Ideas

Part 2 of the Series: Power Shifting, Community Engagement, and Responsibility in Community Change

In the first piece of this series, I clarified the difference between community engagement and power shifting. The next question organizations ask is much harder: When should we be doing each?

That question isn’t technical. It’s a question of judgment.

It’s a question I hear frequently from funders, public agencies, nonprofits, and intermediaries trying to do this work responsibly, without overpromising or causing harm.

The challenge is not treating this as a technical decision when it is fundamentally an ethical one. In practice, engagement and power shifting are not interchangeable. They involve different levels of authority and responsibility. The real question is whether the authority being shared matches the responsibility communities are being asked to carry and whether that alignment is honest within the systems you’re working in.

When alignment is missing, the consequences are not theoretical. Communities are often left carrying the outcomes of decisions they had no meaningful role or real power in shaping. What makes this judgment difficult is the environment organizations are operating in.

The Pressure to Always “Do Power”

In my work across the philanthropic sector and public systems, I’ve observed growing pressure to frame all community-facing work as power shifting. Power language has become shorthand for values alignment and credibility, externally signaling that an institution is serious about equity or transformation. In some cases, it even becomes a protective shield against critique.

That pressure produces two predictable responses.

1. Some organizations adopt power language before they are structurally and culturally prepared to share authority, resources, or accountability.
2. Others avoid the conversation entirely, knowing they cannot meet the expectations that power shifting creates.

Overpromising power erodes trust, while avoiding the conversation preserves the status quo. Neither reflects good judgment. Being honest when power cannot shift—or when there are real constraints that limit the ability to shift is often what allows trust to exist in the first place.

The work is learning how to discern case by case, when engagement is sufficient and when power must actually move.

That discernment starts with understanding when engagement is the responsible choice.

When Community Engagement Is the Responsible Choice

Community engagement is not a lesser practice. In many situations it is the most responsible option available.

Engagement is appropriate when:

• Decisions are time-bound or legally constrained;
• Technical expertise is required to ensure safety or compliance;
• Work is exploratory or in an early learning phase; or
• Communities are already overextended and under-resourced.

In many cases, this judgment is made in conversation with community leaders who understand the ecosystem they are part of and the constraints shaping the work. In these contexts, asking communities to take on decisionmaking authority lacking adequate support can create new risks rather than reduce harm.

When done well, engagement can:

• Surface critical context institutions cannot see from inside their own systems;
• Improve relevance and design;
• Prevent avoidable mistakes, such as designing programs that overlook barriers communities already face; and
• Build relationships that matter later.

What makes engagement ethical is not how participatory it looks, but how clearly it is framed.

Ethical engagement is explicit about:

• What decisions are open and which are not;
• What constraints are real (immediate, structural, or political); and
• What will and will not change because of participation.

When that clarity is present, communities can make informed decisions about whether and how to participate. Engagement becomes a transparent exchange, not an implied promise of shared authority.

When Engagement Becomes Harmful

Engagement becomes harmful when participation is presented as influence and later proves to have had no meaningful pathway to impact. None of these dynamics appear harmful in isolation. The harm occurs when they repeat over time.

This happens when:

• Listening sessions repeat year after year, yet the policy direction never changes. Community members share concerns and ideas, but the same decisions move forward regardless of what was raised.
• Community input is gathered after key decisions have already been made. Community members are invited to comment on a plan or strategy even though the priorities, timeline, or funding allocations have already been finalized.
• Advisory roles exist without real authority. Community advisory committees offer recommendations, but those recommendations can be ignored without explanation or consequence.
• Community voice is used to legitimize predetermined outcomes. Quotes from meetings or summaries of participation appear in reports or grant proposals, even though those voices did not shape the final decisions.

Over time, community members recognize this pattern.

Community members disengage not because they don’t care, but because they have learned that their participation may inform institutional decisions, but it is not allowed to shape them.

The harm is rarely intentional. Many of these efforts are well-intentioned. But the pattern becomes visible over time, participation is welcomed, yet authority remains unchanged. Engagement shifts from being a pathway for insight to becoming extractive. Once that pattern becomes visible, rebuilding trust becomes much harder.

Engagement helps institutions learn. Power shifting determines who decides.

When Power Shifting Becomes Necessary

Sometimes engagement is used in situations where the real issue is decisionmaking authority. In those moments, participation alone cannot address the problem.

These moments rarely appear overnight. They emerge when communities push for change, when institutional leaders are willing to reconsider how authority is held, or when past decisions have made the limits of engagement visible.

Power shifting becomes necessary when decisions:

• Shape short and long-term conditions communities must live with;
• Determine access to safety, resources, housing, education, or economic opportunity;
• Set funding priorities, governance structures, or rules that determine who has influence over decisions;
• Require communities to live with outcomes they did not shape; or
• Attempt to rebuild trust after decisions have already caused harm.

