vested. Who needs to be around the decision table?
This blog shares early learnings from vested. We outline our early beliefs about the experiences needed in the panel, and the implications of our decisions since we’ve been up and running. This is a snapshot of wider learnings from this stage, which we’ll be sharing more on soon.
vested. is supporting a panel of 18–25 year olds to make investment decisions that can tackle youth unemployment in London. We started this project with three core beliefs, which are central to all of our work at Shift:
- Decisions about social issues should include the views of those close to the impact that those decisions will have.
- Decisions are better when shaped by a diverse range of views and perspectives.
- Decisions should be open to those who are far from existing power and decisions-making.
When building the Vested panel, we had each of these front-and-centre of our minds:
- “Close to the impact”: The focus of this Vested fund is youth unemployment, so we chose to recruit people aged 18–25, who’d all had direct experience of unemployment for at least four months. All our panellists identify with characteristics, or have a history of experiences, that we know typically present them with greater barriers to finding work — like being a person of colour, disabled, a carer, or neurodivergent. This means we’re centring decisions with those with direct experience, then providing them with “experts on tap” (see our reasoning for this, in the investment context)
- “Diverse range of views”: We built the panel to include individuals who:
- Had / hadn’t been through employment support programmes
- Had / hadn’t been to university
- Had / hadn’t set up organisations based on their experiences
- Had experienced a range of known barriers that mean someone is more likely to experience unemployment
- Had different motivations for being involved (e.g. to make a difference, or to grow their skills to support their job search)
- Identified with a range of ethnicities, genders and backgrounds
3. “Far from existing power”: We know that community panels can often recycle those who’ve been platformed elsewhere, or those who’ve learned the language of traditional power holders and built confidence and connections through prior engagement. For this reason, we employed sortition when building our panel to reach less heard voices — deploying a randomised selection method similar to that used when building citizen assemblies. This was done not to exclude those with experience of community panels, but to avoid selecting people simply because they were more confident, experienced in participation, or knew how to articulate interest in initiatives like these. This ensured the presence of people with specific experiences and characteristics evidenced as barriers to employment (e.g. being neurodiverse or disabled) and where possible in numbers representative of unemployment statistics for London. We combined this approach with an informal chat that established people were eligible, knew what they were signing up for, and could ask questions.
Some of our learning questions
We knew that we’d made a lot of assumptions in the above. And we wanted to test our beliefs about what supports effective participatory decisions in the investment space, and build greater understanding, with the help of some broader questions:
- What does it mean to be “close to the impact”?
- How do we make space for and include individuals with different kinds of experiences and views, when some of those might radically differ from each other?
- What are the challenges of a randomised approach to bringing a panel together?
- What are the advantages and challenges of having diverse perspectives in the panel? How can we facilitate spaces to maximise the former and minimise the latter?
What we’ve learned so far…
- Diversity is a source of productive tension and personal development, but needs grounding in what a group has in common
Several panellists have recognised the group’s diversity as a source of richness in discussions. We heard that it could be difficult to hear views that were sometimes polar opposite to people’s own, but in general the panel shared how back-and-forth debate on points of difference helped them home in on more fundamental barriers to unemployment, while helping them understand other experiences they rarely considered.
“Despite being so different, I started to see that we’re all facing quite similar problems” — vested. panellist
We saw that keeping disagreements healthy required the panel to stay tuned into what they shared with each other. Where people saw each other as “representatives” of a particular, different group to themselves, it could challenge a sense of common cause.
“One difficulty is that we all prioritise our own story — sometimes I feel like we’re all fighting after our individual cause.” — vested. panellist
In light of this, the panel spoke of the importance of “putting themselves in each other’s shoes”, to build solidarity and overcome disagreement. This speaks to the importance of growing a sense of the “We”, over the “I”, as an ingredient to decision-making in diverse groups — something we heard emphasised in a recent learning event bringing together vested. panellists with panellists from BD Giving’s community steering group.
