Cultural responsiveness, power & experience
Speaking publicly should not be the only way to contribute.
Participants arrive with very different relationships to birth justice, philanthropy, institutional power, research, and community. Facilitation attends to how those differences shape whose knowledge becomes dominant in a room.
Ways to participate
Seven doors into the same conversation.
Neuroinclusive participation
A Decompression & Reflection Space — another legitimate way of participating.
Not a place participants are sent when they cannot participate. A two-and-a-half-day gathering of roughly 150 people is intellectually, emotionally, socially, and sensory intensive.
- Reduced sensory stimulation
- Comfortable seating
- Minimal expectation for conversation
- Individual reflection prompts
- A way to contribute insight without returning to a large group
- Clear permission to leave and re-enter sessions
- Information about what is happening next
Power, named plainly
In mixed community/funder spaces, facilitators receive guidance for recognizing and managing power dynamics without preventing honest dialogue. Race, gender, class, geography, disability, institutional authority, professional status, and lived experience are all treated as live factors in the room.
Live visual sensemaking
An optional graphic recorder would arrive with no predetermined image of birth justice. The artwork emerges from the room — repeated language, relationships across sectors, tensions, community-generated metaphors, power, existing leadership, questions, and possibilities.
Do you recognize our ecosystem here?
What is missing? What has been made too large, or too small?
Whose perspective is difficult to see?
Participatory sensemaking
“Let participants interrogate the synthesis. They should be able to say 'that is missing something' or 'that is not true for rural organizations.'”
Nakeenya Wilson · Co-Director, Funders for Birth Justice and Equity
How Measure addressed it
Live sensemaking is participatory by design: reflections are read back into the room and the room is invited to correct, complicate, and sharpen them before anything is treated as a finding.
Participants interrogate the synthesis while it is still forming.
Rather than the harvesting team announcing "here is what we heard," emerging themes are posted back to the room — on walls, on screen, and in the collective interpretation sessions — with an explicit invitation to correct, complicate, or split them.
“That is missing something.”
“That is not true for rural organizations.”
“You are collapsing two different issues.”
“That is being framed as a CBO capacity issue when it is actually a funder practice issue.”
Corrections are captured as intelligence in their own right. A theme that was challenged and revised carries more weight in the final harvest than one that was never tested.