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Let's Talk About Agency: We Can Support People Without Taking Ownership of their Choices.
- Jul 13
- 7 min read
Updated: Jul 23
The word agency appears often in conversations about human-centered services, ethical storytelling, and community-led work.
Agency is a person’s ability to make choices, influence what happens in their life, and act on their own goals.
It is the right to participate in decisions that affect them.
In nonprofit work, protecting agency means recognizing that people are not passive recipients of help. They bring knowledge, preferences, relationships, strengths, and lived expertise into every interaction.
They may need resources, support, information, access, or advocacy. They do not need someone else to take ownership of their lives.
Agency Is More Than Offering a Choice
Nonprofits sometimes describe a program as empowering because participants are allowed to choose between predetermined options.
That may be a choice, but it does not necessarily mean the person has meaningful agency.
Agency depends on whether someone has enough information, access, safety, and power to make a real decision.
A person may technically be free to decline a service, but that decision is not fully voluntary if refusing means losing access to food, housing, transportation, or another essential resource.
A young person may be asked for feedback, but that feedback carries little weight if adults have already made every important decision.
A community may be invited to attend a listening session, but participation is limited if residents are never told how their input influenced the final plan.
Agency is not created by asking people what they think. It is created when their knowledge has a meaningful place in the process.
Why Agency Matters
When people are experiencing poverty, housing instability, disability, illness, violence, grief, or another difficult circumstance, systems often respond by giving them fewer choices.
Professionals begin deciding what is best. Programs create requirements based on what is easiest to manage.
People are expected to follow a prescribed path, even when that path does not reflect their needs, priorities, culture, or lived reality.
This can happen even inside caring organizations. The staff may be compassionate. The program may provide something genuinely useful. The organization may believe deeply in the people it serves.
But good intentions do not automatically protect agency. A program can be well meaning and still be built around control.
Support and Control Can Look Similar
There is often a fine line between helping someone navigate a difficult system and taking over the decision-making process.
Support sounds like:
Here are the options available. Let’s talk through what each one could mean for you.
Control sounds like:
This is the option we believe is best, and participation depends on your agreement.
Support gives people space to identify their own priorities. Control assumes the organization already knows what the person should want.
Support recognizes that people may make decisions the organization would not make.
Control treats compliance as evidence of success.
This does not mean nonprofits should avoid structure, professional guidance, boundaries, or safety requirements. Some programs must operate within legal, clinical, funding, or organizational limits.
Protecting agency means being honest about those limits while preserving as much choice as possible.
It also means noticing when a rule exists because it is truly necessary and when it exists because it makes the program easier to administer.
Agency in Program Design
Agency begins long before a person enrolls in a program.
It starts with how the program is created. Who identified the need? Who decided what the response should look like? Who selected the schedule, location, eligibility requirements, activities, and expected outcomes? Who gets to define whether the program is working?
A human-centered program does not assume that professional expertise is the only expertise that matters.
Staff may understand funding, compliance, service delivery, or program management. Participants understand what it is like to navigate the issue in daily life. Both forms of knowledge matter.
Community input should shape more than surface-level details. It should influence priorities, accessibility, program structure, and how success is understood. That does not mean every person will want the same thing or that an organization can meet every request.
It means the people most affected by a program should have a central role in shaping it.
Agency in Direct Services
Agency can be protected or undermined through small daily interactions.
It appears in whether people are told what information is being collected and why.
It appears in whether they can ask questions without being treated as difficult.
It appears in whether staff explain available options or simply make referrals.
It appears in whether participants can change their minds.
It appears in whether someone can disagree with a staff member without losing access to support.
It appears in whether people are expected to share personal information that is not necessary for the service they are receiving.
These moments may feel minor from an organizational perspective.
To the person receiving services, they shape whether the program feels respectful, safe, and trustworthy.
Agency in Nonprofit Storytelling
Agency also matters in the way nonprofits talk about people. A story can be factually accurate and still remove someone’s agency.
This often happens when the organization is presented as the active force and the participant is described only through what was done for them.
Consider the difference between:
Our program helped Maya gain confidence, discover her potential, and enroll in college.
and:
Maya came to the program knowing she wanted to become a nurse, but she was unsure which college path would best support that goal. Through conversations with a mentor, campus visits, and support navigating financial aid, she compared her options and chose a school that fit her goals and circumstances. She enrolled and will begin classes this fall.
In the second version, the organization’s contribution is still clear. The student is also clearly part of the action. She had a goal. She made decisions. She used the available support. She took the next steps.
