Beliefs that hold social organisations back from sharing value

In this blog post our co-founder, Ray, challenges some of the toxic beliefs that might be holding your organisation back from properly compensating and valuing those who contribute their lived experience to their design and research projects.

ALT TEXT: A group of five young people sat at a desk talking and making notes on post its

ALT TEXT: A group of eight young people sat at a desk talking with laptops out

One of the earliest projects Nick and the Collaborative Future team worked on together was a research project that had been awarded millions of pounds to improve the mental health of young people from disadvantaged communities. Nick’s team had been awarded a small fraction of this to conduct design and research. And with some of that budget, he was keen that from the start young people were gaining real value from the process so he invited Collaborative Future to be involved because he knew we were embedded in our communities, that we always paid people fairly for their time, and offered a multitude of support to young people to build confidence and advocate for themselves. Sadly, though it was clear early on in the process that many of the institutions involved were uncomfortable with the presence of the young people we worked with. In turn their inability to deeply value these young people was causing more retraumatizing experiences for our young people and caused the institutions to claw more deeply onto their funding.

This experience really laid bare both the sheer amount of money invested in ‘thinking’ about the problems and the massive power imbalances that exist in how many social good initiatives are structured. When we stepped down from this project Nick and I decided to continue to work together to ensure we used our respective experiences and networks to make real progress on the ways power and value can be actively redistributed through research and design projects.

This is why our team is contributing to the ‘Shared Value’ platform. We're hoping that Shared Value makes a practical contribution which makes it easier for organisations to pay people for their time, but we also want to challenge some of the deep-rooted toxic beliefs through this work.

Below are just a few of the toxic myths and assumptions we've heard organisations perpetuate through their projects:

MYTH 1

"THERE’S MORE SKILL AND VALUE IN THOSE CONDUCTING RESEARCH THAN THOSE SHARING THEIR STORY"

The predominant norm in research and design is that those with ‘technical’ skills are privileged with consistent and highly paid work as part of exploring societal challenges, while the ‘beneficiaries’ of the projects should feel privileged their voices are being heard. Thanks to the progress made around Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) in the sector, researchers and designers are likely to invest more time than they used to in seeking input and information from those who have “lived experience”. However, it is still normal, for instance, that a London-based researcher on a project about domestic violence or unemployment gets paid a £600 day rate or a £50k salary, while the people sharing their stories get paid in “thanks”. Because what is hard about being asked questions about your life, right?

But we should be valuing the skill and resilience that these people continue to show as they navigate a life that is stacked against them. We should be compensating them for the fact that in spite of the trauma they have been subjected to they still found the energy and focus to use their voice for change. We should be paying them for the complicated task of translating the depth and gravity of their experience into simple terms that can fit into the neat boxes of the researcher. We need to recognise not just the time spent in a one- off interview or workshop, but all the time they spent processing things ahead of that session and the time they will have to spend healing from the experience afterwards.

MYTH 2

“DISADVANTAGED” PEOPLE CAN’T MAKE INFORMED DECISIONS"

I’ve heard first-hand and second-hand stories of decision-makers who jump to conclusions about what would happen if they were to give monetary compensation directly to the people contributing to their projects. Charities patting themselves on the back for giving Amazon vouchers to those providing feedback on their journey of claiming universal credit, researchers worrying that if they paid money to people with poor mental health or addictions that they’d use the income to buy alcohol or cigarettes. There are multiple layers of these assumptions that worry me. The first is that if the people running these projects are making moral judgements about the use of any financial compensation, how on earth are they going to draw conclusions that actually create change and empower the communities they are examining. The second is that if financial compensation is taken off the table without any input from the people they are seeking to speak to how skewed must their sample population end up being? They either hear from people who have much more time than others in their community, or from those who are forced to contribute to the process rather than it being a free choice.

MYTH 3

"IT’S UNFAIR TO PAY SOME PARTICIPANTS AND NOT OTHERS"

When we’ve spoken to charities researching the lived experience of unemployed people or asylum seekers, one of the reasons they’ve noted for not compensating people for their time is because they aren’t allowed to receive self-employed income if they don’t have the right to work or if it will affect their benefits. This is true in many situations, but we believe getting the financial value into the communities that surround those people, or into the hands of others who have had similar experiences but now can legally receive income (e.g someone who was an asylum seeker but now has settled status), is still beneficial to those who can’t receive income. The reason being that those people are then more likely to have the energy and impetus to keep driving change so that others like them don’t have to endure the same battles they did. It’s highly unlikely that someone with lived experience of a particular issue is going to be angry that someone in a slightly different situation can benefit from financial support. If organisations speak openly and transparently about the reason for the disparity in how they treat different contributors most people will understand and champion the efforts to put power and money into the hands of the communities that represent them.

