AISP Toolkit Feb25 2025 - Flipbook - Page 15
Foundations for
Community Involvement
Assessing Readiness
his Toolkit aims to support you in creating a new kind of data infrastructure that shares power
with community. The reality is that getting there is a long and winding road that we each travel
in distinct contexts. If we jump into conversations with community members before we have
examined our individual and institutional readiness, we risk doing more harm than good. Readiness
includes a range of activities, including examining our personal relationship to the work, exploring
existing policies and processes that dictate how we engage community, and determining how we will
value the contributions of partners external to our organization.
T
The Spectrum of Community Engagement to Ownership
INCREASED EFFICIENCY IN DECISION-MAKING AND SOLUTIONS IMPLEMENTATION
STANCE
TOWARDS
COMMUNITY
IMPACT
IGNORE
INFORM
1
0
Marginalization
CONSULT
2
Preparation or
Placation
INVOLVE
3
Limited Voice or
Tokenization
COLLABORATE
4
Voice
EQUITY
DEFER TO
5
Delegated
Power
Community
Ownership
Used with permission from Facilitating Power
FOUNDATIONS FOR COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT
We strongly recommend orienting your work along a continuum of involvement, such as The
Spectrum of Community Engagement to Ownership, because it encourages organizations to
start where they are and build over time.8 There is no one right way to work toward increasing
community involvement in decision-making. Our guidance is simple—get on the continuum, and
work to move right.
If you’re toward the left side of the spectrum and committed to doing more,
start by assessing your current capacity with the resources in What’s Next?
This section has tools to help you carefully consider the community you are
intending to engage and your institution’s history of engaging with them.
Considerations for next steps are different depending on the group; for
example, see Working with Tribal and Indigenous Data.
8
Gonzalez, R. (2020). The Spectrum of Community Engagement to Ownership. Facilitating Power.
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