The 3 ‘Rs’ of Equitable Community Engagement

“Community Engagement” is a relatively new field of study within public administration and is newly emerging as a best practice for city planning processes, research, and development of social interventions.

If you have ever worked for a nonprofit or in public office, or lived in a town with a budget, you may be familiar with the cycle of participant surveys, focus groups, or public forums that drive public processes and inform policy. These are examples of community engagement.

However, there is a delicate balance to be struck when institutions reach into communities that are marginalized, underserved, and/or over-criminalized to pull data and insights from that community.

The problem here is that there is a tendency to under-compensate and exhaust the people we are trying to serve by inundating them with requests for feedback. This trend is especially harmful to low-income people of color, who are most alienated from the benefits these institutions provide.

If your organization builds community engagement processes into program development, you should be implementing non-extractive methods that include compensation for time and lived experience. What do I mean?

To be non-extractive means to build genuine relationships with people and organizations through which there is reciprocity and mutual respect.

The knowledge that communities hold is precious, and the ethical use of this knowledge for institutional purposes requires the three “Rs” of ethical community engagement: Research, Relationships, and Remuneration.

Research

Understanding context is vitally important. Marginalized peoples are not a monolith, and hyper-local dynamics with institutions is an important point of analysis before and during relationship development.

Relationships

Building relationships in the community is important to the process and will take time and mutual trust. Community members with lived experience in the thing your organization is tackling are experts in that subject and must be treated as such.

Remuneration (compensation)

The remuneration must come from an equity-driven compensation model that centers the lived experience as expertise in the development of policy.

Compensation Models to Consider for Community Engagement

Partnership frameworks for individual compensation should consider:

• The organization’s ability and interest in sustaining relationships.
• The administrative process and reporting capacity of the host organization.
• The potential burden on community members to meet requirements and navigate complicated systems imposed by the renumeration mechanism (such as registrations, paperwork, and compliance).

Case Study: How New Moon Network is Demonstrating Non-extractive Community Engagement

This section will help nonprofits understand the three Rs of ethical community engagement in practice and provide a case study for implementation of “Renumeration” through New Moon Network.

I co-direct an intermediary grantmaking and capacity-building organization called New Moon Network. Our mission is to secure rights and opportunities for people in the sex trade through regranting, capacity-building, and donor education.

Our biggest draw is that we are situated in the community we serve (all having lived experience) and we make it our mission to serve our peers in this work.

This means we walk a delicate line between peer and funder, and navigate these relationships delicately, with respect — and with cash — because we know our movement appreciates being compensated for their expertise.

Being in the community is extremely helpful to build trust with program participants. At New Moon, we have all our staff involved in our capacity-building programs and keeping feedback loops open. We compensate every single person for every single activity they engage in. We find a way to make compensation compulsory.

The Budgeting and Compensation Process

Organizations with inflexible budgets should plan far ahead for compensating engagement efforts, but flexible organizations can use some creativity in building compensation models that work for all parties.

When grantmaking and/or capacity-building are your primary functions, you need to get money out and have a duty to ensure that recipients are equipped to deal with the implications of the infrastructure you put in place for them to receive that money.

For example, utilizing a 1099 contractor relationship with individual community members requires some technical assistance to implement for the individuals, so foundations working with community members need to be aware that not every person with lived expertise in your issue area knows how to send an invoice or register their business properly.

It is therefore our duty to ensure that people have the tools they need to get paid, and understand the process; this is an important part of relationship-building as well

Paying individuals directly may be infeasible for some organizations or public agencies based on capacity and infrastructure (or policy). In those cases, we can get creative with how we compensate the community members we are trying to reach.

Partner with a CBO using a 1099 with MOU or Contract

• In this model, we recognize a host organization, or community-based organization (CBO), as the experts and conveners of the people we want to reach.
  
  This method allows the organization to nominate individuals as critical participants in the process, and they can decide how to compensate their community members within a given budget.
  
  
• This method also allows the host organization to grow relationships with people AND the CBOs who are closest to the community.

Individual Cash equivalency (gift cards)

• This allows the host organization to administer the program without strict tracking of funds, which is low burden on the host agency, but still allows flexible and fast funding to the recipients.

Partner with a CBO with a Donation

• This model allows the host agency to partner directly with a CBO and allows them to conduct their work in partnership, setting the stage for a relationship between the two entities.

In conclusion, ethical community engagement requires a commitment to non-extractive practices that value and compensate community members for their time and expertise.

By implementing the three Rs — Research, Relationships, and Remuneration — organizations can foster genuine, respectful partnerships that empower marginalized communities while ensuring their contributions are acknowledged and valued.

Questions about how to get your participants paid in an equitable and effective manner? Please reach out to us at Contact@newmoonfund.org.

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