will be called out on it.

Write that this is what you do, but you would like to do better. Invite people like me to come help you do better – and pay them.

I’ve offered to assist Bond with equitable membership, pro bono. That’s how passionate I am about this. Heard nothing back FYI.

Power exists but it can be called out – the first step is to acknowledge that you are wielding it over a group of people – or in this case, every other country. Transparency allows us to then have open conversations about how we can do better.

This system of hypocricy has to stop and the first thing to do is to be open if it exists in your organisation. Pay attention to staff members who call out racist and discriminatory practices like this. Open yourselves up to scrutiny by people like me, especially if you’re talking about being anti-racist and aligning with the decolonial movements. Otherwise, and I know I’ve said this a few times now but it needs repeating, your words are empty, your actions are performative allyship, and you will have people like me call you out.

Be clear about who your circles of power are. Write about them. Invite dialogues and criticisms, don’t stonewall people who want to help you, as I’ve been facing. And you have my email if you ever need help!