2024 Policies
Decide how we work together
At People Powered, our work is genuinely rooted in the values of inclusion and equity, and we are an organization committed to unlearning oppressive behaviors and creating programs and resources that are inclusive of people of all identities and backgrounds. This document explains how People Powered strives to create diverse, compassionate, safe and caring spaces for our community and our work. Below is a collection of practices and policies that we use for this purpose. We are not perfect, and we are committed to continuously learning and improving our work culture and organizational practices to better support diversity, equity and inclusion. We hope our members and partners find inspiration, encouragement, and hope in this policy, and we invite feedback and suggestions for how to improve it in the future.
Organizational values
Inclusion and equity are two of our five core values:
- Inclusion: We prioritize the engagement and leadership of people who are typically excluded from participation and power. We strive to make information and decision-making most transparent and accessible to those who have been most excluded.
- Equity: We reduce disparities and inequalities, shifting power and resources to where they are needed most. We focus on making systemic changes that address the greatest inequities.
Long-term organizational commitments
As a global organization working in a field traditionally led by men from the Global North, we are centering gender, geographic inclusion and equity:
- At least half of our board and committee members, member organizations, and staff are from Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe or Latin America and at least half identify as women.
- Our boards, member organizations, and staff take part in deciding our budget allocation and organizational strategy and goals annually, through a participatory and democratic process.
- At least half of funds we allocate go to our member organizations through re-granting, partnership work or consultancy; at least half of funds allocated go to people and organizations from Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, or Latin America; and at least half of funds allocated to individuals go to women.
- We set specific annual goals for all of our work areas, and use the SMARTIE framework to incorporate inclusion and equity into the goals. For example, one goal is that at least half of people that participate in our yearly participatory planning process identify as women and /or non binary.
Hiring
- People Powered is a remote-first organization, open to hire staff, interns, fellows and contractors based anywhere in the world.
- For all hiring processes, at least half of the people interviewed must be from Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, or Latin America and at least half women.
- We list transparent salary and pay rates in all job ads
- We aim to bring together hiring committees that are diverse in terms of age, gender and background.
- We pay a $100 honorarium to all shortlisted candidates who are requested to complete assignments related to the interview process, to acknowledge their time and effort.
- We offer candidates different times and formats for the interviews that can meet their availability and access needs.
Procurement
People Powered uses the following criteria for recruiting, prioritizing, and selecting contractors. We seek out community-based contractors, nonprofit organizations, and cooperatives who:
- Provide their employees with fair and dignified working conditions
- Are led by women, people of color, or other underrepresented groups
- Promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in terms of gender, race, sexual orientation, and people with disabilities
- Work with open-data and open-source when working with digital tools or platforms
- Are climate conscious in their operations
Communications, events and meetings
- We translate our website, communications, and materials into English, Spanish, Portuguese and French. We use automated translation on our website so we can translate it to even more languages. For public events we provide simultaneous interpretation in Spanish, Portuguese, and French, as well as captions.
- We use clear and plain language and intuitive visual design in all our communications, as well as small group discussions, extra time for reflection and feedback, multiple communication channels, and popular education activities in our virtual and in-person events to level the playing field across people with different abilities and needs.
- We always inquire about people’s access needs in registration forms, share materials and content in advance and provide asynchronous ways for our members to stay engaged and add feedback even if they can’t attend events and meetings.
- We ensure all our in-person spaces (for things like member convenings, for example) meet disability accessibility standards.
- When announcing event dates, we include UTC timezone
- We support travel, accommodation, food and childcare costs for in-person meetings, events, convenings and provide stipends for speakers and facilitators.
Work Culture
- Our work is participatory by design: All staff participate in organizational decision-making. We organize an annual process of participatory objective and goal-setting, budgeting and evaluations that is aligned with a similar approach we undertake with the People Powered membership.
- We are a remote-first organization, and support our team by covering the cost of tech and work equipment, as well as a $100 monthly remote work benefit.
