7 ways to elevate community voice and participation in recovery funding decisions
By: Avery, Jenny Six, and Julia Reed
In our last blog post, we shared three overarching priorities that should drive recovery funding choices. Specifically we encouraged cities, states, and counties to:
Work with community to get funds directly to people and communities who need it
Focus on critical transition points, like learners moving from high school to postsecondary pathways or families facing eviction and homelessness
Elevate opportunities that benefit communities on multiple fronts
We offered some ideas that the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) could fund and that would also support these priorities. But we also know that one of the most important ways to ensure equitable recovery investments is to make sure that that the communities most impacted by COVID-19 economic downturns -- including Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color, youth and young adults, people experiencing homelessness, and women -- have a meaningful say in funding decisions.
At all the key decision points -- deciding which problems and solutions are worth prioritizing, where are the dollars going, and how directly are resources getting to the people who need them -- there are opportunities to lift up community voices.
Below we’ve listed a few ideas that we’ve seen used across Washington, nationally in the U.S., and even internationally to expand the voices heard related to public funding decisions like recovery act investments. These are some of the ideas we think are the most innovative right now, but they’re not intended to be a “one and done” checklist. To equitably engage community in funding decisions, government decision-makers need to pursue ongoing engagements that build long-term relationships and community capacity.
For government, business, and philanthropic funders, recovery funding is an opportunity to develop new relationships and deepen existing ones with your community partners through a more engaged, more open, and more transparent process that meets community needs.
7 ways to elevate community voice and participation in recovery funding decisions
Lift up community leaders and community-based organizations who are working towards similar goals. Whether empowering youth in their postsecondary plans, supporting community elders, reactivating community spaces, or some other recovery goal -- there are likely community leaders and community organizations already doing this work and forums where communities have already defined their needs and priorities. Honor these efforts and this knowledge by elevating and funding communities’ existing work and doing your homework on what community voices have already been saying.
Example in Action: City of Seattle’s Neighborhood Matching Fund, City of Seattle Environmental Justice Committee
Provide funding for engagement efforts. Meaningful community engagement takes time and effort. Compensating community leaders for their work recognizes the value of their labor and knowledge.
Example in Action: Tukwila Community Connectors, Burien Community Connectors
Track progress and reflect back to the community how their guidance is informing resource allocation and decision-making. Providing input takes time and energy. From the start set expectations for how the information will be used, along with how - and when - participants can receive updates. Then, follow through. If timelines need to change, be transparent about that. Keeping communities updated supports the relationship building and deepening that is critical for sustained civic engagement.
Example in Action: myTRI 2030’s Top 10 Report on community-driven visioning for the future of the Tri-Cities
Be prepared to give up some of power and control so community decision making can lead. In designing processes, it’s important for funders to communicate their needs and limitations clearly, but overly controlling or engineering a process will limit innovation and can undermine community priorities and decisions. Ultimately, in order to achieve the scale needed to distribute stimulus funds over the next couple of years, local governments and other funders have to turn over some of that work and trust to community groups to develop and execute their own strategies with recovery funds.
Example in Action: City of Bologna’s “pacts of collaboration” creating citizen design labs for reimagining their cities. Over 500 collaborative projects have been implemented through this award-winning process
Use a “Citizens’ Jury” to diversify your policymaking. Citizens Juries are a form of deliberative democracy already in use in Australia, Canada, Iceland, and France. Similar to juries for criminal trials, a citizens’ jury brings together a small group of residents -- usually 12-24 people -- for a short period of time to intensively deliberate on a policy issue important to the community. Jury members are chosen to represent a microcosm of the public, and though they act as volunteers, efforts should be made to compensate them for time, travel, childcare, food, and other costs necessary to participate in the process. Juries are supported by facilitators, and have the opportunity to review data and hear testimony from expert witnesses. More than just another feedback process, citizen juries can be empowered to make real policy decisions and some have argued for them to become a normalized and expected part of any policymaking process.
Example in Action: City of Melbourne’s “People’s Panel” -- a citizens jury of randomly selected residents representing a sample of Melbourne’s population (including the business community, university students) reviewed and made recommendations to guide Melbourne’s $5 billion 10-year financial plan and asset management strategy. The People’s Panel process worked in tandem with the broader community engagement strategies open to all residents.
Build capacity for long-term civic engagement. Building trust with community members and organizations takes time and requires regular touch points, not just isolated conversations. It is critical for funders like local governments to invest in building relationships, communications and engagement structures so that when more urgent decision-making is required, they can be responsive but still guided by community voices. Long-term capacity building means not only supporting structures like resident commissions and committees, but also supporting community development associations, culturally-specific leaders and organizations, and engaging young people to become civic leaders and participants.
Example in Action: New York City Civic Engagement Commission, which runs two citywide participatory budgeting processes -- one focused on allocating $1 million of the public budget, and a youth-driven “It’s Our Money” program engaging youth ages 9-24 in allocating a $100,000 budget
Provide multiple engagement pathways and communication channels that are coordinated. Better civic engagement requires that people be able to engage in the ways that are most comfortable for them and through trusted relationships. As a result of the pandemic, our communities are connected through technology in ways that are unprecedented. But as long as access to the internet and digital devices remains unequal, you can’t rely solely on online outreach. By combining online and offline engagement, we can build more inclusive participatory processes and engage people than ever before. Tools like social media, asynchronous and live video, web-based survey tools and polls, can all be further leveraged, while using more traditional outreach efforts to meet the needs of those who face digital gaps. Investment in robust outreach and tools like community-based translators are critical to ensuring success of civic engagement efforts and support of language needs.
Example in Action: City of Lancaster’s “Engage Lancaster” campaign, a multi-entry point civic engagement effort.
It all comes back to “who does this serve?” and “according to whom?”
Underlying all of these strategies, it’s critical to stay curious about who the recovery funding and resulting efforts most serve and who they should consider the funding, the process, the specific decisions, and their impact. When reflecting on “who this serves” and “who this should serve,” take seriously the perspective of budget decision makers and from community members - and explore where and why those perspectives differ.
It’s also important to remember that:
Community - and even subsets of the community (e.g. BIPOC community, black community) - is not a monolith. Different approaches will fit different scenarios and contexts. Community perspectives might conflict; this reflects variation in community and even subsets of the community.
More / new process is not necessarily better. You can have too much process - manage so that community members see results of their input.
While decisions around stimulus funds often have to be made quickly, cities, counties and states can learn a lot from their peers who are taking steps to bring impacted communities into funding decision-making. By taking the time to really understand community needs and priorities, these entities are creating more open and equitable decisions, building buy-in, and setting themselves up for deeper, more trusting relationships that can serve civic good in the long run.