MYTH 4

"THE AVOIDANCE OF DISRUPTION, DISCOMFORT OR CHANGE WITHIN AN INSTITUTION IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN ADDRESSING THE DAILY PAIN OF “DISADVANTAGED” PEOPLE"

Lots of common finance, legal and HR practices are ultimately in place to protect an organisation, and ultimately protect the status quo. This means that in cases where researchers do deeply value lived experience, and do believe that participants can be trusted with financial compensation, they often still can’t manifest a way to actually bring this into practice within the organisations and structures they are part of because there are so many layers of resistance. I’ve seen so many HR directors and CFOs simply tell people “that’s not possible / legal” or “that’s too risky/complex” when really it would just require a bit of initiative and a little bit of time spent exploring work arounds to find an appropriate solution. When people without legal, financial or HR knowledge are faced with this categoric push-back they often stop there. They don’t want to or know how to challenge these things in a way that isn’t time consuming or in some cases risks their jobs. When I was an HR Director I was once told by a CFO to ‘toe the line’ when I found a way to pay someone £50 for attending an interview when I didn’t have his explicit consent. If I was put back in my place for that amount of money and at that level of seniority it’s no wonder change within most organisations is slow or feels impossible.

But what all of these layers of well-paid people forget is it might take you days and days of many difficult conversations to challenge the people with power to work out legal ways to properly compensate people with lived experience for contributing to your projects, but that time and effort is absolutely nothing in comparison to the disruption and friction many of your participants experience in their lives on a daily basis.

MYTH 5

"ONLY THE PEOPLE COMMISSIONING RESEARCH OR DELIVERING SERVICES NEED TO MAKE USE OF THE LEARNINGS"

The most bizarre thing I’ve experienced when contributing to social research is that you never hear back how your insights were used or what other people shared about their experiences of the issue. On the flip side of this I’ve heard many research teams talking about how they need to make their reports and data 'accessible’ to the general public but often in a way that is so far removed from their daily lives and is solely about looking at basic issues around language and presentation of information.

It’s exciting to see so much more being done on community-led research - for example by organisations like Centric - and more to open up data and insights to participants - through work by the likes of Open Data Manchester. But the fact that as a society we have a system where endless information is extracted and used by those in power to make decisions/ take action (or pretend to) in ways that are likely to be very biased is painfully worrying. Prisca in our team has been developing our own approaches to peer research where young people share their experiences with one another and use those insights to enact change that continues to support the community in the future. And we hope that Shared Value will continue to encourage this sort of approach. We need a society where research is conducted with the purpose of giving the subjects more agency over their lives, where people are supported to learn about themselves and use the insights to shape communities and systems that work for them.

MYTH 6

"EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE UNDERSTOOD AND PROCESSED BEFORE CHANGE CAN BE DECIDED UPON"

Collaborative Future was born out of a very practical pilot project to provide young people with paid work experience among a community of freelancers. Yes, we explored some questions prior to launching this but there is so much from our own lived experience and from the knowledge that exists within our communities already that we don’t need to go over and over the same questions - quite often we know in our souls the change that needs to happen.

Of course with broad societal and systemic change we need to understand the nuances of the issues to provide good solutions, but all too often we see the same organisations being paid endless amounts of money to explore the same questions over and over again without little action happening as a result. Whether it’s the benefits system, housing support or mental health services, well-funded organisations repeat the same type of research and design processes endlessly because those in power either don’t like the obvious answers or don’t actually want to take action to address the inequalities and harm within the system. We believe in the importance of research, but it needs to be accompanied with meaningful action, which is why within our equity & inclusion work we start each project with a reminder that every interaction and person within that project has the power to embody the change we want to create in the world.

We’d love to talk to people and organisations who are interested in contributing their experiences to champion change in this space. Once we've secured some funding we'll also be paying people to shape the development of "Shared Value" so let us know if there's a role or contribution you'd like to make as part of this process. You can book a call with us here or email hello@collaborativefuture.co.uk.