Building Bridges: A Guide to Centering
Community Perspective
A downloadable toolkit featuring real life examples, tips, tools, and resources for those committed to deepening the way they
engage communities they care about in their work.
Defining Communities
We define “communities” as people with lived experience of the issues you focus on. This might mean residents of a certain neighborhood or people with direct experience of the issues you’re working on in your region. If you’re a grantmaker, this might include both nonprofits that experience your funding and capacity building programs, as well as the people who serve.
About this Toolkit
The people closest to the issues know best the solutions, but for many nonprofits and grantmakers, when it comes to authentically centering community perspectives in the work, often there is a gap between intention and action. Building trusting relationships and changing internal processes and practices can feel daunting, but it doesn’t have to be.
Advice for Nonprofits and Foundations Working with Communities
This video features parent and community leader, Fay Pierce.
Through our work in deep partnership with nonprofits and foundations, we at Community Wealth Partners have cultivated and refined our approach to centering community in everything we do. We have developed tools and frameworks to guide our work with nonprofits and foundations. Now we are sharing them with you.
Building Bridges: Centering Community Perspective
This Toolkit offers practical guidance to help nonprofits and grantmakers take the next step in centering the people most impacted by their work.
How to Use This Toolkit
This page features learning tools for two separate paths which include Starting Out / Making the Case and Launching and Troubleshooting. The learning paths were carefully designed to address common questions and tension points nonprofits and foundations experience at the various stages of centering community perspectives. Before you select your path and start downloading materials, we encourage you to review and reflect on the questions we outlined under Step 1.
Step 1
Identify Your Learning Path
Step 2
Download Resources
Step 3
Continue Learning
Step 1
Questions for Reflection
1. Do you have buy-in from your organizational leaders and staff who will need to act on community feedback?
2. Are you clear on what decisions your organization is open to community members making or informing and where the organization is not yet open to community input? Do you know how the input you receive will be used?
3. Do you have an initial idea of how you would engage people (e.g., advisory committee, participatory design process etc)?
If you answered no to one or more of these questions, we encourage you to start
with resources outlined under Starting Out/Making the Case before you move to Launching and Troubleshooting.
Step 2:
Identify and download materials best for you
Starting Out/Making the Case
Starting Out/Making the Case
For organizations that want to understand different models of community engagement, think about how they could be applied to their organization, and work on ways to make the case within their organization for greater community engagement.
Additional reflection questions for individuals and teams:
1. Why are you engaging and/or sharing power with the community?2. What are the key questions to answer as you explore centering community perspective in your work?
Download the resources below to help you continue to make progress.Launching and Troubleshooting
Launching and Troubleshooting
For organizations whose staff and leaders are aligned around the importance of community engagement but want to develop a plan to execute on it. What should it look like? How do we do outreach? How do we compensate etc.
Additional reflection questions for individuals and teams:
1. How do we do start to center community perspective in our work or deepen our practice to share power with community??2. What are the common pitfalls to avoid?
Download the resources below to help you continue to make progress.The Basics: Intro to Community Engagement
Groundwork
Keys to community engagement and power sharing/Principles
Choose a strategy and examples of models
Overview of Community Engagement Process
Overview of Community Engagement Process
Step 3:
Continue Learning About Centering Community Perspective
Sharing power with communities is a ever-evolving process that can include wins and missteps along the way.
Our resource library below features learnings and best practices from our work including links to folks we continue to learn from in the field. Feel free to pair these resources with tools you gathered from the learning paths above.