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Strengthening Decision Making

SB181 Affinity Group

March 2025

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Connection before content

10 min

Please sign in here

Please come off mute and share

Your name + pronouns (if you wish)
Context you’re coming from (organization, location, background - information that is relevant for you to share)
What motivated you to pick this Affinity Group?

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Objectives + Agenda

Objectives:

Reflect on how decisions are currently made within the systems that grantees are working within
Discover more inclusive methods to ensure community members, especially underrepresented groups, have a say in the decision-making process
Explore techniques for reaching consensus among diverse stakeholders and building shared ownership of decisions

Systems Change, Power, and Decision Making

Inclusive Decision Making Methods

Consensus Building

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Proposed Group Agreements

Camera on to engage and participate actively
Approach with curiosity & wonder
No one knows everything–together we know a lot
We will share stories here; the stories should not be shared, but the lessons should be
If you are going to post something in the zoom chat, be ready to express it out loud as well
Take care of your needs.

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This is not a presentation

To understand how you need support with community dialogues and to see what we can learn from each other

The purpose of Affinity Groups are to understand how you need support within your HDCGP Project and create a space for collective learning and sharing. We will focus on strengthening decision making but connect back to your needs and capacity building.

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Systems Change, Power, and Decision Making

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We will go into this in more detail in a minute, but just a quick word on the power of systems. Systems are basically those things which are more than the sum of their parts. And systems are everywhere. They form the fabric of the whole cosmos. Everything is both a whole unto itself, and is made up of smaller parts inside of it. When we look out into the universe, we see galaxies, which are made up of solar systems; and solar systems are made up of planets, and planets are made up of organisms, and organisms are made up of cells, and cells are made up of molecules, down to atoms, and quarks, and on and on. And so at every level, we see this dance of parts and wholes.

When we get this right, we unleash a source of power and energy--we become more than the sum of our parts. When we get it wrong, and our systems get out of balance--whether that is our natural ecosystems, or our human made health and economic systems, they can cause tremendous damage and spiral out of control. Our hope in this training is to unpack the mystery of systems a little bit, and figure out how we can more intentionally, and effectively, become more than the sum of our parts.

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Systems and Non-Systems

Sistemas y no sistemas

VS.

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Conventional Thinking	System Thinking
The connection between the problems and their causes is obvious and easy to trace	The relationship between problems and their causes is indirect and not obvious
Others, either within or outside our organization, are to blame for our problems and must be the ones to change	We unwittingly create our own problems and have significant control or influence in solving them through changing our behavior
A policy designed to achieve short-term success will also assure long-term success.	Most quick fixes have unintended consequences: They make no difference or make matters worse in the long run.
In order to optimize the whole, we must optimize the parts.	In order to optimize the whole, we must improve the relationships among the parts.
Aggressively tackle many independent initiatives simultaneously.	Only a few key coordinated changes sustained over time will produce large system change.

Source: Innovation Associates Organizational Learning

Systems thinking asks us to shift how we think about things.
In the past, conventional thinking would lead some to believe that the connection between the problems and their causes is obvious and easy to trace. Systems thinking leads us to think about the relationship between problems and their causes as indirect and not obvious.
Similarly, conventional thinking might lead us to believe that others - not us as individuals - are to blame for our problems and must be the ones to change. Systems thinking shifts us to think how we create our own problems, and the control and influence we have to solve problems by changing our behavior.
Another key distinction is how conventional thinkinging prioritizes optimizing parts in order to optimize a whole. Whereas systems thinking says that in order to optimize the whole, we must improve the relationships among the parts.
Systems thinking gives us a different way of looking at things and new opportunities for systems change. It also encourages us to see how we - as individuals - can be part of a problem and, therefore, part of a solution.

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Decision Making = Power

Breakout rooms 10 min

Take a moment to reflect on the systems at work in you community:

Who are the people making the most impactful decisions in your community? What is your relationship to them?
Whose voices are often unheard or left out of decision making?
How do the decisions made within different “parts” of the system affect the whole community?

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Community Learning Model

Ensure the various people, perspectives and systems involved in the work are engaged in the process.

