Duncan Green used a great metaphor in his recent blog when he called the recent mega-cuts in global aid budgets a tsunami. We are witnessing the sudden transformation of the aid sector that is losing life and diversity at a dizzying rate, like a coral reef weakened by rising sea temperatures and then battered by a mighty wave. And the good is being swept away with the bad.

Over the past year I’ve been giving methodological backup to a local partner on the Somali-Kenya border to work in a new way with ten rural communities. We’ve been supporting all kinds of different people there to reflect on their reality through storytelling and action. It has brought us into contact not only with remarkable people in the borderland, but also with people working in the humanitarian sector in the two countries, from local NGOs, to contractors, to donors, to UN. Everyone I’ve spoken to in the last few weeks has been in some kind of shock about the changing system. Some still don’t quite believe it’s happening, as programmes close, budgets evaporate, and collaborations dissolve.

For many it’s a question of how to save core operations. But for some of us, especially those of my peers working in insecure and damaged places, it’s a question of how to get back to the basics of who humanitarianism is for and what it’s for. It’s these actors that I’m most interested to watch and support as they pivot to make good out of the meltdown.

On the ground on the Somalia-Kenya border the effects of the tsunami are more muted. There never was much effective aid to these ten villages, even though they have been battered by 30 years of civil war and 15 years of efforts to counter the growing al-Shabaab insurgency. Local people work with each other to navigate indiscriminate violence, going about their lives as pastoralists, shop owners, mothers, traders, educators and the like. They rely on tradition for order, as elders and religious leaders solve disputes and pronounce on customary law, but importantly they are also innovating in fertile social networks that bring new ways of thinking and acting in society.

We heard examples of local people managing water systems, hiring their own teachers, and running generators to provide electricity to whole settlements. We heard how young people get businesses going, women negotiate better treatment by authorities, and how traders and pastoralists move where they need to, largely unmolested by the armed actors. They are paying taxes to both insurgents and at government checkpoints, negotiating the sums down as low as they can, and arguing for armed actors to leave their villages and livestock camps out of the firing line.

Summing it up, one of the community members explained that their way of life is a ‘middle way’ along which they navigate their survival, negotiate how they are treated and innovate in a changing society.

What can we learn from all of this? It’s not about what they need and don’t need in the way of material aid. It’s about how things bloom or how they get stuck in communities, wherever they are. Local experience of aid has been that its logo emblazoned staff come, when they do appear at all, with announcements and interventions, or with workshops and new languages of how community should comport itself. They don’t ask how the community already blooms and where it gets stuck.

What could the middle way mean for us as we navigate the new normal? I think that the way these ten communities are managing local governance (away from government and aid agencies) gives us pointers as to how to work better in their support. It’s not a new idea, rather it’s one that for me started with Robert Chambers’ question ‘whose reality counts?’ Community reality is changing rapidly, and if we want to align with it, we need to understand it and engage with it.

Participatory activists and innovative philanthropists all over the world already know this. They already have a myriad of wonderful ways of aligning. Last year Niranjan Nampoothiri and I did a small project for Citizen University in Seattle. We had the luxury of spending quality time with seven amazing participatory activists in seven countries around the world, learning who they are and how they do things, and sharing that with participatory activists in the US. They showed us an elegant, simple and determined set of ways of working well for the common good.

Duncan Green suggests that people coming afresh to the aid sector in this tumultuous time should consider avoiding the most stressed agencies. He suggested that instead of approaching those who depend on massive funding and high overheads, they should offer their services to those resilient organisations that emphasise social enterprise, solidarity and innovation at low cost and to big effect.

If rather than using a deficit model based on filling southern needs with generous northern largesse, we rebuilt after the great aid tsunami using a surplus model by which groups, communities, and municipalities strengthen themselves (with a little help from their friends), I think the people of our ten small places on the Somalia-Kenya border might congratulate us for finally getting it right.