In hindsight, we think that we could have created greater space, as facilitators, for people to share personal stories and reflections in ways that allowed a deeper sense of the panel’s shared experience to emerge. This is something we want to be mindful of in what lies ahead. When we’re making decisions on specific organisations that we might fund, some of those organisations may be targeting audiences that some panellists identify with, while others don’t. Having “representative” experiences in the panel may help us better assess these organisations for investment, but comparing across a range of different organisations that speak more strongly to different panellists might also accent differences of opinion in the panel, and underscore the importance of a sense of a “shared cause” underlying difference.
2. People value agency over their identity and expression
We’ve seen that people value the ability to choose how much to share, and when, for spaces to be truly inclusive. This means it’s been important not to “define” people by the lived experiences that were used as factors in the initial panel selection.
Some panellists welcomed not having to share their own backgrounds or experiences of marginalisation, for instance. And some chose to define themselves by their present activities and achievements (for instance, as founders of social enterprises). We feel it’s important to maintain this, so people don’t feel pressure to justify their views or their presence in the panel. And we’re exploring how to do this while still creating space for people to share in ways that feel right and relevant to them.
“It’s been really nice not to have to explicitly state our barriers — if I was asked to […] I wouldn’t have been comfortable — I thought it was nice that some people shared about that and others didn’t.” — vested. panellist
Other panellists reflected on the importance of setting clear expectations within the group about what’s appropriate to share and to ask of others, to lower the anxieties of coming together with unfamiliar people:
“I don’t think we had many challenges — we’re all quite reasonable and respectful. The group agreement underlined that and boundaries we set there helped — you have the anticipation of meeting a group of people outside your normal communities you’ve never met”- vested. panellist
3. “Lived experience” as a term can obscure important differences:
Some panellists have shared how they’ve tried to bring a broad perspective to discussions — a perspective grounded in their own experience of barriers to employment as well as their wider understanding developed through the work and learning they’ve undertaken. Others have preferred expressing views from a more personal standpoint, grounded primarily in their personal experiences of marginalisation, and panellists have noticed the differences in these approaches adding richness to conversation. We’ve also seen that, having heard people’s personal stories, some panellists have shared with us that they refrained from expressing views due to feeling more “privileged” than others on the panel.
“Sometimes I thought “should I be on this panel? Should there be someone with more struggles?”” — Vested panellist
Considering these reflections as a team, we’re seeing we need to be more explicit that no one panellist’s experiences or views are more valid than others. And we want to ensure our desire to platform people with “lived experience” retains space for people to draw on more professional experiences and education (that may have been inspired by life experiences), within the process of making decisions.
Relatedly, we may need to better stress that it’s important we have a range of experiences on the panel — it’s not about who is “closest to the issue” — given we’ll soon be deciding on organisations that are themselves likely to be supporting people with a range of different barriers and experiences of unemployment reflective of the panel’s own diversity.
Our takeaways from this stage…
One of our big learnings from vested. so far is that panellists’ own sense of being “legitimate” as decision makers, or knowing which experiences to bring into those decisions, isn’t easy to determine. We don’t have some of the clear markers of legitimacy that are present for example in our place-based participatory work with the Black Food Fund, where living in the area provides an unambiguous marker. We also know that the panellists in our group are younger than those in our other participatory work, and may be less used to “holding us to account” in the way that more experienced individuals may have more confidence in, and feel they have legitimacy to do so.
Ultimately, we want to frame and facilitate panel sessions such that we give individuals greater space to speak freely — to choose whether to reference or move beyond their own lived experiences of the issue we are exploring. While we believe it’s important that different experiences and backgrounds are represented on the panel, and that it’s right to recruit people on this basis, we’ve seen it’s important that people can define themselves on their own terms, identify their common ground, and feel able to draw holistically upon their entire range of life experiences in decision making.
Finally, we believe we’re starting to prove that you can use randomised selection within funding space–something rarely implemented, even in grant-making–to bring together an effective decision-making group. And in doing this, we can better connect with people who are far from power in the service of more equitable innovation.
Questions you might ask yourself, when pursuing participation in the funding space…
- How are you using the term “lived experience”?
- What counts as being “close enough” to a social issue? / What makes someone a “legitimate” decision maker?
- How are you making space for people to identify what they have in common?
- How are you avoiding bias in your recruitment process?
- How are you creating space for healthy disagreement?
vested. is delivered in partnership with Trust for London and funded by Connect Fund.