- We operate flexible hours and a floating holiday system which enables the team to enjoy time off based on the holidays and celebrations that are meaningful to them and their cultures.
- We value the importance of rest and self-care in a sector prone to overwork and burn-out by having two organization-wide breaks each year (mid and end of year).
- We are open to flexible and part-time work, supporting our people to pursue other professional opportunities and to honor their commitments outside of work.
- We foster and encourage continuous learning and development with individual training budgets for our team members, paid professional development and volunteering leave, and by making training and development a core organizational goal year-on-year.
- Our pay is transparent across the board and we operate an open pay scale that all team members have access to.
- Our employee handbook includes anti-bullying, anti-harassment and anti-discrimination policies, as well as a complaints / grievance procedure. Staff is required to undertake anti-harassment training.
- We have a Whistleblower policy that all staff and board sign and commit to.
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24 comments
This is a policy that People Powered members asked us to develop, so we are honoring our commitment to the membership. The policy covers our current approach to diversity, equity and inclusion, summarizes our long-term commitments and then groups our DEI practices under various sections like hiring, work culture, etc. Keen to learn what our members think about it!
Conversation with Clara Bois
I wonder if the language we're using in the hiring section would make PP subject to discrimination lawsuits in the US, especially considering the recent Supreme Court ruling against affirmative action admissions in Universities. Can US candidates sue PP for discriminatory practices because we're a US-incorporated organization?
The language and practice is designed to avoid this - this is why we say “ at least half of the people INTERVIEWED must be from Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, or Latin America and at least half women.” rather than “at least half of the people HIRED must be from Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, or Latin America and at least half women.” Using demographics to decide hiring would pose legal risks, but using demographics to create balanced interviewee pools is generally ok, as far as I know (recognizing that this can change)
Have we got legal advice on this or is this something that we are not planning?
I know that many other organizations set diversity goals for recruitment and this is often recommended as a best practice. I have never heard of legal issues with this, so I don't think getting legal advice is necessary.
Conversation with Alberto Ford
Es mucho lo que PP ha hecho para profundizar la equidad y la inclusión en el interior de la organización. Apoyo todo eso. Un punto que me parece super importante es reconocer la diversidad de recursos que las y los miembros de PP ponen en juego. Aunque la cultura actual valora el recurso dinero sobre otros recursos, en PP debemos seguir esforzándonos por plantear equivalencias más justas, que reconozcan otros recursos como tiempo invertido, saberes locales y prácticas innovadoras. Muchas veces esos recursos vienen del Sur global de forma no monetizada y luego se monetizan en el Norte global (sin que el Sur vea los beneficios). Un ejemplo que traduce concretamente lo que estoy diciendo es que toda tarea rentada que realicen miembros de PP debe ser pagada de igual forma, independientemente de la región geográfica de la que proviene el miembro (esto para no replicar el modelo de producción de Nike, que localiza actividades en países del Sur global para pagar salarios más bajos).
I just added a proposal to develop a new policy to set pay rates, in response to this comment: Pay Scale for Contractors
You can find in the following link a video which provides a brief overview of the ''Diversity, Equity and Inclusion'' https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zpQN8ooWv9n7NFpX9MFBHwM7Lg1Q-4U-/view?usp=sharing
Conversation with Clara Bois
Adjust the language in the long-term commitments to acknowledge non-binary people. For example: "At least half of our board and committee members, member organizations ... identify as women or non-binary".
I think we can add non-binary to all mentions of women in this policy.
Communications, events and meetings section should be revised to match PP's organizational capacity. For example, all the projects we developed with members so far had program materials in English. The final product was translated into other languages, but the materials and communications throughout the development process were in English. On interpretation, we have provided it according to demand, so we don't pay for translation when there is no demand for it. There will be situations in which we won't be able to support everyone's travel, accommodation, food and childcare costs for in-person events.
