Changemaker Conversations Episode 5: The Shared Power Philosophy™ - Your Key to Running a More Inclusive and Effective Nonprofit

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What if we told you that your nonprofit’s most effective strategic decisions shouldn’t be made in a closed boardroom with just staff and board members? What if the key to both inclusion and organizational effectiveness was deeply involving the very people your organization serves in shaping everything you do?

This idea is the heart of the Shared Power Philosophy™, the central belief that guides all of our work at Prosper Strategies. After years of implementing this approach with organizations ranging from local community groups to national nonprofits like Feeding America, we’ve seen firsthand how transformative it can be.

In this week’s episode of Changemaker Conversations, we’re diving deep into what the Shared Power Philosophy™looks like in practice, why it’s so crucial for nonprofit strategy work, and how your organization can start implementing it today.

What Is the Shared Power Philosophy™?

The Shared Power Philosophy™ is our central belief that a nonprofit does not develop an effective strategy in a closed room with board and staff only. Instead, a nonprofit develops an effective strategy—and thereby becomes an effective organization—by deeply involving all of its stakeholders in its important strategic decisions.

This includes donors, funders, partners, community members, staff, and board, but most importantly, your constituents: the people and communities your organization serves, those you work with directly, or that your mission exists to benefit.

All of these stakeholders need to be involved in shaping your nonprofit strategy if your organization really wants to be truly inclusive and effective. This applies whether you’re doing strategic planning, developing a marketing or fundraising plan, or making any other important strategic decision.

One-off Input is Not Enough

While most organizations understand they need perspectives from various stakeholders, they typically do this sporadically. They might survey stakeholders at the beginning of strategic planning, but they never go back to those stakeholders once they’ve developed their plan priorities.

What we’ve found is that the nonprofits that are most successful really have stakeholder and constituent engagement baked into the fabric of their organizations. They create continual feedback loops of stakeholder engagement rather than one-and-done transactions.

Shared Powerr™ in Action: Real Examples

California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA): Built for Shared Power™

CRLA is a legal justice organization that had many of the ingredients of a Shared Power™Nonprofit already in place when we began working with them. They serve constituents who speak multiple languages, and long before we started working with them, they created a language justice department within the organization to engage constituents in the languages they’re most comfortable with.

As a result, our entire strategic planning process with CRLA was offered in a multilingual setting—everything was translated into Spanish, our retreat was bilingual with both Spanish and English-speaking facilitators, and those who spoke other languages were able to use headsets to participate with real-time translation. Additionally, CRLA has what’s called a “comité”—a committee of community members on their board who are representative of the communities they serve. This comité was deeply involved throughout their strategic planning process.

The result? We received tremendously rich and valuable input that shaped their strategic plan in ways that wouldn’t have been possible without these deep community connections.

The Muhammad Ali Center: Responding to Crisis Through Shared Power™

Not all organizations have a solid Shared Power™ foundation in place like CRLA did when we started working with them. In fact, it’s more common for us to help an organization begin to explore Shared Power™ approaches through the lens of strategic planning. That’s what happened when we began our work with the Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville. Our work together kicked off shortly after the murder of Breonna Taylor, when the community was looking to the center as a place to rally and explore local social justice issues. The center was being called to respond and be more than just a museum, but they did not have a strong handle on exactly what their community wanted most from them going forward.

Instead of developing their strategic response in isolation, we conducted a wholesale assessment of all their stakeholders: community partners, locals who visited the museum, other social justice organizations, donors, funders, and even the Mayor of Louisville.

We built both staff and board strategic planning committees and conducted surveys and interviews with all these different stakeholder groups. Then we brought those insights to the committees to shape the strategic plan. Crucially, once we had a drafted plan, we hosted listening sessions with community stakeholders to ask: “Is this plan actually meeting what you said you need from the Center?”

Those listening sessions changed the course of the plan in both minor and major ways. We then took all that feedback, edited the plan, and trained the staff and board in systems for continuing to operationalize the plan, track progress and get ongoing community input.

Feeding America: Organization-Wide Constituent Engagement

Feeding America came to us with a different challenge. They had already identified neighbor engagement (involving people experiencing food insecurity) as a key strategic priority in an existing strategic plan, but they needed help figuring out how to make it happen across their entire national organization.

We developed an organization-wide neighbor engagement strategy that included extensive neighbor listening—interviews, listening sessions, and surveys with people experiencing food insecurity. We audited what Feeding America was already doing to engage neighbors and identified gaps between what neighbors said they wanted and what the organization was currently offering.

