In the discourse on useful outsiders, one of the most compelling questions is whether it is genuinely possible for a person who holds institutional power and controls significant financial resources to step back from that power in a way that actually strengthens community self-determination. The instinct of many community practitioners is to be sceptical: the structures of professional accountability, the requirements of funders and the personal investment of institutional actors in their own sense of purpose and competence all create powerful pressures against genuine power-sharing.

Henry Moore, assistant city manager in Savannah, Georgia, offers an answer to that scepticism that is grounded in lived practice rather than aspirational theory. His story is one of an institutional actor who recognised, with unusual honesty, the limitations of the model he was operating within and made a deliberate choice to relocate the authority he held from the institution to the street.

The recognition of failure

Moore’s insight began with an honest assessment of what the conventional model of grant administration was actually producing. His role involved administering millions of dollars in top-down grant funding, directing significant resources toward community development initiatives across the city. By any conventional institutional measure, this was a position of considerable importance and impact.

But Moore’s honest assessment of the outcomes told a different story. The money was being administered efficiently and the programmes it funded were being delivered. But the lives of the people the funding was intended to benefit were not, in any meaningful or durable way, being improved. The communities were consuming the services produced by the grants without developing any greater capacity to meet their own needs. Moore found himself sitting on a throne of institutional authority that felt powerful but was producing very little of lasting value.

Stepping down from the throne

Moore’s response to this recognition was to redesign his approach in a way that deliberately relocated authority from the institution to the people. He retained his institutional position and continued to access the resources it provided. But he changed entirely how those resources were deployed.

Instead of administering large grants to professional organisations with complex accountability requirements, he began offering tiny microgrants to ordinary citizens. The amounts were small enough that they did not require the bureaucratic infrastructure of a standard grant process. The application was reduced to its minimal form: a single page, a straightforward description of what three neighbours were committing to do together, and the signatures of those three people.

The power of the tripartite signature

The requirement that three neighbours co-sign the single-page letter was the most deliberate and most important element of Moore’s redesigned approach. It ensured that the resources were not going to an individual acting alone, or to an organisation acting on behalf of a community, but to a small cluster of citizens who had made a public, named commitment to act together on a specific shared initiative.

This requirement embedded a relational accountability into the grant process that no formal compliance framework could replicate. The three signatories were accountable not to Moore’s institution but to one another and to the street that would see, or not see, the results of their commitment. The authority for the initiative had been relocated from the institutional hierarchy to the community block.

The model and its implications

Moore’s model has implications that extend far beyond the specific context of municipal grant administration. It demonstrates that institutional actors who hold authority and resources are not inevitably trapped by the logic of top-down service delivery. With sufficient clarity of purpose and sufficient willingness to redesign the systems they control, they can create mechanisms that actively build community agency rather than substituting for it.

The key design principle is simple: strip away every bureaucratic requirement that is not essential to the community’s own accountability for the work, and relocate the resulting simplicity and freedom to the street. When the complexity of the institutional process is reduced to a single page and three signatures, the community can begin within days rather than months.

Questions for reflection

If you hold an institutional position of power or budget control, how much of that decision-making authority are you actually willing to give away to regular peers and community members?

What is a low-stakes microgrant or resource-sharing mechanism your organisation can strip of unnecessary red tape to unleash rapid, locally owned collaboration?

Think of an institutional process you are involved with that currently takes weeks or months. What would remain if every element that was not essential to the community’s own accountability were removed?

What would it take for your organisation to design a resource-distribution mechanism with the same elegant simplicity as Moore’s single-page, three-signature letter?

Inspired by: Russell, C. and McKnight, J. (2022) The connected community: discovering the health, wealth, and power of neighborhoods. Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.