2 Recruit community partners

2 - Recruit community partners

Who to recruit

Determine who is most impacted by your work and engage where participation is likely so the effort is likely to be more successful. Look for what perspectives are missing and invite people from your user communities representing these perspectives to participate as a full member of the team. Diversity is not just physical attributes, true diversity includes a variety of lived experiences. To reduce inequity that has been baked into a process requires measuring the inequity and addressing root causes. Note that if you commit to measure what's wrong you need to commit to change it, otherwise you are creating false expectations and possibly making inequality worse. Don’t label some else's friction. It's also important that the labels, names and descriptions of the inequality do not come from those who are not or have not experienced it. Otherwise you run the risk of telling someone else how they feel and what it means. If you are measuring the ux of a service, include someone who has experiences using their services and has struggled or failed to complete the service journey in their assessment process.

How to outreach to potential partners

Look for existing relationships within your agency or at another agency that you might be able to potentially leverage the relationship the agency(ies) have with the impacted community who can help you understand more about the existing relationship that group has with the federal government, and any advice to respect their cultural context.

Remove barriers to participation. This might mean accommodating barriers to participation that people brought into the team may have, such as lack of time, which might prevent them from participating fully. The team should do all it can to make participation equal. Approach collaboration from assets or strengths based frame, that the community is resilient and has value. Just the fact that you want to partner with them is an indicator of the value of their community and knowledge from being part of the community.

Federal engagement with community partners

The government engages with communities by collecting feedback from Federal Advisory Committees, under the Federal Advisory Committee Act, or FACA; listening sessions, and public feedback to rulemaking, working groups and for American Indian and Alaskan Natives there are Tribal Consultation sessions. Tribal Consultations and working groups are intended to create a two way dialogue but can end up being listening sessions without reciprocity of exchange or commitment to next steps. These communication sessions are typically set up by the Federal government and not originating in concerns of the community. Moving towards equity means creating a platform for the concerns of the community to be heard and addressed by the government.