I think, one of potential problem if we working together in region (hub), is languages. When you held an onsite event in region, It would be more effective if you can translate some materials in national languages of the participants. The interpretator more likely. Thankyou
Conversation with daniel schugurensky
Inconsistency in language.
The title says: "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion", but the next paragraph is only about equity and inclusion. Diversity is not a value.
I suggest either adding diversity to values, or have only 'equity and inclusion' in title of policy.
Hi Daniel, The paragraph indeed refers to two of our _explicit_ organisational values - equity and inclusion. Diversity is still an important value but perhaps not an explicit one. Many of our long-term organizational commitments speak to diversity, so I think we could keep it both in the title and as part of the general policy. If we wanted to add it as an explicit organizational value, this is something that we'd have to open up more broadly to the membership, staff and the board.
Thank you Iona. My only suggestion is to have consistency between the title and the first sentence.
The title says 'diversity, equity and inclusion policy" and the first sentence says "our work is genuinely rooted in the values of inclusion and equity.". Given your comment, it may make sense to keep the first sentence as is and change the title to "Equity and Inclusion Policy". Aa you say, diversity could be added as an explicit value in the future (in this policy or somewhere else) after PP discussion.
To clarify a bit more, I'm not sure that the issue is whether values are explicit or not. There are two related but different things here:
1) Our core organizational values: inclusion, collaboration, problem-solving, equity, learning (https://www.peoplepowered.org/about). Those are set and we decided not to change them this year.
2) Our diversity, equity, and inclusion policy. This is a policy that we decided to have, which does not depend on our core organizational values. We could (and arguably should) have this policy even if equity and inclusion were not core values.
I don't think we should change our core organizational values to incorporate every value from every specific policy, so I'm wary of heading in that direction here. It might be more helpful to cut the text on our organizational values (which is confusing because it only mentions 2 of the relevant values), and in this policy just speak directly on what we are doing.
In the comunications issue we mention that we have automatic translation to all our materials. But this kind of translation is not always accurate. Maybe we can try a colective effort to revise the translations in order to make them more eficient.
No estoy segura si se puede hacer por lo que señalan arriba de problemas legales en EE.UU. con este tipo de políticas, pero creo que no solo hay que ver de dónde son las personas que trabajan en PP (staff), sino que dónde están localizadas. Me parece que tener personas trabajando de distintos lugares es distinto a tener personas que son de un lugar, pero que viven, por ejemplo, en los países que suelen dominar este tipo de espacios. Un ejemplo: ser de Argentina y vivir en Londres o ser de Argentina y vivir en Mendoza. Creo que sería importante buscar variedad en la localidad de los miembros del staff PP.
Conversation with daniel schugurensky
Potential inconsistency:
Under procurement: "Promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in terms of gender, race, sexual orientation, and people with disabilities"
However, the document also mentions several time the issue of regional inclusion (global south).
Could you explain a little bit more this point, Daniel? Do you mean that we are paying more attention/emphasis to geographical inclusion in some cases?
Hi Mariana.
My point is minor. Procurement policy mentions "gender, race, sexual orientation, and people with disabilities", and this is fine. I just noted that the document also mentions several time the issue of regional inclusion (global south), so I was wondering if "partners from the global south" should be added to the other four criteria as another factor to consider. For instance, if a document needs to be translated to another language, partners from the global south would have priority over translators based in the global north. Just a suggestion. Please ignore it not pertinent.
DEI in itself is an important goal, but it's also important for PP to do its work as a global hub where we want to engage membership and initiatives from different regions, cultures, and contexts, with internal representation that better reflects our focus areas.
For the board of directors members and staff selection, it would be important to include an intersectionality framework to make sure we are inclusive of diverse identities and their intersections.
Very fan on the point regarding the place that PP let to women and other geographic area 🤗 . It will be great to add a point regarding coaching (on advocacy and other important skills) for support the women leadership on participatory democracy in their countries or continent for having critical women voice's for the global advocacy.
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