Furthering Participation

Nina Simon, author of The Participatory Museum, says that museums can be compared to community foundations. Both are historically oriented around “problematic objects:” in the case of a museum, artifacts which may have been stolen or gained in ways that are not considered ethical by today’s standards; in the case of community foundations, money often generated through exploitation of people or the environment. However, both types of institutions have a mandate to preserve those resources in order to add value to local communities over the long-term.

Simon argues that the only credible way for community institutions to meet their mandate, over time, is to become a “participatory institution.” She expands:

There’s a big difference between an institution servicing a vaguely defined community by opening its doors and an institution that anticipates being changed by specifically defined communities, which it seeks out, by going outside its own doors and de-centering itself within that community.

While community institutions typically have boards and advisory committees made up of community members, that doesn't inherently make them participatory institutions, according to Simon.

In other words, there is more than one kind of participation, and participatory institutions aspire to involve communities in ways that require them to share significant power and control over the institution.

Adapted from the New Economics Foundation.1

The three axes reflect three choices institutions face when engaging community:2

Most institutions engage the participation of the professional and expert classes - people who have been to university and live middle and upper middle class lives. The Democracy Cube uses an inner cube of perforated lines to indicate the most common participants, types of influence extended, and decision modes. This leaves the greater part of communities unengaged and without influence.

How community institutions define “community,” determines with whom they interact, engage, and share power. Those are the people shaping the institutions.

For example, Vancouver Foundation is a community foundation with community advisory committees which review grant applications sorted by categories of focus (eg. health, community economic development, arts). The committees meet to deliberate, and then make recommendations about what to fund, which are normally implemented by staff. These committees typically draw on the ‘professional stakeholder’ class on axis one; advising & consulting on axis two; and expressing/developing preferences on axis three. Their expertise in a given area appears to be the source of legitimacy for their recommendations.

This model –asking local professionals and experts to advise and consult the institution on how to use its resources for community betterment – is a common one; however, there are many reasons to engage and be influenced by non-experts as well. Non-experts introduce new ideas, logics, humility, and different networks. Also, the decisions of panels of experts in similar granting committee contexts have often proven no more insightful than random selection or lay decision makers (see Decision Stories for more on this.) This research suggests we may put too much stock in professional expertise to determine how to allocate community resources while undervaluing equality of participation and opportunities more generally.

Without mechanisms for engaging the ‘diffuse’ public sphere --that is, everyday folks -- and giving them the authority to deliberately make, and be accountable, for decisions -- institutions stay more or less as they are. Not changing, Simon says, will eventually make community institutions irrelevant and obsolete.

“We all know that we’ve had experiences with participatory public comment that are not so meaningful,” acknowledges Simon, in her TedX talk, “Opening Up the Museum.” She describes the generic and empty feedback that many of us are used to seeing online in the comment sections or in museum guestbooks, and beyond. The difference, she says, is in the invitation. If community institutions want powerful, meaningful input that can start conversations, break down barriers, and offer fresh insights, they need to design an invitation that shows the same care and intentionality. Design methods can make it more natural and delightful for people to slow down, reflect, and start deeper conversations. In the museum, this has looked like asking people to bottle memories prompted by the artifacts, and display them for other visitors to read, or offering up a typewriter when asking people to write love letters.

Philanthropic foundations have lots of reasons to invite broad public participation into their decisions and activities, and it can also create opportunities for members of the various communities they serve to influence and connect with each other. This, Simon argues, is the ultimate goal: for the community institution’s resources (be they artifacts or other investments) to create an opportunity that prompts interactions which make people more curious about each other, and bring people into mutual understanding, building greater trust and bridging divides.

Simon uses dogs as an example for how this happens. When people are out and about with their pet dogs in community, other people, who would never otherwise speak to them, will strike up a conversation, about and through the dogs! Simon wants museum artefacts to be more like dogs. Rather than individually viewing and processing an exhibit, she wants to see strangers having new conversations with each other about their relationships to the exhibit. How can philanthropies present their beliefs & values, aspirations, projects or investments, and opportunities more like dogs? So that people feel comfortable chatting about and around them?

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  Broader & deeper engagement

  In order to stay relevant, community institutions must engage people more broadly, but also offer more meaningful forms of participation.
  
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  Lay people have a lot to contribute

  Whereas professional and expert class citizens are engaged more frequently to advise and consult with community institutions, laypeople are also stakeholders with key insights that can make such organizations more relevant and responsive.
  
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  Design opportunities to be changed

  Meaningful participation means that community members are able to exert influence on the institution, changing it.
  
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  Make philanthropic assets more like dogs

  Philanthropy has assets: not just money, but networks, learning, and sense of purpose. If philanthropies can present their assets more like dogs – a point of connection that gives strangers permission to talk– they will both strengthen communities and secure greater engagement.

Experiences & Observations

Which specific communities of stakeholders do you think about or reach out to most, in the context of a foundation you are close to?

Reactions & Impressions

How do you react to the argument that a community foundation must actively design opportunities to be influenced and changed by specific communities in order not to become obsolete?

Questions & Hunches to test

Over the past year, consider which specific communities have influenced a foundation you are close to, and which stakeholder communities’ influence has been absent. What might need to change in order to engage the meaningful participation of communities whose influence is absent?