Build Trust.

Move away from a transactional mindset and towards genuine long-term relationship building. Honesty and accountability are key, especially when things go wrong or mistakes are made. This means being vulnerable and speaking truth to power, sometimes even within your own institution.

Be Accountable.

Set up accountability structures within your institution to ensure community feedback, insight, and decisions are captured and acted on in a timely and meaningful manner. Frequent temperature checks gauging community sentiments towards your participatory efforts help measure the success of your journey and identify any needed course corrections.

Model Transparency.

Clear and complete information is needed for community members to meaningfully participate. You can set the tone by ensuring any information shared is direct, understandable, and omits jargon. Information should be provided promptly—in a timely manner, in the written, visual, or oral formats most helpful to your community. Any requests should come with reasonable turn-around times.

Compensate.

Community members should be compensated for their time and expertise. This also means addressing other barriers to participation such as childcare and transportation. Community members are often asked for their opinions and input without remuneration. This perpetuates power dynamics and wealth inequities. Make sure to carve out a budget to compensate for participants’ time and effort. For more information on equitable compensation practices click here.

Provide Clear Entry and Exit Points.

Have clear timelines and milestones so the community can make informed decisions about engaging. Give clear direction on how community members can begin to engage, and how they opt out or stop. Consider exploring onramps and off-ramps to committees, positions on board, etc. to limit ambiguity and confusion.

Allocate Resources.

Dedicate resources such as time, team capacity, and budget to ensure that best practices are met throughout the process. This work takes significant staff capacity, relationship capital, time, and capital. It requires long-term commitment and dedicated budgets to match intentions.

Shift Power not Burdens.

While power sharing is important, it’s also important not to relinquish responsibility. Placing additional responsibilities on the community may also place undue burden. Institutions have access to resources and capacity that the community does not. Institutions should work with the community to identify the places they can absorb responsibilities, tasks, and work, to make it easier for the community.

Set Expectations.

Institutions must clearly communicate what is malleable and what is immutable within a process so community members can set their expectations accordingly. Knowing and clearly communicating where change is possible and where input matters targets the participatory process towards things that are influenceable. It also prevents community members from feeling like their perspectives and engagement weren’t respected. Before communicating this, institutions must internally understand where and how changes can be made.

Non-Participation

Denying access to information, withholding information, or otherwise not sharing information as a result of unconscious or conscious exclusion. It can be intentional, such as when aiming to reduce harm before incorporating community voice.

Inform

Providing objective, relevant, and accessible information in a timely manner regarding decisions that have already been made. The information isn’t just clear and understandable, but it’s transparent and provides the context needed to make sense of it.

Consult

Gather input to obtain feedback, experiences, expertise, etc. through clearly defined channels controlled by your organization.

Involve

Ensure assets, needs, and concerns are integrated into processes and inform planning through bilateral processes that give everyone an opportunity to influence the direction/outcome. Involving the community includes more one-time engagements.

Collaborate

Ensure the capacity for the community to be in a substantive partnership role in decision-making and the implementation of decisions. Collaborating with the community includes more ongoing partnerships.

Share Power

You foster democratic participation and equity by sharing decision-making power. Confirm you are sharing power by tracking your efforts through continued conversation with your community to ensure they feel like they have the information and agency to make decisions.