Ideas

Part 3 of the Series: Power Shifting, Community Engagement, and Responsibility in Community Change

Power shifting does not happen inside a single organization, grant, or initiative. It happens across an ecosystem, and it succeeds or fails based on how that ecosystem functions. In the first two pieces of this series, I clarified the difference between community engagement and power shifting and examined when each is appropriate or harmful. This third piece builds on that foundation by shifting the focus to where power sits and how it moves across different parts of the system.

Power shows up differently at the hyperlocal, regional, and national levels. Understanding those differences is essential if we want to shift power responsibly, without overpromising, misplacing accountability, or asking any one actor to carry more than they realistically can. When funders, public agencies, intermediaries, and nonprofit organizations try to shift power in isolation, it’s easy to misread where authority sits and who has the ability to influence outcomes. An ecosystem lens helps clarify those dynamics and makes it possible to act with greater alignment and responsibility.

Why an Ecosystem Lens Matters

One of the most common mistakes I see in community change work is the assumption that every organization involved should be doing the same thing with power. That assumption creates two problems. It places unrealistic expectations on some actors, and it allows others to avoid changing how they hold or use power. Both outcomes preserve the status quo, just through different mechanisms.

When organizations try to shift power without understanding how different actors, institutions, and constraints shape where authority sits, the work tends to collapse into one of two positions. It becomes romanticized, framed as simply giving power to the community, or it gets avoided entirely, framed as not realistic within existing constraints. Neither position is honest, and neither is helpful.

These levels are not as clean as they sound. Many actors operate across them. A community foundation may fund locally while influencing regional priorities. A public agency may sit at the city, county, or state level, each with different authority and constraints. Advocacy organizations often move across levels at the same time, organizing, advocating, building coalitions, and shaping narratives. What matters is not where an organization sits, but the role it plays within the ecosystem, how it uses the power it holds, and how that power connects to others across levels.

An ecosystem lens does not ask every actor to do the same thing. It asks each actor to be clear about what power they hold, what they are positioned to share, and how their role connects to others. That clarity makes coordinated, responsible power shifting possible.

This is where the work from the first two pieces comes into focus. Naming power clearly matters. So does judgment. But those questions do not live inside a single organization. They play out across a system where no single actor holds enough authority to answer them alone.

Hyperlocal Ecosystems: Where Lived Experience and Consequences Live

At the hyperlocal level, neighborhoods, towns, Tribal lands, and small cities, power is most visible because consequences are immediate. This is where people are directly affected by decisions they had no meaningful role in. It is where policies, funding, and services are experienced directly, and where deep contextual, cultural, and historical knowledge lives.

A lot of what we think of as power building lives at this level. Organizing, leadership development, coalition building, movement work. These strategies matter. They shape priorities, develop leaders, and create momentum. But on their own, they do not shift power. This is where judgment matters, understanding when building power is not the same as shifting it. That only happens when the systems they engage are forced to respond.

Power shifting at the hyperlocal level takes the form of shared governance or decisionmaking bodies, community review or oversight councils with real authority, resident-led priority setting, and the ability to stop or redirect decisions that cause harm. This is also the level where power shifting is most expected and most under-supported.

At the same time, hyperlocal actors have the least access to flexible resources, the least protection from political or institutional backlash, and the highest risk when power shifting is promised but not supported. Power shifting fails at the hyperlocal level when communities are given responsibility without protection, authority without resources, or visibility without real backing.

Regional Ecosystems: Where Power Is Filtered, Translated, and Sometimes Concentrated

Regional actors play a different role than those closest to the ground. They may not hold the deepest lived experience, but they hold connective power. Regional ecosystems are where hyperlocal priorities are aggregated or filtered, where funding strategies are aligned, and where decisions about scale are made. What looks like coordination can start to function as filtration. What happens at this level determines whether community-defined priorities survive or are reshaped to fit institutional comfort.

This is one of the more subtle risks at the regional level. When organizations or individuals are positioned as community representatives without accountability to broader constituencies, ecosystems can reproduce exclusion in new forms. Authority may appear to have shifted, but influence can narrow.

The most responsible role for regional actors is to design pathways that allow power to move downward and outward. Sometimes that means refusing to filter or soften community priorities. Sometimes it means naming clearly when a regional structure has become a bottleneck rather than a bridge.

