How to Integrate Participatory Investing into Your Institution.

“When you are at the table with funders, you can see their level of commitment to the work and this helps to build trust.”

Fatima Malik, DPH Growers’ Alliance

What’s Next?

Using the results of the Where are you quiz as a starting point, the following sections will help outline potential opportunities for you to integrate more participatory strategies into your institution. This is not an exhaustive list of actions, and not every action will make sense in every situation. We trust you—in partnership with your community—to determine which actions make sense for your institution given your unique relationships, context, and goals.

Mirroring the quiz, the strategies are broken down into four common investment functions and follow the spectrum of engagement:

Bonus: Participatory Grantmaking/Integrated Capital

While this toolkit focuses on Participatory Investing, community led organizations also rely on grant capital as a critical source of funding. Consider how your organization may explore integrated capital to better address the capital needs in your community. Click here to learn more about these fields.

Participatory Investing is a way of viewing the work. It should be iterative and deeply integrated into an institution—it is not a box to check.

Would you like to work through this process as a team?

Implementation of Participatory Investing in your institution will take effort, time, and resources. While you may be able to implement some participatory changes in your organization on your own, we have put together this facilitator guide to support you in creating a group of allies to help you make more systemic changes within your institution's investment functions.

What’s next?

If you are interested in learning more insights in the field of participatory investing check out the work of Shift Health Accelerator and Build Healthy Places Network (BHPN). Shift is exploring opportunities to carry forward the ideas that surfaced during this project, in particular applying Participatory Investing in the healthcare institutional space, to reframe risk and return calculations to center a return on health and seed power shifts for local community health equity efforts. We hope these organizations can be valuable resources as you continue your journey into participatory investing.

Special Thanks:

Special thanks to our partner in this work:

Cohort: 

Michael O'Bryan | Samuel S. Fels Fund

Sarah Martinez-Helfman | Samuel S. Fels Fund

Joanna Visseradjoian | Spring Point Partners

Margot Kane | Spring Point Partners

Nomzana Augustin | WES

Smitha Das | WES

Action-Lab Team:

Josh Mbugua | Alliance Healthcare Foundation

Rochelle Witharana | California Wellness

Tina Eshaghpour | Cal Wellness

Jessica Montague | Footprint Foundation

Kristina Montague | Footprint Foundation

Lisa Pinckney | Footprint Foundation

Mark Paley | Hyams Foundation

Esther Park | #NoRegrets Initiative

Avery Anderson Sponholtz | #NoRegrets Initiative

Sonia Sarkar | Healing Capital

Katheryn Witt | Common Future

Cristina Lara-Agudelo | Common Future

Advisors:

Jen Lewis Walden | Build Healthy Places Network & SHIFT Health Accelerator

Jessyca Dudley | BOLD Ventures

Lisa Richardson | SHIFT Health Accelerator

Sean Campbell | Capital For Communities

Farhad Ebrahimi | The Chorus Foundation

Sabrina Wu | East Bay Community Foundation & LUNAR

Enjolie Lafuarie | Cihuapactli Collective

Fatima Malik | DPH Growers’ Alliance

Bobby Cochran | National Policy Consensus Center

Cohort Speakers:

Eric Horvath | Common Future

Joanna Levitt Cea | Beloved Economies

Nwamaka Agbo | Kataly Foundation

Lynne Hoey | Kataly Foundation

Shari Davis | Participatory Budgeting Project

Leslie Lindo | Olamina Fund

Curt Lyon | Transform Finance

Content Reviewers:

Arianna Muirow | Criterion Institute

Katy Love | Independent Consultant

Elizabeth Garlow | Francesco Collaborative

Claire Mattingly | U.S. Impact Investing Alliance

Kelli Reagan Hickey | Francesco Collaborative

Curt Lyon | Transform Finance

Silan Akgul | World Education Services

Roque Barros | Imperial Valley Wellness Foundation

Deborah Frieze | Boston Impact Initiative

Ben Wrobel | Proximate

Lauren Grattan | Mission Driven Finance

Content Creation:

Katheryn Witt | Common Future

Cristina Lara-Agudelo | Common Future

Special Contributors:

Adrienne Russman | Reimagine Colorado

Content Architecture

Joi Edwards | Common Future

Copywriting

Cristina Diaz-Borda | Common Future

Graphic Design

Kathryn Jaynes | Common Future

Copyediting

Daydriane Chapman | Common Future