At the Civic Canopy, we use a research-based Community Learning Model (CLM). The CLM puts results at the center to create meaningful, measurable change on social issues. Those results are achieved through a continuous learning process of including relevant and diverse stakeholders, engaging in thoughtful dialogue, developing action plans, and learning from efforts to achieve results–all within a culture of trust and collaboration.
Within this model, engaging with community is an essential step toward getting to equitable results.
This tends to fall into the inclusion stage of the model where we need to ensure the various people, perspectives and systems involved in the work are engaged in the process.
Said more simply, we believe that alone we know a little and together we know a lot. The problems we’re working to address are far from simple. Without it, decisions tend to be short-sighted, programs poorly implemented, or buy-in lackluster because those farthest from opportunity weren’t included.

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Equity Standard of Practice

All those affected by an issue have a meaningful opportunity to influence action on the issue.

For communities to participate, prosper, and reach their full potential, each stage of the CLM needs to reflect that same commitment to equity.
Achieving equity isn’t just about where we’re going, it’s also about how we get there.
Our equity standard of practice for inclusion says that all those affected by an issue have a meaningful opportunity to influence action on the issue.

One key point here is “meaningful opportunity.”
You’ll notice that it doesn’t say all those affected by an issue will have decision-making power or will have final say over action on the issue. Why? Because it’s impossible to engage every affected person on every issue.
But many of the ways we try to engage communities just benefit a few who are already tapped in. We call these the “usual suspects.”

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Why inclusion?

Source: Crystal Evans

Power Interest Grid

For a long time, the way we’ve done community engagement has benefited those “usual suspects.”
On the left, you’ll see a Power Interest Grid frequently used by project managers. It puts people into buckets depending on how much power and how much interest they have.

Those who have high power and high interest in a decision, or an issue are the folks we’re supposed to keep the closest tabs on or manage closely. This is because they have both the interest and the power to block potential decisions, so we need them in our corner.
Whereas folks who have a lot of power, but low interest are people to keep satisfied.
And folks who have high interest but low power should be kept informed.
This model is effective for managing the needs of your different communities to ensure you can get decisions passed and move action forward. But at what cost? Looking at this grid as a community member which grid do you want to be a part of? Do you want to be managed, satisfied, or informed? All those feel a little like different ways of saying “kept quiet.”
It also keeps power in the hands of the already powerful. This model says you should adjust to satisfy the needs of the powerful, while those with less power should be kept informed. In the end, this keeps inequity in place by maintaining power for those who already have it.

Even if folks haven’t seen this power interest grid, they’ve felt it.

In the 1990s, the disability community started championing this rallying cry, “Nothing about us without us.”
This was a shift from seeing disability as something that needed to be cured and that people made decisions for them or on behalf of them.
Instead, the independent living movement demanded the same choices and control in their every-day lives that their non-disabled brothers and sisters, neighbors and friends take for granted.
Since then, other movements have taken up the cry as they seek to move out of the “Keep informed” and “Monitor” boxes.

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When decisions aren’t inclusive, people call the process unfair and disregard the results.

Kahane, Loptson, Heriman, & Hardy, 2013; Karpowitz & Raphael, 2014; Carcasson & Sprain, 2010

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IAP2 Spectrum of Public Participation

Inform

To provide the public with balanced and objective information to assist them in understanding the problem, alternatives, opportunities and/or solutions.

Consult

To obtain public feedback on analysis, alternatives and/or decisions.

Involve

To work directly with the public throughout the process to ensure that public concerns and aspirations are consistently understood and considered.

Collaborate

To partner with the public in each aspect of the decision including the development of alternatives and the identification of the preferred solution.

Empower

To place final decision making in the hands of the public.

Goal

Relationship

The International Association for Public Participation created this spectrum of public participation.
For each level of participation, there’s a goal and a promise to the folks you’re engaging. Here you can also see a visual of what the relationship between you and the folks you’re engaging at each level.
At the first level, inform, your goal is to provide the public with balanced and objective information to assist them in understanding the problem, alternatives, opportunities and/or solutions.

You can see in the visual that information is coming from you to people in your community.

At the next level, consult, you being to obtain public feedback on that information.

Now the arrows point to you as people in the community provide you with information about how you should move forward. While you’re getting input, your organization or decision-makers in your organization still make the ultimate decision, but you weigh input from the community in that decision.

Moving up to “involve,” the relationship shifts to going both ways as you work throughout the process to ensure that public concerns and aspirations are consistently understood and considered.

In this case you generally have a solution or a course of action that you’d like to move forward with, but you’re incorporating feedback to improve that solution.
For example, you may have already decided you want to open a new food bank in your community, but through involving the community you decide to move it from one neighborhood to another based on a poll to the community about where they would prefer to have the food bank.

