“Listening Before Leading”
By Tibeb Asfaw (Duke MIDP ’26)
Summer 2025 AFE Blog Post Series
From Field Notes to Future Blueprints
Why Volunteer-Powered Change Isn’t Plan B. It’s the Plan.
This summer, I haven’t been chasing metrics. I’ve been listening for shifts- small ones. In trust. In power. In who gets to lead.
In a world that rewards efficiency and credentials, I’ve been learning to move at the pace of people. Not programs. Not reports. Just people. That means more listening than leading, more reflection than conclusions, and more coffee than I care to admit, mostly while sitting with stories no report ever budgets for. Or has the guts to include.
One of the most grounding moments didn’t happen in the field. It happened at a dinner table in North Carolina, during Easter, with my Rotary host family, Lisa and Jeff Higginbotham. Over baked ham and sweet potatoes, Jeff told my husband and me about how he spends his weekend hours packing thousands of meals for people facing urgent hunger across the world.
There was no fancy title behind that act. No budget code. Just presence. Just care. And definitely no KPI for gracefully stacking rice packets while elbow-to-elbow with teenagers and retirees in matching hairnets.
And that, to me, is the beauty of volunteerism. It doesn’t ask for degrees, age, race, or timeline. It just asks that you show up.
You don’t always see that kind of wide-open welcome in structured development spaces. But you see it in community kitchens. In school yards. In the quiet rhythms of people who care without being asked.
That same spirit, care without credit, is what I kept seeing again and again in my field work. As part of my Applied Field Experience, I’ve been supporting the review of a community-led education program in Southeast Asia. At first glance, it looked like a standard program assessment. But what emerged from pages of students, parents, teachers, and staff feedback felt more like testimony.
These weren’t just inputs. They were stories of belonging, silence, resilience, and stretch. Of showing up even when exhausted. Of leading even when unsure.
One student wrote, “We hide from visitors. Not because we don’t care, but because we don’t know if they’ll see us.”
That line sat with me.
Because I’ve seen the same dynamic elsewhere- volunteers holding systems together while remaining invisible to the systems themselves. They mediate conflict. They reopen classrooms. They check on neighbors when the funding stops.
We ask them to do everything. Yet they’re rarely given the recognition, tools, or space to lead fully.
Still, they build. They build trust, learning, and safety. They build soft infrastructure, the kind that keeps communities going when institutions lag behind.
The more I listen, the more convinced I become: volunteerism isn’t a supplement to development. It’s the foundation.
It’s where knowledge gets passed between classmates. Where teenagers teach one another after school. Where leadership doesn’t wear a badge, it just shows up.
These contributions don’t always fit inside donor frameworks. They’re too relational, too real. But they matter. They’re often the difference between something working and something falling apart.
If we’re serious about peace, we have to be serious about how care is organized. Not just through institutions, but through networks of people who quietly hold their communities with both hands.
After over a decade in the formal development space, I’ve seen the budgets, the buzzwords, the brilliant frameworks. But too often, what’s missing is the simplest thing: the people who actually live the change. We’ve built entire careers around “capacity building,” yet sidelined the very capacity already holding communities together. What a miss.
This summer reminded me that real transformation isn’t always scaled. Sometimes, it’s shared. It’s passed, person to person, without an agenda. That’s where I want to keep building from.
Volunteers are always the first to show up. Long before the assessments are written, before the situation rooms are booked, before the PowerPoints are polished. They hold the line. They keep the community together- often with no funding, no mandate, and no fanfare.
Then, just when momentum is building, the formal development machine finally arrives- with its log frames, its timelines, and a firm plan to “scale” things that were already working. No hesitation. No real curiosity about what’s already been built.
We miss the chance to ask: How do we strengthen what exists? How do we leave the next crisis with better collaborators already in place, instead of restarting from zero?
I’ve worked in this field long enough to know that structured development is rarely as structured as it sounds. It’s usually late, occasionally lost, and always convinced it invented the wheel. Meanwhile, the community’s been rolling for months on worn tires, duct tape, and heart.
We’ve spent years promising to “shift the power”- from the Grand Bargain to endless localization pledges- but somehow, we keep pouring millions into systems designed to centralize it. If structured development took volunteerism seriously, not as charity but as civic power, we might’ve moved the needle by now. Instead, we hold summits about community ownership… in conference rooms 5,000 miles away from the communities.
I’m still in the middle of this AFE. Still learning, still asking better questions.
What if we treated unpaid labor as civic intelligence? What if volunteer-powered systems weren’t seen as a fallback, but as the model?
I don’t have a final answer. But I know peace isn’t always loud. It’s built in the pause. In someone packing meals on a Saturday. In someone sitting with a student after class.
That’s what I’m learning: the plan isn’t always written. Sometimes, it’s lived. If the plan was ever written, it wasn’t in a strategy brief. It was lived first, then maybe scribbled down by someone who was actually there.