2024 Policies
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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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Conversation with Mariana
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.
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