This differs from collaboration in that in this stage you partner with the public in each aspect of the decision including the development of alternatives and the identification of the preferred solution.

When collaborating, the different parts of the community not only have to work with you as the decision maker, but also with each other to arrive at a decision.
Using our previous example, at the collaboration level, you may gather folks together to say that you’ve identified an issue, like an increasing need for hunger services in the community, but you want to work together on developing solutions. A food bank could be the answer, or it could be a famer’s market that accepts SNAP bucks, or it could be working with local employers to increase wages to make sure folks have enough money for rising food costs.
In this case, whoever is hosting a group to come together and will be responsible for making the final solution work oversees the decision but works together with others to arrive there.

At the empower stage, the community makes the decision. The organization hosting folks simply facilitates that decision and then implements what the community decides.

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IAP2 Spectrum of Public Participation

Inform

To provide the public with balanced and objective information to assist them in understanding the problem, alternatives, opportunities and/or solutions.

We will keep you informed.

Consult

To obtain public feedback on analysis, alternatives and/or decisions.

We will keep you informed, listen to and acknowledge concerns and aspirations, and provide feedback on how public input influenced the decision.

Involve

To work directly with the public throughout the process to ensure that public concerns and aspirations are consistently understood and considered.

We will work with you to ensure that your concerns and aspirations are directly reflected in the alternatives developed and provide feedback on how public input influenced the decision.

Collaborate

To partner with the public in each aspect of the decision including the development of alternatives and the identification of the preferred solution.

We will look to you for advice and innovation in formulating solutions and incorporate your advice and recommendations into the decisions to the maximum extent possible.

Empower

To place final decision making in the hands of the public.

We will implement what you decide.

Goal

Promise

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IAP2 Spectrum of Public Participation

Inform

To provide the public with balanced and objective information to assist them in understanding the problem, alternatives, opportunities and/or solutions.

Fact sheets

Websites

Open Houses

Consult

To obtain public feedback on analysis, alternatives and/or decisions.

Public Comment

Focus Groups

Surveys

Public Meetings

Involve

To work directly with the public throughout the process to ensure that public concerns and aspirations are consistently understood and considered.

Workshops

Deliberative Polling

Collaborate

To partner with the public in each aspect of the decision including the development of alternatives and the identification of the preferred solution.

Citizens Advisory Committees

Consensus-building

Participatory decision-making

Empower

To place final decision making in the hands of the public.

Citizens juries

Ballots

Participatory Budgeting

Delegated decision

Goal

Examples

Here are examples for what each stage looks like.
At the inform level, you may have fact sheets you share, information on a website, or host a open house to announce what you’re working on.
When consulting with the public, you might host different events that allow people to give input, but remember this input is one directional.

This could be the public comment section at a city council meeting where community members can come up and speak into a mic for a few minutes.
It could also be a focus group or survey that asks community members specific questions to get input.
Consulting tends to be the most efficient for both the organization and the folks providing their input. This can, however, come with a tradeoff. When folks provide their input in this way, they oftentimes don’t have to hear other folks’ opinions or wrestle with how to navigate multiple, conflicting points of view. So, when the final decision gets made, if it doesn’t align with what they think should have been done, they don’t feel heard. This can leave people feeling over surveyed and underserved. They get asked their opinion, but don’t see it in the final results.

Public Participation at the Involve level can look like engaging folks in workshops to tweak an idea or possible solution. It can also look like deliberative polling, a type of process that allows people to consider possible actions and weigh in. One example of this is the Citizen’s Initiative Review. The is a process that’s happened in Colorado, Oregon, Arizona, California, and Massachusetts. In this case, a group of citizens are randomly selected. Basically, they send out letters to a bunch of registered voters in the state. Folks say their interested in participating and out of that a random group is pulled out that matches up with demographics of the state. This group then comes together for 3 days to consider an upcoming ballot initiative. They hear from experts and then decide whether or not they support the ballot. They work together to write up a guide for voters that includes pros to the ballot measure, cons, and how they would vote overall. This guide then gets mailed to voters to use in their own decision making. This way, voters can hear from real citizens who have really considered the ballot measure. In this case, community members are simply advising people on how they could vote, so it’s at the involve level.
At the collaboration level, you can have citizens advisory committees who work with experts in the stages of developing solutions and bringing them to life.

