When a company, organization, board, committee, or community group makes a commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI), they are making an important decision that should affect all aspects of their existence. Making this decision is often the beginning of a whole new area of awareness and work, including learning about privilege and biases, becoming aware of (and replacing) broadly-used and accepted discriminatory language, and reviewing every document, process, procedure, and activity within an organization’s culture and practices. It is hard and necessary work.
Informing EDI work
The best people to learn from in our communities are the people with lived experience; people who can offer first-hand insights on why changes are needed. There are many consultants offering paid professional services in this area, who can really help build new policies and procedures. Still, in many cases it is also crucial that people in your company or community be part of this process in some way.
Often this is in the form of a board, committee, task force, or working group, comprising diverse viewpoints and lived experiences.
What is lived experience?
Lived experience is what we all uniquely experience across all ages and areas of work, family, and social life. In EDI, when we refer to people with lived experience, we are referencing the first-hand, personal experiences that people have had in everyday events that have contributed to the ways in which they encounter the world around them, especially within the lens of systemic and direct racist, discriminatory, and ableist experiences.
Why is it important to offer compensation to people with lived experience?
When we ask people with lived experience to be part of efforts to grow EDI within an organization or community, we are often asking them to draw on negative personal experiences. While the goal of EDI work is to recognize and eliminate future negative experiences, doing this work is hard for everyone, especially people who have been subject to racism and discrimination in their lives. While we cannot take those past negative experiences away, we can show appreciation for their involvement by offering them compensation for their time.
This is a challenging conversation. In grassroots and volunteer spaces, who decides who should be paid for their time? Is it anyone who requests it or people who are representative of equity-seeking groups? Is it presumptuous to assume that all representatives of equity-seeking groups wish to be compensated? Are there people who bring lived experiences who are not obvious in their need for compensation?
A suggested path forward: Statements of Presence
We recently came up with a way to begin this conversation in a way that approaches every person uniquely for their time and allows them to decide for themselves. We call it making Statements of Presence.
Consider for a moment an EDI committee within a city or college as an example. Some of the members may be staff, others representative of local nonprofits, and others students or community members. The staff are already paid; it is part of their jobs to be there. The nonprofit members may be paid to be there as a part of their community commitments. Perhaps the students or community members are volunteering, or perhaps there is an honorarium for their time. Statements of Presence will help to document this.
How to make Statements of Presence
We see it working like this: In every meeting, there is a new item early in the agenda:
Statements of Presence
Carol is here on behalf of the college and is an Indigenous person, and the college is paying her for her time.
John is here as a student representative and has a physical disability, and he would like to be compensated for his time.
Pat is here as a representative of the ABC Food Security Society, and the society is paying them for their time.
Joanna is here as a board liaison and a representative of the Filipino community and is content to volunteer her time.
Through these examples, we see a way to document where further equitable action is needed. The goal of Statements of Presence is to specifically and briefly show subtle inequitable treatment and allow people to give direction about their need to be compensated without having to champion themselves in a more aggressive way. Ideally, these statements will become a new avenue to show one way a given organization is working toward its EDI goals.
Taking responsibility for next steps
There is a risk in adding Statements of Presence to your meeting agenda as it could re-traumatize people with lived experience with no specific way to resolve it. Before introducing this idea, it is critical that people who may be affected by it know about how it works, agree with its introduction to the committee or board, and recognize that there is a risk that compensation may still take a while.
The board or committee body itself may also need support in understanding and accepting the necessity of offering compensation to members with lived experience. It is worth calculating what the actual expense to the organization or group will be and how to pay for it in advance of introducing the idea.
There is great research already in existence about the importance of paying people with lived experience for their time and suggestions of what the values of compensation should be. We have summarized some of this research in our blog post Considerations for compensation of people with lived experience.
A work in progress
This is a new idea, and we are sharing it for the first time. We are also starting to use it now to see where it might still need work. What do you think? We would love your thoughts and feedback on this idea and how it might be improved to be even more effective in its goals.
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