Reform Promises Nothing

 Rot and Renewal, Week 6. Two faith-based institutions, twenty years apart. One decided. One did not.

The ledgers

I joined the finance department of a regional church network a few weeks after the "July war"  ended in 2006. I was twenty-five. My job was to report on a humanitarian program that was rebuilding water and sanitation systems in the south and getting farmers through a season that had been destroyed along with everything else.

It was not the biggest thing I had worked on. As a junior auditor I had carried client portfolios worth many times it. But those were other people's books. I read them from the outside, wrote my report, and left. This was the first time I was sitting inside the institution the numbers belonged to, and I was glad to be there. It took me about a month with the ledgers to understand that the institution carrying it was dying.

The problem was arithmetic, and it was not a secret from anyone who could read a balance sheet. The cost of running the institution was larger than project funding was ever designed to carry. The church donors who had sustained the network for decades could see it too. They had stopped giving, and they had been specific about what would restart it. Reform first.

In practice, reform meant one thing. The network had around sixty people on the payroll, across Lebanon, Egypt, Cyprus and several small offices scattered through the region, and it needed fewer.

That decision was never taken.

I want to be careful here, because the easy version of this story is that a leader lacked courage, and the easy version is wrong.

In a faith-based network, authority does not sit with the person who signs. It sits with the consensus that allows him to sign. Each of the church families sending people into that building had an equal claim on it, and that shared claim was not an obstacle to the institution's legitimacy. It was the institution's legitimacy. Cutting the payroll meant imposing visible loss on the very constituencies whose agreement was the entire basis of the mandate.

More than three general secretaries passed through that office in my eight years there. The decision belonged to the first of them. He did not refuse it, and the structure gave him no way to pay for it.

By the time the cuts came, under a successor, they were no longer a decision. There was no money. What was left was the administration of an outcome, and even that was not one man's to carry alone.

So nobody decided, and then the decision was made anyway.

There was no downsizing plan. There was no phased exit, no severance schedule, no soft landing, no institutional memory handed to anyone. There was a month with no money for salaries, and then another one, and the thing came apart in the hands of the people still standing in it. For a while it kept breathing only because a small number of us did unglamorous work, and because one of the constituent church families put in money and time far beyond anything owed. Decades of legacy went out with it.

I have thought about that situation for twenty years, and the conclusion I keep arriving at is the least comforting one available. The decision to downsize did get made. It was made by arithmetic rather than by people, on a date nobody chose, in a manner that protected nobody.

That is the only real choice an institution has. Decide, or be decided.

What reform actually promises

For years I argued for reform the way most people do, which is by claiming that it works. I was wrong, and being wrong about this made me worse at the job.

Reform does not promise change. Reform is not the improvement you are hoping for. It is the price of being allowed to try for it, and it comes with no guarantee at all. Downsizing that network in 2007 would not have saved it. It might have failed for a dozen other reasons. What it would have done is give the institution the standing to ask its donors for a future, on a date of its own choosing, with its people leaving in a manner it had designed.

That is a genuinely difficult thing to argue for. You are asking a room full of people to accept a certain, immediate, nameable cost in exchange for an uncertain benefit. Anyone who tells you that is an easy sell has never had to make it.

But here is what strikes me most, having spent my whole working life inside faith-based organizations. These are the institutions with the most language for renewal of any kind of organization on earth. Reformation. Renewal. Being made new. Every tradition that sends people into those situations has it at the centre of its own story. And in not one of those stories is renewal described as comfortable. It always costs something, and the cost always arrives before the promise does.

Somewhere along the way the institutions kept the vocabulary and dropped the price. The alternative to reform is not stability. There is no stability. Organizations move through cycles the way everything alive does, and an institution that will not renew itself is not therefore preserved. It is only continuing, and continuing has an end date that somebody else sets.

The room called Light

Twelve years later, in a different organization and a different decade, I watched a reform survive. It is one of the very few I have seen do it, and almost nothing about it went the way I would have predicted.

It started with a donor.

The Asfari Foundation had been supporting our work for years. They are, in my direct experience, among the most serious philanthropic institutions working in this region, with a team that understands what actually changes an organization rather than what looks good in a report. Their published model says it plainly. They work by strengthening civil society organisations through long term funding, advice, networking and capacity development. Their product is the thing institutions never buy for themselves.

They offered to fund an organizational certification with the American University of Beirut's NGO initiative. End to end. I believe it cost somewhere around eight thousand dollars, and I cannot tell you exactly, which turns out to be the most important detail in this story. It never entered our operating budget. So it never had to compete with anything. So nobody ever had to choose it over something urgent.

We accepted gladly. Then I nearly let it die of neglect.