Collaboration can also include consensus-building, where you must workshop an idea until a group is in full agreement or consensus. For example, we worked with the San Luis Valley Regional Opioid Council to decide how to spend money that came out in court cases against major pharmaceutical companies who helped produce the opioid epidemic. There were over 50 people part of the council, including local elected officials, but also folks working for recovery nonprofits, healthcare workers, and people with lived experience of substance abuse. This group came to consensus on how to use and distribute the funds over six counties. You can read more about this example in the course materials.

Lastly, at the empower stage, the example we most often think of is voting. Whichever options wins most votes, becomes the decision. Similar, juries in court cases make the decision directly. There are other processes we’ll talk about shortly, like Participatory Budgeting that allows community members to decide what to do with dollars.

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What opportunities do you see for those affected by an issue to have a meaningful opportunity to influence action on that issue?

¿Qué oportunidades ve para las personas afectadas por un problema para que tengan una oportunidad significativa de inspirar medidas para abordar ese problema?

Town hall meetings with partners so they can contribute to ideas for change.

Youth facilitating focus groups of other youth and then sharing the report with other decision-makers

Schools in Carbondale have more parent involvement

Collecting data (in many equitable ways) from target populations to prioritize services

Organize as a group

Students analyzing data (ex- HKCS) and prioritizing needs for supports for their peers based on that data

Focus on top issues and develop plan to make change and consider who can make the change happen

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What opportunities do you see for those affected by an issue to have a meaningful opportunity to influence action on that issue?

¿Qué oportunidades ve para las personas afectadas por un problema para que tengan una oportunidad significativa de inspirar medidas para abordar ese problema?

llamar o invitar a las personas para tener conversaciones de que son sus preocupaciones cómo juntas caseras llaman así (Judith)

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How can the community decide?

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What are some different methods of making collective decisions?

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Different methods for different decisions

Level of Ownership

Speed

Source: Pleus Consulting

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Fist to Five Voting Method

CONSENT

CONSENSUS

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Small is good, small is all.

(The large is a reflection of the small.)

Breakout rooms 10 min

Take a moment to reflect on your community:

How could you make decisions within your organization that reflect the will of the larger community?
What can you create at the small scale that reflects what you wish to see at the large scale (within a team → in a neighborhood → in a county → in our democracy)?
What creative ideas do you have for trying out more inclusive decision making?
How can these methods lead to systems change and improved health outcomes (SDoH) for your community?

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Let’s close it out

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Reflection–What is one new thing you learned today?

Reflexión: ¿qué es algo nuevo que aprendió hoy?

The importance of listening

Fist to Five Voting Method

How inclusive decision making can also build trust in community

Be mindful of communication, ways to increase, improve, and share

To be intentional - from the deepest part of ourselves - from 0 to 5, there is a different possibility

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Canopy Learning Online

Getting to Results

Community Engagement Continuum

Need 1:1 support? Request a coaching session.

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Was this helpful?

Join Another Affinity Group!

Systems Change - May 5, 2025; 2:00-3:30pm
Getting to Results - June 10, 2025; 10:00-11:30 am
Community Engagement Spectrum - June 17, 2025; 10:00-11:30 am

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Meeting Assessment

Evaluación de la reunión

Not very

effective

Very effective

What could we improve? Cosas para mejorar

Loved the small breakout groups

I enjoyed the break out time and getting to learn from and with a new peer/ statewide colleague

What made it work? Que funciono?

Would be interesting to try and include our individual projects in the discussion.

How effective was today’s meeting?

¿Cuán eficaz fue la reunión de hoy?

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Thank you

Please fill out this Evaluation

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Extra Slides

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Art of Hosting

Art of Hosting includes several tools you can use to engage a group in conversations and action planning. These can be useful tools when you want to engage folks early in the decision-making process, before you’ve landed on options, and engage them in brainstorming.
For example, using a world café, you start with tables of 4-8. At each table, you pick one person to be both a notetaker and a host. You engage in a conversation, then everyone switches tables to start a new conversation EXCEPT the notetaker. They start off the next conversation with a summary of what happened previously and the new group continues the conversation.
Appreciative Inquiry is a process groups can use to build off what is already working, and design specific solutions based on what we already know. As a group, you begin with discovery, discussing what is the best of what we’re already doing. Then you dream, imagining what might be before starting to design what could be. Finally, you end with destiny and jump into action around what you’ve just imagined and designed.
Open space technology can be a way of organizing a large group of people into the conversation they need to have in that moment without a pre-set agenda. Open space uses a few rules to guide folks movement throughout a space. Then anyone can suggest a topic they’d like to host and invite folks to join them in a given room or location. Everyone splits up to the topics they find interesting and move to another topic when they feel called to.

