Changing Lives: How Leaders of Philanthropic Organizations Understand Their Mission

The purpose of this study is to better understand what leaders of local organizations mean by the phrase “changing people’s lives.” Three major themes emerged from the data, collected from interviews and organizational information, suggesting that people do make transformative changes in their lives and engagement with a philanthropic organization seems to facilitate the change process. Our research question was “How do staff members of local philanthropic organizations make meaning of the phrase in their mission statements ‘changing people’s lives.’” Transformative learning implies that a fundamental change occurs in the way a person perceives the world. From a constructivist perspective, transformative learning acknowledges that individuals create new knowledge as they interpret and reinterpret the meaning of their experiences. Transformative learning is “a critical dimension of learning in adulthood that enables us to recognize, reassess, and modify the structures of assumptions and expectations that frame our tacit points of view and influence our thinking, beliefs, attitudes, and actions” (Mezirow & Taylor, 2009, p. 18). Individuals develop habitual expectations based on past experiences. These expectations, often uncritically assimilated from the social world, community, and culture, frequently contain distortions, stereotypes, and prejudices that guide action. In Mezirow and Taylor’s view, transformative learning occurs when individuals have experiences that are not congruent with their expectations and as a result they critically reflect on their assumptions and engage in critical discourse to develop new and more expansive perspectives. An exploration of how nonprofit organizations make meaning of “changing people’s lives” may expand the understanding of transformative learning for vulnerable people. Our interest in conducting this study stemmed from the disjuncture between the real-world work of nonprofit organizations that are “caring for vulnerable people” by helping them change their lives and the inadequacy of transformative learning theory to inform practice in this area. This disjuncture arises from the notion that “hungry, desperate, sick, homeless, destitute and intimidated people obviously cannot participate fully and freely in discourse” (Mezirow, 2003, p. 60) and that discourse and critical reflection are essential components of key theories of transformative learning (Brookfield, 2000). Although we agree with the criticism that transformative learning theory over-emphasizes rationality (Cunningham, 1992) and inadequately accounts for other ways of knowing (Kasl & Yorks, 2002), research suggests that people in crisis cannot engage in transformative learning (Kilgore & Bloom, 2002). Yet, community-based nonprofit organizations claim they are helping people change their lives. Baumgartner (2012) suggests that to expand the theory of transformative learning continued exploration is warranted on the effects of various contexts on the transformative learning process including the sociocultural, interpersonal, historical, and situational. This is the first phase of a study examining how vulnerable people change their lives. This phase focuses on how staff members in nonprofit organizations that care for vulnerable people make meaning of this phrase in their mission statements.