Participatory Standards.
Below are the non-negotiables needed to ensure your institution engages in effective, sustainable, and equitable participatory work.
These standards include deeply held beliefs, norms, and ways of working that are critically important—we do not recommend compromising on them.
The good news is that you may already be familiar with them—many are well-known best practices. These standards are important at each and every step—no matter where you start in your Participatory Investing journey. By employing these standards, you set yourself up for success, with more effective, sustainable, and equitable outcomes that reduce harm while engaging with your community.
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.
Consider the Risks
Although the Participatory Standards above can help reduce potential harm, it is important to consider how your community may bear the risks of implementing Participatory Investing work. Institutions should develop plans to proactively avoid harm and to earnestly and promptly repair relationships if harm occurs.
“A resilient and equitable community is one that is inclusive, built on relationships and trust, and puts people at the center.“
Lisa Pinckney, Footprint Foundation
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.
“Unfortunately, sometimes when funders think about ceding power, they conflate it with doing less, because that can feel like empowering community members and removing themselves from decisions. As the organization with relatively more power, it’s not enough to sit back, listen, and observe. Funders can bring their many strengths, resources and privileges to bear (such as their many forms of social, relational and financial capital), with humility, as they try to actively support and unburden already-overworked community leaders.”
Eric Horvath, Common Future
Avoid Tokenization
In conversation with your community, carefully consider what roles you are asking leaders to step into. Every human is unique, holds multitudes, and cannot be expected to represent an entire community alone. Avoid including only one or two community members in a process to prevent tokenization and feelings of loneliness.
Be Gracious to the Mess
Institutions must accept that participatory processes are often more difficult and take longer than expected. It requires graciousness and a mindset of experimentation—openness to failure, learning, and trying again.
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