By Mary Coleman, Head of Community and Culture
At Voqal Partners, we believe those closest to a problem should have a hand in shaping its solution. It’s a value that influences how we work with our community, how we think about power and, increasingly, how we operate internally.
My role is to help translate those values into practice. That means examining the policies, processes, and everyday ways of working that determine how decisions are made — and asking whether they reflect the kind of organization we say we want to be.
Going into the International Society for Third-Sector Research (ISTR) conference, I had been thinking a lot about the mechanics of that work. I was preparing to map decision-making processes across roles and departments: Who does what? Where does a decision go next? How do we document it? How do we make sure people know what to do?
Then I attended a session that made me realize I might be starting with the wrong questions.
Who gets to shape the decision?
During a session on democratic governance in nonprofit organizations, Michael Meyer of the Vienna University of Economics and Business discussed what democratic theory can teach us about governance inside nonprofits.
One idea in particular stuck with me: Democratic systems need mechanisms for both participation and contestation.
To put it plainly, it isn’t enough to know who has the authority to make a decision. People also need meaningful ways to participate in shaping decisions and to question, challenge and influence them. That distinction immediately changed how I thought about the work waiting for me at Voqal Partners. I realized I was about to document how decisions move through our organization without first asking a more important question: Who gets to shape them?
A perfectly mapped workflow can tell someone who approves a budget or who has final responsibility for a program. But it doesn’t tell a staff member, grant recipient or program participant when their perspective matters, how they can offer it or what happens when they disagree with the direction being taken.
That doesn’t mean everyone needs to make every decision. Nor does it mean we need to build an elaborate process for every possible scenario. What I’m interested in now is getting clearer about where decision-making authority sits and making sure people understand the ways they can shape a decision, even when they aren’t the person making the final call.
Depending on the decision, that could mean feedback channels, surveys, advisory councils or other participatory structures. The mechanism can change with the context. What matters is that people understand where and how they have agency.
Structure is only half the equation
Then another session complicated my thinking in a useful way.
In a presentation on social economy ecosystem development, Julieth Alzate of Universidad EAFIT discussed groups in Colombia transitioning from traditional organizational structures to cooperative models. During that transition, organizations experienced an in-between period marked by increased friction as people adjusted to a new organizational culture — don’t I know it.
Voqal Partners isn’t becoming a co-op, but we have been undergoing our own organizational transformation since 2020. We have been working to move away from hierarchical ways of operating and towards a culture grounded in shared power and liberatory creativity.
We have revised our handbook, developed an orientation to our values and invested in building a learning culture. Even though I’ve been at the forefront of some of those changes, I’ve still felt uncomfortable and hesitant at times. Trying something new sounds great until you’re the person responsible for figuring out how it actually works.
Alzate’s research gave me another way to understand that discomfort. We can create all the participatory mechanisms we want, but people have to feel connected enough to use them. A feedback channel doesn’t automatically create trust. An advisory council doesn’t automatically make someone feel like they belong. If we want staff, partners, and collaborators to make decisions with us, we also need to create the conditions that enable shared decision-making. Do people experience our values together, or do they primarily encounter them in a handbook?
That changes what comes next for me at Voqal Partners.
Back to the map
Rather than trying to engineer a detailed process for every function, I want to focus on establishing clear parameters for decision-making authority and giving our team a set of participatory tools they can draw on, depending on the people and context involved. At the same time, I want us to look more intentionally at the communal practices that build the trust and shared identity necessary for those tools to work.
I went to ISTR thinking I needed to get better at mapping decisions. I came home realizing that the map is only useful if we’re asking the right questions first: Who gets a say? When? How? And what have we built around them that makes speaking up feel possible?
So, yes, I’m still going to work on decision mapping. I’m just starting somewhere different.
Read more about my experience at ISTR on Alliance Magazine’s blog.