National Ecosystems: Where Rules, Resources, and Narratives Are Set

At the national level, power is furthest from lived experience, but it is also the most influential. National actors shape funding priorities, policy frameworks, definitions of success, and what counts as evidence. This is where the gap between power language and structural change is most visible. Communities may be invited to participate, but the underlying structure of the system remains the same. That is not power shifting. It is participation dressed in the language of transformation.

Power shifting at this level is about changing the rules, not just the rhetoric. These changes are often slow, but they determine whether power language leads to meaningful change.

How Power Moves and Sometimes Stalls Across Levels

Power does not move in a straight line. It moves through relationships, trust, and coordinated strategies across levels. No single actor orchestrates it. That is why asking “are we shifting power?” inside a single organization almost always leads to the wrong conclusion.

I have seen this happen in ways that never appear in reports or grant narratives. A funder opens access to resources. A regional intermediary redesigns a process. A community council asserts authority. Together, these actions change what is possible. Partial shifts still matter. They can alter narratives, build alliances, and surface what the system is protecting. Ecosystem change often unfolds incrementally.

What Misalignment Looks Like Across Levels

Misalignment rarely announces itself.

At the hyperlocal level, it shows up when communities are told they have power, but their decisions are later overridden. Communities are left holding responsibility without the protection that was implied when authority was offered.

At the regional level, priorities get softened in translation or filtered to fit existing strategies, often without any single decision removing them entirely. What looks like coordination can quietly become filtration.

At the national level, input is sought, but the rules remain untouched. Power language travels downward. Authority does not.

These breakdowns rarely come from bad intent. They come from unclear roles, mismatched expectations, and unspoken limits.

The Real Question Is Not “Are We Shifting Power?”

Too often the question is “are we shifting power?” That is the wrong starting point. A more useful question is what role we play in this ecosystem and how we are using the power we hold. None of these roles are neutral. And none are interchangeable.

A Final Reflection

Across these three pieces, I have been building toward one idea from different angles. Language first, because you cannot shift what you cannot name. Then judgment, because knowing the difference between engagement and power shifting means nothing if you cannot tell which one the moment is calling for. And finally, ecosystem, because no single organization holds enough power to move it alone, and pretending otherwise has cost communities more than we have been willing to admit.

Here’s the so what.

At the national level, the question is not whether strategies include community voice. It is whether eligibility rules, reporting requirements, definitions of success, and relationships are structured in ways that allow authority to move. Communities can be named in a framework and still have no meaningful role in shaping it. Language without structure is not power shifting. It’s branding.

At the regional level, the question is not whether actors are at the table. It’s whether the hyperlocal priorities that reached them made it to the national conversation intact, or were filtered and reshaped along the way to fit what larger systems were already comfortable funding. It is also whether hyperlocal actors had seats as genuine decisionmakers, not as voices invited to inform a process designed without them. Regional actors are not just connectors. They’re gatekeepers or guardians, and which role they play is determined by what they protect, whose seats they secure, and what they refuse to let get lost.

For public agencies, the question is not whether listening sessions were held. It’s whether anything structural changed because communities showed up. If the answer is no, that isn’t engagement. That’s extraction with better optics.

Across levels, this pattern shows up consistently. Communities are invited to participate, asked to share input, and often expected to carry responsibility without the authority, resources, or protection needed to shape what happens next. This is what I think of as the Participation Without Power Trap.

Participation is present, but power does not move with it. Without alignment across the ecosystem, participation alone cannot move systems. When this pattern holds, it’s communities who carry the weight of that misalignment.

And to those getting into “good trouble” at the hyperlocal level, this is partly a love letter to you. You’ve been right. The ceiling is real. The authority was not yours even when it was framed that way. The priorities you named didn’t always make it to the regional table or arrive intact. The ecosystem around you hasn’t always done its part. That needs to change.
Power shifting is not a performance, a trend, or a toolkit. It is a coordinated practice that requires every actor in the ecosystem to be honest about what they hold, what they are willing to share, and what they are hiding behind when they are not. When that honesty takes hold across levels, communities are no longer asked to carry the burden alone. Real change becomes possible, not because everyone does the same thing, but because each actor plays their part in relationship to the whole.

That’s the work. All of it.

For organizations navigating these questions in practice, this work is rarely straightforward. It requires clarity about roles, alignment across the ecosystem, and a willingness to move from language to structure.

This is the work Community Science supports funders, public agencies, intermediaries, and community partners in doing. Contact me at jwilliamswashington@communityscience.com if you want to partner with us!