Why Small Organisations Should Compare Notes

Networking and community building is one of the three activities we are registered for. Most people assume that means connecting families to help. It does. It also means something less obvious, which is connecting organisations to each other.

In a single ward you can have two groups doing similar work who have never met. Not out of rivalry, and usually not out of anything at all. They started in different years, through different people, and nothing put them in the same room.

Two groups, one ward, no introduction

A community group almost always grows outward from somebody's own street. Someone sees a household struggling, does something, and the work spreads to the next street. That is a good way to start, because the group learns its area properly rather than theoretically.

It also means the map any group holds is real but partial, and its edges are accidental. Nobody drew a boundary and agreed it. A group covers the area its founders could walk to.

As far as we know there is no single place to look up who is doing what in a given ward. So two groups can work a few hundred metres apart for years, each with a clear picture of its own households and none at all of the other's. The information does not travel.

What the gap costs

The same households get help twice while others get none. The families easiest to find are those already known to somebody, and being known to one group makes you more likely to be known to the next. Visibility compounds. So does invisibility.

Gaps open where each group assumes the other is covering. This is the quieter failure and the more serious one. If you have heard that another organisation works with older people nearby, it is reasonable to put your effort elsewhere. It is also possible they stopped last year, or cover three villages while you assumed five.

A family tells the same painful story four times. Every assessment asks a person to explain the worst thing that has happened to them, to a stranger, with a form. Once is necessary. Four times, to four people who each go away again, is a cost we impose on people already carrying enough.

A funder receives two overlapping proposals. Two groups from the same ward describe the same need and ask for money to do much the same thing. A funder with no way to tell them apart may fund neither, and the ward gets nothing.

Why the instinct is to guard territory

It would be easy to write that as a complaint about other organisations. It is not. The behaviour is what the conditions produce, and we work under the same conditions as everyone else.

Funding is scarce and awarded competitively. If there is one grant and two applicants, telling the other what you do and which families you serve can feel like handing over your case for existing. Contacts and a record of delivery are most of what a small organisation has, and nobody gives those away lightly.

The instinct is structural rather than personal. The cost of acting on it does not land on the organisations competing. It lands on a family who told their story four times, and on a village nobody visits because everybody assumed somebody else did.

What sharing looks like without merging

Comparing notes does not mean merging, sharing a bank account or diluting anyone's independence. A group that answers to its own members and its own constitution should stay that way. What it means is narrower.

Know who does what. Which groups operate here, what each one delivers, and where each one stops. Half of the duplication problem disappears at this level alone, and it costs a conversation.

Have a referral you can genuinely make. Not a vague suggestion that a family try somewhere else, but a name, a number and a reasonable expectation that someone will answer. A referral that goes nowhere spends a family's trust as well as their bus fare.

Be willing to hand a case to someone better placed. If another group is closer or more experienced with a need, the family is better served there. Giving a case away feels like losing something, which is what makes it the clearest test of whether the work is about the people or the organisation.

The part that needs care

Sharing between organisations must never mean passing a family's private details around. A person's health, their household circumstances, a child's condition or a death in the family are theirs. They told one group in confidence, and that confidence does not transfer because two groups get on well.

That means asking first, and asking properly. Tell the person who you want to talk to, what you would say and why. Accept a refusal without penalty and keep helping either way. Consent given for one purpose is not consent for a general exchange of names.

Most of what is worth sharing is not personal anyway. Coverage, capacity, what a centre needs this month, which office handles which application. None of it requires naming a household.

If you run a group in Kiambu and any of this is familiar, we would rather know you exist than not. Get in touch. Comparing notes costs an afternoon, and the alternative is paid for by people who never chose it.