Organizations often claim their actions benefit others, especially through social impact initiatives aimed at addressing societal challenges like poverty and education. While such claims help organizations gain legitimacy with stakeholders like donors and customers, actual benefits to target beneficiaries are often minimal or even harmful. Recent research highlights a triadic relationship among organizations, evaluators, and target beneficiaries. Rather than being passive recipients, beneficiaries actively supported and shaped social impact initiatives by corroborating the corporation’s claims to evaluators, leveraging this position to negotiate localized practices that provided substantive benefits. By redirecting generic, global practices into contextually relevant ones, beneficiaries played a crucial role in both organizational legitimation and impactful outcomes. This triadic perspective reveals the potential of beneficiary agency to bridge the gap between stated goals and meaningful impacts in social initiatives.

Image courtesy of interviewee. January 1, 2025