International development has long been and continues to be defined by top-down, one-size-fits-all, non-participatory models. Organizations doing ‘development’ come from the outside with the problem and the solution predetermined, without consultation or input from the community they will ‘develop’. Because of this model (which is a colonial legacy), organizations typically predetermine their ‘sector’ and stick to it. Indeed, such models often don’t even ask the community to identify their needs at all. Much of the same can be said about the funding landscape in northeast Wisconsin.

SEPO is entirely different

We start with the people with lived experience, we don’t end with them. We start by building relationships in the communities where we work, we start by listening, we start by co-creating spaces where our partners (‘people with lived experience’) share their challenges, frustrations, knowledges, and hopes with us.

It is only after those relationships are built that SEPO rolls up our sleeves to focus collective efforts on specific challenges. People with lived experience are our partners, much more so than other institutions, organizations, or even funders. One of our core principles, informed by an anti-colonial perspective, is that folks who experience particular struggles know more about those struggles and the resources and support needed to address those struggles than those outside that experience. While this seems like it should be obvious to all, most non-profit work takes an outside/savior approach – something that SEPO deliberately avoids by always centering anti-racist and anti-colonial tactics.

Our place-based approach emphasizes the importance of contextual specificity to our programming and demands that our partners drive the conversations about any interventions, instead of SEPO alone. This allows SEPO to integrate, challenge, and transform economic, environmental, social, cultural, historical, political, and institutional dynamics in ways that are complicated, but necessary to create opportunities for anti-colonial and anti-racist chincheho (change).

Sometimes this means that we don’t move as fast as we may want because we never move without wide consultation and community support. There is a saying that guides our understanding of the value of waiting:

If you want to go fast,

go alone.

If you want to go far,

go together.

SEPO is committed to the communities we work with ‘going far’ – that is what we mean when we talk about sustainability.