A New Blueprint: Design Justice as a Catalyst for Structural Change in Philanthropy
Design justice calls us to rethink who leads, who benefits, and how we build systems that truly serve.
Design thinking has already established its place in philanthropy as a method for deepening innovation and impact. The Knight Foundation highlights how design thinking fosters empathy for communities, enabling funders to move beyond assumptions and gain a deeper understanding of the lived experiences of those communities. Exponent Philanthropy points to design thinking as a tool for reimagining grantmaking, offering an iterative approach that embraces failure and learning. Bridgespan’s guide emphasizes the importance of quickly prototyping and testing ideas, particularly for complex social challenges. Georgetown’s Center for Social Impact Communication shows the potential of design thinking to revolutionize nonprofit storytelling, encouraging organizations to create more authentic and human-centered narratives.
Other examples include Design Thinking for the Greater Good: Innovation in the Social Sector by Daisy Azer, Jeanne Liedtka, and Randy Salzman, which uses ten case studies in areas like healthcare, education, and government to show how organizations apply the Four-Question Methodology (What is?, What if?, What wows?, and What works?) to foster empathy in tackling complex social challenges. Similarly, the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, in partnership with the Raikes Foundation, shows how design thinking can help philanthropists and foundations develop strategies grounded in solid evidence shaped by the real needs of the communities they aim to serve.
While these examples demonstrate the potential of design thinking to transform how we do our work, I encourage us to take a step further and implement a design justice framework to examine the structures of power, accountability, and inclusion that shape philanthropy.
Moving from Design Thinking to Design Justice
In her book Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need, Sasha Costanza-Chock describes design justice as:
“...a framework for analysis of how design distributes benefits and burdens between various groups of people. Design justice focuses explicitly on the ways that design reproduces and/or challenges the matrix of domination (white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, settler colonialism, and other forms of structural inequality). Design justice is also a growing community of practice that aims to ensure a more equitable distribution of design’s benefits and burdens; meaningful participation in design decisions; and recognition of community-based, Indigenous, and diasporic design traditions, knowledge, and practices.”
While design thinking has transformed how we approach programs and services, it rarely pushes the boundaries to implement design justice within the systems and cultures of philanthropic organizations themselves. We talk about designing better programs, but not about redesigning the power dynamics that shape our work.
I’ve seen firsthand how the failure to embrace design justice internally can undermine an organization’s mission. In my first post for philanthropy unfiltered, I mentioned a time when I was working at a nonprofit focused on creating more equitable pathways to education. I led a blog series elevating student voices, and one Black student shared an honest reflection of the racism they experienced on their education journey in the rural, conservative town they grew up in. But when the CEO read the post, they wanted to pull it down. Why? Because it might make the (white) donors uncomfortable, revealing the fragility of fearing that any honest discussion of racism will blame or reflect poorly on all white people.
How can an organization claim to champion equity while muting the voices it claims to amplify? This experience reminded me that organizations often excel at utilizing design thinking as a toolkit for creating external programs and prototyping solutions, but frequently fail to apply design justice principles to their own systems, cultures, and decision-making processes. Had that organization embraced design justice by centering those most impacted, perhaps the student’s voice would have been celebrated, not censored.
And the funders played a role in this dynamic, too. If a funder’s discomfort with confronting systemic issues (like racism) can derail an honest conversation, that’s a design flaw. A philanthropic system that values the comfort of funders over the truth-telling of communities will always fall short of being truly equitable.
Designing Better Systems
The Design Justice Network principles provide a blueprint for how philanthropy might embrace design justice as a roadmap for transforming systems with justice and equity at the center:
We use design to sustain, heal, and empower our communities, as well as to seek liberation from exploitative and oppressive systems.
We center the voices of those who are directly impacted by the outcomes of the design process.
We prioritize design’s impact on the community over the intentions of the designer.
We view change as emergent from an accountable, accessible, and collaborative process, rather than as a point at the end of a process.
We see the role of the designer as a facilitator rather than an expert.
We believe that everyone is an expert based on their own lived experience, and that we all have unique and brilliant contributions to bring to a design process.
We share design knowledge and tools with our communities.
We work towards sustainable, community-led and -controlled outcomes.
We work towards non-exploitative solutions that reconnect us to the earth and to each other.
Before seeking new design solutions, we look for what is already working at the community level. We honor and uplift traditional, Indigenous, and local knowledge and practices.
In summary, these principles encourage us to utilize design to sustain, heal, and empower communities while seeking liberation from exploitative and oppressive systems. They center the voices of those most directly impacted, prioritize the design’s impact on the community over the designer’s intentions, and view change as an emergent, collaborative process rather than a single endpoint. These principles also view the role of the designer as a facilitator, honor lived experience as a form of expertise, and promote the sharing of design knowledge and tools with communities.
This aligns seamlessly with Arturo Escobar’s Designs for the Pluriverse, which reminds us that design is deeply embedded in the structures that hold the modern world in place. As design evolved alongside postmodernism and globalization, theorists and practitioners alike began to understand that design is ubiquitous, that social context matters, and that design plays a critical role in creating a more livable world.
Escobar challenges us to shift from an attitude of separation, control, and hierarchy toward relationality and interconnectedness. This invites us to rethink autonomy as collective and relational, rather than individualistic, and to embrace speculative design in imagining alternative ways of being.
It also involves understanding design as a cultural and technical practice. He demonstrates that design is linked to politics and culture. By embracing design as an “ethical praxis of world-making,” we can move away from extractive, hierarchical systems toward a world where all communities can flourish.
Together, the Design Justice Network principles and Escobar’s vision of a pluriverse can push us to reimagine philanthropy as a system that must be redesigned with community voices, accountability, and collective liberation at its core.