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Participatory Budgeting

Participatory Budgeting is a way that decisions can be made directly BY community members. PB, as it’s called for short, starts with a pot of money that community members can decide what to do with. This could be a few thousand or a few million, depending on what you have available to work with.
Residents design the process of how people will be able to brainstorm ideas, proposals, and vote. Then the organization hosting the process implements what the community decides.
You might say, but I’m a nonprofit, not a government. You may consider including Participatory Budgeting in your grants. You can apply for funds and let your funder know that you’d like to support the community deciding how to spend the dollars. Or you can create a fundraising campaign where you allow folks to name what improvement they’d like to see and bring the results to funders to get donations. This can be a powerful when you’re working with folks who have been left out of decision-making processes, like undocumented immigrants or people experiencing homelessness.

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Gamification

Community engagement doesn’t have to be boring! Gamification is a way of making the decision-making process into a game that allows people to play.
This can get folks who wouldn’t usually be interested in participating in the conversation involved. It can also help people feel like they know enough to contribute without being an “expert” in the topic.
Here are two examples. To the right, the City of Fort Collins partnered with the Center for Public Deliberation to create a Lego game. In 2017, community members gathered to play out the following scenario: with 12 square miles of vacant land left in Fort Collins, find a way to fit 70,000 new residents into town. Each table was given different types of housing a city map that was divided into 9 sections for them to decide where to place the housing.
To left is a program from Warm Cookies of the Revolution, a civic health club out of Denver, Colorado. They host different events that allow people to get involved in their community while having a little fun. They hosted this bingo night and invited folks to find out how tax dollars from “sins” like gambling, marijuana, cigarettes, and soda are collected, spent—and just who decides all of that.
Gamification doesn’t have to be complicated either. It can simply be a way of making engagement more fun! For example, maybe you need to do a survey of the parents in your program to find out how they’d feel about increase to childcare costs. Look around your childcare center for materials that can create a fun way to vote. Maybe you use traffic cones you use out at recess and label each one with an option to vote on. Then as parents pick up their kids, give the kid and the parent a marble they can vote with by dropping it in the hole at the top of the traffic cone. Reveal the results the next day when parents come back!

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More Resources

We’ve just talked through a few examples of what community engagement can look like but there are SO, SO many more.
Check out the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation’s Engagement Streams guide for a quick overview of many different types of engagement and when to use them.
If you want to explore even more, you can go to Participedia, a global network and crowdsourcing platform for researchers, educators, practitioners, policymakers, activists, and anyone interested in public participation and democratic innovations.
Go to the course materials to find these resources. Explore the resources and choose one that you’d like to try out. It doesn’t have to be big to start. You could even think about facilitating a different type of engagement at an upcoming staff meeting before engaging with your larger community.
In the course materials, you’ll also find a guide for engaging diverse stakeholders. You can use this guide to think through how to recruit folks for your event, focus group, or participatory budgeting process!

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RACI – Deciding who decides

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Project Phase	Activity	Responsible	Accountable	Consulted	Informed
Project Planning	Planning meeting with partner	Alex	Alex	Farah	Canopy Team
	Create participant tracking and email communication	Farah	Alex	Alex	Ernesto
	Develop pre-event materials and mail packet	Ernesto	Alex	Fatima	Farah, Partner
	Create post-event short evaluation	Fatima	Alex	Farah	Ernesto
Day of Event	Facilitate the event	Alex	Alex	Farah	Partner
Day of Event	Handle production	Farah, Fatima	Alex	Alex, Ernesto	Partner
Post-Event Follow Up	Survey participants	Fatima	Alex	Ernesto, Farah	Partner
Post-Event Follow Up	Meet with partner to decide next phase of work	Alex	Alex	Brenda, Ernesto	Canopy Team

RACI – Deciding who decides

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Stages of a �Decision-making �Discussion

Source: Interaction Associates

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Tools to Open

Brainstorm

different

Ideas…

Make a Proposal

Research, community engagement, surveys

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Tools to Narrow

Impact

Feasibility

N/3

Prioritization

Advocate

Idea 1

Idea 2

Idea 3

Idea 4

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Tools to Close

Take a

Straw

Poll

Combine:

“Both and…”