In these cases, continuing to engage without sharing authority can deepen harm rather than mitigate it. Power shifting is not about inclusion for the sake of inclusion. It is about accountability, aligning decisionmaking authority with those who will bear the consequences. That does not mean every decision must be shared equally. But it does mean that some authority should move.

What Power Shifting Can Look Like in Practice

Power shifting can take many forms. It doesn’t always look like full shared governance or formal community control. When most people think of power shifting, they often misunderstand it as a single, dramatic act. In practice, it shows up in more specific and often quieter ways. Here are three forms of power that make the difference tangible.

Veto authority over specific outcomes
Veto authority exists when communities can stop or redirect a decision, not just advise on it. For example, a community review body may have the authority to block a policy, funding decision, or hiring outcome if it does not meet agreed-upon criteria. This authority is often bounded to specific decisions, but within those bounds, it is decisive.

Veto power fundamentally changes accountability. Institutions must respond, not simply acknowledge feedback. This is one of the clearest distinctions between engagement and power shifting. If communities cannot interrupt harm or change course, authority has not moved.

Protecting community priorities as work moves upward
Another form of power shows up when intermediaries or regional actors actively protect community priorities as strategies move up the chain. This can look like an intermediary refusing to dilute or reframe community-defined goals to make them more palatable to funders or pushing back when priorities are softened to fit institutional comfort. In these instances, power is exercised through refusal. The choice not to translate, sanitize, or filter community priorities becomes a way of preserving influence as decisions move further from the ground. This kind of power is easy to overlook because it happens behind the scenes, but it often determines whether community priorities survive contact with larger systems.

Using access to shift where resources flow
Sometimes power is exercised without making a funding decision at all. A funder may recognize that a community organization is doing critical work, even though that organization does not fit within their own funding strategy. Rather than dismissing the organization or encouraging it to contort itself to fit, the funder uses their relationships to make an introduction to another funder whose strategy aligns. This is especially significant when that second funder is invitation-only, meaning the organization could not access that opportunity on its own. In this scenario, power is exercised by opening a door that would otherwise remain closed. The funder uses credibility and access to shift where resources flow not for recognition, but because the organization is essential to the health of the broader ecosystem. This kind of power rarely appears in reports, but it changes outcomes. It determines who gets resourced and whether critical gaps are addressed.

These examples vary in scale. What they share is a shift in who ultimately influences outcomes.

Power Shifting Is Not Always Appropriate

Power shifting is not always appropriate, and it is not always safe.

Shifting power can place communities in precarious positions without the conditions needed to support it, such as:

• Adequate resources;
• Clear decision rules;
• Institutional backing; and
• Protection from retaliation.

I have seen communities given formal authority without real support and then blamed when outcomes were slow, contested, or messy. That is not power shifting. That is a relinquishment. Power shifting done poorly does not eliminate harm; it redistributes it.

Many institutions operate under real constraints, boards, statutes, procurement rules, and political oversight. Naming those constraints honestly is not an excuse. It is a prerequisite for deciding what responsibility looks like within them.

Power shifting should never be treated as a default posture or a moral performance. It is a structural choice that carries responsibility.

A Responsibility Check, Not a Checklist

So where do you start? There is no formula that can tell you whether engagement is sufficient or whether power must shift in a given moment.

But there are questions that can support honest judgment:
What decisions are truly open right now?
Who has the authority to stop or redirect harm?
What forms of power or access do we hold that others do not?
How could that power be used responsibly, even if indirectly?

These questions often start inside an organization, but they rarely stop there.

Once you begin asking who holds authority, access, and influence, it becomes clear that the answers are spread across an ecosystem.

These Questions Can’t Be Answered in Isolation—Look Across the Ecosystem
One reason this work feels so difficult is that organizations often try to answer these questions in isolation. In reality, power is distributed across an ecosystem. Authority, resources, access, and influence sit with different actors at different levels. What is appropriate for a grassroots organization may not be appropriate for a regional intermediary. What a funder can do directly may differ from how they can support power shifting indirectly.

Once you start asking who holds authority, access, and influence, it becomes clear that no single organization can answer these questions alone. Power is distributed across the ecosystem and so is responsibility. The question is not just what should we do? It is what role do we play, and who else needs to be involved for power to move and for whom?

Where This Leads

In the third piece, I widen the lens to look at how power operates across an ecosystem, at the hyperlocal, regional, and national levels, and how different actors can use the power they already hold to support real shifts in authority without overpromising or causing harm. Because no single organization holds all the power, and no single organization can shift it alone.