Intersectionality and Navigating Power in Design
Of course, design thinking and design justice are not catch-all solutions. As Ruha Benjamin reminds us in Race After Technology, even the most well-intentioned design can reinforce the systems of oppression we seek to dismantle. Without an intersectional lens, design justice risks becoming just another tool that centers dominant perspectives while excluding the most marginalized.
For example, Black feminist thought helps us see how race, class, and gender aren’t separate issues; they’re deeply connected and often experienced together, especially by those who live at the intersections. This is the core idea behind intersectionality, first coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, though its roots run deeper. Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?”, Claudia Jones’s writings on being “triply oppressed,” and the Combahee River Collective’s critiques of white feminism all laid the groundwork.
Crenshaw showed how looking at race, class, or gender in isolation, what she called “single-axis” thinking, limits our understanding of injustice. Too frequently, design efforts fall into this trap, relying on universalist approaches that erase those who are marginalized in multiple ways under systems like white supremacy, capitalism, and colonialism. Without an intersectional lens, we can’t design solutions that work for everyone.
Drawing from these frameworks, we must recognize that power, privilege, and oppression operate at the personal, community, and systemic levels. Design processes must confront these dynamics directly if we hope to build equitable systems.
Let’s Prototype Philanthropy’s Future
Design thinking shouldn’t just be a tool for creating new programs or funding strategies; it should be embedded in justice, implemented as a practice that reshapes our own systems. We must treat philanthropy not as a static institution, but as a living system, one that can be reimagined, prototyped, and rebuilt with accountability, humility, and a commitment to co-creation.
Drawing inspiration from Sasha Costanza-Chock, Arturo Escobar, Ruha Benjamin, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and others, here are the questions philanthropy should be asking to fundamentally reimagine itself:
Values
What values are embedded in the design of our philanthropic systems, policies, and decision-making structures?
Do we inadvertently replicate oppressive structures (white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, ableism, colonial mindsets) in how we operate?
Are our values aligned with the transformative change we claim to support externally?
Practices
Who gets to participate in shaping our organizational culture, governance, and strategy?
How do we shift from top-down, expert-driven models to community-led or collaborative processes?
Are staff, grantees, and communities treated as co-designers or simply as recipients?
Narratives
What stories do we tell ourselves, and the world, about how philanthropy works?
How do we frame our challenges and solutions?
Are our narratives reinforcing the status quo or making space for collective dreaming, critical reflection, and new ways of being?
Sites
Where does philanthropy happen, and who has access to those sites?
Are key spaces (boardrooms, strategy sessions, decision-making meetings) accessible to those most impacted by our systems?
Which design sites do we privilege (large institutional convenings, closed-door strategy meetings), and which do we overlook (local strategy sessions, neighborhood forums, grassroots convenings)?
Pedagogies
How do we teach and learn about philanthropy’s role in shaping the world?
Do we value lived experience and situated knowledge, or default to expert-led, academic, or corporate models of learning?
How can we create learning environments that challenge the matrix of domination rather than reproduce it?
Intersectionality & Power
How does our design of philanthropy distribute benefits and burdens across communities?
Are our systems inclusive of those multi-burdened by race, class, gender, disability, and other forms of oppression?
How can we embrace intersectional analysis to challenge, and not reinforce, the matrix of domination within our own walls?
Ideologies & Pluriverse
Do our philanthropic practices reinforce a single worldview, or make space for many worlds to flourish?
Are we willing to challenge the ideologies of control that have defined philanthropy’s history?
How can we design our systems to nurture autonomy, relationality, and interconnectedness?
Design as Ethical Praxis
Are we ready to treat philanthropy as an “ethical praxis of world-making”?
How might design thinking (rooted in relationality, co-creation, and accountability) help us imagine new philanthropic worlds that are liberatory, not extractive?
How can we embrace speculative design to ask, “What if philanthropy looked fundamentally different, and who decides what different looks like?”
This is not a call to adopt design thinking as just another tool for program innovation. It’s an invitation to apply design justice principles to the core of philanthropy’s practices and culture, to radically transform how we think, learn, govern, and build the future we claim to stand for.
Take the Next Step with These Reads
Benjamin, R. (2019). Race after technology: Abolitionist tools for the New Jim Code. Polity Press.
Costanza-Chock, S. (2020). Design justice: Community-led practices to build the worlds we need. The MIT Press.
Crenshaw, K. (2019). On intersectionality: Essential writings. The New Press.
Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the pluriverse: Radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds. Duke University Press.
Liedtka, J., Salzman, R., & Azer, D. (2017). Design thinking for the greater good: Innovation in the social sector. Columbia Business School Publishing.
I’m grateful for this dialogue. This topic has shown up for me as a former fellow researching impact entrepreneurship during my masters to now, after losing my husband to early-onset colorectal cancer and becoming an advocate for health equity and more integrative, human-centered care.
I am increasingly drawn to models of care that emerge not from institutions alone, but from lived experience, supportive reflection, story, and community. Wellness is shaped by a constellation of relationships, systems, and inner truths. To me, reimagining care also means restoring agency: supporting people in reclaiming stake in their healing rather than outsourcing it to profit-driven systems. There’s deep potential in designing from this place.
I often talk about this idea with people in advocate or organizing leadership spaces. This is why many often pull away from wanting to form a grassroots movement into a nonprofit; the typical successful nonprofits create expensive fundraising events for high donors, to only receive enough money back just to pay for the event. It's short sighted, when more money needs to be going in to the programs that the nonprofit actually works towards instead of the fancy meals, music, or hotel rooms of the rich. In reality, the issue is not with philanthropy or nonprofits, but in how traditionally they or it has functioned, and we need to explore better ways of fundraising than just adhering to the ultra wealthy.