How can we support teams of government and community leaders working to share power? Build trust, establish structures, and use them.
At FTM, our work supporting national research and framework development is rooted in the lessons we see emerging from local teams doing the work. This keeps us proximate to the real challenges and opportunities of co-governance, while seeing patterns that inform how we support this movement in continuing to learn and grow.
In Chicago, FTM has been supporting teams of community-government leaders working to build co-governance structures across multiple city departments.
As an adviser for one of these teams, Lauren Burdette has supported a new partnership of returning residents (formerly incarcerated individuals), nonprofit organizations, and City government leaders who share power in deciding how to spend $500,000 in public funds.
Recognizing that the ecosystem of government contractors is typically limited to known entities and creates barriers for innovative ideas to increase effectiveness, the group decided to use a public process to identify key needs to support re-entry and address the root causes of recidivism.
Simultaneously, this co-governance team is working to identify system failures in the returning resident pipeline and prioritize which to strengthen first. This work radically shifts how policy is made by building a deeper understanding of the challenge and engaging non-government partners in implementation, where new issues will need their diverse expertise to help the policy meet its goals.
As a consultant to a co-governance table, Lauren balanced both project management and strengthening trust and relationships across the team to help ensure this outcome, focusing on three key elements of co-governance:
Build Trust
Helping groups build trust is a key first step, as is holding space for any truth-telling that needs to happen. Trust is built over time and by consistently “doing what you say you’re going to do,” but there is targeted early work groups can do to ensure strong conditions for trust-building. These include being explicit about power dynamics, creating spaces of shared learning and personal relationship-building, and navigating conflict together.
Establish Structures
Trusted partnerships without real momentum to get things done won't be effective at changing outcomes in the way our communities need. Setting a regular meeting cadence, building space to learn together, deciding how you’ll make decisions, agreeing on how to set agendas, creating processes for getting work done in between meetings, and pulling in insight from other community/government partners is essential to success. One overlooked structural component is ensuring there is space to learn from each other and level-set on how each system works so the group can make decisions fully informed and together. Community residents often have no idea how departments, elected officials, and other elements of government interact, and government staff often have no idea how community coalitions make decisions.
Use the structures you built, and change them if they’re not working
Too often, groups spend a lot of time up front building structures and then abandon them, devolving into habits and traditional power roles. Repetition leads to retention, so instead of building community agreements and decision-making structures and never using them again, make sure the group is set up to revisit and use the systems they built. If something isn’t working, diagnose why not together and pivot where necessary.
When done with intention and strategy, co-governance builds a truly effective way of transforming the relationship between government and community, and one that can begin rebuilding trust in government itself.