That is what agency looks like in storytelling.
The nonprofit does not disappear from the story. It simply stops claiming ownership of the person’s growth.
The Difference Between Empowerment and Power
Nonprofits often say they empower people. The word is usually well intentioned, but it can suggest that power begins with the organization and is then given to someone else.
People already have knowledge, values, preferences, relationships, and the ability to make meaning from their own experiences. The question is not always how an organization can give someone power.
Sometimes the better question is whether the organization is creating access, removing barriers, sharing information, or stepping out of the way.
This is especially important when nonprofits work with communities that have repeatedly been excluded from decisions. Inviting participation without sharing influence can feel like another version of the same experience. Agency requires more than being heard.
It requires being taken seriously.
What Agency Does Not Mean
Protecting agency does not mean an organization must agree with every choice. It does not mean staff cannot offer professional guidance. It does not mean programs should have no expectations, boundaries, or accountability. It does not mean every outcome rests entirely on individual choice.
People make decisions within real conditions. Their choices may be limited by cost, transportation, discrimination, family responsibilities, health, safety, policy, geography, or access to information.
Agency should never be used to blame people for circumstances shaped by systems they did not create. A person can have agency and still face deeply limited options. Human-centered work recognizes both.
Agency and Funder Expectations
Funders often ask nonprofits to describe how participants are involved in program planning and decision-making. Organizations may respond by saying they conduct surveys, collect testimonials, or invite participants to provide feedback.
Those practices can be useful, but they do not automatically demonstrate agency. A stronger response explains what changed because of participant input.
Perhaps program hours were adjusted because families could not attend during the workday. Maybe transportation support was added after young people identified it as the primary barrier to participation.
Perhaps former participants now serve on an advisory group with a defined role in program decisions. Maybe the organization changed how success is measured because the original outcomes did not reflect the goals participants valued most.
These examples show that community knowledge is not being collected only to satisfy a grant question. It is influencing the work.
Agency and Outcomes
Nonprofits should also examine whether their outcomes reflect participant goals or only organizational goals. A program may define success as completing a predetermined number of sessions or following a specific service plan. Those measures may help the organization track participation, but they do not always show whether the person moved toward something meaningful to them.
A housing program may value long-term stability.
A participant may first value safety, privacy, proximity to family, or the ability to keep a pet.
A youth program may prioritize academic improvement.
A young person may value belonging, confidence, leadership, or having one trusted adult.
A workforce program may measure employment placement by income level.
A participant may be focused on finding work that accommodates childcare, disability, transportation, or long-term career goals.
The organization’s outcomes and the participant’s goals do not have to compete. But the program should understand the difference.
Questions Worth Asking
Agency becomes clearer when organizations look honestly at where decisions are being made.
Who has the most influence?
Who is expected to adapt?
Whose knowledge is treated as credible?
What happens when a participant disagrees with the recommended plan?
Can people decline part of a service without losing access to everything else?
Are participants asked to share more personal information than the program truly needs?
Does community input change decisions, or is it mainly collected for reporting?
Most nonprofits operate under real constraints. Funding requirements, limited staffing, safety concerns, and administrative systems all shape what is possible. The purpose is to notice where more choice, transparency, and shared decision-making can be created.
Agency Is Part of Dignity
Dignity-centered work is not only about using respectful language. It is about how power is handled. A nonprofit can describe people beautifully and still exclude them from decisions.
It can use human-centered messaging while designing a program around compliance. It can talk about community voice while continuing to make every meaningful choice internally.
Protecting dignity requires more than changing the words in a grant proposal. It requires examining who is trusted, who is heard, and who has the ability to influence what happens next.
Agency means people remain the authors of their own lives, even when an organization is walking alongside them. The organization may provide resources. It may open doors.
It may make a difficult system easier to navigate. It may offer expertise, relationships, advocacy, or support.
But the person remains more than the program they entered, the need they experienced, or the outcome the organization hopes to report.
Human-centered nonprofit work does not ask how to take charge of someone’s future.
It asks how to create the conditions, access, and support that allow people to move toward the future they choose.
Does Your Language Reflect the Agency of the People You Serve?
Agency should show up not only in how a program operates, but also in how the organization describes its work.
If your case for support, grant language, or program materials place the organization at the center of every success, Shared Ground Consulting can help you strengthen the message. Together, we can clarify your role, reflect participant choice and lived expertise, and build language that is human-centered, credible, and grounded in dignity.