Not from doubt. From load. It landed in a year when I could not see the top of my desk, and certification is slow procedural work with nothing visible to show for months. I was ready to let it lapse.

A colleague would not let me. She is our internal consultant in everything but job title, and she has done more than almost anyone to bring that organization back toward its own stated values. She held me to it in the week I was ready to drop it. Then she went and built the team herself, out of the youth workers in my department, and asked them to give up their weekends.

They said yes. There were five of them, in their twenties.

They had renovated the training centre themselves the year before. They had painted every room to a theme, and the one we kept coming back to was the one they called Light. A yellow disc up near the ceiling with rays running down across both side walls, so that sitting in the middle of it you had the sun leaning in on you from three directions. The couches had been carrying twenty years of dust and came back out of the workshop in yellow. The tables were built from old wood the organization already owned, and when the wood ran out they bought iron legs and assembled the rest by hand. In that entire room, the only two things anyone paid for were the white lighting and the air conditioning.

These were not people with spare time. They already carried programs. They already carried hundreds of tasks. They were apprentices, hired into an idea I had started so that young people would have somewhere to be during the worst years of the crisis.

And for weeks, on weekends, they sat in that room with me and one senior colleague and argued about words.

What they were writing were the organization's guidelines and policies. Not the technical kind. The kind that says what this place is for, how it approaches the communities it works in, how it understands the world outside its own walls, and what it intends to do about any of it.

We achieved Silver certification in 2023, after a process that ran roughly two years.

I should have been covering their backs. It was the other way round, and I have never forgotten it.

Why that one lived

Two faith-based institutions. Both needed to change. One never made the decision, and the arithmetic made it instead. The other made it and is still standing on the result.

When I line them up, three things separated them, and not one of them was conviction. There was no shortage of conviction in that church network. There were people there who understood the problem more clearly than I did: 

1- Somebody else paid. The certification never had to survive an internal budget conversation, and an internal budget conversation is where most reforms in most institutions quietly die without anyone ever voting against them.

2- Somebody else set the deadline. Certification runs on an external assessor's calendar. We could not reschedule it into next quarter, which is the fate of every deadline an institution sets for itself. Institutions do not miss deadlines they cannot move.

3- And the people who carried it stood outside the hierarchy. This is the one I did not expect, and it has changed how I look at every organization I walk into. Everyone senior in that building held territory. A budget, a department, a way of working that a new set of policies might contradict. That is not a character flaw, it is what seniority is. Five people in their twenties held none of it. They could write down what the organization was for precisely because they had no stake in what it already was.

I used to read that as a sad fact. I have stopped. It is the most useful thing I know about institutional renewal: the capacity to reform an organization tends to sit with the people who have the least to defend, and that is almost always the last place anyone thinks to look.

And this is not only a small-institution problem. In 2002 this country passed a law creating an independent regulator for the electricity sector. Serious legislation, never repealed. The regulator it created was appointed in September 2025. Twenty-three years, four donor conferences, and nobody at any point refused. Between an institution of sixty people and a state of five million, the mechanism is the same and only the number of zeroes changes.

Four questions I ask now

I have started asking these out loud, in the meeting, before I agree to lead anything called a reform.

Whose money is it? If it comes out of the operating budget, it will compete every year with something urgent, and urgent always wins. Reform funded from inside is reform on probation.

Who set the deadline? If we set it, we will move it. Find one date that belongs to somebody else. An assessor, a certification cycle, a funder milestone, a public commitment.

Who continues this if I am hit by a car? Not who helps. Who continues. If the answer is nobody, then what has been approved is not a reform. It is my personal project, and it will last exactly as long as I do.

What is the date we declare this failed? Every plan states when success is due. Almost none states the date on which, if it has not happened, the failure gets written down and sent to the board or the donor. A reform with no failure date cannot fail. It can only remain pending, for twenty-three years.

What is still standing

The training centre is in a different building from my office, so going there is a decision. I still go, most often on a weekend. The tables built from salvaged wood are still in use. The couches are still yellow. The disc is still up near the ceiling with its rays coming down on both sides, and the guidelines drafted underneath it still govern how that organization works.

Four of the five people who wrote them have moved on to other things. Nobody outside that building knows their names. What they left is not a document in a drawer. It is the one part of that institution that was written on purpose, by people who chose to write it, stating plainly what the place is for. If that organization gets a new chapter, and it needs one, that is where the foundation already is. Somebody laid it on a weekend, in a room they had painted themselves, for no reward anyone recorded.

Reform is a decision. It does not promise you the change you want. It gives you the standing to try for it, and the right to choose your own date.

The network I joined in 2006 never gave itself that permission. It did not get to choose how its story ended.

Five people in their twenties decided. The work is still standing.