About PI
Our main aims for the PI initiative and how we plan to achieve them
Power & Integrity is incubated within 
Our main aims for the PI initiative and how we plan to achieve them
Power & Integrity is incubated within
Our purpose
Enabling organisations to embody integrity
We exist to enable holistic, effective, and evolving integrity practice. By nurturing co-creation and shared learning of power-sensitive organisational integrity practices, we will cultivate just ways of working that evolve with changing conditions and new knowledge.
We aim to create an enabling environment, initially for the nonprofit sector, in which organisations can strengthen their integrity practice and, ultimately, their impact.
How we work
Our three key approaches
Our work incorporates three distinct, but interdependent ways of working on power and integrity with nonprofits and sector-level organisations.
Whole-system
We are exploring how organisations can embody integrity. We mean this in both senses of the word: honest, responsible, accountable, and principled; and whole and unbroken.
Organisational integrity requires a holistic and strategic mindset, combined with effective integrity practice at individual, organisational and sector levels.
Using a whole-system approach, we will support organisations to integrate integrity practice that strengthens oversight, strategy, risk management and operations. This will help them be more proactive, more efficient, and much less likely to cause harm.
Power-sensitive
Adapting well-established work by nonprofits on power and inequality, we are exploring how societal power structures underpin negative organisational culture and behaviours, such as saviourism, sexism, racism, bullying, and corruption.
Power analysis identifies the intersecting root causes for multiple aspects of integrity, essentially providing the lens for the whole-system approach to organisational integrity.
A power-sensitive approach also provides valuable insights into how best to address negative power manifestations and – importantly – how to nurture positive power.
Synergy-led
Integrating power-sensitive integrity practice requires continuous learning and diverse perspectives to shape a shared understanding. By learning collectively and reducing duplication, we can establish a much stronger foundation for organisations to strengthen their integrity practice and, ultimately, their impact.
So we will help build an enabling environment with the nonprofit sector to work not just collectively on power and integrity, but in synergy.
We will also work to increase coherence between donor requirements around integrity and contribute to wider sector-level work on legitimacy, decolonisation and power.
Our principles
Power-sensitive governance is at the heart of our aims and we are committed to being the change we seek. So we’ve carefully considered our ways of working and have agreed two sets of principles:
- We’ve adopted feminist leadership principles to guide our behaviour and culture. Developed by Srilatha Bathliwala, these embody power sensitivity and self-awareness, and foster diversity and inclusion. We will apply them with a specific commitment to acknowledge and dismantle all forms of bias.
- For our structure and how we take decisions, we’ve taken inspiration from sociocractic principles. We decide by consent, not by consensus, through a process of rounds. This creates space for each voice and perspective. For more information on this process and its benefits see Sociocracy For All.
Sharing experiences
We’ll share more about our principles as we start putting our ideas into practice. We’d also appreciate learning from experiences you may have in these areas.
Watch this space for opportunities to share or explore more on these ways of working.
Our Partnership with NCVO
Learning with our incubation host
For the first step of our journey, our discovery phase, we are incubated within National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO).
Our host has already started a parallel journey, undertaking a range of work to address recent integrity failings. NCVO has recognised and apologised for these, and is fully committed to culture change. They have also been active in sharing learnings with the voluntary sector.
Because organisations work within a wider social context of inequality, we believe all will reflect some societal injustice. It’s crucial to recognise and be transparent about this. We all have a duty of care to staff, partners and the communities we seek to serve. So it’s important to provide spaces for conversation, reflection and learning. This will strengthen intentions and commitment, as well as the actions required to dismantle injustices.
We strongly support NCVO’s determination to change and take action to address injustice and harm. PI will work independently within NCVO, but we want to collaborate closely with our hosts to harness potential synergies. We look forward to learning from their road to transformation and accountability. And in turn we will contribute to efforts to develop an equitable and inclusive NCVO.
“We at NCVO are excited by Power & Integrity’s proposal to develop a practical, sector wide, approaches to addressing this issue. We look forward to supporting the work.”
Get involved
Help us shape Power & Integrity
During our new discovery phase, it’s essential we join with others in the nonprofit sector to make sure this important work has the best possible start.
We’re looking for:
- sector-level organisations, to explore ways of developing sector-wide coherence and synergy
- UK-based nonprofits seeking to take part in our Power Labs (from Jan ’23)
- Funding partnerships to support this much-needed, groundbreaking work.
Find out more about the PI initiative
Check out our media channels
We’re starting to explain more about PI at events and via blogs and other media channels. See what’s available on our news page.
Stay updated
If you want to know how our work is progressing, why not join the PI mailing list? We’ll let you know about news, upcoming events and other important information.
Get in touch
Do you want to know more about participating in the PI initiative? Perhaps you have a media enquiry or just a general enquiry about our work? If so, let us know.
Stay updated
PI Feminist principles
Feminist principles guide us in the way we work together. We recognise all these principles must be held together even if some may be in tension.
- Self-aware – ‘put your ego in the passenger seat’. Seek to engage and contribute, ‘everyone is able’, everyone has ideas to share
- Self-care and caring for others – take care of your physical and emotional needs first, then support one another to enable us all to reach our individual, organisational and collective goals and renewal
- Dismantle bias – check your own privilege – work to explore your own biases
- Inclusion – create ways for everyone to be heard in our action research
- Share power – lead to transform others – enable leadership across structures to enable everyone to succeed
- Responsible and transparent use of power – guide and enable others. Understand your own power share your ambition, concerns and vulnerability to enable others to do the same
- Accountable collaboration– bring your whole self to your task and to our meetings, offer and ask for help. Make commitments you can keep or let us know in good time if you can’t
- Respectful feedback – feedback is a gift, an opportunity to grow
- Courage – be brave, seek transformative change – take risks to grow, ‘make failure your fuel’
- Zero tolerance – for any form of discrimination or abuse of power – challenge arrogance within ourselves and our organisation
- Confidentiality of meetings – Chatham House rule (what is said in the room can be generalised to be shared but should not be identified with individuals without their prior permission)
- Commitment to the vision and mission of Pi – of an open sourced, co-created, dynamic approach that can enable sector wide changes