By Maria Rio, Fractional Fundraiser + CEO of Further Together Fundraising

If CCF stops at perfecting individual ethics while systemic harm continues untouched, we’ve accomplished what the recycling movement did before governments intervened: we’ve made people feel better about participating in a fundamentally unjust system.

Community-Centric Fundraising has fundamentally shifted how thousands of fundraisers think about donor-centricity, storytelling, and power dynamics. We’ve learned to question sob stories, challenge scarcity narratives, and push back against treating donors like saviors. 

This is critical work, but it’s incomplete.

CCF as a movement feels focused intensely on ethical behavior at the individual level: how you write appeals, how you steward donors, how you tell stories. But prioritizing individual ethics without meaningfully confronting systemic barriers mirrors the same failures we see across public health, environmental policy, and consumer protection. 

When institutions with power avoid accountability by framing harm as personal choice, real change remains impossible.

The Individual Responsibility Trap

The dominant narrative across countless social issues sounds the same: “If individuals just made better choices, the problem would go away.” 

• Smokers should quit. 
• Consumers should recycle. 
• People should eat healthier. 
• Donors should give better.

When we fixate on individual behavior rather than overarching regulation, we guarantee that harm continues; we just get better at blaming the people with the least power for outcomes they don’t control.

How Systemic Change Actually Works

The tobacco industry spent decades insisting smoking was an individual choice. They argued they weren’t responsible for what consumers decided to do with their products. 

Then governments intervened—not by shaming smokers harder, but by exposing the industry’s deliberate deception, mandating warning labels, restricting advertising, removing smoking from TV, and pursuing litigation. The responsibility shifted from individuals to producers, and smoking rates plummeted. Not through shame. Through systemic intervention.

Compare this to gun violence in the United States. The dominant argument “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” downloads all responsibility onto individuals after the harm occurs. Violence gets framed as a result of an individual’s mental health issues, rather than a public health crisis requiring regulation. But what does this lead to? Massive societal harm continues while manufacturers and distributors face minimal accountability. Guns remain protected despite overwhelming population-level data because we refuse to treat this as the systemic issue it is.

Or consider food quality. In North America, weak regulation allows widespread use of additives, excessive sugars, and ultra-processing. Responsibility gets framed as “personal diet choices.” In Europe, stronger regulation bans harmful substances before widespread damage occurs. The outcome? North America has some of the highest obesity rates globally, while Europe doesn’t, despite similar consumer behavior. The difference isn’t willpower. It’s regulation.

When systemic change actually happens, power holders:

• Expose hidden costs. People adapted to recycling when governments communicated the true cost of landfills and created incentives. In Ontario, my home province, we can dispose of recycling for free. However, excessive garbage bags require payment for tags, making garbage costly and recycling free. Behaviour shifted not because individuals became more virtuous or aware of environmental harms, but because the system made different behavior logical.
• Counter powerful narratives. Tobacco companies claimed consumers preferred their products and bore sole responsibility for outcomes. Governments exposed long-term harm, secondhand exposure, and deliberate manipulation, removing the industry’s plausible deniability.
• Protect people without agency. Secondhand smoke regulations weren’t about smokers’ choices. They were about protecting bystanders who never consented to harm. This reframed the debate entirely.
• Shift accountability upward. Once governments proved individuals would adapt to new systems, corporations lost their excuse that “consumers prefer it this way.” Responsibility moved where it belonged: to the institutions creating the conditions for harm.

The sequence is consistent: reveal true cost, enable or incentivize individual compliance, prove adaptation is possible, then regulate institutions. 

Individual ethics matter, but only systemic intervention actually changes outcomes.

What This Means for Fundraising

Our sector mirrors these challenges. We’ve placed ethics on individual fundraisers, while structural causes of harm remain largely untouched:

• Donor-Advised Funds concentrate wealth and delay community benefit, but we frame this as “donor preference.” 
• Tax policy incentivizes wealth hoarding, but we treat this as unfortunate but inevitable. 
• Northern wealth extraction creates the conditions requiring Southern “development,” but we focus on better donor conversations rather than confronting global inequity through lobbying or regulatory change.

The communities harmed by these systems have no agency in how philanthropy operates. They bear the consequences of decisions made by people with structural power, mediated by nonprofits that depend on those same power holders for survival.

Just like recycling, food quality, and tobacco, people choose what is subsidized, normalized, and marketed as responsible. Philanthropic behavior follows the structure policy creates. “Donor preference” is manufactured by tax incentives, regulatory frameworks, and dominant narratives that treat charity as superior to redistribution.

CCF Cannot Stop at Individual Ethics

Community-Centric Fundraising has made us better fundraisers. We tell stories with more dignity. We challenge donor supremacy in our daily practice. We refuse to perpetuate harm through our communications.

This both matters immensely and is not enough.

If CCF stops at perfecting individual ethics while systemic harm continues untouched, we’ve accomplished what the recycling movement did before governments intervened: we’ve made people feel better about participating in a fundamentally unjust system.

Real change requires moving from ethics to power. That means:

• Collective advocacy such as fundraisers lobbying for policy changes that reduce wealth concentration, increase mandatory payout rates, and eliminate donor control mechanisms that delay community benefit.
• Structural reform like challenging the regulatory frameworks that make charity tax-advantaged while direct cash transfers aren’t and questioning why perpetual endowments receive preferential treatment when community needs are immediate.
• Accountability for institutions, starting with naming which foundations, which wealth managers, which policymakers benefit from systems that download responsibility onto communities and individual fundraisers.

We cannot shame our way to justice any more than we could shame our way to lower smoking rates. We cannot individual-ethics our way out of systems designed to concentrate power and extract wealth.

The Question CCF Must Answer

What if we demonstrated—clearly, publicly, with data—the true cost of relying on charity instead of robust public systems? The true cost of chronic nonprofit underfunding? The true cost of downloading responsibility for societal wellbeing onto communities and the people who serve them?

Then the “individual choice” argument collapses the same way it did for tobacco.

CCF has taught us to see the water we’re swimming in. Now we need to change the water itself. That requires moving beyond what individual fundraisers can do differently and confronting what institutional power must be forced to do differently.

The sector has spent decades perfecting how to ask nicely, how to build relationships, how to demonstrate impact to satisfy donor preferences, all while the conditions creating the need for charity intensify.

The question isn’t whether individual ethics matter. They do. The question is whether CCF, and the people who follow the principles of the movement, are ready to meet the moment. To move past individual ethics to power shifting. To name institutions. To demand regulation. To shift accountability upward to where it belongs.

Because if we don’t, we’re just teaching people to recycle while corporations keep polluting. We’re shaming smokers while tobacco companies lobby hard to write policy. We’re downloading responsibility onto individuals who never had the power to change systems in the first place.

And nothing fundamental to our collective liberation changes at all.