The result was a comprehensive engagement strategy that helped them move through a full spectrum of neighbor engagement: not just consulting with neighbors, but involving, collaborating with, and empowering them to actually be part of Feeding America’s work.

The Four Core Tenets of Shared Powerr™ Nonprofits

Through our work with dozens of organizations, we’ve identified four core tenets that shared power nonprofits exhibit:

1. Commit: Centering Constituent Priorities

Shared Power™ nonprofits commit to centering the priorities of their constituents in all that they do. This isn’t just a staff commitment—it requires alignment from board members, community partners, and other stakeholders. Organizations should articulate and write out what these commitments actually look like, creating a shared power vision statement that everyone can rally around.

2. Engage: The Shared Power™ Spectrum

We’ve developed a framework called the Shared Power™Spectrum that outlines five increasing levels of engagement:

- - Inform: Providing information about your organization without asking for anything back
  - Consult: Getting input before making decisions through surveys, focus groups, and listening sessions
  - Involve: Creating two-way or recurring opportunities for stakeholders to provide input and see their influence on decisions
  - Collaborate: Sustained opportunities for constituents to work with staff and board, like advisory panels
  - Empower: Implementing what constituents decide by intentionally recruiting them into staff and board roles

Most organizations are doing some informing and consulting, but they’re missing opportunities to involve, collaborate with, and empower their constituents.

3. Respect: Dignified and Trauma-Informed Engagement

Sharing power with constituents requires serious consideration of how to engage respectfully. This means:

Building relationships first before asking for input. It’s problematic when organizations want to survey or interview constituents they haven’t talked to all year.

Ensuring representation that reflects the demographics of the population you serve.

Prioritizing dignity by asking beneficiaries what they need to have a dignified experience engaging with your organization. This might include anonymous participation options, identity-aligned facilitators, and ensuring everyone involved has trauma-informed training.

Providing compensation for sustained engagement. Constituents are essentially serving as consultants to your organization, providing valuable input you can’t get anywhere else. They deserve fair compensation for their time, comparable to market rates for similar input. Sometimes, minimizing cost (such as providing childcare or transportation) might be compensation enough.

4. Action: Putting Philosophy into Practice

The final tenet is actually taking action based on what you learn from constituents. This means creating systems for ongoing feedback, making real changes based on input, and continuously reporting back to constituents about how their feedback shaped your work.

Two Paths to Get Started

Organizations typically take one of two approaches to implementing the Shared Power Philosophy™:

Path 1: Dip Your Toe In

Start with your next strategic planning, marketing, or fundraising planning process. Make it a goal to deeply involve your constituents throughout the entire process, not just at the beginning. This gives you a structured opportunity to practice Shared Power™ principles with guidance and a clear pathway.

Path 2: Dive Fully In

Take a more holistic approach by working through all four tenets and identifying opportunities for stakeholder engagement across the entire spectrum. This might involve:

- - Gathering a Shared Power™ task force of constituents and stakeholders
  - Creating a Shared Power™ vision statement and organizational commitment
  - Developing your own spectrum of ways to engage stakeholders
  - Making a comprehensive constituent engagement plan like Feeding America did

The Bottom Line

Whether you start with strategic planning or take a more comprehensive approach, the principles remain the same

What we know for certain is that organizations practicing Shared Power™ principles are more effective, more equitable, and better positioned to create lasting impact in their communities. The people you serve have invaluable insights about what works, what doesn’t, and what they need from your organization. The question is: are you ready to listen?

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

The Shared Power ™ Philosophy
Four Core Tenets of Shared Power™ Nonprofits
The Shared Power™ Spectrum Framework
The Shared Power ™ Collective / Shared Power Champions ™ online course
Shared Power ™ Nonprofits’ Declaration of Interdependence
Whitepaper: Four Things Shared Power ™ Nonprofits Do Differently
Changemaker Conversations Website – changemakerconversations.com for show notes and additional resources

About Changemaker Conversations

Changemaker Conversations is a podcast for nonprofit leaders who are ready to build smarter, more strategic organizations with less friction and more joy. Join hosts Alyssa Conrardy and Lindsay Mullen, Principals at Prosper Strategies, every other week as they pull you out of the day-to-day grind and refocus your attention on the big picture through candid conversations about the challenges facing nonprofit leaders today.

Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and visit changemakerconversations.com for show notes and additional resources. If you have ideas for future episode topics or guests, email us at hello@changemakerconversations.com.