Define and Understand Your Community.
Who should be participating? Who are you shifting power to? Before starting this work, answering these questions is critical.
“It is really important to be mindful of who gets to come into the room, and strive to open that door for people who don't get into these rooms.”
Bobby Cochran, National Policy Consensus Center
Before diving into Participatory Investing work, it's critical to have a clear definition of who you are talking about when you talk about your community.
This means being clear about prioritizing the most marginalized and being explicit about things like race, class, and income. Your institution’s definition of community could be guided by your mission statement, values, strategic priorities, geographic context, funding priorities, target demographics, or other factors.
Trust the communities you work with. They know what they need.
Time and time again, we have seen that the people closest to the problems are already leading models to restore community wealth, but these solutions require additional attention, support, and financial investment. What’s more, when you build for diversity of opinion and expertise, you create a space to start making better and more inclusive decisions.
Trust is the keystone of participatory work—it will not be successful without it. In many communities, a history of harm, inconsistency, and unfulfilled ambitious promises means that building trust may not be an easy road. Building trust takes time, investments in relationships, intentionality, and a repeated commitment to showing up, even when the work gets hard.
We encourage you to move at the speed of trust, even when that’s uncomfortable. An institution must be committed to building trust and deep relationships to mitigate potential harm caused by participatory work.
Common Future Community Principles:
A group of people sharing an identity-forming narrative. Community represents a shared place, identity, experience, affiliation, interest. Community can reinforce belonging, trust, social bonds and shared cultural resources among/for a group of people.
We co-create in partnership with community voices to best inform our practices, principles, and programs.
When using the term community, it should be used with intention. If you mean people, say people. If you mean community, say which community you mean, and say why those identity-forming narratives are important to what you’re trying to do.
For an additional resource on Defining Your Community click here.
Get started by answering these questions:
Who is your primary constituent group? Who does your mission say you should be supporting?
Within that group, who is the most marginalized and under-resourced?
Who are the people often excluded from the table?
What does it look like to have lived experience within the context of the challenges your capital aims to address?
How do the people your institution serves—through its grantmaking, investment, or programmatic efforts—define their community?
"Crafting and agreeing to an organizational values statement that centers in historically excluded communities was key and now we are applying that values statement across all aspects of our work, internally and externally.”
Sarah Martinez-Helfman, Samuel S. Fels Fund
Back to Home Page